Budapest, Occupied Hungary • October 17, 1944 On this date in 1944 Adm. Miklós (Nicholas) Horthy, regent of the Kingdom of Hungary since 1920, left his native country as a prisoner of Nazi Germany. Horthy had angered Adolf Hitler after the latter had received confidential reports that the 76‑year-old Hungarian head of state was secretly…
Falaise, Northern France • August 18, 1944 Two and a half months had passed since the initial landings of U.S., British, and Canadian forces in Northern France (Operation Overlord). On the British flank the Canadian First Army, Second Division, II Corps entered Falaise on August 16, 1944 (see map below) and engaged the Germans in bitter street…
Moscow, Soviet Union • August 3, 1940 Early on the morning of August 24, 1939, Soviet People’s Commissar on Foreign Affairs, Vyacheslav Molotov, and his German counterpart, Joachim von Ribbentrop, affixed their signatures to the German-Soviet Nonaggression Pact, also known as the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. As German dictator Adolf Hitler viewed it, the pact was a “strategic…
Budapest, Occupied Hungary • July 9, 1944 On this date in 1944 Raoul Wallenberg, a 31-year-old bachelor from a distinguished Swedish family, arrived in Budapest, capital of Nazi-occupied Hungary. With diplomatic accreditation from the Swedish Ministry of Foreign Affairs (Sweden was a neutral nation), Wallenberg had been secretly recruited by the recently created (January 22, 1944)…
Southwest of Stalingrad, Soviet Union • December 23, 1941 On this date in 1942 the German Wehrmacht (armed forces) ended Operation Winter Storm (German, Unternehmen Wintergewitter), the 11‑day attempt by German Army Group Don, a new formation commanded by Field Marshal Erich von Manstein, to break the Soviet envelopment of Gen. Friedrich Paulus’ German Sixth…
Camp Ritchie, Maryland • June 19, 1942 On this date in 1942 the U.S. Army activated the Military Intelligence Training Center (MITC) at Camp Ritchie. Former property of a failed ice company, the rural site was converted into a summer training camp for the Maryland National Guard in 1926. Sixteen years later the U.S. Army…
Hermann Goering (or Göring) was a World War I fighter ace who joined the Nazi Party in 1923. He helped Adolf Hitler plan the Munich Beer Hall Putsch against the Bavarian government the same year, was wounded in the leg and groin on the afternoon of November 9 when police fired into the crowd at the Odeonsplatz in…