Belgrade, Yugoslavia · April 6, 1941 At the tail end of February 1941 British Commonwealth forces from Nigeria captured Mogadishu, capital of Italian Somaliland (part of today’s Somalia), after Benito Mussolini’s armies had abandoned any pretense of defending their East African colony. The Italian colony in the Horn of Africa had threatened the southern entrance to the…
Berlin, Germany · April 5, 1943 On this date in 1943 in Berlin, Lutheran pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer was arrested at his parents’ home by two Gestapo agents. Bonhoeffer was a deeply convicted theologian and a founding pastor of the Confessing Church (Bekennende Kirche), which rejected the Third Reich’s efforts to Nazify the German Lutheran Church….
Ohrdruf, Central Germany · April 4, 1945 Over the first three weeks of April 1945, during the brutal terminal phase of the Third Reich, Allied armies discovered more than one hundred concentration camps, including Buchenwald, Nordhausen, Flossenbuerg, and Bergen-Belsen. On this date in 1945 soldiers of Gen. George S. Patton’s U.S. Third Army unexpectedly came…
Berlin, Germany · April 2, 1945 In the spring of 1945 senior leaders of the Third Reich were growing panicky. In the west, American troops had succeeded in crossing the Rhine River at Remagen 35 miles south of Cologne on March 7 and were advancing into the German heartland. In the east, the tracks of Soviet mechanized…
London, England · March 31, 1939 On this date in 1939, two weeks after German troops entered Prague and all of Czechoslovakia fell under the German boot, the British government, followed a few days later by the French, pledged to guarantee the independence (though interestingly not the territorial integrity) of Poland. A week later the…
Berlin, Germany · March 29, 1945 By 1945 everything was falling apart for the Nazi regime. Most of the conquered areas in the Soviet Union and Western Europe had been recaptured from the Nazis. The Wehrmacht’s last gambit in the west, the Ardennes Offensive, better known as the Battle of the Bulge (mid-December 1944 to…
SHAEF HQ, Reims, France · March 28, 1945 On this date in 1945 Supreme Allied Commander Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower telegrammed Soviet leader Joseph Stalin that he proposed, after encircling the Germany’s Ruhr district, to advance on an west-east axis through the center of Germany to the Upper Elbe River, 50 miles from Berlin, there to…
Vienna, Austria · March 25, 1941 On this date in 1941 in Vienna, the government of Yugoslav regent Prince Paul signed a protocol of adherence to the Berlin-Rome-Tokyo Tripartite Pact, thereby setting the stage for a complex guerrilla war against Germans, Italians, and their Yugoslav allies, and within the Yugoslav resistance forces themselves. Not two…
Xanten, North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany · March 23, 1945 In the aftermath of Operation Market Garden, the inventive but failed September 1944 thrust into Germany, came Operation Plunder, another offensive conceived by British Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery. It kicked off on this date in 1945 when the first set of 300,000 U.S., British, and Canadian troops crossed…
Berlin, Germany · March 21, 1943 Adolf Hitler was the target of assassins on at least 30 occasions. On this date in 1943 in Berlin, German army officers made the second of two attempts in March to kill Hitler with a bomb. The week before, two staff officers had planted a bomb aboard Hitler’s private plane….
