Moscow, Soviet Union • October 15, 1941 On June 22, 1941, the day Adolf Hitler sprang his surprise attack on the Soviet Union, a country of 180 million people to Germany’s east, 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…
Budapest, Hungary • January 4, 1945 In March 1944 Adolf Hitler ordered the Wehrmacht (German armed forces) to occupy his wavering Axis ally Hungary, whose oil reserves and fuel storage tanks at Nagykanizsa (German, Grosskirchen) southwest of the capital Budapest in the Lake Balaton (German, Plattensee) area had grown strategically more important to the German…
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…
Stalingrad, Soviet Union • November 1, 1942 By one German count, over five million Red Army soldiers had been taken prisoner since Adolf Hitler unleashed Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of the Soviet Union begun 16 months earlier. As for the number of Soviet service personnel killed and disabled, there was only a rough estimate, but clearly…
Moscow, Soviet Union · April 15, 1943 On this date in 1943 Soviet Gen. Géorgui Zakharov placed a patrol of six Yak‑7s with Soviet pilots under Free French command. The initial six French pilots formed a mixed patrol of six French and six Russian planes. The brainchild of Gen. Charles de Gaulle, leader of the…
Berlin, Germany • December 25, 1941 On this date in 1941 Japanese citizens celebrated the 15th anniversary of the succession to the Imperial Throne of Emperor Hirohito (posthumously referred to as Emperor Shōwa), according to tradition the 124th direct descendant of Jimmu, the legendary first ruler of the Empire of the Rising Sun. Festive toasts…
Berlin, Germany · December 18, 1940 On this date in 1940 in Berlin, one day before receiving the credentials of the new Soviet ambassador to Germany, Adolf Hitler signed Fuehrer Directive 21, Operation Barbarossa (Unternehmen Barbarossa), thereby initiating the secret preparations and military operations that led to the Axis invasion of the Soviet Union on June 22,…
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…
Moscow, Soviet Union · December 6, 1941 Three weeks after launching Operation Barbarossa on June 22, 1941, the Germans and their Axis partners had reached close enough to Moscow to fly sorties and bomb the Soviet capital. Tactically, the Wehrmacht (German armed forces) won resounding victories, taking over 3 million Soviet prisoners in 1941 and seizing…
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…