Berlin, Germany · August 31, 1939 On August 22, 1939, Adolf Hitler told his generals he would fabricate a story to justify his planned aggression against neighboring Poland. The plan was for Nazi Party Schutzstaffel (SS) operatives to dress in Polish uniforms, attack a German customs post and a German radio transmitter station in Gleiwitz,…
Warsaw, Poland · August 30, 1939 After his sudden decision on Friday, August 25, 1939, to cancel his invasion of Poland, Adolf Hitler ordered preparations for a second planned invasion. From the Army’s Quartermaster General he learned that the earliest date on which mobilization could be completed was Thursday, August 31. Therefore, he set Friday, September 1,…
Berlin, Germany · August 29, 1939 Adolf Hitler ordered the German invasion of Poland to begin on August 26, 1939. Troops, panzer tanks, and aircraft had been lining up near Poland’s western border since mid-August. Though planned since late March 1939, the invasion was bound to rile Poland’s eastern neighbor, the Soviet Union. That concern was…
London, England; Paris, France; Warsaw, Poland · August 28, 1939 Public opinion in Europe had shifted from dread of war and a longing for peace evident in the Czech Sudeten crisis of September 1938 to a fatalistic acceptance that war was now unavoidable. British and French politicians were more confident that they could take their…
Berlin, Germany; Warsaw, Poland; and London, England · August 27, 1939 On this date in 1939, one day after Adolf Hitler aborted his plan to invade his eastern neighbor, Poland, German mobilization continued. Between August 25 and 31, a further 21 infantry divisions and 2 motorized divisions were in place along the German-Polish frontier. No reserve units were…
Berlin, Germany · August 26, 1939 Serious discussions between the Nazi and Soviet regimes began secretly in late July 1939. On August 21 Germany announced that Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop had been invited to Moscow. Two days later the world learned that Ribbentrop and his Soviet counterpart, Vyacheslav Molotov, had initialed a nonaggression pact (Molotov-Ribbentrop…
Warsaw, Occupied Poland · August 1, 1944 After landing on Normandy’s Gold, Juno, and Sword beaches on D‑Day, June 6, 1944, British soldiers came upon Germany’s Leichter Ladungstraeger (light charge carrier) named “Goliath,” a tank-tread robot demolition mine approximately 4 feet long, 2 feet wide, and 1 foot tall/1.3 m long, 0.6 m wide, and 0.3 m tall that carried 170–220 lb/77–100 kg of…
Warsaw, Occupied Poland · July 29, 1944 By July 1944 Poland had been occupied by the forces of Nazi Germany for close to five years and by those of the Soviet Union for considerably less. The Polish resistance Home Army (Armia Krajowa), which was loyal to the London-based Polish government-in-exile, had long planned some form…
Warsaw, Poland · May 5, 1939 In 1923 Poland’s Baltic neighbor to the north, Lithuania, unlawfully annexed Memel Territory (now Klaipėda Region in present-day Lithuania) that had been, up to 1918, part of Prussia under Kaiser Wilhelm II. Like the Danzig enclave in Poland and the Saar Territory in the Rhineland, Memel was a League of…
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…
