Salzburg, Austria • August 11, 1939 On this date in 1939 near Salzburg, Austria, Adolf Hitler’s foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop told Italian dictator Benito Mussolini’s foreign minister, Galeazzo Ciano, about Hitler’s decision “to set Europe on fire.” “We want war,” Ribbentrop said to the 36‑year‑old Ciano (who was Mussolini’s son-in-law), though the German foreign…
Berlin, Germany • July 31, 1941 On this date in 1941 Reichsmarshall Hermann Goering formally empowered SS‑Gruppenfuehrer (German, Group Leader) Reinhard Heydrich to undertake “preparations in organizational, technical and material respects for the complete solution to the Jewish question in the German area of influence in Europe.” At this time neither Goering, nor his boss…
Warsaw, Occupied Poland • July 29, 1944 By July 1944 Poland had been occupied by the armed forces of Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Germany for close to 5 years and by those of Joseph Stalin’s Soviet Union for considerably less. (For nearly 2 years, from September 1939 to June 1941 when the German Wehrmacht invaded the Soviet Union…
Hamburg, Germany • July 24, 1943 On this date in 1943, over the North German city of Hamburg, the Royal Air Force kicked off Operation Gomorrah (July 24 to August 3, 1943). British retaliation for the Luftwaffe’s firebombing of the medieval city of Coventry in the English Midlands, where 503 tons of explosives, 56 tons of incendiaries, and 127 parachute…
Wolf’s Lair, Rastenburg, East Prussia, Germany • July 20, 1944 Adolf Hitler had been the target of 4 assassination attempts before he became Germany’s head of state in January 1933 and perhaps 2 dozen more afterwards. On July 11, 1944, 36‑year-old Lt. Col. Claus von Stauffenberg arrived at the Berghof on the Obersalzberg, Hitler’s Bavarian retreat near Berchtesgaden, carrying a…
Budapest, Occupied Hungary • July 9, 1944 On this date in 1944 Raoul Wallenberg, a 31-year-old bachelor from a distinguished Swedish family, arrived in Budapest, capital of Nazi-occupied Hungary. With diplomatic accreditation from the Swedish Ministry of Foreign Affairs (Sweden was a neutral nation), Wallenberg had been secretly recruited by the recently created (January 22, 1944)…
London, England • July 8, 1941 On this date in 1941, 5 months before the United States was drawn into World War II, the Boeing B‑17 Flying Fortress was flown in combat for the first time, this by the Royal Air Force in an attack on the North German port of Wilhelmshaven. The first production model, the…
Near Kursk, Russia • July 5, 1943 The pivotal year of the war in Europe was 1943. Early February saw Gen. Friedrich Paulus’ German Sixth Army, the largest army the Wehrmacht (armed forces) fielded in the war, surrender at Stalingrad (modern-day Volgograd) in Southern Russia. Some 850,000 service members from German, Italian, Romanian, Hungarian, and…
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 news that the 86‑year-old German military hero had only months to live. Hitler feared that…
Berlin, Germany • June 28, 1935 On this date in 1935, Nazi Germany amended Paragraph 175 of the German penal code that had been in place since 1871 during the chancellorship of Prince Otto von Bismarck, the Iron Chancellor in Kaiser Wilhelm I’s Second Reich. Paragraph 175 outlawed acts of “unnatural indecency” only between men. Six years later…
