South West Pacific Area HQ, Brisbane, Australia • January 24, 1944 On this date in 1944 an advance party of the 93rd Infantry Division landed on the Pacific Island of Guadalcanal, the first African American (“colored” was the term used at the time) infantry unit to see action in World War II. Reactivated on May 15, 1942, at…
Gotenhafen, German-Occupied Poland • January 23, 1945 On this date in 1945 German Grand Adm. Karl Doenitz launched Operation Hannibal, a seaborne evacuation or, as Germans called it, a rescue operation (Rettungsaktion) of well over a million people trapped by war in Latvia, East Prussia, and German-occupied Poland. Mounted by naval, merchant marine, and civilian vessels,…
Washington, D.C. • January 22, 1944 On this date in 1944 President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9417, which created the War Refugee Board (WRB), an independent government agency. The president said that “it was urgent that action be taken at once to forestall the plan of the Nazis to exterminate all the Jews…
London, England • January 21, 1943 Arguably one of Germany’s greatest assets early in World War II was the Enigma machine. It could encrypt and decrypt sensitive diplomatic and military messages in billions of ways (actually 10 to the 23rd power). The location of German surface ships and U‑boats and Allied supply convoys in the Atlantic…
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Munich, Germany • January 20, 1929 On this date in 1929 failed German chicken farmer Heinrich Himmler became Reichsfuehrer-SS Heinrich Himmler. The SS in his title “Reich Leader-SS” referred to Schutzstaffel, meaning “Protection Squad.” Informally known by its initials, the SS was created after National Socialist (Nazi) party leader Adolf Hitler, himself a Viennese vagrant,…
Fuehrer HQ on the Obersalzberg, Germany • January 19, 1941 On this date in 1941 Adolf Hitler and Italian leader Benito Mussolini began 2 days of crisis talks at the Berghof, Hitler’s palatial Alpine residence whose enormous sliding window afforded magnificent views of nearby Berchtesgaden and, in the distance, Salzburg, Austria. High on the agenda was the…
Warsaw, Occupied Poland • January 18, 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…
Warsaw, Liberated Poland • January 17, 1945 On this date in 1945 Warsaw fell to Soviet and Polish Communist forces as the Nazis beat a hasty retreat from the ruins of Poland’s capital. In moving against the retreating Wehrmacht (German armed forces), the Soviets liberated 800 Jews in Częstochowa and 870 Jews in Łódź, Poland. Ten…
Berlin, Germany • January 16, 1945 The Soviet Union’s offensive that began on the Vistula River, the principal river in Poland, on January 12, 1945, spread out over the following days to engulf Nazi Germany’s entire Eastern Front, running from the Baltic Sea in the north to the Carpathian Mountains in Southern Poland. Four days later,…