Dongo near Lake Como, Northern Italy · April 27, 1945 On this date in 1945, with the Wehrmacht (German armed forces) in Italy in full retreat—indeed, their commanders had signed surrender documents on this date—Italian strongman Benito Mussolini was en route to a safe haven in Switzerland. The Duce (Italian for “leader”) was wearing a…
German 12th Army HQ, Larissa, Greece · April 21, 1941 On this date in 1941 representatives of the Greek government, leaderless after Prime Minister Alexandros Koryzis committed suicide three days earlier, signed a document of capitulation at the headquarters of the German 12th Army at Larissa in Central Greece. Fourteen Greek divisions laid down their…
Salzburg, Austria · April 8, 1943 On this date in 1943 in Salzburg, Austria, Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini met for the first time since the collapse of the Axis defense of Stalingrad at the end of January. Ignoring Mussolini’s trial balloon about negotiating a ceasefire with the Soviet leader, Joseph Stalin, Hitler remained convinced…
Belgrade, Yugoslavia · April 6, 1941 At the tail end of February 1941 British Commonwealth forces from Nigeria captured Mogadishu, capital of Italian Somaliland (part of today’s Somalia), after Benito Mussolini’s armies had abandoned any pretense of defending their East African colony. The Italian colony in the Horn of Africa had threatened the southern entrance…
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…
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…
Munich, Germany · February 26, 1932 On this date in 1932 in Germany, Austrian-born Adolf Hitler was granted German citizenship. A decade earlier the stateless Austrian (Hitler had formally renounced his Austrian citizenship in April 1925) was the unlikely leader of a fringe Populist-nationalist movement, the National Socialist German Workers’ Party. In November 1923 he…
Berlin, Germany • February 6, 1941 During the German invasion of France in 1940, an ambitious general named Erwin Rommel distinguished himself as the “lead from the front” commander of the 7th Panzer Division. Disregarding the performance-enhancing effects of his consumption of Army-issued Pervitin, a methamphetamine soldiers dubbed “Panzer Schokolade,” Rommel was a daredevil by…
Fuehrer HQ on the Obersalzberg, Germany · January 19, 1941 On this date in 1941 Adolf Hitler and Italian leader Benito Mussolini began 2 days of crisis talks at the Berghof, Hitler’s palatial Alpine residence whose enormous sliding window afforded magnificent views of nearby Berchtesgaden and, in the distance, Salzburg, Austria. High on the agenda was…
Washington, D. C. · January 6, 1941 On this date in 1941 in Washington, D.C, President Franklin D. Roosevelt used his State of the Union Address to the U.S. Congress to outline his desire for a world based not on a “new order of tyranny”—an allusion to the “new European order” championed by Adolf Hitler’s…
