Berlin, Germany • August 7, 1944 On July 20, 1944, Col. Claus von Stauffenberg left a bomb in his briefcase in a conference room at the East Prussia headquarters of Adolf Hitler, the Wolf’s Lair (Wolfsschanze), before excusing himself to take a call in the telephone exchange hut. In the conference room were Hitler and…
London, England • July 10, 1940 On this date in 1940, less than one month after France’s humiliating capitulation to Nazi Germany and just 10 days after the Germans had seized Great Britain’s Channel Islands of Jersey and Guernsey off France’s Brittany coast, Luftwaffe aircraft based in occupied France began a relentless aerial campaign targeting the…
Moscow, Soviet Union • June 23, 1944 On this date in 1944 along a 450-mile front some 2.4 million Soviet frontline and support troops, 5,200 tanks, and 5,300 aircraft smashed through German lines in present-day Belarus (White Russia and Belorussia in some earlier sources). Sabotage of rail networks and bridges by guerrillas several days before June 23 impeded German…
London, England • June 1, 1944 In June 1942 members of the French Resistance provided British intelligence with a copy of the top-secret blueprint of portions of Adolf Hitler’s Atlantic Wall—part of the defenses against the anticipated Allied invasion of Western Europe. The map had been spirited from the office of the German public works…
Salzburg, Austria • April 8, 1943 On this date in 1943 in Salzburg, Austria, Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini met for the first time since the collapse of the Axis defense of Stalingrad at the end of January. Ignoring Mussolini’s trial balloon about negotiating a ceasefire with the Soviet leader, Joseph Stalin, Hitler remained convinced…
Auschwitz-Birkenau, Occupied Poland • October 30, 1944 On this date in 1944 in Poland, the last murders by poison gas took place at the Nazis’ largest and arguably most infamous death camp, Auschwitz-Birkenau (Polish, Oświęcim), one of eight camps used for mass murder during World War II. (Six were in what is today Poland, one in…
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…
London, England • September 21, 1944 On this date in 1944 some 147 of 154 dispatched B‑17 Flying Fortresses bombed the synthetic oil plant at Ludwigshafen, an industrial city on the Rhine River in West-Central Germany. The sortie was one of 7 (for a total of more than 1,400 B‑17s) that unloaded high-explosive and incendiary…
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)…
