Concentration Camps

In 1933, the SS had operated a network of concentration camps, to hold Jews and other targets of the Nazi regime.

After the war began, the Nazis stopped expelling Jews to concentration camps and changed their tactics to just exterminating them, by using mobile death squads. They even exterminated Jews while invading other countries like Jews that lived in the Soviet Union.

Though the Nazis also imprisoned and killed Catholics, homosexuals, political dissidents and the disabled, above all they targeted Jews. Around 6 million jews were killed in German-occupied Europe by the end of the war.

The end of the War

By the end of 1942, the tide of war turned agaisnt Germany.

As the war continued, Hitler became increasingly unwell, isolated and dependent on medicine adminisrtered by his doctor.

Within a few months of the successful Allied invasion of Normandy in June 1944, the Allies had begun liberating cities across Europe. That December, Hitler attempted to direct another offensive through the Ardennes, trying to split American and British forces.

After January 1945, Hitler held up in a bunker benath the Chancellery in Berlin. With Soviet forces closing in, Hitler mad eplans for a last-ditch resistance before finally abandoning that plan

The Death of Adolf Hitler

On the night of April 30, Hitler shot himself while his wife Eva Braun took poision. Their bodies were bruned as according to Hitler last final command.

Now that Soviet troops occupied Berlin, Germany surrendered on all front on May 7, 1945, bringing the Second World War to a close.

In the end, Hitler planned "Thousand-Year-Reich" lasted jsut over 12 years, but wreaked unfathomable destruction and devastation during that time, forever transforming the histroy of Germany, Europe and the world.