Ohrdruf, Central Germany · April 4, 1945 Over the first three weeks of April 1945, during the brutal terminal phase of the Third Reich, Allied armies discovered more than one hundred concentration camps, including Buchenwald, Nordhausen, Flossenbuerg, and Bergen-Belsen. On this date in 1945 soldiers of Gen. George S. Patton’s U.S. Third Army unexpectedly came…
Oppenheim, Germany · March 22, 1945 On this date in 1945, one day before the British 21st Army Group under Field Marshal Bernard 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 sneaked a division of his U.S….
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, traveled 184 ft, 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…
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. Pacelli took the name Pius XII. Pius’ actions during the Holocaust are controversial. Critics have accused him of everything from anti-Semitism to colluding…
Berlin, Germany · March 1, 1935 On this date in 1935 Adolf Hitler appointed World War I air ace (last commander of the famous “Red Baron” Richthofen Fighter Squadron) Hermann Goering 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…
Budapest, Hungary · February 14, 1945 On December 29, 1944, Soviet and Romanian troops (Romania was now a Soviet ally) began laying siege to Budapest, the capital of Adolf Hitler’s vassal state of Hungary. Budapest, split in two by the River Danube, was a city of over 800,000 resi¬dents and refugees, including well over 100,000…
Stockholm, Sweden · February 5, 1945 Within five months from the start of the German conquest of Norway in April 1940 the first Norwegian political prisoners were deported to Germany. Two years later, in September 1943, the first deportations of Danish prisoners and Jews to Germany began after German civil and military authorities assumed direct…
Auschwitz-Birkenau, Poland · January 27, 1945 In the months following the Red Army’s entry into the abandoned Nazi death camp at Majdanek on the outskirts of Lublin, Poland, where more than 79,000 people had been killed, the growing list of liberated camps (the Nazis had over 40 death camps) characterized by mounds of corpses and emaciated survivors…
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). 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 and other persecuted minorities…
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 the Polish capital. In moving against the retreating Wehrmacht, the Soviets liberated 800 Jews in Częstochowa and 870 Jews in Łódź, Poland. On January 26, 1945, Soviet…