Berlin, Germany • January 18, 1944 On this date in 1944 Grand Admiral Karl Doenitz approached his commander in chief, Adolf Hitler, with a design for a new midget submarine, much larger than the one‑man Biber (Beaver) sub that was in the prototype stage. The Hecht (Pike) was a three‑man midget based on a British…
Warsaw, Liberated Poland · January 17, 1945 On this date in 1945 Warsaw fell to Soviet and Polish Communist forces as the Nazis beat a hasty retreat from the ruins of the Polish capital. In moving against the retreating Wehrmacht, the Soviets liberated 800 Jews in Częstochowa and 870 Jews in Łódź, Poland. On January 26, 1945, Soviet…
Berlin, Germany · January 16, 1945 On this date in 1945 Adolf Hitler moved his entourage into the “Fuehrer Bunker” under the Old Reich Chancellery in Berlin, where he lived and directed the last months of the war in Europe. The bunker—a maze of living quarters, conference rooms, offices, and utilities spreading two stories deep…
London, England · January 15, 1944 On this date in 1944 Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower assumed command of the Allied Expeditionary Force preparing to liberate France from the stranglehold of Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Germany. A month earlier President Franklin D. Roosevelt had designated the 53‑year‑old army general Supreme Allied Commander for Operation Overlord, the invasion of…
Casablanca, Morocco, North Africa · January 14, 1943 This date in 1943 saw the start of the ten-day Casablanca Conference at a seaside resort in Morocco between U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, and their Combined Chiefs of Staff. Soviet leader Joseph Stalin had been invited to the summit but reportedly…
Saarbruecken, Saarland, Germany · January 13, 1935 On this date in 1935 Germans held a plebiscite in the only part of Germany that remained under foreign occupation following their country’s defeat in World War I—the Saar region, or Saarland in German. The wealth of its coal deposits and their large-scale industrial exploitation, coupled with its location…
Moscow, Soviet Union · January 11, 1945 On this date in 1945 the Germans intercepted a Soviet radio transmission that ominously declared, “Everything is ready.” The Soviet offensive on the Eastern Front between the Baltic Sea in the north and the Carpathian Mountains in the south began the next day with an artillery barrage that…
Stalingrad, Soviet Union · January 10, 1943 On this date in 1943 the Soviets launched Operation Ring, their name for the action that tightened the noose around the 250,000-plus soldiers of the German Sixth Army trapped in Stalingrad (now Volgograd). Operation Ring had been preceded by Operation Uranus (November 19–23, 1942), a one-million-man-plus Soviet offensive…
Washington, D. C. · January 6, 1941 On this date in 1941 in Washington, D.C, President Franklin D. Roosevelt used his State of the Union Address to the U.S. Congress to outline his desire for a world based not on a “new order of tyranny”—an allusion to the “new European order” championed by Adolf Hitler’s…
Berlin, Germany · January 5, 1939 On this date in 1939, eight months before the armed forces of Nazi Germany surged over Polish borders to launch World War II in Europe, German Chancellor Adolf Hitler told Poland’s visiting Foreign Minister Józef Beck that Germany would guarantee his country’s frontiers were a “final settlement” reached over the…