The Haganah is set up as an underground military organization to protect Jewish settlements in Palestine

Arabs in the Palestinian town of Hebron turn on their Jewish neighbours and murder sixty-seven

Irgun, a new Jewish paramilitary group, is set up by Haganah commanders frustrated by the older organization's policies

Adolf Hitler passes a law forcing the 'retirement' of all Jews working in the civil service, schools and universities

Adolf Hitler promulgates a law prohibiting any sexual relationship between Jews and 'Aryans'

New Nazi laws announced at Nuremberg strip Jews of their German citizenship

Left-wingers and Jews suffer immediate persecution in Nazi Austria, now part of Germany

Nazi gangs smash the premises of Jews throughout Germany and Austria in a night that becomes known as Kristallnacht, the night of cut glass

In preparation for the invasion of Russia, Adolf Hitler and Heinrich Himmler set up Special Task Commandos (Einsatzkommando) to exterminate Communists and Jews

Goering orders Reinhard Heydrich to prepare plans for the 'final solution of the Jewish queston'

Adolf Eichmann, in an official letter about policy in relation to the Jews, uses the phrase 'the final solution'

In three adapted vans at Chelmno, in western Poland, the Germans begin using poison gas to kill Jews

A Jewish girl in Amsterdam, Anne Frank, is given a diary for her thirteenth birthday

German industrial enterprises are moved from the vulnerable Ruhr valley to the slave labour facilities of Auschwitz

Jews in Warsaw resist a fierce German onslaught for a month before their ghetto is finally destroyed

Raoul Wallenberg, a Swedish diplomat in Budapest, saves thousands of Jews from extermination

By the end of the war the total number of Jews killed by the Nazis is around 6 million

An Arab boy, herding goats in the Qumran desert, finds the first of the Dead Sea Scrolls