Berlin, Germany • April 23, 1945 On this date in 1945, with most land communications and electrical power lines down, Adolf Hitler broadcast on Greater German Radio the order to save his beleaguered capital. The order called for Wehrmacht forces opposing the Americans at the Elbe River to withdraw and move north to rescue Berlin,…
German 12th Army HQ, Larissa, Greece • April 21, 1941 After their prime minister’s suicide 3 days earlier representatives of the leaderless Greek government signed a document of capitulation at the headquarters of the German 12th Army at Larissa in Central Greece on this date in 1941. Fourteen Greek divisions laid down their arms. An armistice…
Berlin, Germany • April 20, 1945 On this date in 1945 a stooped, haggard, yellowish gray- and jowly-faced Adolf Hitler celebrated his 56th birthday in the safety of his underground command bunker 50 feet/15 meters beneath Berlin’s battered Old Reich Chancellery. Unlike previous birthdays marked by much ceremony and fuss, this one was all gloom and doom…
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. (Poland’s Jewish community numbered 3.5 million at the time.) The…
Seelow Heights, Germany • April 16, 1945 On this date in 1945 the Allies called off their strategic bombing campaign against Nazi Germany because most targets were already in Allied hands or, like the Reich capital, Berlin, would be soon. So on the day the aerial campaign stopped the Red Army unleashed a battle to…
Ruhr Pocket, Northwestern Germany • April 14, 1945 In the spring of 1945 senior leaders of the Third Reich were on edge. On Germany’s Eastern Front, the tracks of Soviet mechanized armor and the boots of their infantry could be heard approaching the outskirts of the epicenter of Nazism, Berlin. On the Western Front, elements of…
Forward SHAEF HQ, Reims, France • April 12, 1945 On this date in 1945 President Franklin D. Roosevelt died in Warm Springs, Georgia, and Harry S. Truman became the thirty-third president of the United States. That same day the Supreme Commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force, Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower, informed his staff that neither American…
Berlin, Germany • April 11, 1940 On this date in 1940 Reichsfuerhrer-SS Heinrich Himmler, the second-most powerful man in Nazi Germany, appointed SS-Standartenfuehrer (Colonel) Max Sollmann to be managing director of the Lebensborn Program (German, Lebensborn e.V), which was heavily in debt. It was Himmler, head of the Schutzstaffel (commonly abbreviated to SS), who founded…
Berlin, Germany • April 9, 1940 On this date in 1940 German land, sea, air, and specialized forces advanced overland into Denmark and attacked various points along Norway’s coast from the air and sea. Earlier in the year, on January 27, the German High Command (Oberkommando der Wehrmacht, OKW) had established a task force to orchestrate…
Berlin, Germany • April 8, 1940 On this date, April 8, 1940, when Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich was at the top of its game (the occupation of Denmark and the invasion of Norway were a day away), the German Fuehrer issued his order regarding the “handling of Jewish mixed-breeds in the German armed forces” (Behandlung…
