Moscow, Soviet Union · October 15, 1941 On June 22, 1941, the day Adolf Hitler sprang his surprise attack on the Soviet Union, he reportedly confided to some of his intimates: “I feel as if I have opened a door into a dark, unseen room—without knowing what lies behind the door.” His gloomy premonitions soon…
Brenner Pass, Italy · October 4, 1940 On this date in 1940, at a border crossing between Germany and Italy, Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler met for the 7th time. (The duo would meet 17 times.) The Brenner Pass meeting of the 2 Axis Pact dictators followed on the heels of their June 18, 1940, meeting in Munich, which…
Berlin, Germany · September 17, 1940 In November 1939, some two months after Germany had invaded Poland, Grand Admiral Erich Raeder, head of the Kriegsmarine, instructed a subordinate to draw up a paper on “the possibility of troop landings in England.” The study paper set out four prerequisites. The next month the German Army, with…
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…
On the Eastern Front · July 27, 1941 On this date in 1941, five weeks after the launch of Operation Barbarossa, Nazi Germany’s surprise attack on the Soviet Union, Adolf Hitler paid a visit to the headquarters of Army Group North. Led by Field Marshal Wilhelm von Leeb (1876–1956), Army Group North had begun its…
London, England · July 10, 1940 On this date in 1940, less than one month after France’s capitulation to Nazi Germany and just 10 days after the Germans had seized Great Britain’s Channel Islands of Jersey and Guernsey off France’s Brittany coast, Luftwaffe aircraft based in France began a relentless aerial campaign targeting the lone European…
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 (see map). These territories had been assigned to the Soviet sphere of influence in a secret protocol…
