Oppenheim, Germany • March 22, 1945 On this date in 1945, 1 day before the mixed British-Canadian 21st Army Group under Field Marshal Bernard Law Montgomery was due to launch Operation Plunder, the long-awaited northern offensive across the Rhine River at Rees and Wesel in North Rhine-Westphalia, Gen. George S. Patton, Jr., sneaked soldiers of the…
Auburn, Massachusetts • March 16, 1926 On this date in 1926 in Auburn, Massachusetts, Dr. Robert Goddard (1882–1945) conducted his first successful rocket flight. His liquid-propellant rocket rose 41 ft/12.5 m, traveled 184 ft/56 m, and burned no more than 3 seconds, but it proved the concept of rocket flight worked. Goddard, who received limited support for his research and…
Berlin, Germany • March 1, 1935 On this date in 1935 Adolf Hitler appointed World War I air ace Hermann Goering, last commander of the famous “Red Baron” Richthofen Fighter Squadron, to the position of Luftwaffe Commander-in-Chief. Goering held the post until the final days of the Third Reich. A faithful Nazi from the earliest days…
Near Bad Orb, Hessen • December 1, 1939 On this date in 1939, 4 months since the outbreak of war in Europe, the German Wehrmacht (military) established a prisoner of war camp, Mannschafts-Stammlager IX B, outside Bad Orb, roughly 30 miles/48 km northeast of Frankfurt am Main. Over the course of the war Stalag IX B—Stalag being a…
Auschwitz-Birkenau, Occupied Poland • October 30, 1944 On this date in 1944 in Poland, the last murders by poison gas took place at the Nazis’ largest and arguably most infamous death camp, Auschwitz-Birkenau (Polish, Oświęcim), one of eight camps used for mass murder during World War II. (Six were in what is today Poland, one in…
Kyiv, Occupied Ukraine • September 29, 1941 By the end of 1940, 16 months after Adolf Hitler had plunged Europe into war by invading Poland, the number of Jews killed by Nazi Germany approached 100,000. But in 1941 the death toll grew exponentially as mass murder of Jews became state policy. By the end of 1941…
Paris, Occupied France · June 14, 1940 On this date in 1940 German troops marched into a half-empty Paris, forcing the French government to move to Tours, then to Bordeaux on the French Atlantic coast, where for the third time since the Franco-Prussian war of 1870–71 it set up an impromptu national headquarters. In a…
Berlin, Germany · June 9, 1942 On this date in 1942, with the full leadership of the Third Reich in attendance, Nazi “martyr” Reinhard Heydrich was eulogized in one of the most elaborate funerals ever staged in Berlin. (Heydrich had been added by Adolf Hitler to the “honorary list of the Fallen of the Nazi…
Rome, Italy • March 2, 1939 On this date in 1939 in Vatican City, Roman Catholic Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli was elected pope on his sixty-third birthday. His coronation took place ten days later. Son of a Vatican lawyer, Pacelli took the name Pius XII. Pius’ actions during the Holocaust are controversial. Critics have accused him of…
Paris, France • November 7, 1938 On this date in 1938, 17-year-old Herschel Grynszpan, an unemployed German-born Polish Jew living illegally in the French capital, severely wounded Ernst vom Rath, Third Secretary at the German embassy on the Rue de Lille on Paris’s Left Bank. He shot Rath, the young assassin told French authorities, to…