Washington, D.C. • February 2, 1945 The Combined Chiefs of Staff (CCS) was the supreme military staff for the Western Allies during World War II. CCS members were drawn from the British Chiefs of Staff Committee and the American Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) and typically met in Washington, D.C. On occasion Soviet military officers…
Auschwitz-Birkenau, Poland • January 27, 1945 In the months following the Red Army’s entry into the abandoned Nazi death camp at Majdanek on the outskirts of Lublin, Poland, where more than 79,000 people had been killed, the growing list of liberated camps (the Nazis had over 40 death camps) characterized by mounds of corpses and emaciated…
Gotenhafen, German-Occupied Poland • January 23, 1945 On this date in 1945 German Grand Adm. Karl Doenitz launched Operation Hannibal, a seaborne evacuation or, as Germans called it, a rescue operation (Rettungsaktion) of well over a million people trapped by war in Latvia, East Prussia, and German-occupied Poland. Mounted by naval, merchant marine, and civilian vessels,…
Warsaw, Occupied Poland • January 18, 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. (Poland’s Jewish community numbered 3.5 million at the time.) The…
Warsaw, Liberated Poland • January 17, 1945 On this date in 1945 Warsaw fell to Soviet and Polish Communist forces as the Nazis beat a hasty retreat from the ruins of Poland’s capital. In moving against the retreating Wehrmacht (German armed forces), the Soviets liberated 800 Jews in Częstochowa and 870 Jews in Łódź, Poland. Ten…
London, England • December 19, 1939 On the afternoon of August 23, 1939, Adolf Hitler’s foreign secretary Joachim von Ribbentrop appeared in Moscow’s Kremlin fortress to sign off on the Nazi-Soviet Nonaggression Pact. The 10‑year pact, also known by the twin surnames of Soviet foreign minister Vyacheslav Molotov and German foreign minister Ribbentrop, was the necessary…
Warsaw, Occupied Poland • November 4, 1939 On this date in 1939 in Nazi-occupied Poland, newly appointed Governor-General Hans Frank established the Warsaw ghetto and began forcing the city’s Jews into a single area. Ten days later Frank and his deputy Arthur Seyss-Inquart ordered Jews in Poland to wear a white bracelet bearing a hexagonal…
Berlin, Germany • October 26, 1939 On this date in 1939 in Poland, 56 days after Germany invaded that country, Dr. Hans Frank, Germany’s chief jurist and one of the most vicious products of Nazism, was appointed Governor-General of the General Government—that half of Nazi-occupied Poland not directly incorporated into the Reich. It included much of…
Forward German HQ in Poland • September 24, 1939 On this date in 1939 in Poland, Luftwaffe chief Hermann Goering prepared to send hundreds of aircraft to blitz Warsaw in the largest air raid ever up to that time, while German armored forces prepared for a ground assault on the Polish capital. At 8 a.m. the…
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…