SHAEF HQ, Reims, France • March 11, 1945 The hard-fought victories of the Western Allies between October 1944 and the Rhine River crossings in March 1945 held out the promise of an imminent end to the war in Europe. Seven Allied armies were advancing north, east, and south into the German heartland against bitter albeit…
Luebeck, Northern Germany • April 24, 1945 Reichsfuehrer-SS, Reich Minister of the Interior, Gestapo chief, and Adolf Hitler-devotee Heinrich Himmler began making clumsy attempts to secure a separate peace treaty with the Western Allies as German defenders of the Reich capital—ground zero of Nazi resistance—failed to push the Red Army east back across the Spree…
Berlin, Germany • December 13, 1941 On this date in 1941, just 2 days after Germany and the U.S. had declared war on each other, U‑boat Adm. Karl Doenitz initiated the Kriegsmarine’s wolf pack campaign against ill-prepared merchant shipping along the Canadian and U.S. eastern and Gulf seaboards. (Wolf packs consisted of a group of…
Reims, France • May 7, 1945 Five days after the suicide of Adolf Hitler on April 30, 1945, Adm. Hans-Georg von Friedeburg, an emissary from Grand Admiral Karl Doenitz, arrived in the French cathedral town of Reims, headquarters of Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower, Supreme Commander Allied Expeditionary Force, looking pale and tired. For the second…
London, England · December 26, 1943 The Scharnhorst was a German capital ship, variously described as a battleship and battlecruiser of the German Kriegsmarine. Launched in 1936 and completed in 1939—her nine‑gun, triple turrets the pride of the Kriegsmarine—the 31,500‑ton ship was sister ship to the Gneisenau. During much of the early part of the…
Berlin, Germany · December 13, 1941 On this date in 1941, two days after Germany and the U.S. had declared war on each other, U‑boat Adm. Karl Doenitz initiated the Kriegsmarine’s wolf pack campaign against ill-prepared merchant shipping along the Canadian and U.S. eastern seaboards. (Wolf packs consisted of a group of U‑boats systematically attacking…
Nuremberg, Germany · November 21, 1945 On this date in 1945 in occupied Germany the International Military Tribunal (Nuremberg Trials) of Nazi leaders got down to business in the Bavarian city where Adolf Hitler had staged his 1930s showy Nazi Party rallies. The legal basis for the trials was established by the London Charter, issued…
Washington, D.C. · October 2, 1939 On January 31, 1939, President Franklin D. Roosevelt held a closed-door meeting with the Senate Military Affairs Committee at the White House. Reportedly FDR made the comment that “the frontier of the United States is the Rhine,” meaning France’s eastern border with Nazi Germany. When the statement was leaked…
Berlin, Germany · May 24, 1943 In June 1942 German submarines sank 637,000 tons of British shipping—a greater total than in any previous or subsequent month. So many prowling U‑boats made it hard for merchant convoys sailing in the major trans-Atlantic traffic lanes to evade detection. The next year, in March, Atlantic U‑boats sank 82 ships (476,000 tons)…
Muerwik, near Flensburg, Northern Germany · May 23, 1945 On this date in 1945, twenty-three days after Adolf Hitler’s suicide under the rubble of the Reich capital, Berlin, and sixteen days after emissaries from Grand Admiral Karl Doenitz’s government agreed to the unconditional surrender of all German military forces, a British liaison officer went to…