Berlin, Germany · April 25, 1945 In the same month World War II began in Europe, September 1939, the German Army Weapons Agency (Heereswaffenamt, or HWA) placed all programs associated with the nation’s nascent nuclear energy project under its authority. The weapons program eventually expanded into three main efforts: setting up a nuclear reactor, producing…
Luebeck, Northern Germany · April 24, 1945 Reichsfuehrer-SS, Gestapo chief, and Adolf Hitler-devotee Heinrich Himmler began making clumsy attempts to secure a separate peace treaty with the Allies as the defenders of the Reich capital—ground zero of Nazi resistance—failed to push the Red Army back across the Spree River, the last physical barrier to the…
Berlin, Germany · April 23, 1945 On this date in 1945, with most land communications and electrical power lines down, Adolf Hitler broadcast on Greater German Radio the order to save his capital. The order called for Wehr¬macht forces opposing the Americans at the Elbe River to withdraw and move north to rescue Berlin, now…
Wright Field, Dayton, Ohio · April 22, 1945 During the war Allied countries were keen to gain access to the products of German research and development. A British commando raid on a German radar installation on February 27–28, 1942, in occupied France convinced British scientists who analyzed the radar array that it was impervious to jamming…
German 12th Army HQ, Larissa, Greece · April 21, 1941 On this date in 1941 representatives of the Greek government, leaderless after Prime Minister Alexandros Koryzis committed suicide three days earlier, signed a document of capitulation at the headquarters of the German 12th Army at Larissa. Fourteen Greek divisions laid down their arms. The news…
Berlin, Germany · April 20, 1945 On this date in 1945, a stooped, jowly-faced Adolf Hitler celebrated his 56th birthday in his command bunker under Berlin’s Old Reich Chancellery. Unlike previous birthdays marked by much ceremony and fuss, this one was all gloom and doom due to the Wehrmacht’s failure to halt the Soviet advance…
Warsaw, Occupied Poland · April 19, 1943 In October 1940, a little over a year after Nazi Germany’s conquest of its eastern neighbor Poland, German Governor-General Hans Frank established a Jewish ghetto in Poland’s capital, Warsaw, moving some 90,000 Jews from all over Poland into the ghetto. The largest of the ghettos in Poland, the Warsaw…
Berlin, Germany · April 18, 1941 On this date in 1941 tests began of the world’s first operational turbojet fighter, the Messerschmitt 262 Swallow (Schwalbe). The tests were really of the airframe because the BMW turbojets were nowhere close to being ready. On July 18, 1942, a fully configured version flew—this almost nine months before the…
Monte Cassino, Italy · April 17, 1944 On this date in 1944, 52,000 soldiers of the untested Polish II Corps under Maj. Gen. Wladyslaw Anders quietly moved into position under the cover of darkness and smokescreen. The Polish II Corps, part of Gen Oliver Leese’s British Eighth Army, relieved the exhausted New Zealand II Corps, which since…
London, England · April 16, 1941 This night and early the next morning in 1941, when London’s historic St. Paul’s cathedral was bombed and damaged, marked the start of the final phase of the Blitz (September 7, 1940 to May 21, 1941), which reached its climax on May 10 with a deadly raid that hit the House of…
