Ruhr Pocket, Northwestern Germany • April 14, 1945 In the spring of 1945 senior leaders of the Third Reich were on edge. On Germany’s Eastern Front, the tracks of Soviet mechanized armor and the boots of their infantry could be heard approaching the outskirts of the epicenter of Nazism, Berlin. On the Western Front, elements of…
Berlin, Germany • April 9, 1940 On this date in 1940 German land, sea, air, and specialized forces advanced overland into Denmark and attacked various points along Norway’s coast from the air and sea. Earlier in the year, on January 27, the German High Command (Oberkommando der Wehrmacht, OKW) had established a task force to orchestrate…
Berlin, Germany • April 5, 1943 On this date in 1943 in Berlin, Lutheran pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer was arrested at his parents’ home by two agents of the Gestapo (Secret State Police). One of the leading Protestant theologians of the past century, Bonhoeffer was a founding pastor of the dissident Confessing Church (Bekennende Kirche), which…
Ohrdruf, Central Germany • April 4, 1945 Over the first 3 weeks of April 1945, during the brutal terminal phase of Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich, Allied armies discovered more than 100 concentration and extermination camps, including Buchenwald, Nordhausen, Flossenbuerg, and Bergen-Belsen. Discoveries like these came mostly by accident because sites of this nature were not…
Berlin, Germany • April 2, 1945 In the spring of 1945 senior leaders of the Third Reich were growing panicky. In the west, American troops had succeeded in crossing the Rhine River at Remagen 35 miles/56 kilometers south of Cologne on March 7 and were advancing into the German heartland. In the east, the tracks of Soviet mechanized…
London, England • March 31, 1939 On this date in 1939, 2 weeks after German troops entered Prague and all of Czechoslovakia fell under the German boot, the British government, followed by the French a few days later, pledged to guarantee the independence (though interestingly not the territorial integrity) of Poland. “If any action clearly threatened…
Berlin, Germany • March 29, 1945 By 1945 everything was falling apart for the Nazi regime. Most of the conquered areas in the Soviet Union and Western Europe had been recaptured from the Germans. The last gambit by the Wehrmacht (German armed forces) in the west, the Ardennes Offensive, better known as the Battle of…
SHAEF HQ, Reims, France • March 28, 1945 On this date in 1945 Supreme Allied Commander Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower telegrammed Soviet leader Joseph Stalin that he proposed, after encircling Germany’s Ruhr district, to advance on an west-east axis through the center of Germany to the Upper Elbe River, 50 miles/80 kilometers west of Berlin, there to…
Chanute Field, Rantoul, Illinois • March 19, 1941 Pressed on one side by Black news media and civil rights groups demanding that pilot training be opened up to African Americans and on the other by an upcoming re-election, President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1940 authorized the creation of a segregated flight school and an all-Black…
Over Germany • March 18, 1945 On April 18, 1941 tests began of the world’s first operational twin-engine turbojet fighter, the Messerschmitt 262 Swallow (Schwalbe). The tests were really of the airframe because the BMW turbojets were nowhere close to being ready. Over a year later, on July 18, 1942, a fully configured version flew—this almost…