Luebeck, Northern Germany • April 24, 1945 Reichsfuehrer-SS, Reich Minister of the Interior, Gestapo chief, and Adolf Hitler-devotee Heinrich Himmler began making clumsy attempts to secure a separate peace treaty with the Western Allies as German defenders of the Reich capital—ground zero of Nazi resistance—failed to push the Red Army east back across the Spree…
Berlin, Germany • April 7, 1933 Following his swearing in as chancellor on January 30, 1933, Adolf Hitler and his Nazi Party began a policy of Gleichschaltung (synchronization), whereby Germany would be thoroughly reordered along Nazi lines. With the Reichstag’s passage of the Enabling Act on March 23, 1933, signed into law by German president Paul von…
New York City, New York • July 26, 1935 On this date in 1935 in New York Harbor, a group of anti-Nazi activists boarded the German passenger liner Bremen, tore from the ship’s jackstay the red, white, and black Nazi Party flag, its swastika emblazoned in the center, and pitched it into the Hudson River….
Paris, Occupied France · June 14, 1940 On this date in 1940 German troops marched into a half-empty Paris, forcing the French government to move to Tours, then to Bordeaux on the French Atlantic coast, where for the third time since the Franco-Prussian war of 1870–71 it set up an impromptu national headquarters. In a…
Berlin, Germany · June 9, 1942 On this date in 1942, with the full leadership of the Third Reich in attendance, Nazi “martyr” Reinhard Heydrich was eulogized in one of the most elaborate funerals ever staged in Berlin. (Heydrich had been added by Adolf Hitler to the “honorary list of the Fallen of the Nazi…
London, England • April 13, 1939 Following the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia’s German-speaking Sudetenland in October 1938 and the invasion and incorporation of the rest of Czechoslovakia into the Reich in mid-March 1939, Great Britain, France, Poland, Greece, and Romania entered into mutual assistance pacts in case of a military invasion by “a European power,”…
Rome, Italy • March 2, 1939 On this date in 1939 in Vatican City, Roman Catholic Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli was elected pope on his sixty-third birthday. His coronation took place ten days later. Son of a Vatican lawyer, Pacelli took the name Pius XII. Pius’ actions during the Holocaust are controversial. Critics have accused him of…
Berlin, Germany • December 1, 1939 From a small cadre of fanatical thugs assigned to protect Nazi Party leader Adolf Hitler at political meetings in the 1920s, the Schutzstaffel (“Protection Squad”), or SS, grew into one of the most notorious organizations in history, with many responsibilities. Under SS-Obergruppenfuehrer Reinhard Heydrich, it ran the Reich Security…
Paris, France • November 7, 1938 On this date in 1938, 17-year-old Herschel Grynszpan, an unemployed German-born Polish Jew living illegally in the French capital, severely wounded Ernst vom Rath, Third Secretary at the German embassy on the Rue de Lille on Paris’s Left Bank. He shot Rath, the young assassin told French authorities, to…
London, England • August 17, 1943 In mid-June 1943 a Royal Air Force reconnaissance mission flew over the top-secret Peenemuende Army Research Center and V‑2 rocket launch site on the German Baltic coast. Images confirmed the presence of long-range ballistic missiles at the site. A month later British Prime Minister Winston Churchill ordered an attack…