Luebeck, Northern Germany · April 24, 1945 Reichsfuehrer-SS, Gestapo chief, and Adolf Hitler-devotee Heinrich Himmler began making clumsy attempts to secure a separate peace treaty with the Allies as the defenders of the Reich capital—ground zero of Nazi resistance—failed to push the Red Army back across the Spree River, the last physical barrier to the…
Berlin, Germany · April 20, 1945 On this date in 1945, a stooped, jowly-faced Adolf Hitler celebrated his 56th birthday in his command bunker under Berlin’s Old Reich Chancellery. Unlike previous birthdays marked by much ceremony and fuss, this one was all gloom and doom due to the Wehrmacht’s failure to halt the Soviet advance…
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…
Berlin, Germany · April 2, 1945 In the spring of 1945 senior leaders of the Third Reich were growing panicky. In the west, American troops had succeeded in crossing the Rhine River at Remagen 35 miles south of Cologne on March 7 and were advancing into the German heartland. In the east, the tracks of Soviet mechanized…
Oppenheim, Germany · March 22, 1945 On this date in 1945, one day before the British 21st Army Group under Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery was due to launch Operation Plunder, the long-awaited northern offensive across the Rhine River at Rees and Wesel in North Rhine-Westphalia, Gen. George S. Patton sneaked a division of his U.S….
Berlin, Germany · March 1, 1935 On this date in 1935 Adolf Hitler appointed World War I air ace (last commander of the famous “Red Baron” Richthofen Fighter Squadron) Hermann Goering 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…
Auschwitz-Birkenau, Poland · January 27, 1945 In the months following the Red Army’s entry into the abandoned Nazi death camp at Majdanek on the outskirts of Lublin, Poland, where more than 79,000 people had been killed, the growing list of liberated camps (the Nazis had over 40 death camps) characterized by mounds of corpses and emaciated survivors…
Munich, Germany · January 20, 1929 On this date in 1929 failed German chicken farmer Heinrich Himmler became Reichsfuehrer-SS Heinrich Himmler. The SS in his title referred to Schutzstaffel, meaning “Protection Squad.” Informally known by its initials, the SS was created after National Socialist (Nazi) party leader Adolf Hitler, himself a Viennese vagrant, set about…
Berlin, Germany · January 16, 1945 On this date in 1945 Adolf Hitler moved his entourage into the “Fuehrer Bunker” under the Old Reich Chancellery in Berlin, where he lived and directed the last months of the war in Europe. The bunker—a maze of living quarters, conference rooms, offices, and utilities spreading two stories deep…