Along the Eastern Front · June 28, 1942 On this date in 1942 on the Eastern Front, Adolf Hitler launched Germany’s second summer campaign against the Soviet Union in two years. (The first had been Operation Barbarossa begun the previous June, which had been intended to knock the Soviet Union out of the war.) Ignoring…
Bucharest, Romania · June 27, 1940 On this date in 1940 Red Army troops invaded Romania in the wake of Romanian King Carol II’s refusal to cede the eastern territories of Bessarabia and northern Bukovina to the Soviet Union. These territories had been assigned to the Soviet sphere of influence in a secret protocol in…
Berlin, Germany · June 22, 1941 The largest military force ever assembled—three million soldiers, 4,300 tanks, nearly 4,400 aircraft, and some 46,000 artillery pieces—assaulted the Soviet Union on this date in 1941. Since the 1920s Adolf Hitler had championed a crusade against “Jewish Bolshevism,” with its political, ideological, and economic center in Moscow. Hitler believed that only when…
Crete, Eastern Mediterranean · May 20, 1941 With the start of marathon German operations against the Soviet Union, codenamed Operation Barbarossa, a month away, Adolf Hitler needed to ensure that his Romanian oil supplies in and around Ploiești would not come under bomber attack from stationary bases in the Eastern Mediterranean. The most likely source…
Berlin, Germany · May 12, 1941 On this date in 1941, two days after Deputy Reich Fuehrer Rudolf Hess had embarked on his historic “peace mission” to England, Adolf Hitler finally confirmed June 22 as the start date for Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of the Soviet Union. Among Hitler’s goals was the eradication of the “Jewish Bolshevik”…
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…
London, England · April 13, 1939 Following the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia’s German-speaking Sudetenland in October 1938 and the invasion and incorporation of the rest of Czechoslovakia into the Reich in mid-March 1939, Great Britain, France, Poland, Greece, and Romania entered into mutual assistance pacts in case of a military invasion by “a European power,”…
Berlin, Germany · February 25, 1941 The first flight of the German prototype Me 321 Gigant (“Giant”) took place on this date in 1941. The previous October German aircraft maker Messerschmitt had been given just 14 days to submit a proposal for a large-capacity troop- and cargo-carrying glider. The prototype glider’s maiden flight encouraged Messerschmitt to enlarge…
When June 22 to December 5, 1941 Where The three Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, plus present-day Belarus, Ukraine, Moldova, and Western Russia. By July 1941, after Finland had joined the German onslaught to the north of Leningrad, the Eastern Front would eventually stretch from the Baltic Sea in the north to the…
When September 8, 1941 to January 27, 1944 (872 days) Where Leningrad (today’s St. Petersburg), Russia Who German Army Group North (on map, Herresgruppe Nord) initially under Field Marshal Wilhelm Ritter von Leeb (1876–1956) with token support to the north and east of Leningrad from German-allied Finnish units under Marshal Carl Gustaf Mannerheim (1867–1951). In…
