Berlin, Germany • May 12, 1941 On this date in 1941, two days after Deputy Reich Fuehrer Rudolf Hess had embarked on his historic “peace mission” to England (see story below), Adolf Hitler finally confirmed June 22 as the start date for Operation Barbarossa (Unternehmen Barbarossa), the German invasion of the Soviet Union. Moving toward the…
Southwest of Stalingrad, Soviet Union • December 23, 1941 On this date in 1942 the German Wehrmacht (armed forces) ended Operation Winter Storm (German, Unternehmen Wintergewitter), the 11‑day attempt by German Army Group Don, a new formation commanded by Field Marshal Erich von Manstein, to break the Soviet envelopment of Gen. Friedrich Paulus’ German Sixth…
Washington, D.C. • November 7, 1941 On March 11, 1941, U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed into law the Lend-Lease Act, which was a government-back program under which the still-neutral United States would begin supplying Great Britain and members of the British Commonwealth (Australia and New Zealand, for instance), Free French Forces led by Gen….
Rome, Italy • October 8, 1941 Two months before Great Britain joined the United States in declaring war on Japan, Italian dictator Benito Mussolini used this date in 1941 to blast the Japanese for not carrying their weight in the Tripartite (Axis) Pact, a political, economic, and military agreement that Italy, Germany, and Japan had…
Kyiv, Occupied Ukraine • September 29, 1941 By the end of 1940, 16 months after Adolf Hitler had plunged Europe into war by invading Poland, the number of Jews killed by Nazi Germany approached 100,000. But in 1941 the death toll grew exponentially as mass murder of Jews became state policy. By the end of 1941…
Berlin, Germany • August 20, 1939 In the early morning hours on this date in 1939 the first of two back-to-back seismic changes to Europe’s political, economic, and geostrategic equilibria occurred with the signing of the German-Soviet Trade and Credit Agreement in Berlin. An outgrowth of monthslong economic and political talks between German and Soviet…
Moscow, Soviet Union • July 1, 1941 Early in the morning of August 24, 1939, the foreign ministers of Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union signed a treaty of nonaggression, formally known by the two signatories’ names—the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, which bore the date August 23, 1939. Neither Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov (who was also Soviet Premier)…
London, England • April 13, 1939 Following the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia’s German-speaking Sudetenland in October 1938 and the invasion and incorporation of the rest of Czechoslovakia into the Reich in mid-March 1939, Great Britain, France, Poland, Greece, and Romania entered into mutual assistance pacts in case of a military invasion by “a European power,”…
Tokyo, Japan • May 11, 1939 Europe, the United States, and Japan, profiting from the technological, economic, social, and military advantages conferred on their countries by the Industrial Revolution, began placing weaker nations elsewhere in the world under their “protection.” The United States did that in 1898 when the Philippines became an American territory. Japan…
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