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 neighboring Poland, German mobilization continued. Between August 25 and 31, a further twenty-one infantry divisions and two motorized divisions were in place along the German-Polish frontier, while armaments for other…
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 non-aggression pact (Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact)…
Warsaw, Occupied Poland · August 1, 1944 When British soldiers landed on Normandy’s Gold, Juno, and Sword beaches on June 6, 1944, they came upon Germany’s Leichter Ladungstraeger (“light charge carrier”) named Goliath, a tank-tread robot approximately 4 feet long, 2 feet wide, and 1 foot tall that carried 170–220 lb of high explosives. Known as the beetle tank to…
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…
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…
Prague, Czechoslovakia · March 15, 1939 From the ruins of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in November 1918 a half-dozen new states emerged. Among them were Austria and Czechoslovakia. When Austria was incorporated into Adolf Hitler’s Greater German Reich in March 1938, Czechoslovakia found itself inside a German pincer. On October 1, 1938, following the Munich Agreement signed…
Moscow, Soviet Union · March 5, 1940 In a proposal written on this date in 1940 to Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin and other members of the Soviet Politburo, Lavrentiy Beria, who was the head of the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs (NKVD), the Soviet secret police, advocated executing all members of the Polish Officer Corps who…
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 attended….