Berlin, Germany · September 17, 1940 In November 1939, some two months after Germany had invaded Poland, Grand Admiral Erich Raeder, head of the Kriegsmarine, instructed a subordinate to draw up a paper on “the possibility of troop landings in England.” The study paper set out four prerequisites. The next month the Wehrmacht (German armed…
Berlin, Germany · September 15, 1940 On this date in 1940 Adolf Hitler wrote a letter to Gen. Francisco Franco, the Caudillo of Spain, asking for naval bases for Germany in the Spanish Canary Islands and other places. Franco replied one week later, demanding enormous stockpiles of weapons, supplies, and part of French North Africa…
Berlin, Germany · September 14, 1930 On this date in 1930 German voters went to the polls to elect a new Reichstag, and the results were shocking. The National Socialist German Workers’ Party (Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, or NSDAP) was the ninth and smallest of Germany’s political parties, with but twelve members in the national parliament….
Fuehrer HQ, Rastenburg, Germany · September 12, 1943 On September 11, 1943, imprisoned in the Hotel Campo Imperatore high in the Apennine Mountains, deposed Italian dictator Benito Mussolini learned of the terms of the “long armistice” the Allies had presented to Marshal Pietro Badoglio’s new Italian government. (A “short armistice” had been signed in Sicily…
Washington, D.C. · September 11, 1941 Starting on September 1, 1941, two years into the Battle of the Atlantic, U.S. warships began escorting convoys of British-bound merchantmen from the North American coast. Convoys departed from Newfoundland, Canada, and ended in the mid-Atlantic at Iceland. Four days after initiating the escort service, the U.S. destroyer Greer…
Nuremberg, Germany · September 10, 1935 On this date in 1935 the Nazis convened their annual party congress in Nuremberg completely fixated on the charismatic savior-figure Adolf Hitler, Germany’s chancellor since January 1933. The 1935 “Rally of Freedom” (Reichsparteitag der Freiheit) touted Hitler’s wildly popular reintegration of the Saar region—formerly a League of Nations mandate—into…
Bucharest, Romania · September 5, 1940 In the wake of Romania’s swift territorial concessions of Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina to the Soviet Union, the northwestern part of Transylvania to Hungary, and the southern part of Dobruja to Bulgaria (see map below), 47‑year‑old King Carol II abdicated in favor of his 19‑year‑old son, Michael (Mihai), but not…
London, England · September 3, 1939 Addressing a national audience by radio, Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain intoned the following words: “This morning the British ambassador in Berlin handed the German Government a final Note stating that, unless we heard from them by 11 o’clock that they were prepared at once to withdraw their troops from Poland, a…
London, England and Paris, France · September 2, 1939 Shortly after British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain and French Premier Édouard Daladier confirmed for themselves the German invasion of Poland on September 1, the two leaders gave the order for general mobilization and evacuation of children and mothers from their main cities. Both leaders also prepared…
Warsaw, Poland · September 1, 1939 World War II in Europe began on this date in 1939 in Danzig (present-day Gdańsk), Poland, when the German training ship Schleswig-Holstein bombarded the Polish naval base in Danzig harbor. After a fierce day-long fight, Danzig fell and was annexed by the Reich the next day. Meanwhile, Hermann Goering’s…
