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…
Munich, Germany · February 26, 1932 On this date in 1932 in Germany, Austrian-born Adolf Hitler was granted German citizenship. A decade earlier the stateless Austrian (Hitler had formally renounced his Austrian citizenship in April 1925) was the unlikely leader of a fringe Populist-nationalist movement, the National Socialist German Workers’ Party. In November 1923 he…
London, England · February 20, 1944 On this date in 1944, while Soviet armed forces were ridding their country of the German Wehrmacht on the Eastern Front, U.S. and British air forces embarked on Operation Argument in the skies over the Western Front. Unofficially dubbed “Big Week,” Operation Argument was an intensive 6‑day air campaign…
Berlin, Germany · February 4, 1937 On this date in 1937, in a bold, sweeping decree, Adolf Hitler assumed command of the entire German armed forces, or Wehrmacht. He abolished the Reichskriegsministerium (Ministry of War), in the act liquidating the traditional power of the army general staff as the ultimate controller and director of Germany’s…
Berlin, Germany · January 16, 1945 On this date in 1945 Adolf Hitler moved his entourage into the Fuehrerbunker under the Old Reich Chancellery in Berlin, where he lived and directed the last months of the war in Europe. The “Leader’s bunker”—a maze of living quarters, conference rooms, offices, and utilities spreading 2 stories deep…
SHAEP HQ, Versailles, France · January 1, 1945 Nazi Germany’s position on the Western Front had declined precipitously after the D-Day landings of Allied troops on June 6, 1944. Gen. George S. Patton’s Third U.S. Army was driving rapidly into the enemy’s rear. The German High Command (Oberkommando der Wehrmacht) was aware that German troops were…
Nuremberg, Germany · November 21, 1945 On this date in 1945 in Germany, the International Military Tribunal (Nuremberg Trials) of Nazi leaders got down to business in the city where Adolf Hitler had staged his 1930s showy party rallies. The legal basis for the trials was established by the London Charter, issued on August 8, 1945,…
London, England · 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,…
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, while German armored forces prepared for a ground assault on the Polish capital. At 8 a.m. the…