Berlin, Germany • September 15, 1940 On this date in 1940 Adolf Hitler wrote a letter to Gen. Francisco Franco, the Caudillo (political-military leader) of Spain, asking for naval bases for Germany in the Spanish Canary Islands off Africa’s west coast and in other places flying the flag of Spain. Hitler believed Franco owed him…
SHAEF HQ, Versailles, France • September 5, 1944 On this date in 1944 Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower, Supreme Commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force, determined that the route U.S. forces would take from liberated areas in France and Belgium eastward into Nazi Germany would pass through the ancient city of Aachen, once the seat of…
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 neutrality pact between…
Rome, Italy · June 10, 1940 On March 18, 1940, at the Brenner Pass on the Italian-Austrian border, Adolf Hitler and Italian strongman Benito Mussolini met face to face. Hitler had requested the summit in order to force the Duce (Italian, “leader”) to take sides within the framework of the German-Italian Pact of Steel, signed…
Bestselling historian Andrew Nagorski takes a fresh look at the decisive year 1941, when Hitler’s miscalculations and policy of terror propelled Churchill, FDR, and Stalin into a powerful new alliance that defeated Nazi Germany.
In early 1941, Hitler’s armies ruled most of Europe. Churchill’s Britain was an isolated holdout against the Nazi tide, but German bombers were attacking its cities and German U-boats were attacking its ships. Stalin was observing the terms of the Nazi-Soviet Pact, and Roosevelt was vowing to keep the United States out of the war. Hitler was confident that his aim of total victory was within reach.
\By the end of 1941, all that changed. Hitler had repeatedly gambled on escalation and lost: by invading the Soviet Union and committing a series of disastrous military blunders; by making mass murder and terror his weapons of choice, and by rushing to declare war on the United States after Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor. Britain emerged with two powerful new allies—Russia and the United States. By then, Germany was doomed to defeat.
Nagorski illuminates the actions of the major characters of this pivotal year as never before. 1941: The Year Germany Lost the War is a stunning examination of unbridled megalomania versus determined leadership. It also reveals how 1941 set the Holocaust in motion, and presaged the postwar division of Europe, triggering the Cold War. 1941 was a year that forever defined our world.
London, England • April 16, 1941 This night and early the next morning in 1941, when London’s historic St. Paul’s Cathedral was bombed and damaged, marked the start of the final phase of the Blitz (September 7, 1940, to May 21, 1941), which reached its climax on May 10 with a deadly raid that hit the House of Commons,…
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…
Berlin, Germany • April 11, 1934 On this date in 1934 German Chancellor Adolf Hitler secretly met with German War Minister Gen. Werner von Blomberg, the unofficial representative of the officer corps of the Reichswehr (German armed forces), and reached an agreement that sealed the fate of the post-World War I Weimar Republic. Behind titular President…
Bridgend, South Wales • March 10, 1945 Twenty-two miles west of the Welch capital, Cardiff, was a British prisoner-of-war camp built to house mainly German but also some Italian prisoners. Capable of accommodating 2,000 inmates, the camp was called Island Farm. On this date in 1945, 67 POWs (one source says as many as 84 POWs) escaped from…
Cairo, Egypt • March 7, 1941 On this date in 1941 in Greece, a British expeditionary force from Egypt arrived just two days before the army of Italian dictator Benito Mussolini started its last unsuccessful campaign against Greek forces. The previous October the Italian Army had crossed Greece’s northwestern frontier from neighboring Albania, launching the…
