Berlin, Germany • April 14, 1945 Austria’s capital Vienna fell to the Red Army on April 13, 1945, and the Soviet News Agency announced it to the world on this date in 1945, the same day Adolf Hitler, in his Fuehrerbunker under the rubble of the Reich Chancellery in Berlin, learned of it. The Austrian front…
Budapest, Hungary • January 4, 1945 In March 1944 Adolf Hitler ordered the Wehrmacht (German armed forces) to occupy his wavering Axis ally Hungary, whose oil reserves and fuel storage tanks at Nagykanizsa (German, Grosskirchen) southwest of the capital Budapest in the Lake Balaton (German, Plattensee) area had grown strategically more important to the German…
Stalingrad, Soviet Union • November 1, 1942 By one German count, over five million Red Army soldiers had been taken prisoner since Adolf Hitler unleashed Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of the Soviet Union begun 16 months earlier. As for the number of Soviet service personnel killed and disabled, there was only a rough estimate, but clearly…
Berlin, Germany • December 25, 1941 On this date in 1941 Japanese citizens celebrated the 15th anniversary of the succession to the Imperial Throne of Emperor Hirohito (posthumously referred to as Emperor Shōwa), according to tradition the 124th direct descendant of Jimmu, the legendary first ruler of the Empire of the Rising Sun. Festive toasts…
Berlin, Germany · December 18, 1940 On this date in 1940 in Berlin, one day before receiving the credentials of the new Soviet ambassador to Germany, Adolf Hitler signed Fuehrer Directive 21, Operation Barbarossa (Unternehmen Barbarossa), thereby initiating the secret preparations and military operations that led to the Axis invasion of the Soviet Union on June 22,…
Moscow, Soviet Union · December 6, 1941 Three weeks after launching Operation Barbarossa on June 22, 1941, the Germans and their Axis partners had reached close enough to Moscow to fly sorties and bomb the Soviet capital. Tactically, the Wehrmacht (German armed forces) won resounding victories, taking over 3 million Soviet prisoners in 1941 and seizing…
Stalingrad, Soviet Union · November 19, 1942 On this date in 1942 the Soviets kicked off Operation Uranus, Phase I of the Red Army’s encirclement of Gen. Friedrich Paulus’ Sixth Army (the single-largest German troop formation), as well as the German Fourth Panzer Army and the Third and Fourth Romanian armies at Stalingrad (today’s Volgograd)….
Stalingrad, Soviet Union · November 1, 1942 By one German count, over five million Red Army soldiers had been taken prisoner since Adolf Hitler unleashed Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of the Soviet Union begun 16 months earlier. As for the number of Soviet service personnel killed and disabled, there was only a rough estimate, but clearly…
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…
Wolf’s Lair, Fuehrer HQ, East Prussia · August 23, 1941 On this date in 1941 at his concealed East Prussian “Fuehrer Headquarters” in the Rastenburg swamps, Adolf Hitler made a decision that doomed Operation Barbarossa—his planned liquidation of the Soviet Union. Barbarossa had been launched 2 months earlier, on June 22. But after 3 weeks of disagreeing with…