Brenner Pass, Italy · October 4, 1940 On this date in 1940, at a border crossing between Germany and Italy, Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler met for the seventh time. (The two would meet seventeen times.) The Brenner Pass meeting of the two dictators followed on the heels of their June 18 meeting in Munich, which…
Rome, Italy · October 3, 1935 On this date in 1935 Benito Mussolini’s Italy invaded the northeast African Kingdom of Abyssinia (present-day Ethiopia) without a declaration of war, and for doing so the League of Nations instructed its member states to impose limited economic sanctions on Italy. (Neither the U.S. nor Germany were members of…
London, England · October 1, 1938 The storm clouds of war in Europe seemed to have parted on this date in 1938 in London, one day after Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain had returned from his triumph in Munich. Three visits to Germany had been required to part the clouds: the first to Berchtesgaden in the…
Kiev, Occupied Ukraine · September 29, 1941 By the end of 1940, sixteen 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…
Munich, Germany · September 25, 1937 On this date in 1937 Italian strongman Benito Mussolini paid his first visit to Germany, meeting Adolf Hitler in the Fuehrer’s private residence in Munich. During the visit Mussolini made Hitler an honorary corporal of the Italian Fascist militia, while Hitler conferred the Iron Cross of Greater Germany on…
Forward German HQ in Poland · September 24, 1939 On this date in 1939 in Poland, Luftwaffe chief Hermann Goering prepared to send hundreds of aircraft to blitz Warsaw in the first major city attack of World War II, while German armored forces prepared for a ground assault on the Polish capital. At 8 a.m. the…
Berlin, Germany · September 23, 1934 On this date in 1934 Ludwig Mueller, a crew-cut former naval chaplain, was installed as the new Reich Bishop in a gaudy spectacle at the swastika-bedecked Berlin Cathedral. The year before, German chancellor Adolf Hitler had proposed, as part of an administrative overhaul of the German Evangelical (Lutheran) Church,…
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 seven (for a total of more than 1,400 B‑17s) that unloaded high-explosive and incendiary bombs on…
Berlin, Germany · September 20, 1940 On this date in 1940 the chief of the German high command, Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel, announced that Wehrmacht troops were being dispatched to Romania “in case a war with Soviet Russia is forced upon us.” The next month German troops entered the country ostensibly to train and rebuild…
Brest-Litovsk, Occupied Eastern Poland · September 19, 1939 Adolf Hitler’s armies stormed over Poland’s border on September 1, 1939, in what became known as the first blitzkrieg—“lightning war.” Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin hastened to claim his share of the spoils under the terms of a secret protocol in the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact signed in Moscow the month before,…
