January 6, 1945: Birkenau; Three women are hanged in front of the entire women's camp. They were women previously tortured in connection with the revolt at Birkenau but gave away no one. Among them was one conspirator, Roza Robota. Her final words were, "that vengeance would come."
January 11, 1945: Budapest; The deportations to Austria have ended. 120,000 Jews await in protected housing for the arrival of the Red Army. A gang of eight Nyilas enter one of the houses and kills 15 men, 26 women and one child. Another group surrounds the Jewish hospital, torturing and killing 95 patients.
January 15, 1945: Brodnica labor camp; All Jewish women too sick or weak to be moved were shot.
January 17, 1945: Budapest; The Red Army enter the city and the remaining 120,000 of the original 470,000 Jews are now safe from any further disaster. Raoul Wallenberg, savior of thousands of Jews, is summoned by the Russian authorities and is never seen again. Also on this day, the Soviet Army enters Warsaw. Only 200 Jews of more than a half a million survive.
January 17, 1945: Chelmno; SS begin killing the special Commando group of Jews that was used to help dismantle the camp over the past three months. Forcing them to wear bottles on their heads, the SS took target practice.
January 18, 1945: A count was made of remaining prisoners in the assorted labor and concentration camps:
January 19, 1945: The Death Marches began for the surviving Jews and Poles who were evacuated from Labor Camps and Concentration Camps. Those who were too weak to march were shot by the thousands. As they marched through the severity of winter to new locations, tens of thousands more were shot for any infraction.
Palmnicken March: 9,000 Jews were marched to the Baltic Sea, were they were shot, hit or shoved off the cliffs onto the shore below. Only 13 would survive
Flossenberg March:Thousands of Jewish women die as they are marched toward Flossenberg from their camp at Neusalz.
January 25, 1945: Stutthof; In order to evacuate the concentration camp another Death March begins by sending prisoners Westward in the middle of driving snow and bitter cold. Many would die from freezing. Others were shot or thrown into the icy Baltic Sea.
January 27, 1945: The Red Army enters Birkenau, almost entirely empty of human inhabitants. One found in the hospital was Anne Frank's father, Otto. Anne had died there months earlier from decease. (Otto would return to Amsterdam to find the famed diary.) Though most of the storage facilities were already destroyed, the Russians discover 836,255 women's dresses, 348,000 sets of men's suits and 38,000 pairs of men's shoes.
February 8, 1945: U.S. armies, 85 divisions strong, begin to close in on the Rhine.
February 23 1945: Schwarzheide, Dresden area: The Red Army approaches deep inside Germany. 300 Jews moved from Berkenau to the Schwarzheide factories are shot. The German camps of Belsen, Dachau, Buchenwald and Mauthausen, Sachsenhausen and Ravnebruck are now the destination of thousands of evacuated Jews from all the other camps.
March 3, 1945: Ebensee, sub-camp of Mauthausen; 2,059 Jews are sent from Gross Rosen. 49 die in the trains on the way. 182 more die upon arrival.
March 7, 1945: American forces reach Ramagen. To their delight, the find the bridge still intact. They race to un-detonate, however, the bridge is blasted twice. The bridge still stands and the Americans have their bridgehead on the Rhine for crossing.
March 20, 1945: Tiefstack; Jews are killed by Allied air attacks on the camp.
March 21, 1945: Flossenberg March: For three days the remaining survivors of the march are crammed into cattle cars and await further transport. Many die of thirst. They are sent to Belsen. Only 200 of the original 1000 women survive the entire trip.
March 21, 1945: Germany; Dozens of small camps are liberated by the Red Army.
March 30, 1945: Ravenbruck; 9 women try to escape. They are caught and executed.
April 2, 1945: Poland; Leon Feldhendler, a leader of the Sobibor death camp revolt is killed by Poles.
April 1945: Death Marches: The Death Marches continued. 60% of the marchers were non-Jews.
April 4, 1945: U.S. Forces reach Ohrdruf. There, they witness the aftermath of a "minor" labor camp's evacuation. Hundreds of murdered Jewish and non-Jewish corpses lay scattered around the grounds. Eisenhower visits this camp and immediately reports the horror he sees to Churchill.
April 8, 1945: Birkenwald evacuation; All the Jewish prisoners are evacuated and "Marched" southeast to Flossenberg. Those non-Jews who remained await their liberation.
April 10, 1945: Theresienstadt; Adolf Eichmann makes his last visit to the camp. "I shall gladly jump into the pit, knowing that in the same pit there are five million enemies of the state."
April 11, 1945: Buchenwald: The camp is liberated. As late as April 6 - 28,000 inmates were evacuated as part of Germany's liquidation of the camp programs. 19,000 remained. Half of them Jews. This was a camp where prisoners, Jews and Gypsies alike, were tied up and dogs would attack them mercilessly. In the last few days it was estimated that 13,500 inmates died from exhaustion or were killed.
April 12, 1945: Germany is giving up positions and rapidly losing the war. Himmler decrees that any commander failing to hold a town or important local "is punishable by death."
April 13, 1945: Belsen March: 5,000 Jews taken from Auschwitz and marched to Belsen are corralled into a barn. The Germans set the barn on fire. Many escape. Many thousands more were burned to death. Germans would shoot the heads of those who tried to escape during the fire.
April 14, 1945: Gardelegen Camp; U.S. troops reach the camp. They find smoldering logs strewn with the bodies of recently cremated victims.
April 15, 1945: Belsen: British Tanks enter the camp, freeing thousands of remaining emaciated prisoners. The British discover first hand the evidence of the horrors that had taken place there. Despite liberation 300 prisoners would die per day over the next two weeks as a result of malnutrition, the effects of torture and illness. For five days prior, no food or water was available for any of the stranded prisoners. Belsen provided the proof and news to stir the world, albeit years late, to the true horrific depths of the Holocaust.
April 16, 1945: American troops reach Nuremberg.
April 17, 1945: Sachsenhausen and Ravenbruck March; With the Allies closing in and the war coming to an end, the Germans continue to "March" evacuees (17,000 women and 46,000 men) deeper into Germany.
April 18, 1945: Lippstadt; 325,000 Germans, including 35 generals, surrender to the American forces.
April 20, 1945: Berlin; Himmler allows 7,000 women (½ are Jewish) to be sent to safety in Sweden. The allies are but miles away.
April 22, 1945: Jasenovac Camp; Only a thousand Jews and Serbs remained. Tens of thousands of them were killed over the past five years. Six hundred rise in revolt. The Germans kill 520 of them.
April 25, 1945: Russian and United States Forces meet in Torgau, cutting Germany in half.
April 27, 1945: Mussolini and his bride are caught while trying to escape outside of Lake Como. They are executed and their bodies are brought to Milan where the next day they are hung up by their heels from lampposts, later cut down, and then mutilated.
April 29, 1945: U.S. Troops enter Dachau. There the troops find fifty train wagons of piled emaciated bodies. Near the crematorium another huge pile of bodies were found. Of the 33,000 survivors found at Dachau, only 2,439 were Jews. Very few Jews are left alive to liberate. In the next few weeks another 27,000 Jews from the hundreds of camps and sub- camps would still die due to illness, exhaustion and the irreversible effects of starvation.
April 29, 1945: Berlin; Hitler writes - The Second World War had been ‘provoked exclusively by those international statesmen who either were of Jewish origin or worked for Jewish interests. The Jews were the real party in this murderous struggle.' On this day American troops liberate 32,355 prisoners left in Dachau.
April 30, 1945: Berlin; HITLER COMMITS SUICIDE in his bunker.
Goebbels and Bormann carry Hitler's body and that of Eva Braun to the garden, place them in a shell hole from a Russian bomb, and then ignites gasoline all about them.
On this day 2,775 Jews were marched to Theresienstadt. 1,000 of them try to flee and are shot dead. Only 500 would reach Thereisenstadt alive. On this day, the Red Army liberates 23,000 Jews and non-Jews from Ravenbruck. (90,000 had been killed there during the past two years.)
May 1, 1945: Mathausen March; As the U.S. Army approaches, and even though Hitler commits suicide they prior day, the death marches continue. Hundreds of more Jews would die during the marches from exhaustion. Also on this day, Goebbels takes his own life and that of his wife by ordering an SS orderly to shoot them in the back of the head. But first, he poisons his own six children.
May 2, 1945: Berlin; Berlin surrenders to the Red Army. Only 162 Jews remained out of an original population of 33,000.
May 3, 1945: Lubeck; 500 Jews are killed as they try to board a German boat containing 7,500 Jews who were being evacuated.
May 5, 1945: Ebensee; Germans flee from this gathering point for those who survived the Death Marches. U.S. troops entered the camp. U.S. Troops also enter Mauthausen where they encounter the shock of piles of over ten thousand bodies laying in one huge communal grave. 110,000 survivors. 28,000 of them were Jewish. The Americans did not have enough supplies to offer a fraction of these numbers. Foods such as candy, chocolate, milk and jams were too rich for the starving who still died as a result of malnutrition One survivor, Sidney Fahn, weighed 80 pounds.
May 8, 1945: GERMANY SURRENDERS. The Holocaust Ends.