London, England • April 16, 1941 This night and early the next morning in 1941, when London’s historic St. Paul’s Cathedral was bombed and damaged, marked the start of the final phase of the Blitz (September 7, 1940, to May 21, 1941), which reached its climax on May 10 with a deadly raid that hit the House of Commons,…
Berlin, Germany • April 11, 1934 On this date in 1934 German Chancellor Adolf Hitler secretly met with German War Minister Gen. Werner von Blomberg, the unofficial representative of the officer corps of the Reichswehr (German armed forces), and reached an agreement that sealed the fate of the post-World War I Weimar Republic. Behind titular President…
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…
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…
Wolf’s Lair, Fuehrer HQ, East Prussia · October 10, 1944 Shortly after the July 1944 attempt on Adolf Hitler’s life, an adjutant of the Chief of the General Staff of the Army remarked that the 55-year-old Hitler had the “posture of an old man.” On September 24, 1944, Dr. Theodor Morell, the Fuehrer’s loyal, long-serving physician,…
London, England · October 1, 1938 The storm clouds of war in Europe seemed to have parted on this date in 1938 in London, one day after British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain had returned from his triumph in Munich. Three visits to Germany had been required to part the clouds: the first to the Berghof…
Forward German HQ in Poland · September 24, 1939 On this date in 1939 in Poland, Luftwaffe chief Hermann Goering prepared to send hundreds of aircraft to blitz Warsaw in the first major city attack of World War II in Europe, while German armored forces prepared for a ground assault on the Polish capital. At 8 a.m….
Berlin, Germany · September 17, 1940 In November 1939, some two 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…
Warsaw, Poland · September 1, 1939 World War II in Europe began on this date in 1939 in Danzig (now the present-day Polish city of Gdańsk) when the German training ship Schleswig-Holstein, under the guise of a ceremonial visit to the city, bombarded Poland’s naval base in Danzig harbor. After a fierce daylong fight Danzig…
Berlin, Germany · August 31, 1939 On August 22, 1939, Adolf Hitler told his generals he would fabricate a story to justify his planned aggression against neighboring Poland. The plan was for Nazi Party Schutzstaffel (SS) operatives to dress in Polish uniforms, attack a German customs post and a German radio transmitter station in Gleiwitz,…