Prague, Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia • September 27, 1941 On this date in 1941 SS-Obergruppenfuehrer Reinhard Heydrich arrived in Prague to take up his post as Acting Reich Protector of the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. Five days later the new military governor of Czech lands, which Germany had seized in March 1939, outlined…
Berlin, Germany • September 26, 1944 On this date in 1944 the German news agency announced the surrender of 600 British troops in a small village west of Arnhem in the Netherlands. For days the lightly armed men of the British 1st Airborne “Red Devil” Division had held the northern end of a key bridge…
Munich, Germany • September 25, 1937 On this date in 1937 Italian strongman Benito Mussolini paid his first visit to Germany, meeting Adolf Hitler in the Fuehrer’s private, luxurious 9‑room apartment in Munich, 10 minutes away from the Brown House, Nazi Party national headquarters, and the Fuehrerbau, where Hitler had formal offices. During the visit Mussolini…
Berlin, Germany • September 20, 1940 On this date in 1940 the chief of the German high command, Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel, announced that Wehrmacht troops were being dispatched to Romania “in case a war with Soviet Russia is forced upon us.” The announcement was Berlin’s warning shot across Moscow’s bow that the Soviets were…
Brest-Litovsk, Occupied Eastern Poland • September 19, 1939 Adolf Hitler’s armies stormed over Poland’s border on September 1, 1939, in what became known as the world’s first blitzkrieg—“lightning war.” Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin hastened to claim his share of the spoils under the terms of a secret protocol in the Molotov-Ribbentrop Nonaggression Treaty signed in Moscow less…
Wolf’s Lair, Rastenburg, East Prussia, Germany • September 16, 1944 On this date in September 1944, at his forward headquarters in East Prussia, Adolf Hitler laid out his demands for a surprise counteroffensive on the Western Front that came to be known as the Ardennes Offensive, or Battle of the Bulge. September’s date is notable because…
Berlin, Germany • September 14, 1930 On this date in 1930 German voters went to the polls to elect a new Reichstag, and the results were shocking. The National Socialist German Workers’ Party (Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, or NSDAP) was the ninth and smallest of Germany’s political parties, with but 12 members in the national parliament. In…
Fuehrer HQ, Rastenburg, Germany • September 12, 1943 On September 11, 1943, imprisoned in the Hotel Campo Imperatore high in the Apennine Mountains of Central Italy, deposed Italian dictator Benito Mussolini learned of the terms of the Long Armistice the Allies had presented to Marshal Pietro Badoglio’s new Italian government. (A Short Armistice had been signed…
Washington, D.C. • September 11, 1941 Eight months before Japan’s December 7, 1941, attack on U.S. assets at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, Nazi Germany’s navy began mounting a series of U‑boat attacks on cargo ships crossing the North Atlantic from North America to Great Britain, a nation at war with Germany since September 3, 1939. The…
Nuremberg, Germany • September 10, 1935 On date in 1935 the Nazis convened their annual Party congress in Nuremberg completely fixated on the charismatic savior-figure Adolf Hitler, Germany’s chancellor since January 1933. The 1935 “Rally of Freedom” (Reichsparteitag der Freiheit) touted Hitler’s wildly popular reintegration of the Saar region into the German Reich (from 1920…