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…
Paris, Occupied France · May 27, 1942 On May 10, 1940, Adolf Hitler, having ended Poland’s existence in September 1939, turned his wrath on the democracies in the West. The Netherlands and Belgium capitulated to his war machine in May. Representatives of Marshal Philippe Pétain, who had recently been named premier of the French Third…
The Hague, Netherlands · May 15, 1940 Following the Dutch surrender on this date in 1940, Adolf Hitler appointed fellow Austrian Arthur Seyss-Inquart to be Reichskommissar for the Occupied Netherlands. Previously, long-time Nazi Party member Seyss-Inquart had served as Reichsstatthalter (governor) of the new German province of Ostmark, which had once been the independent country of…
SHAEF HQ, Versailles, France · May 2, 1945 On this date in 1945, a rain-sodden but peaceful day in Berlin, the battle for the war-ravaged Reich capital ended when General of the Artillery Helmuth Weidling surrendered his garrison to Soviet Lt. Gen. Vasily Chuikov. The Soviets claimed to have taken 480,000 POWs, captured 1,500 tanks and self-propelled…
Warsaw, Occupied Poland · April 19, 1943 In October 1940, a little over a year after Nazi Germany’s conquest of its eastern neighbor Poland, German Governor-General Hans Frank established a Jewish ghetto in Poland’s capital, Warsaw, moving some 90,000 Jews from all over Poland into the ghetto. The largest of the ghettos in Poland, the Warsaw…
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, Hitler ruled by decree and the Nazi synchronization…
Ohrdruf, Central Germany · April 4, 1945 Over the first three weeks of April 1945, during the brutal terminal phase of the Third Reich, Allied armies discovered more than one hundred concentration camps, including Buchenwald, Nordhausen, Flossenbuerg, and Bergen-Belsen. On this date in 1945 soldiers of Gen. George S. Patton’s U.S. Third Army unexpectedly came…
London, England · March 31, 1939 On this date in 1939, two weeks after German troops entered Prague and all of Czechoslovakia fell under the German boot, the British government, followed a few days later by the French, pledged to guarantee the independence (though interestingly not the territorial integrity) of Poland. A week later the…
Oppenheim, Germany · March 22, 1945 On this date in 1945, one day before the British 21st Army Group under Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery was due to launch Operation Plunder, the long-awaited northern offensive across the Rhine River at Rees and Wesel in North Rhine-Westphalia, Gen. George S. Patton sneaked a division of his U.S….
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. Pacelli took the name Pius XII. Pius’ actions during the Holocaust are controversial. Critics have accused him of everything from anti-Semitism to colluding…