Forward SHAEF HQ, Reims, France · April 12, 1945 On this date in 1945 President Franklin D. Roosevelt died in Warm Springs, Georgia, and Harry S. Truman became the thirty-third president of the United States. That same day the Supreme Commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force, Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower, informed his staff that neither…
Berlin, Germany · April 11, 1934 On this date in 1934 German Chancellor Adolf Hitler secretly met with German War Minister Gen. Werner von Blomberg, the unofficial representative of the officer corps of the Reichswehr (German armed forces), and reached an agreement that sealed the fate of the post-World War I Weimar Republic. Behind titular President…
Washington, D.C. · April 10, 1941 On April 9, 1941, a full year after Operation Weseruebung had brought Denmark and Norway into Nazi Germany’s orbit, the Danish minister in Washington, D.C., Henrik Kauffmann, signed a treaty with the United States, authorizing the U.S. to protect the remote Danish colony of Greenland “against attack by a…
Berlin, Germany · April 9, 1940 On this date in 1940 German land, sea, air, and specialized forces advanced overland into Denmark and attacked various points along Norway’s coast from the air and sea. Both Scandinavian countries had deficiencies in men, organization, training, and modern equipment that prevented a credible defense. Tiny Denmark, with 3.8…
Salzburg, Austria · April 8, 1943 On this date in 1943 in Salzburg, Austria, Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini met for the first time since the collapse of the Axis defense of Stalingrad at the end of January. Ignoring Mussolini’s trial balloon about negotiating a ceasefire with the Soviet leader, Joseph Stalin, Hitler remained convinced…
Berlin, Germany · April 7, 1933 Following his swearing in as chancellor on January 30, 1933, Adolf Hitler and his Nazi party began a policy of Gleichschaltung (synchronization), whereby Germany would be thoroughly reordered along Nazi lines. With the Reichstag’s passage of the Enabling Act on March 23, 1933, Hitler ruled by decree and the Nazi synchronization…
Belgrade, Yugoslavia · April 6, 1941 At the tail end of February 1941 British Commonwealth forces from Nigeria captured Mogadishu, capital of Italian Somaliland (part of today’s Somalia), after Benito Mussolini’s armies had abandoned any pretense of defending their East African colony. The Italian colony in the Horn of Africa had threatened the southern entrance to the…
Berlin, Germany · April 5, 1943 On this date in 1943 in Berlin, Lutheran pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer was arrested at his parents’ home by two Gestapo agents. Bonhoeffer was a deeply convicted theologian and a founding pastor of the Confessing Church (Bekennende Kirche), which rejected the Third Reich’s efforts to Nazify the German Lutheran Church….
Ohrdruf, Central Germany · April 4, 1945 Over the first three weeks of April 1945, during the brutal terminal phase of the Third Reich, Allied armies discovered more than one hundred concentration camps, including Buchenwald, Nordhausen, Flossenbuerg, and Bergen-Belsen. On this date in 1945 soldiers of Gen. George S. Patton’s U.S. Third Army unexpectedly came…
Washington, D.C. · April 3, 1945 On this date in 1945 the Roosevelt administration appointed Gen. Douglas MacArthur Commander-in-Chief U.S. Army Forces Pacific (AFPAC), responsible for all Army and Army Air Forces units in the Pacific theater excepting Maj. Gen. Curtis LeMay’s Twentieth Air Force based in the Marianas. At the same time Adm. Chester…
