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. (Poland’s Jewish community numbered 3.5 million at the time.) The…
Aboard the USS Hornet • April 18, 1942 The Doolittle Raid—a top-secret U.S. retaliatory airstrike following the surprise Japanese bombing of American naval and air bases at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, 19 weeks earlier—was the country’s first joint action with the U.S. Army Air Forces and the U.S. Navy. The groundbreaking mission shipped 16 North American B‑25B Mitchell…
Rhine Meadow Camps, German Rhineland • April 17, 1945 By this date in 1945 and over the next 2 months, American, British, and French armies established 19 Rhine Meadow camps (German, Rheinwiesenlager) principally on the west bank of the Rhine River in the German states of North-Rhine Westphalia and Rheinland-Pfalz (Rhineland-Palatinate) (see map below). The Rhineland camps were…
Seelow Heights, Germany • April 16, 1945 On this date in 1945 the Allies called off their strategic bombing campaign against Nazi Germany because most targets were already in Allied hands or, like the Reich capital, Berlin, would be soon. So on the day the aerial campaign stopped the Red Army unleashed a battle to…
Tulelake, Modoc County, California • April 15, 1942 On this date in 1942, in a remote, underdeveloped reclamation district roughly 35 miles/56 kilometers southeast of Klamath Falls, Oregon, and about 10 miles/16 kilometers from the town of Tulelake (or Newell), the federal government began construction of the Tule Lake Relocation Center for persons of Japanese ancestry forcibly deported from…
Ruhr Pocket, Northwestern Germany • April 14, 1945 In the spring of 1945 senior leaders of the Third Reich were on edge. On Germany’s Eastern Front, the tracks of Soviet mechanized armor and the boots of their infantry could be heard approaching the outskirts of the epicenter of Nazism, Berlin. On the Western Front, elements of…
Rabaul, New Britain Island, Papua New Guinea • April 13, 1943 On this date in 1943 the headquarters of Adm. Isoroku Yamamoto on Rabaul, the important Japanese garrison on New Britain Island in the Bismarck Archipelago, sent a coded military radio signal to various Japanese commands in the Western South Pacific. The message listed the dates…
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 American…
Berlin, Germany • April 11, 1940 On this date in 1940 Reichsfuerhrer-SS Heinrich Himmler, the second-most powerful man in Nazi Germany, appointed SS-Standartenfuehrer (Colonel) Max Sollmann to be managing director of the Lebensborn Program (German, Lebensborn e.V), which was heavily in debt. It was Himmler, head of the Schutzstaffel (commonly abbreviated to SS), who founded…
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 ambassador in Washington, D.C., Henrik Kauffmann, signed an executive agreement with the U.S. Secretary of State, Cordell Hull, authorizing the U.S. to protect the remote Danish colony of…
