What were the first steps towards the holocaust and when?

Question

steps like the yellow stars
reducing rights aloowing violence and then finally concentration and death camps?

Answer 1

The first major steps were the anti-Jewish laws which passed during 1934. They forbid Jews from doing many things: marrying "Aryan" Germans, practicing most professions, owning businesses.

http://cghs.dade.k12.fl.us/ib_holocaust2001/Persecution_early_years/nuremberg_laws.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racial_policy_of_Nazi_Germany
http://www.calvin.edu/academic/cas/gpa/ww2era.htm#Antisem

Kritsallnact was the next major step in November, 1938. It effectively made mass violence against the Jewish population of Germany politically acceptable.
http://www.historyplace.com/worldwar2/timeline/knacht.htm
http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Holocaust/kristallnacht.html

And finally was the Wanssee Conference in January, 1942, which laid out the logistical details (train schedules, building camps) for the "Final Solution."
http://www.historyplace.com/worldwar2/timeline/wannsee2.htm

Answer 2

The high volume mass extermination of European Jewry did not take effect until after Jan. 1942, when Reinhard Heydrich convened a meeting (otherwise known as the Wansee Conference) of top SS and Nazi bureaucrats to begin the initial planning, the decision to settle the "Jewish question by the Final Solution". Prior to that, the acts of discrimination, the night of the "broken glass", the Nuremburg Laws and other killings were not the components of a holocaust.

The holocaust is synonymous with high volume and mass extermination, which is dated from Jan 42 to Nov 1944. (the 1944 date coincided with the order by Himmler to destroy the crematoria at Auwswitz as the Red Army approached from the East.) The events prior to the holocaust were preludes to that horrific event, as well as the events after Nov. 1944, but they pale in comparison to the events of Jan 1942 to Nov 1944.

Answer 3

Even before the Nazi government began imposing the Nuremburg laws in 1934, there were signs of state sponsored anti-semitism. The Brown Shirts, even before Hitler took power, routinely brutalized individual Jews with no retribution. Germany had long-standing anti-semitic beliefs and there was no social penalty for acting out these theories. Thus the ground was fertile for the Nuremburg edicts, followed by ever-escalating violence, and culminating in state-sanctioned mass extermination.