Rome, Italy · October 28, 1940 In October 1940 Romanian strongman Gen. Ion Antonescu gave Adolf Hitler permission to occupy his country. Hitler’s Axis partner Benito Mussolini was caught off guard by the news, and the Italian public reacted negatively: for years the Italian dictator and his countrymen had considered Romania to lie within their…
Belgrade, Yugoslavia · October 22, 1944 On April 6, 1941, Yugoslavia was invaded from all sides by the Axis powers, primarily by Germany but also by Italy, Hungary, and Bulgaria. The invasion lasted little more than ten days, ending with the unconditional surrender of the Yugoslav Army on April 17 and the flight of King Peter II…
Kragujevac, Serbia, Yugoslavia · October 21, 1941 From Europe, to Africa, to the Far East, regular Axis troops, as well as specialized killing squads (Einsatzgruppen), murdered millions of unarmed civilians. These mass murders often targeted ethnic or political groups. Sometimes they were committed in retaliation for acts of resistance, whether or not the victims were…
German 12th Army HQ, Larissa, Greece · April 21, 1941 On this date in 1941 representatives of the Greek government, leaderless after Prime Minister Alexandros Koryzis committed suicide three days earlier, signed a document of capitulation at the headquarters of the German 12th Army at Larissa. Fourteen Greek divisions laid down their arms. The news…
London, England · April 13, 1939 Following the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia’s German-speaking Sudetenland in October 1938 and the invasion and incorporation of the rest of Czechoslovakia into the Reich in mid-March 1939, Great Britain, France, Poland, Greece, and Romania entered into mutual assistance pacts in case of a military invasion by “a European power,”…
Belgrade, Yugoslavia · April 6, 1941 At the tail end of February 1941 British Commonwealth forces from Nigeria captured Mogadishu, capital of Italian Somaliland (part of today’s Somalia), after Benito Mussolini’s armies had abandoned any pretense of defending their East African colony. The Italian colony in the Horn of Africa had threatened the southern entrance to the…
Vienna, Austria · March 25, 1941 On this date in 1941 in Vienna, the government of Yugoslav regent Prince Paul signed a protocol of adherence to the Berlin-Rome-Tokyo Tripartite Pact, thereby setting the stage for a complex guerrilla war against Germans, Italians, and their Yugoslav allies, and within the Yugoslav resistance forces themselves. Not two…
Cairo, Egypt · March 7, 1941 On this date in 1941 in Greece, a British expeditionary force from Egypt arrived just two days before the army of Italian dictator Benito Mussolini started its last unsuccessful campaign against Greek forces. The previous October the Italian army had crossed Greece’s northwestern frontier from neighboring Albania, launching the…