Wolf’s Lair HQ, East Prussia, Germany • October 21, 1944 On this date in 1944 Adolf Hitler summoned SS-Obersturmbannfuehrer (Lt. Gen.) Otto Skorzeny to Fuehrer headquarters deep in the East Prussian wilderniss near Rastenberg (present-day Kętrzyn, Poland). The scar-faced 6‑ft, 4‑in/193‑centimeter Skorzeny had made a name for himself participating in a derring-do operation that succeeded in rescuing…
Moscow, Soviet Union • October 19, 1941 On this date in 1941, the day the official “state of siege” was declared in the Soviet capital of Moscow, Red Army forces from the Soviet Far East and Siberia began arriving on the Russian Front. Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin was convinced that evacuating most of his troops…
Berlin, Germany • October 18, 1940 On this date in 1940 German aircraft maker Messerschmitt was given just 14 days to submit to the Luftwaffe a proposal for a large-capacity troop- and cargo-carrying glider. A prototype heavy-lift glider flew February 25, 1941, pulled by several 4‑engine Junkers Ju 90s. The prototype glider’s maiden flight encouraged…
Tokyo, Japan • October 13, 1940 On this date in 1940 Japan’s foreign minister Yōsuke Matsuoka, who had grown up in Oregon and California (1893–1902), invited the United States and other nonaligned nations to join the Tripartite Pact, which Axis powers Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, and Imperial Japan had initialed in Berlin the previous month…
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, noted…
Posen, Western Occupied Poland • October 6, 1943 Despite Adolf Hitler’s Germany being engaged in a European and, after December 11, 1941, a global war, the Nazi leader (Fuehrer) had not directed his country’s full industrial might toward total war as had the leaders of his enemy states—the United States, Great Britain, and the Soviet Union….
Munich, Germany • October 5, 1921 On this date in 1921 the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartie, NSDAP or Nazi Party) headed by Adolf Hitler formally established the Sturmabteilung (lit. “Storm Detachment”). The organization is better known by its initials SA and colloquially as “brownshirts” (Braunhemden) for the color of their shirt…
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…
Rome, Italy • October 3, 1935 On this date in 1935 Benito Mussolini’s Italy invaded the Northeast African Kingdom of Abyssinia (present-day Ethiopia) without a declaration of war, and for doing so the League of Nations (forerunner to today’s United Nations) instructed its member states to impose limited economic sanctions on Italy. (Neither the U.S….
London, England • October 1, 1938 The storm clouds of war in Europe seemed to have parted on this date in 1938 in London, one day after British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain had returned from his diplomatic triumph in Munich. Three visits to Germany had been required to part the clouds: the first to the…