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…
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…
Obersalzberg, Bavaria, Germany · August 22, 1939 Adolf Hitler’s foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop was just about to affix his signature to the German-Soviet Nonaggression Pact (aka Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact) in Moscow, when, on this date in 1939, the Fuehrer summoned the commanders of his various armed forces and other officers to the Berghof, his Bavarian…
Moscow, Soviet Union · August 19, 1939 On this date in 1939 Soviet Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov presented to Adolf Hitler’s Moscow ambassador a draft of a nonaggression pact between the two powers. The draft contained essentially everything the German serial aggressor could have wished for because it opened the gates for crushing neighboring Poland…
Salzburg, Austria · August 11, 1939 On this date in 1939 near Salzburg, Austria, Adolf Hitler’s foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop told Italian dictator Benito Mussolini’s foreign minister, Galeazzo Ciano, about Hitler’s decision “to set Europe on fire.” “We want war,” Ribbentrop said to Ciano, though he omitted saying that Hitler had just signed the…
Munich, Germany · June 17, 1940 On this date in 1940 Joseph Stalin of the Soviet Union, drawing on provisions of the secret protocol in the August 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop Nonaggression Pact with his Nazi ally, ordered an attack on the Baltic state of Latvia. (The 1939 protocol had already returned dividends to the two conspirator…
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…
Berlin, Germany · January 16, 1945 On this date in 1945 Adolf Hitler moved his entourage into the Fuehrerbunker under the Old Reich Chancellery in Berlin, where he lived and directed the last months of the war in Europe. The “Leader’s bunker”—a maze of living quarters, conference rooms, offices, and utilities spreading 2 stories deep…
Berlin, Germany · December 11, 1941 On this date in 1941 in Berlin, Adolf Hitler addressed a toothless Reichstag eager to hear him declare war on America. Hitler did this four days after the Japanese attack on the American Pacific fleet at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, without technically being forced or even obligated by treaty to…