Montoire, German-Occupied France · October 24, 1940 After failing the day before to convince Spanish dictator Francisco Franco to bring his country into the war on the Axis side, Adolf Hitler met with 84‑year-old Marshal Philippe Pétain and Pierre Laval, head of state (chef de l’État Français) and deputy leader of Vichy France, respectively, on…
Hendaye, France · October 23, 1940 In late November 1939, shortly after the start of World War II, the nominally neutral but fascist Spanish government of Generalissimo Francisco Franco ratified a pact with Germany in which Spain promised “more than favorable” neutrality. On this date, October 23, 1940, in Hendaye, a town on the Franco-Spanish…
Paris, Occupied France · September 28, 1941 On this date in 1941, in the wake of the first public assassination of a German officer in France, the German military authorities issued a Code of Hostages to the French people. Pools of Frenchmen, whether detained by French authorities or by the German Wehrmacht (armed forces) or the…
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,…
Mont Mouchet, South Central France · June 20, 1944 During the Allied invasion of France (Operation Overlord), the Maquis and other French resistance groups played a role in delaying the arrival of German reinforcements to the Normandy beachhead as well as in the eventual Allied victory in France. The FFI (Forces Françaises de l’Interieur for…
London, England · June 18, 1940 Four days after the fall of Paris to German invaders, Charles de Gaulle, a tall (6 ft, 5 in/196 mm), young (49), relatively unknown French general who had escaped to England on June 17, 1940, addressed the French people in a radio broadcast from London on this date in 1940. In a…
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…
Munich, Germany · November 10, 1942 On this date in 1942, two days after Allied landings in Vichy-held Morocco and Algeria (Operation Torch), Italian dictator Benito Mussolini sent his son-in-law, foreign minister Galeazzo Ciano, to Munich in his stead to speak with Adolf Hitler. Mussolini had wanted to meet the Fuehrer in Salzburg, in the…
Montoire, German-Occupied France · October 24, 1940 After failing the day before to convince Spanish dictator Francisco Franco to bring his country into the war on the Axis side, Adolf Hitler met with 84‑year-old Marshal Philippe Pétain and Pierre Laval, head of state (chef de l’État Français) and deputy leader of Vichy France, respectively, on…
Hendaye, France · October 23, 1940 In late November 1939, shortly after the start of World War II, the nominally neutral but fascist government of Generalissimo Francisco Franco ratified a pact with Germany in which Spain promised “more than favorable” neutrality. On this date in 1940 in Hendaye, a town on the Franco-Spanish border, Adolf Hitler…