Berlin, Germany · June 29, 1934 Late on this date in 1934 German Chancellor Adolf Hitler unleashed an extraordinary murder spree known as the Night of the Long Knives (Nacht der Langen Messer). President Paul von Hindenburg’s doctors had leaked the news that the 86-year-old German war hero had only months to live. Hitler feared…
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 in some earlier sources). Sabotage of rail networks and bridges by guerrillas several days before June 23 impeded German movement of…
Berlin, Germany · June 22, 1941 The largest military force ever assembled—three million soldiers, 4,300 tanks, nearly 4,400 aircraft, and some 46,000 artillery pieces—assaulted the Soviet Union on this date in 1941. Since the 1920s Adolf Hitler had championed a crusade against “Jewish Bolshevism,” with its political, ideological, and economic center in Moscow. Hitler believed that only when…
Munich, Germany · June 17, 1940 On this date in 1940 Joseph Stalin of the Soviet Union, drawing on provisions of the secret protocol in the August 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop Nonaggression Pact with his Nazi ally, ordered an attack on the Baltic state of Latvia. (The 1939 protocol had already returned dividends to the two conspirator…
London, England · June 13, 1944 Beginning on this date in 1944 in London, one week after the Allied D-Day landings in Normandy, France (Operation Overlord), the Germans unleashed their pilotless flying “retaliation weapon,” Vergeltungswaffe‑1, on England. Only one of ten V‑1 flying bombs launched that day caused any casualties—eight civilians killed when a V‑1…
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…
Off the Normandy Coast, Occupied France · May 29, 1944 The German Kriegsmarine possessed several notable midget submarines (Kleinst-U-Boote), one being the one-man Biber (German for “beaver”) and the other the two-man Seehund (German for “seal”). Neither U‑boot was particularly successful as a weapon against Allied supply and troop ships. Influenced by a captured one-man British…
Berlin, Germany · May 28, 1938 On this date in 1938 Adolf Hitler informed his senior military commanders of his plans to march into neighboring Czechoslovakia and erase that country from the map. No serious objections were raised by those who heard Hitler ring the death knell for Czechoslovakia and for the European order that…
Muerwik, near Flensburg, Northern Germany · May 23, 1945 On this date in 1945, twenty-three days after Adolf Hitler’s suicide under the rubble of the Reich capital, Berlin, and sixteen days after emissaries from Grand Admiral Karl Doenitz’s government agreed to the unconditional surrender of all German military forces, a British liaison officer went to…
Berlin, Germany · May 22, 1939 On this date in 1939 Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy signed the “Pact of Steel,” which tied the two dictatorships in a ten-year military alliance and stipulated that neither side could make peace without the other’s consent. Ominously dubbed the “Pact of Blood” in the planning stage, the alliance…
