Berlin, Germany • April 20, 1945 On this date in 1945 a stooped, haggard, yellowish gray- and jowly-faced Adolf Hitler celebrated his 56th birthday in the safety of his underground command bunker 50 feet/15 meters beneath Berlin’s battered Old Reich Chancellery. Unlike previous birthdays marked by much ceremony and fuss, this one was all gloom and doom…
Berlin, Germany • April 8, 1940 On this date, April 8, 1940, when Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich was at the top of its game (the occupation of Denmark and the invasion of Norway were a day away), the German Fuehrer issued his order regarding the “handling of Jewish mixed-breeds in the German armed forces” (Behandlung…
Berlin, Germany • March 21, 1943 Adolf Hitler was the target of assassins on at least 30 occasions. On this date in 1943 in the German Reich’s capital, Berlin, Army officers made the second of 2 attempts in March to kill Hitler with a bomb. The week before, 2 staff officers had planted a bomb aboard Hitler’s private…
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…
London, England • March 6, 1941 By January 1941 the Allies had lost 1,300 merchant vessels, almost half of them to German U‑boats. Following the enslavement of 120 million people in 7 Western and Eastern European countries by Nazi Germany in 1940, the British were reduced to fighting Adolf Hitler’s military juggernaut alone. In alarm they watched the…
Berlin, Germany • March 1, 1935 On this date in 1935 Adolf Hitler appointed World War I air ace Hermann Goering, last commander of the famous “Red Baron” Richthofen Fighter Squadron, 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…
London, England • July 10, 1940 On this date in 1940, less than one month after France’s humiliating capitulation to Nazi Germany and just 10 days after the Germans had seized Great Britain’s Channel Islands of Jersey and Guernsey off France’s Brittany coast, Luftwaffe aircraft based in occupied France began a relentless aerial campaign targeting the…
Alexandria, Egypt • November 11, 1940 Italian Army operations in North Africa, based in Libya, required a supply line from the Italian mainland. The British Army’s North African Campaign, based in Egypt, suffered from supply difficulties in the Mediterranean Theater due to the proximity of Italy’s Regia Marina naval base at Taranto on the Italian…
Berlin, Germany • September 17, 1940 In November 1939, some 2 months after Germany had invaded Poland, Grand Admiral Erich Raeder, head of the Kriegsmarine, instructed a subordinate to draw up a paper on “the possibility of troop landings in England.” The study paper set out four prerequisites. The next month the German Army, with input…
Cologne, Germany • May 30, 1942 During World War II in Europe Allied air power had several principle objectives. Foremost among them were destroying Nazi Germany’s war-making capacity, oil installations, and transportation networks; demoralizing Germans by laying waste to their population centers, where mostly civilians lived, many working for the military-industrial firms in the area;…