1887 Birth: Vidkun Quisling, Norwegian politician and Nazi collaborator. He held the office of Minister President in occupied Norway from February 1942 to the end of World War II, while the elected social democratic cabinet of Johan Nygaardsvold was exiled in London. After the war he was tried for high treason and subsequently executed by firing squad. His name has become an eponym for traitor, especially a collaborationist.
For further information, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vidkun_Quisling>
1915 WW1: The Second Battle of Isonzo begins. A series of battles on this river are fought during the year with no gain for the Italians and the loss of 280,000 men.
Running from 18 July-3 August 1915, in actuality the second Isonzo battle achieved little more than the first other than increased casualties: 60,000 on the Italian side, 45,000 Austro-Hungarian. The Italian Second and Third armies made a number of trivial gains in the Carso following two days of often hand to hand fighting from 18 July, but were unable to maintain forward position gains around Gorizia. Throughout the Isonzo battles Cadorna consistently persisted with a policy of massed frontal infantry attacks against well prepared defensive positions, despite clear evidence on the Western Front that such tactics were fruitless.
http://www.firstworldwar.com/battles/isonzo2.htm>
1918 WW1: As Ludendorff prepares to pull back, Foch orders a counteroffensive at Soissons. The French, using light tanks and aided by US and British divisions, assault the Marne from left to right, reaching the Vesle River and recapturing Soissons. Ludendorff calls off the proposed drive in Flanders. Note: Later the German Chancellor would write, "On the 18th even the most optimistic among us knew that all was lost. The history of the world was played out in three days."
1918 WW1: July 18-25 Dispatch Runner Lance Corporal Adolf Hitler participates in defensive operations between Soissons and Reims with 3 Company, 16 Bavarian Reserve Infantry Regiment.
1925 The first volume of Mein Kampf (My Struggle), Hitler's personal political testament, is published in Munich. The book is dedicated to Dietrich Eckart and the sixteen Nazi who died in the Munich Putsch of November 9, 1918.
For further information, please see http://comicism.tripod.com/meinkampf.html>
1935 Ethiopian King Haile Selassie urges his countrymen to fight to the last man against the invading Italian army.
Haile Selassie ascended the throne in the era of polar exploration and slow communication. Africa's oldest nation was little more than a footnote to the great stories of the day --something that Americans and Brits read about in the pages of the National Geographic. Some people still called the country Abyssinia. In certain countries far beyond Ethiopia's borders, segregation and apartheid were long established and little questioned. Most other African "nations" were colonies. Even at home, slavery was technically still legal.
In such an era, words like "pan-Africanism" and "civil rights" were little more than esoteric philosophical notions entertained by an enlightened few. That a country as backward as Italy, whose widespread poverty prompted the emigration of millions, would seek to devour a nation like Ethiopia, was an irony too subtle to raise eyebrows outside the most sophisticated intellectual circles.
http://www.imperialethiopia.org/selassie.htm>
1936 Holocaust: The Nazi-controlled Danzig Senate nullifies the Free City's constitution, prohibits the Jewish method of slaughtering animals, and prevents Jews from renewing leases and business licenses.
1939 Holocaust: A public announcement is printed: "The German Society of Race-hygiene is to organize the Fourth International Congress of Eugenics in Vienna on 26-28 August 1940. The President of the Congress will be Professor Rüdin. George Herbert Walker and Prescott Bush were active in the leadership of the eugenics societies that were popular among the wealthy classes in the first half of the twentieth century. Prescott Bush was the Connecticut director of the Mental Hygiene Society which originated at Yale University in 1908. The headquarters of the American Eugenics Society was also at Yale (also home of the Order of Skull & Bones) until its relocation to and merger in 1952 with the Population Council, which was founded by John D. Rockefeller and John Foster Dulles …
http://watch.pair.com/reich.html>
1940 The Democratic national convention in Chicago nominates President Franklin Roosevelt for a third term in office.
Incumbent President Franklin D. Roosevelt (FDR), a Democrat, broke with tradition and ran for a third term, which became a major issue. The surprise Republican candidate was maverick businessman Wendell Willkie, a dark horse who crusaded against Roosevelt's failure to end the Depression and eagerness for war. Roosevelt, aware of strong isolationist sentiment in the U.S., promised there would be no foreign wars if he were reelected.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_election,_1940>
1940 WW2: The RAF carries out a daylight raid on invasion barges at Rotterdam, and a night raid on the Krupp armaments works at Essen in the Ruhr.
During this time, the English public became involved in a way never before seen in warfare: live radio reports form the front. BBC broadcasters would broadcast live or recorded blow-by-blow reports of the fighting in the Channel, and the public was fascinated by the progress. This helped to unite the populace in a way the Nazis never imagined.
http://www.worldwar2database.com/html/britain_40.htm>
1941 Holocaust: The first acknowledged reports concerning the mass killings of Jews in the East begin reaching England.
After the German army invaded the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941, a new stage in the Holocaust began. Under cover of war and confident of victory, the Germans turned from the forced emigration and imprisonment of Jews to mass murder. Special action squads, or Einsatzgruppen, made up of Nazi (SS) units and police, moved with speed on the heels of the advancing German army. Their job was to kill any Jews they could find in the occupied Soviet territory. Some residents of the occupied regions, mostly Ukrainians, Latvians, and Lithuanians, aided these German mobile killing squads by serving as auxiliary police.
http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Holocaust/mobile.html>
1941 Holocaust: A group of 30 White Russians who refuse to shovel earth over 45 Jews who had been tied together and thrown into a large pit are executed by the SS. All 75 are left dead in the pit.
http://www.humanitas-international.org/showcase/chronography/timebase/1941tbse.htm>
1942 WW2 Stalin to FDR:
As regards the survey flight, we could in the next few days send a plane from Krasnoyarsk to Nome - I mean an American twin-engine aircraft - which could take on the US officers on its way back from Nome. I take this opportunity to thank you for the news about the dispatch of an additional hundred and fifteen tanks to the USSR. I consider it my duty to warn you that, according to our experts at the front, US tanks catch fire very easily when hit from behind or from the side by anti-tank rifle bullets. The reason is that the high-grade gasoline used forms inside the tank a thick layer of highly inflammable fumes. German tanks also use gasoline, but of a low grade which yields smaller quantities of fumes, hence, they are more fireproof. Our experts think that the diesel makes the best tank motor."
1942 Holocaust: Himmler continues to inspect Auschwitz and the surrounding area with several officials from I.G. Farben.
The Nazi occupation of Poland was to be brutal. They wanted to make the Poles a nation of slaves and it was to help them achieve this aim that the Nazis first built places like Auschwitz, modelled on concentration camps they'd already established in Germany. Hoess who had worked in concentration camps since 1934 knew that his task was to create a place that would strike terror into the Poles. But the gas chambers for which Auschwitz was to become infamous were not yet conceived.
Hoess even adopted the cynical motto of Dachau concentration camp in Germany—Arbeit Macht Frei—"Work makes you free"—and emblazoned it on the new gates of Auschwitz. The Polish prisoners now arriving at the new camp were subject to appalling treatment from the SS. Over half the 23,000 Poles first sent to Auschwitz were dead within twenty months.
http://www.pbs.org/auschwitz/about/transcripts.html>
1942 WW2: The German Messerschmitt Me-262, the first jet-propelled aircraft to fly in combat, makes its first flight using only its jets.
For further information, seehttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Messerschmitt_Me-262>
1942 WW2: In the East, the advance by 6th Armme and 4th Panzerarmee toward the Don bend at Kalach continues..
The success of the initial advance of Sixth Army was such Hitler now ordered Fourth Panzer Army south to assist First Panzer Army in forcing a crossing of the lower Don river. This sudden redeployment of an entire Army caused massive logistical problems, as the road network in this part of USSR was not well developed by German standards. The resulting traffic jams caused delays to both Army Group A and B's progress. It also removed vital tank support from Sixth Army, slowing its advance and giving the Red Army further time to consolidate their positions.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Blue>
1943 WW2: In Sicily, the attacks by the British Eighth Army (Montgomery) before Catania are stalled in the face of stiff German resistance.
1944 WW2: The US First Army fights its way into the village of St.-Lo, France, ending the battle of the hedgerows.
The German army occupied the town on June 17, 1940. Being a strategic crossroads, Saint-Lô was almost totally destroyed (95% according to common estimates) during the Battle of Normandy in World War II, earning the title of "The Capital of the Ruins" from Samuel Beckett; it was even questioned whether to rebuild it or to leave the ruins intact as a testimony to the bombing.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint-L%C3%B4>
1944 WW2: Hideki Tojo resigns as Japanese premier and war minister due to setbacks suffered by his country in war. He is succeeded by an Army General, Kuniaki Koiso.
1944 WW2: Operation Goodwood begins as British and Canadian troops cross the Orne River at Caen and drive toward the south.
Operation Goodwood was an attack launched … by the British army to the east of the city of Caen. British VIII Corps led the attack with three armoured divisions, supported by British I Corps on the eastern flank and the Canadian II Corps on the western flank, who were launching their own attack codenamed Operation Atlantic, to capture the remainder of Caen.
When Operation Goodwood ended on 20 July, the armoured divisions had broken through the initial German defences and had advanced 7 miles before coming to a halt in front of the Bourguebus Ridge, although armoured cars had penetrated further south and over the ridge.
There has been controversy since July 1944 over the objective of the operation: whether it was a limited attack to secure Caen and pin German formations in the eastern region of the Normandy beachhead, preventing them from disengaging to join the counterattack against the US Operation Cobra or a failed attempted breakout from the Normandy bridgehead. At least one historian has called the operation the largest tank battle that the British Army has ever fought.http://wapedia.mobi/en/Operation_Goodwood
The son of a Berlin professor of psychiatry, Bonhoeffer studied theology at Tubingen, Berlin and at Union Theological Seminary in New York City. When Hitler came to power in 1933, Bonhoeffer, student chaplain and lecturer at the University of Berlin, joined the anti-Nazi pastors in the German "church struggle." In 1935, he was appointed head of the Finkenwalde Confessing Church Seminary, which was closed by the government in 1937. In 1939, Bonhoeffer rejected the possibility of a job in America, safe from the impending European war. He was convinced that he had to face the difficulties ahead with the Christians in Germany.
Back in Germany during World War II, Bonhoeffer was forbidden to preach or to publish. Though claiming to be a disciple of Gandhi and his credo of non-violence, Bonhoeffer worked as a double agent in the anti-Nazi resistance movement and in the German military office, and eventually joined the wartime conspiracy to assassinate Hitler. His arrest in 1943, however, arose from his direct involvement in smuggling fourteen Jews to Switzerland. He was hanged by the Nazis at Flossenburg on April 9, 1945.
http://www.rapidnet.com/~jbeard/bdm/exposes/bonhoeffer/general.htm>
Particularly unpleasant was the gassing of the emaciated women from the women's camp, who were generally known as 'Muslims'. I remember I once took part in the gassing of one of these groups of women. I cannot say how big the group was.
When I got close to the bunker [I saw] them sitting on the ground. They were still clothed. As they were wearing worn-out camp clothing they were not left in the undressing hut but made to undress in the open air. I concluded from the behavior of these women that they had no doubt what fate awaited them, as they begged and pleaded to the SS men to spare them their lives. However, they were herded into the gas chambers and gassed. As an anatomist I have seen a lot of terrible things: I had had a lot of experience with dead bodies, and yet what I saw that day was like nothing I had ever seen before.
http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/biography/kremer.html>
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