London, England • August 17, 1943 In mid-June 1943 a Royal Air Force reconnaissance mission flew over the top-secret Peenemuende Army Research Center and V‑2 rocket launch site on the German Baltic coast. Images confirmed the presence of long-range ballistic missiles at the site. A month later British Prime Minister Winston Churchill ordered an attack…
Washington, D.C. and London, England • December 17, 1942 In remarks he made to 14 senior Nazis at a top-secret conference in the fashionable Berlin suburb of Wannsee on January 22, 1942, 38‑year-old SS-Obergruppenfuehrer Reinhard Heydrich, chief of the Reich Security Head [or Main] Office as also head of the German secret police apparatus, spoke of…
Berlin, Germany • July 1, 1937 On this date in 1937 the Gestapo (German secret police) arrested outspoken Lutheran theologian and pastor Martin Niemoeller. The next year Niemoeller, still incarcerated, was tried by a three-judge “special court” (a Nazi Sondergericht) for activities against the State. Niemoeller’s court-appointed defense counsel defended the cleric, insisting Niemoeller had raised…
Washington, D.C. and London, England · December 17, 1942 In remarks he made to senior Nazis at a conference in the Berlin suburb of Wannsee on January 22, 1942, SS-Obergruppenfuehrer Reinhard Heydrich, chief of the Reich Security Head Office and head of the German secret police apparatus, spoke of “practical experience” that was being collected “in…
Riga, Occupied Latvia · November 30, 1941 On November 25 and 29, 1941, Einsatzgruppe 3 (Special Task Group 3), one of many SS (short for Schutzstaffel) mobile death squads operating behind German front lines, murdered 5,000 “Reich Jews,” that is, German- and Austrian-born Jews. These men, women, and children had arrived in the Baltic ghetto…
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 fatally wounded Ernst vom Rath, Third Secretary at the German embassy. He shot Rath, he told authorities, out “of love for my parents and for my people.” His was an…
Warsaw, Occupied Poland · November 4, 1939 On this date in 1939 in Nazi-occupied Poland, newly appointed Governor-General Hans Frank established the Warsaw ghetto and began forcing the city’s Jews into a single area. Ten days later Frank and his deputy Arthur Seyss-Inquart ordered Jews in Poland to wear a white bracelet bearing a hexagonal…
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’s Poland, one in…
Kiev, Occupied Ukraine · September 29, 1941 By the end of 1940, sixteen 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…
Berlin, Germany · September 27, 1937 On this date in 1937 the Reichssicherheitshauptamt, Reich Security Head Office (known by its acronym RSHA), was created by Reichsfuehrer-SS Heinrich Himmler through the merger of the Nazi Party’s Schutzstaffel (SS) intelligence service; the Sicherheitsdienst (SD), or Security Service; and the Sicherheitspolizei (SiPo), or Security Police. The SiPo comprised the…