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…
Berlin, Germany · March 21, 1943 Adolf Hitler was the target of assassins on at least 30 occasions. On this date in 1943 in Berlin, German army officers made the second of two attempts in March to kill Hitler with a bomb. The week before, two staff officers had planted a bomb aboard Hitler’s private plane….
Brenner Pass, Austria · March 18, 1940 On this date in 1940 on the Austro-Italian border, German leader Adolf Hitler and Italian strongman Benito Mussolini met for their fifth face-to-face meeting. Hitler had requested the summit in order to force Il Duce (Italian, “the leader”) to take sides within the framework of the so-called Pact…
Prague, Czechoslovakia · March 15, 1939 From the ruins of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in November 1918 a half-dozen new states emerged. Among them were Austria and Czechoslovakia. When Austria was incorporated into Adolf Hitler’s Greater German Reich in March 1938, Czechoslovakia found itself inside a German pincer. On October 1, 1938, following the Munich Agreement signed…
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…
Berlin, Germany · February 28, 1933 On this date in 1933, with the Reichstag (German parliament building) still smoldering following the fire set by 24-year-old Dutch Communist Marinus van der Lubbe the day before, German Chancellor Adolf Hitler persuaded 87-year-old President Paul von Hindenburg to sign the Reichstag Fire Edict. The emergency decree suspended key…
Munich, Germany · February 26, 1932 On this date in 1932 in Germany, Austrian-born Adolf Hitler was granted German citizenship. A decade earlier the Austrian was the unlikely leader of a fringe Populist-nationalist movement, the National Socialist German Workers’ Party. In November 1923 he led a “beer-hall putsch” in the Bavarian capital, Munich, hoping to…
Munich, Germany · February 22, 1943 On this date in 1943 siblings Sophie (age 21) and Hans Scholl (24) and their friend Christoph Probst (24), members of the underground White Rose (Weiße Rose) resistance circle, were charged with sedition for writing, printing, and distributing anti-Nazi leaflets and “tried” by “Hitler’s Hanging Judge,” the notorious Nazi…
SHAEF HQ, Reims, France · February 21, 1945 On this date in 1945 U.S. fighter-bombers attacked the Berghof, Adolf Hitler’s Alpine retreat on the Obersalzberg near Berchtesgaden on the Bavarian-Austrian border. The Berghof served as an outpost of Hitler’s Berlin chancellery, making it an obvious target. Further north, in a less symbolic move, more than…
Berlin, Germany · February 12, 1945 On this date in 1945 German women were called up for service in the Volkssturm (national militia). Adolf Hitler was playing his final card in World War II by mobilizing practically every German civilian for an apocalyptic defense of the Third Reich, a 20th-century Wagnerian Goertterdaemmerung. Nazi themes of death,…