Rome, Italy · October 28, 1940 In October 1940 Romanian strongman Gen. Ion Antonescu gave Adolf Hitler permission 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 had considered Romania to lie within their…
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 seventh time. (The two would meet seventeen times.) The Brenner Pass meeting of the two dictators followed on the heels of their June 18 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 Romanian oil supplies in and around Ploiești would not come under bomber attack from stationary bases in the Eastern Mediterranean. The most likely source…
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. Fourteen Greek divisions laid down their arms. The news…
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,”…
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 had threatened the southern entrance to the…
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 two…
Cairo, Egypt · March 7, 1941 On this date in 1941 in Greece, a British expeditionary force from Egypt arrived just two days before the army of Italian dictator Benito Mussolini started its last unsuccessful campaign against Greek forces. The previous October the Italian army had crossed Greece’s northwestern frontier from neighboring Albania, launching the…
Fuehrer HQ on the Obersalzberg, Germany · January 19, 1941 On this date in 1941 Adolf Hitler and Italian leader Benito Mussolini began two 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…