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Timeline xxiii 1939 January 30 Hitler’s address to the Reichstag states that if Jewry plots another world war, European Jews will be exterminated. March 15 German troops invade Czechoslovakia. May–June Ship St. Louis, carrying 936 Jewish passengers, is forced to return to Europe neither Cuba nor the United States will permit entry, even though each passenger has a landing per- mit for Cuba and visas to the United States. September 1 Germany invades Poland. September 3 World War II begins. September 6 Adam Czerniakow begins to keep his diary in Warsaw. September 27 Reinhard Heydrich establishes Jewish councils ( Judenräte ) in German-occupied Poland. Adam Czerniakow becomes president of the Judenrat of the Warsaw ghetto. October Hitler personally extends the euthanasia program to include Jews (and backdates his decision to September 1, so that it appears to be a wartime measure). 1940 April French Foreign Legion is sent to labor camps in North Africa. April 9 Germany invades and occupies Denmark and southern Norway. May 7 Lodz ghetto is sealed: approximately 165,000 inhabitants are forced to live in 1.6 square miles. May 10 Germany invades Holland, Belgium, and France. May 20 Concentration camp is established at Auschwitz. June 22 France surrenders to Germany. August 8 Air war against Britain begins. October 12 Warsaw ghetto is established. November 16 Warsaw ghetto is sealed: almost 500,000 persons, or thirty percent of the city’s total population, are crammed within its walls. Some 5,000 Austrian Jews are deported from Vienna to Poland to the Kiecle and Lublin ghettos. 1941 January–March Jews are expelled from the countryside outside Warsaw. Thousands of skilled workers from Upper Silesia in Poland