This is where the Daily Chronicles are posted
Berlin, Germany · August 29, 1939 Adolf Hitler ordered the German invasion of Poland to begin on August 26, 1939. Troops, panzer tanks, and aircraft had been lining up near Poland’s western border since mid-August. Though planned since late March 1939, the invasion was bound to rile Poland’s eastern neighbor, the Soviet Union. That concern was…
London, England; Paris, France; Warsaw, Poland · August 28, 1939 Public opinion in Europe had shifted from dread of war and a longing for peace evident in the Czech Sudeten crisis of September 1938 to a fatalistic acceptance that war was now unavoidable. British and French politicians were more confident that they could take their…
Berlin, Germany; Warsaw, Poland; and London, England · August 27, 1939 On this date in 1939, one day after Adolf Hitler aborted his plan to invade his eastern neighbor, Poland, German mobilization continued. Between August 25 and 31, a further 21 infantry divisions and 2 motorized divisions were in place along the German-Polish frontier. No reserve units were…
Berlin, Germany · August 26, 1939 Serious discussions between the Nazi and Soviet regimes began secretly in late July 1939. On August 21 Germany announced that Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop had been invited to Moscow. Two days later the world learned that Ribbentrop and his Soviet counterpart, Vyacheslav Molotov, had initialed a nonaggression pact (Molotov-Ribbentrop…
Kyūshū Island, Japan · August 25, 1945 On this date in 1945, ten days after Japan had agreed to unconditional surrender, two U.S. Army pilots flying P‑38 Lightnings on armed reconnaissance landed on Kyūshū Island, the southernmost Japanese Home Island, after one of the P‑38s ran low on fuel. The two pilots became the first…
Berlin, Germany · August 24, 1941 On this date in 1941 Adolf Hitler cancelled the Aktion T‑4 euthanasia program that he had personally put in place in September 1939. Normally Hitler had a policy of not issuing written instructions for policies relating to what would later be called “crimes against humanity,” but he made an…
Wolf’s Lair, Fuehrer HQ, East Prussia · August 23, 1941 On this date in 1941 at his concealed East Prussian “Fuehrer Headquarters” in the Rastenburg swamps, Adolf Hitler made a decision that doomed Operation Barbarossa—his planned liquidation of the Soviet Union. Barbarossa had been launched 2 months earlier, on June 22. But after 3 weeks of disagreeing with…
Obersalzberg, Bavaria, Germany · August 22, 1939 Adolf Hitler’s foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop was just about to affix his signature to the German-Soviet Nonaggression Pact (aka Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact) in Moscow, when, on this date in 1939, the Fuehrer summoned the commanders of his various armed forces and other officers to the Berghof, his Bavarian…
Paris, Occupied France · August 21, 1941 On this date in 1941 in Paris a 22‑year-old Communist member of the French Resistance named Pierre Georges (noms de guerre, Frédo and Colonel Fabien) fired two bullets into the back of Alfons Moser, a young German naval officer, at the Barbès-Rochechouart metro station. These were the opening shots…
Moscow, Soviet Union · August 20, 1939 The he Soviet Union and Japan, two expansionist powers that occupied portions of the Asian mainland north of China, butted heads in the Mongolian borderlands as early as 1929. They had also fought a war in 1904–1905, the Russo-Japanese War, over influence in China, Mongolia, and Manchuria, the…