Fuehrer HQ on the Obersalzberg, Germany • January 19, 1941 On this date in 1941 Adolf Hitler and Italian leader Benito Mussolini began 2 days of crisis talks at the Berghof, Hitler’s palatial Alpine residence whose enormous sliding window afforded magnificent views of nearby Berchtesgaden and, in the distance, Salzburg, Austria. High on the agenda was the…
Berlin, Germany • December 13, 1940 Italy had long had an interest in the neighboring Balkans, which lay to the country’s east across the Adriatic Sea. In June 1917 Italian soldiers briefly seized portions of central and southern Albania, declaring them a protectorate. Italian Fascism, which was rooted in Italian nationalism, urged Italians to reestablish…
Rome, Italy • October 28, 1940 In early October 1940 Romanian strongman Gen. Ion Antonescu gave Adolf Hitler permission for the German Wehrmacht (armed forces) to occupy his country. Hitler’s Axis partner Benito Mussolini was caught off guard by the news, and the Italian public reacted negatively. For years the Italian dictator and his countrymen…
Brenner Pass, Italy • October 4, 1940 On this date in 1940, at a border crossing between Germany and Italy, Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler met for the 7th time. (The duo would meet 17 times.) The Brenner Pass meeting of the 2 Axis Pact dictators followed on the heels of their June 18, 1940, meeting in Munich, which…
Crete, Eastern Mediterranean • May 20, 1941 With the start of marathon German operations against the Soviet Union, codenamed Operation Barbarossa, a month away, Adolf Hitler needed to ensure that his oil supplies in and around Ploiești, Romania, where he had sent a German “military mission,” would not come under Allied bomber attack from stationary…
German 12th Army HQ, Larissa, Greece • April 21, 1941 After their prime minister’s suicide 3 days earlier representatives of the leaderless Greek government signed a document of capitulation at the headquarters of the German 12th Army at Larissa in Central Greece on this date in 1941. Fourteen Greek divisions laid down their arms. An armistice…
Vienna, Austria • March 25, 1941 On this date in 1941 in Vienna, the government of Yugoslav regent Prince Paul signed a protocol of adherence to the Berlin-Rome-Tokyo Tripartite Pact, thereby setting the stage for a complex guerrilla war against Germans, Italians, and their Yugoslav allies, and within the Yugoslav resistance forces themselves. Not 2 days…
Belgrade, Yugoslavia • April 6, 1941 At the tail end of February 1941 British Commonwealth forces from Nigeria captured Mogadishu, capital of Italian Somaliland (part of today’s Somalia), after Benito Mussolini’s armies had abandoned any pretense of defending their East African colony. The Italian colony in the Horn of Africa, which in August 1940 absorbed…
German 12th Army HQ, Larissa, Greece • April 21, 1941 On this date in 1941 representatives of the Greek government, leaderless after Prime Minister Alexandros Koryzis committed suicide three days earlier, signed a document of capitulation at the headquarters of the German 12th Army at Larissa in Central Greece. Fourteen Greek divisions laid down their…
London, England • April 13, 1939 Following the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia’s German-speaking Sudetenland in October 1938 and the invasion and incorporation of the rest of Czechoslovakia into the Reich in mid-March 1939, Great Britain, France, Poland, Greece, and Romania entered into mutual assistance pacts in case of a military invasion by “a European power,”…