On the Eastern Front · July 27, 1941 On this date in 1941, five weeks after the launch of Operation Barbarossa, Nazi Germany’s surprise attack on the Soviet Union, Adolf Hitler paid a visit to the headquarters of Army Group North. Army Group North had begun its first attack on Leningrad (present-day St. Petersburg)—the Soviet…
Kursk, Soviet Union · July 13, 1943 On this date in 1943 Operation Citadel (Zitadelle), Adolf Hitler’s gambit to retake Kursk, an important Soviet rail hub south of Moscow, and straighten the German line on the Eastern Front failed with devastating losses on both sides, but especially to German strategic armored reserves. A day earlier…
Near Kursk, Russia · July 5, 1943 On this date in 1943 Germans and Soviets unleashed the largest tank battle in history, the Battle of Kursk. Following the surrender of the German Sixth Army at Stalingrad (January 31, 1943), Soviet advances during the first months of 1943 pushed deep into German-held territory to recapture the Ukrainian…
Moscow, Soviet Union · June 23, 1944 On this date in 1944 along a 450-mile front some 2.4 million Soviet frontline and support troops, 5,200 tanks, and 5,300 aircraft smashed through German lines in present-day Belarus (White Russia in some earlier sources). Sabotage of rail networks and bridges by guerrillas several days before June 23 impeded German movement of…
Berlin, Germany · June 22, 1941 The largest military force ever assembled—three million soldiers, 4,300 tanks, nearly 4,400 aircraft, and some 46,000 artillery pieces—assaulted the Soviet Union on this date in 1941. Since the 1920s Adolf Hitler had championed a crusade against “Jewish Bolshevism,” with its political, ideological, and economic center in Moscow. Hitler believed that only when…
Paris, Occupied France · May 27, 1942 On May 10, 1940, Adolf Hitler, having ended Poland’s existence in September 1939, turned his wrath on the democracies in the West. The Netherlands and Belgium capitulated to his war machine in May. Representatives of Marshal Philippe Pétain, who had recently been named premier of the French Third…
Rotterdam, Netherlands · May 14, 1940 On this date in 1940 in Holland, the German Luftwaffe bombed Rotterdam’s medieval city center, killing nearly 1,000 people and leaving 85,000 homeless. Rather than endure more bombings—leaflets dropped on Utrecht indicated it was next Dutch city in German crosshairs—the Dutch army surrendered the next day. The German offensive against the…
Reims, France · May 7, 1945 Five days after the suicide of Adolf Hitler on April 30, 1945, Adm. Hans-Georg von Friedeburg, an emissary from Grand Admiral Karl Doenitz, arrived in Reims, France, headquarters of Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower, Supreme Commander Allied Expeditionary Force. Friedeburg was tasked with opening surrender negotiations on behalf of Doenitz, head of the…
Berlin, Germany · April 23, 1945 On this date in 1945, with most land communications and electrical power lines down, Adolf Hitler broadcast on Greater German Radio the order to save his capital. The order called for Wehr¬macht forces opposing the Americans at the Elbe River to withdraw and move north to rescue Berlin, now…
Berlin, Germany · April 14, 1945 Austria’s capital Vienna fell to the Red Army on April 13, 1945, and the Soviet News Agency announced it to the world on this date in 1945, the same day Adolf Hitler, in his Fuehrerbunker under the rubble of the Reich Chancellery, learned of it. The Austrian front had been…