1945

January 16, ARMY LIBERATED BUDAPEST (Hungary) - From the time the Arrow Cross party took power until the Russian liberation, over 90,000 Hungarian Jews lost their lives. [111] (103)

January 18, AUSCHWITZ EVACUATED (Poland) As the Russians approached, Germans began to evacuate Auschwitz. Some 66,000 prisoners were forced on a death march of which over 15,000 died. When the Russians arrived on January 26, they found only 7,000 survivors, many of whom died in the following days. [111] (103)

March 15 - ANNE FRANK (Bergen Belsen, Germany) Died in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp from typhus, shortly before the liberation. Through her diary, she became singular symbol of the Holocaust for millions of people. She was 15 years old. (see June 12 , 1929) [111] (103)

April 15, BRITISH LIBERATED BERGEN-BELSEN (Germany) - The first major camp to be liberated by the Allies, the British found 60,000 inmates still alive although 14,000 of them died soon after the liberation. The dreadfulness of the camp received wide spread public attention. Among those found were its commandant Josef Kramer, and many of its administrators. The British forced them to help in the clean up. Twenty of them contracted disease and died. Kramer, who was also the commandant of Birkenau, was condemned to death November 17, 1945 by the British. [111] (103)

April 29, DACHAU (Germany) - The first of the S.S. concentration camps was captured by the US Army. They found 32,335 prisoners, many of whom died in the weeks that followed. The Americans later used it as a prison camp for Nazi war criminals. [111] (103)

April 30 - HITLER (Germany) Killed himself in the bunker at the Reich Chancellery in Berlin. [111] (103)

May 8, GENERAL JODL SIGNED GERMANY'S SURRENDER (Rheims, Germany) - At Eisenhower's headquarters, Germany was divided into four sectors. Tens of thousands of Jews fled to the American and British Zones. The Third Reich, known as the Thousand Year Reich was over. While it existed, approximately 6,000,000 Jews were killed; 63% of the Jewish population of Europe prior to the war was exterminated. [111] (103)

August 11, CRACOW (Poland) - A Jewish school was burned down in the first of the post-war anti-Jewish riots that spread over Poland. Many of them were instigated by organizations such as AK-WiN (Wolnosc i Niezawislosc - Freedom and Independence) which was the successor to the right wing A.J. (Armja Krajowa). WiN accused the Jews and the Soviet NKVD of instigating the riots. Other riots broke out in Radom and Czestochowa. The approximately 80,000 Jews in Poland at the time (a further movement of Jews into Poland from Russia would take place in 1946) looked for any means to enter the western sectors of Germany. [111] (103)

August 27, MAURITIUS DETAINEES (Eretz Israel) - The 1310 surviving Mauritius detainees were allowed into Eretz Israel. Mauritius, a small island in the Indian Ocean, was used by the British to detain Jewish refugees fleeing Europe and trying to enter Eretz Israel. In late December 1940, about 1500 people, including 621 women and 116 children, were forcibly transferred to the island. Twenty-two died from disease along the way. Although many of the men volunteered to join the Allied forces, their families were not recognized as families of British soldiers, by the British government. (103)

October - POLAND From the beginning of the year until October, 351 Jews had been murdered in anti-Jewish riots in Poland. [111] (103)

November 2 - EGYPT Riots took place on the anniversary of the Balfour Declaration. Similar riots in Tripoli left 120 Jews dead. [111] (103)

December 10, NUREMBERG Council Law No. 10 is signed by 23 countries establishing the war crimes commission at Nuremberg. Approximately 5000 people were tried with 600 receiving the death sentence. [111] (103)