Belgrade, Yugoslavia • October 22, 1944 By late March 1941 Yugoslavia, a multiethnic nation of 15.5 million people in Central and Southeast Europe, was surrounded on all sides by Axis-aligned nations with the exception of Greece to its south. Romania and Hungary had joined Yugoslavia’s neighbor to the west, Italy, in the Tripartite Pact in…
Budapest, Occupied Hungary • October 17, 1944 On this date in 1944 Adm. Miklós (Nicholas) Horthy, regent of the Kingdom of Hungary since 1920, left his native country as a prisoner of Nazi Germany. Horthy had angered Adolf Hitler after the latter had received confidential reports that the 76‑year-old Hungarian head of state was secretly…
Wolf’s Lair, Fuehrer HQ, East Prussia • October 10, 1944 Shortly after the July 1944 attempt on Adolf Hitler’s life, an adjutant of the Chief of the General Staff of the Army remarked that the 55-year-old Hitler had the “posture of an old man.” On September 24, 1944, Dr. Theodor Morell, the Fuehrer’s loyal, long-serving physician, noted…
Posen, Western Occupied Poland • October 6, 1943 Despite Adolf Hitler’s Germany being engaged in a European and, after December 11, 1941, a global war, the Nazi leader (Fuehrer) had not directed his country’s full industrial might toward total war as had the leaders of his enemy states—the United States, Great Britain, and the Soviet Union….
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…
Berlin, Germany • August 24, 1941 On this date in 1941 Adolf Hitler cancelled the Aktion T-4 euthanasia program that he had personally put in place in September 1939. Normally Hitler had a policy of not issuing written instructions for policies relating to what would later be called crimes against humanity, but he made an…
Obersalzberg, Bavaria, Germany • August 22, 1939 Adolf Hitler’s foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop was just about to affix his signature to the German-Soviet Nonaggression Pact (aka Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact) in Moscow, when, on this date, August 22, 1939, the Fuehrer summoned the commanders of his various armed forces and other officers to the Berghof, his palatial Bavarian…
Paris, Occupied France • August 21, 1941 On this date in 1941 in Paris, well over a year after the hardstepping German Wehrmacht (armed forces) and Gestapo (Germany’s sinister secret police) had entered the French capital and settled in, a 22‑year-old Communist member of the French Resistance named Pierre Georges (noms de guerre, Frédo and Colonel…
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)…
Warsaw, Occupied Poland • April 19, 1943 In October 1940, a little over a year after Nazi Germany’s conquest of its eastern neighbor Poland, German Governor-General Hans Frank established a Jewish ghetto in Poland’s capital, Warsaw, moving some 90,000 Jews from all over Poland into the ghetto. (Poland’s Jewish community numbered 3.5 million at the time.) The…