Significant Timeline #3 - 01 Sept 1939 - Dec 1941

Timeline of Events September 1939 - 30 December 1941

THE WAR YEARS: 

1939 (Continued)

01 September 1939: Germany invades Poland [Gehäuse weiß /Case White] with over one and a half million men. Jews in Germany are given a curfew. Britain and France submit ultimatums which call for Germany’s withdrawal of all its military forces from Poland.  Germany is given until 11am on the 3^rd of September to comply. Hitler chooses to ignore the Britain and France’s demands. Italy announces its neutrality.  –  Reinhard Heydrich sent his Einsatzgruppen units behind the Wehrmacht with the task of arresting or killing Poland’s intelligentsia and other potential political threats to their authority.  

Early September 1939: In Germany, Joseph Goebbels bans the listening to foreign broadcasts, including those of Germany’s allies, the penalty for doing so could range from imprisonment to execution, especially if one repeated what one heard.

02 September 1939: The Stutthof concentration camp, some 20 miles east of Danzig is established near the village of Stutthof by the Germans. The Germans launch an air raid against Warsaw killing at least 21 people.

03 September 1939: Hitler leaves Berlin onboard his new mobile headquarters, the Führersonderzug Amerika (Leader special train) for Poland (After the declaration of war on the USA, the train was renamed Brandenburg).  -  With no German withdrawal from Poland, Britain and France formally declare war on Germany and Britain formally informs its people that their country is at war with Germany over the radio at 11:15 am. At 11:35am, the air raid sirens are heard over London, but this a false alarm. The British passenger ship, the ‘SS Athenia’ is torpedoed by a German U-boat [U-30] killing some 117 passengers and crew.  This was first ship to be sunk in the war. Later the commander of the U-boat claimed that he thought the ship was an armed merchant ship. Hitler leaves Berlin on his special train ‘Amerika’ for the frontline in Poland.

04 September 1939:  French troops cross the German border into the Saarland as a minor show of strength.

04-06 September 1939: The Germans murder 180 Jews in and around the Polish city of Częstochowa. This massacre became known as ‘Bloody Monday.’

05 September 1939: The United States declares its neutrality.

06 September 1939: The Polish government flees from Warsaw to Brest-Litovsk. South Africa declares war on Germany.

07 September 1939: German troops are sent to counter the French that have entered the Saarland.

08 September 1939: German scouts reach the suburbs of Warsaw whilst some 60,000 Polish troops are surrounded near Radom, south of Warsaw. The first official news report of an execution is published. The story tells that Johann Heinen, was shot in the concentration camp at Sachsenhausen the day before for refusing to work on a construction site. (Johann was a convicted thief). Soon other stories of executions were printed in the German press.  The Germans force 200 Jews from the Polish city of Bedzin into a local synagogue and after locking them in, they set fire to the building killing everyone inside.

09 September 1939: The German army enter Łódź, in central Poland. All Jewish men in Gelsenkirchen, in the Ruhr, Germany are deported to the concentration camp at Sachsenhausen. In Germany, the Reich Minister of the Interior orders that all prostitutes be registered with the police and that they undergo regular health checks. 

10 September 1939: Canada declares war on Germany.

12 September 1939: The British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain flies to France for talks with the Allied Supreme Council.

13 September 1939: At Mielec in Poland, the Nazis seize 35 Jews and burn them alive in a nearby slaughter house.

14 September 1939: The Germans seize 43 leading Polish Jews in the city of Przemysl and take them to a labour camp where they are set upon and given a severe beaten prior to being shot.

16 September 1939: The German Foreign Minister von Ribbentrop informs the Soviet Foreign Minister Molotov that he believes that Warsaw will fall the next day.

17 September 1939:  The Soviet Union invade the eastern part of Poland, claiming that she was intervening to protect ethnic Russians living there. The true reason for the invasion was that under the Nazi-Soviet pact, Russia was to occupy the eastern half of Poland as her reward for not intervening against Germany’s invasion.  The French withdraw their troops from the Saarland.

18 September 1939: The British aircraft carrier HMS Courageous is sunk in the Atlantic with the loss of some 500 men.

19 September 1939: Hitler is greeted with wild enthusiasm by Danzig Germans during a visit of the city. Neville Chamberlain states in London that the war will only be over once Hitlerism has been destroyed.

20 September 1939: London receives reports that anti-German revolts are taking place in Bohemia, Moravia and Slovakia.

21 September 1939: In Berlin, Reinhardt Heydrich chairs a meeting with other leading SS personnel who are already employed in the round up of Jews in Poland.  Heydrich informs those present that the Jews of Poland are to be herded into ghettos that are close to railway junctions.  The Germans also setup 'Jewish Council of Elders' (Jüdischer Ältestenrat or Ältestenrat der Juden) to administer the life in the ghettos, these organisations become known as the ‘Judenrat’, throughout occupied Poland for the sole purpose of assisting the German authorities in controlling the Jewish population as a whole. Each council is to be run by a ‘Chairman’ who will be supported by at least 23 council members. The council initially will also carry out a census of local Jews, and to implement all German directives issued to them.  The primary function of the Judenrat, in connection with the Jews themselves will be to maintain the community through housing, policing, employment, and the feeding of the population, as well as initiating and maintaining other amenities.  In Poland the Germans issue a decree stating that all Jewish communities with less than 500 Jews are to be dissolved and that the said dissolved Jewish communities are to move in Nazi authorised areas [ghettos] of larger cities or other special areas which have been set aside for them.

22 September 1939: The ex-head of the German Army, Werner Feiherr von Fritsch, serving in an artillery regiment is fatally wounded on the outskirts of Warsaw.

23 September 1939: In Germany Jews forbidden to own radios.

23-24 September 1939: Theodor Eicke instructs 2 battalions of the Brandenburg Division, which is stationed in and around Loclawek to Bydgoszoz to eliminate Polish intellectuals and municipal leaders. Some 800 Poles are murdered in this action.

25 September 1939: The Germans launch ‘Operation Coast’, an air assault on Warsaw. Over 400 planes are involved.

26 September 1939: The Polish commander in Warsaw asks General von Brauchitsch, who is in command of the German 8th Army, for a truce, but Brauchitsch refuses stating that he would only accept unconditional surrender of all Polish troops in and around Warsaw. Hitler boards his special train and heads back to Berlin. In France, the French Communist Party is dissolved by the government.

27 September 1939: The Reichssicherheitshauptamt (The Reich Main Security Office) also known as the RSHA is set up to harmonize the activities of the SD (Sicherheitsdienst: Security Service), the Gestapo (Geheime Staatspolizei: Secret State Police) and the other various Police units. Heinrich Himmler appoints Reinhardt Heydrich to head the department. –

Warsaw surrenders to the Germans at 2pm. Some 140,000 Polish soldiers are taken into captivity.

28 September 1939: The German Foreign Minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop signs a second German-Soviet treaty with Stalin's Foreign Minister, Vyacheslav Mikhaylovich Molotov in Moscow.  This treaty amended the first treaty's agreed German-Soviet partition of Poland lines which had been signed in August.  Also agreed was the resettlement of ethnic Germans from all areas under Soviet administration to the Reich, and that Stalin may if he so wishes, seize territories within the Baltic region [Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia]. Heinrich Himmler and his SS would be given the responsibility of vetting and rehousing all ethnic Germans that arrive the East.

30 September 1939: The German pocket battleship ‘Admiral Graf Spee’ sinks the British merchant ship ‘Clement’.

September 1939: Scientists in Germany meet in Berlin to discuss ways of harnessing energy from nuclear fusion. The German War Office agrees to assist the scientists in any way they can.

Late September 1939: Kurt Daluege suggests to Reinhard Heydrich the possibility of using suitable anti-Semitic Poles in their racial war against the Jews.

01 October 1939: The German army march triumphantly into Warsaw. British bombers drop leaflets over Berlin telling the populace that their leaders have tricked them into going to war.

02 October 1939: The United States government recognises the Polish government in exile which is being set up in Paris.

04 October 1939: In Warsaw the Nazi authorities set up a Judenrat to help assist them in the controlling the Jewish population. The Judenrat is made up of prominent Jews.

05 October 1939: Latvia signs a mutual aid pact with the USSR in Riga.

06 October 1939: Hitler proclaims the isolation of the Jews.  The last pocket of Polish resistance ends. Gestapo leader, Heinrich Müller instructs Adolf Eichmann to begin preparing for the removal of between 70,000 to 80,000 Jews from the newly annexed area of Silesia and the Protectorate (NISKO plan to settle Jews in the Lublin area if Poland). Eichmann would only manage to remove just under 5,000 Jews after having transport issues.  Hitler offers Britain and France a chance for peace in which he proposes a four-power peace conference stating at the end that this would be his last offer of peace if Britain and France reject the proposal and he reaffirms his friendship with Belgium and Holland.

07 October 1939: Britain rejects Hitler’s peace overtures. Heinrich Himmler is made Reich Commissioner for the Consolidation of German Nationhood.

08 October 1939: Hitler and Goering sign the decree that officially annexed western Poland and make it part of Greater Germany. This new territory is named ‘Warthegau,’ and the rump that was left over of Poland is given the name ‘General-Government of Poland’ which was to be governed by the Nazi party’s legal advisor Hans Frank. From the outset Frank let it be known that Poles would now to be regarded as slaves to the Third Reich. The Nazis start to establish a Jewish ghetto at Piotrków Tryunalski in Poland which was completed by the end of the month.  This was the first ghetto to be established. All ghettos would witness depravity, disease and illness, corruption, starvation and death on huge scales as Jews struggled to exist within these prisons, and no matter the death toll or disease, the Germans kept the pressure up on these communities.  Crime within the ghettos was also a problem as the young were left to fend for themselves and where the black-market flourished for those who could afford to pay extortionate prices.  To curb this, the Judenrat would establish the Ordnungsdienst (Order Service, or simply a uniformed ghetto police). These Jewish police forces would be, at times, be just as bad as their German masters, abuse of office was rampant in all ghettos. 

09 October 1939:  The Swedish businessman, Birger Dahlerus meets Hitler in Berlin to discuss a negotiated peace settlement with the Allied powers. Dahlerus informs the Führer that Britain and France are demanding the restoration of Poland to its pre-war boundaries and that the German people be given a free vote on Hitler’s foreign policies and that Germany destroy all her weapons of aggression.  In Germany, orders for 'Operation Gelb' (Yellow) are issued, which was the codename used for an offensive in the West. Philipp Bouler, head of Hitler’s Chancellery, sends out census forms to all hospitals and doctors. The aim of the forms is to collect information on patients, who are deemed senile, criminally insane, or of non-German blood, so that they can be dealt with in Hitler’s now secret euthanasia programme. Many thousands are murdered by Nazi doctors under this policy. The Prices of Food Bill is introduced in Britain as a way to prevent profiteering from the war.

10 October 1939: The Swedish Businessman Birger Dahlerus meets Hitler again, this time it is to relay the Führer’s reply to the Allied Powers peace settlement, he informs them that Poland will remain within the German sphere of influence and at the same time, he demands the return of all German pre-Great War colonies or substitute territories. Finland mobilises their Baltic fleet.

11 October 1939: A Friend of Albert Einstein, Alexander Sachs meets with the American President, Dwight Roosevelt. Sachs brings the President a letter from Einstein, which explains that atomic energy could be used to create a very potent weapon. Roosevelt sets up an advisory committee on uranium, which holds its first meeting in Washington. America is now in the race to create nuclear weapons. The French Premier Daladier turns down Hitler’s peace feelers. The USSR cede the former Polish city of Vilna to Lithuania.

12 October 1939: The British Prime Minister Winston Churchill informs the British nation of his rejection of Hitler’s offer of peace during a speech on national radio. Hans Frank is appointed chief civilian officer for occupied Poland. Jews from Vienna are expelled.

14 October 1939: The German submarine U-47, under the command of Gunther Prien, the commander, penetrated the British naval defences at Scapa Flow in the early hours. With 3 torpedoes, she sinks the British battleship ‘Royal Oak’ as she lay at anchor, killing more than 833 men.

15 October 1919: In Washington, President Roosevelt rejects Hitler’s proposal that the US mediate between Britain, France and Germany. The German Counter-Intelligence agency the Abwehr, forms a second company to complement its first. This 2nd Company is made up of Rumanian Volksdeutsche as well as Baltic Germans and a handful of men who lived in Palestine. The first German aircraft (2 X bombers) are brought down by fighters over British territory.

16 October 1939: The German authorities within the city of Łódź appoint Chaim Rumkowski as Chairman of the Judenrat (Jewish Council) and he is instructed by the Germans to choose his own council members. However, the vast majority of those picked by Rumkowski, were murdered within weeks by the Nazis, so new members had to be chosen. At this stage, the Jews have not been informed that they will soon be ordered to move into a ghetto. The German authorities order all Poles to leave the Port and city of Gdynia as well as all the towns and villages within the annexed areas of Poland.

17 October 1939: Hitler makes it clear that the Polish intelligentsia are to disappear so that they cannot form any organised resistance, and that the remainder of the Polish population would be used as a source of cheap labour for German interests.  A decree is issued by the German Ministerial Council for the Defences of the Reich, giving the SS field division’s judicial independence from the German army. The German army loses its administrative control in Poland. Hans Frank is given complete control to administer the country.

18 October 1939: Keitel receives Hitler’s Directive No 7 for the conduct of the war. It authorises attacks on Passenger ships in convoy or proceeding without lights.

19 October 1939: Turkey signs a mutual assistance pact with Britain and France in Ankara.

22 October 1939: Joseph Goebbels tells the German people that Winston Churchill had ordered the sinking of the British passenger liner Athenia so that Germany could be blamed for propaganda purposes.

24 October 1939: The British Expeditionary Force in France set up their first casualty clearing station.

25 October 1939: The British government drops all unfinished pre-war legislation.

28 October 1939: The SS in Germany proposes that all Jews be made to wear the Star of David.

30 October 1939: In the Polish town of Turek, Jews are gathered together in the local synagogue and are made to crawl along the pews singing. While being continuously beaten with whips by the SS. They are then forced to take down their trousers so that they can be beaten on their bare buttocks. One Jew, who had fouled his trousers in fear, was compelled to smear his excrement over the faces of the other Jews.

31 October 1939: The USSR declares that she will remain neutral.

October 1939: Heinrich Himmler, Lord of the SS and with Hitler’s approval as ‘Reich Commissariat for the Consolidation of German Nationhood’ (the office which took control off all racial matters) sets up a Central Land Office. The Central Land Office will deal with the handing out of polish land ad houses to Volksdeutsche, (People with German blood) as well as a Central Office for Evacuation.

October 1939: The T4 Programme begins (forced euthanasia) which is aimed at the removal of Germany's mentally and physically handicapped citizens, including very young children.

01 November 1939: The British government announces that bacon and butter will be rationed from mid-December.

03 November 1939: Some 96 schoolteachers in the Polish town of Rypin, are arrested by the Gestapo and shot within the school premises or are taken to a nearby wood to be executed. The American Congress repeals the provision from their ‘Neutrality Act’ that stopped them selling arms to belligerent countries and granting economic credits to such countries.

04 November 1939: In Warsaw, the city's Jewish leaders are summoned by the SS and are informed that they and the rest of the city's Jews are to move into an area of the city earmarked for Jews only. In protest, Adam Czerniaków and other Jewish leaders appeal to the city's military commander, General Karl von Neumann-Neurode.  The attempt to ghettoize Warsaw's Jews failed in this attempt.

05 November 1939: Some 167 Polish professors and lecturers at Cracow University are arrested by the Gestapo and sent to Sachsenhausen concentration camp.

07 November 1939: Heinrich Himmler orders the removal of all Jews and Poles from the annexed areas of Poland. They are to be relocated within the General-Government of Poland. An Anglo-French purchase commission is set up in Washington to purchase US defence materials.

08 November 1939: Johann Georg Elser tries and fails in an attempt to assassinate Adolf Hitler at the Bürgerbräukeller in Munich. Elser had hidden a bomb within a pillar close to the lectern where Hitler planned to make his speech at the Party’s commemoration of the failed 1923 Beer Hall Putsch. Hitler had the commemoration brought forward by half an hour and cut his speech by one hour because he wanted to return to Berlin and focus his attention on the war against the West. The bomb exploded some thirteen minutes after Hitler had left the hall which killed eight and injured dozens of others.

09 November 1939: 21 Jews are summarily executed in Buchenwald concentration camp. The youngest of these victims was just 17. 

10 November 1939: In Switzerland, general mobilisation is ordered

11 November 1939: Arthur Karl Greiser, the Gauleiter and Reichsstatthalter [Reich Governor] for Wartheland, which had been annexed from Poland after the Polish defeat, issues a decree ordering the Jews of Wartheland to display the yellow Star of David on their clothing so that they can be easily identified. 350 Poles are removed from a labour camp near Gdynia to the prison in the town of Wejherowo, where they are forced to dig their own graves, then brought to the pits in groups and shot.

14 November 1939: Winston Churchill informs the war cabinet in Britain that Germany is using a new weapon, magnetic mines which are being used against shipping.

17 November 1939: In Prague, The Nazis execute 9 Czech students for leading anti-German demonstrations.

22 November 1939: Some 53 Jews are executed as a reprisal for the killing of a Polish policeman whom had been murdered by a Jew. The Gestapo had promised to release their prisoners if a ransom was paid. When the Warsaw Jewish Council brought the money, they were informed that the prisoners had already been executed. The Gestapo kept the money. This was the first mass killing of Jews within Warsaw. A German magnetic mine is discovered on mudflats near Shoeburyness, recovered and dismantled the British discovered how it worked and the Admiralty set out to find ways to deal with them.

23 November 1939: Hans Frank, the General Governor of Poland ordered that all Jews, over the age of ten, should wear a white armband with the Star of David on it. Any Jew caught without it would sever grave penalties. General Petzel, the German commander in the Warthegau, wrote a report on the SS and Gestapo’s brutalities which General Blaskowitz sent to Hitler. The Luftwaffe drop mines on the Thames estuary.

24 November 1939: The Gestapo execute 120 Czech students because of their anti-Nazi activities

25 November 1939: The USSR demands that Finland withdraws her troops at least 16 miles from the Russian border.

26 November 1939: The Finnish government ignores the USSR’s demand to withdraw their troops from the Russian border as clashes between them occur.

28 November 1939: Stalin renounces his country’s non-aggression pact with Finland.

30 November 1939: The Red Army invades Finland. 26 Soviet divisions (465,000 men) take on only 9 Finnish divisions (130,000 men). The Soviets believed that the Finns would capitulate quickly; therefore, they decided not to issue their troops with winter clothing.

November 1939: Joseph Goebbels visits occupied Poland to visit his newly established propaganda branches within the Governor-Generals Ministry.

01 December 1939: Mass deportations of Jews from German occupied territory begin under Adolf Eichmann.

02 December 1939: The Soviet News agency ‘Tass’ announces the establishment of a ‘people’s government of Finland’, even though the fighting was still continuing. In this war, the Finns invented a simple but deadly device, which consisted of glass bottles partially filled with petrol, with rags in the neck of the bottle. These devices were primarily used against Soviet armour with devastating effect. This new weapon was quickly dubbed the ‘Molotov Cocktail’.

December 1939: Every Polish inmate of the Stralsund Mental Hospital, are taken to the Stutthof concentration camp, near Danzig and shot. Their bodies are then buried by Polish prisoners, who are then shot after their task is complete. Other mental asylums throughout the General Government area were also emptied of patients who are then killed.

December 1939: For the death of 2 German soldiers, who had died at the hands of 2 Polish criminals that were trying to evade arrest, 170 men and boys are rounded up in Wawer and the nearby village of Anin. All the prisoners were taking to a nearby tunnel where they were held for several hours before being taken in groups of 10 and shot. Two American citizens were among those shot.

December 1939: The Finnish army which faced the Soviet 163rd and 54th divisions managed to drive them back across the Soviet border. Stalin in a rage ordered the execution of General Vinogradov, who had commanded the 54th division. Over 26,000 Russian troops were killed as a result of Finnish action and the freezing cold weather.

07 December 1939: The British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain announces that 30 fighter aircraft is to be sent to Finland in support of their war against the Soviet Union. Britain, France and Italy would later give extra weapons to volunteers who would travel to Finland to help the Finns fight against the Soviets. Hitler issues his ‘Night and Fog’ decree, which authorised the arrest of anyone suspected of endangering German security. Anyone arrested under this decree was not to be executed straight away, but to disappear without trace into the ‘Night and Fog’ of the concentration camp system. Inmates who had the letters NN (Nacht und Nebel) against their names, signalled execution at some time in the near future.

08 December 1939: Some 31 Poles, 6 of whom are Jews, are shot in Warsaw. They had been accused of ‘acts of sabotage’.

11 December 1939: The League of Nations in Geneva debate the Soviet Union’s naked act of aggression against Finland. It ends with the Soviet Union’s expulsion from the league.

12 December 1939: The Nazis set up Labour camps throughout occupied Poland. Jewish males between 14 and 60 are assigned to be used as forced labour. Jews from occupied Kalisz in western Poland are expelled. At least 1,000 able bodied men are sent to a forced labour camp at Kozminek, some 35km northwest of Kalisz.

13 December 1939: The German pocket battleship Graf Spee reaches the Uruguayan harbour in Montevideo.

14 December 1939: 1,500 Jews are deported from Poznan into the General Government area of Poland.  Stalin’s USSR is expelled from the League of Nations following their Pact with Germany.

17 December 1939: The German battleship, the Graf Spee, is scuttled by her captain, Hans Langsdorff, to prevent British cruisers, Achilles, Ajax and Exeter from capturing her or sinking her. Langsdorff commits suicide by shooting himself in a hotel room in Montevideo.

19 Decembers 1939: Some 7,500 Canadian volunteers arrive in Britain to assist her in the war against Germany.  The Germans launch their 7.860-ton cruiser ‘Atlantis’ which had been converted from a freighter. Her main tasks are the destruction of Allied merchant shipping. To aid her in her aims, she would fly various national flags as a deceptive means to get close to enemy shipping. The Atlantis quickly became one of Germany’s deadliest weapons. The British Admiralty reports to the War Cabinet that they have devised a way to demagnetise their ships, thus being able to avoid German magnetic mines.

Mid-December 1939: Heinrich Himmler initiates new SS-controlled organisations. The Einwandererzentralstelle or EWZ was aimed at encouraging ethnic Germans living within the Soviet Union or areas controlled by Moscow to move to the newly conquered region of Poland that was to be annexed to the Reich [the Warthegau].   Those ethnic Germans would then be assessed by racial experts at the EWZ within their offices based within the Warthegau for their suitability and then be given Polish homes and farms as an incentive for returning home.  These people would make up the future Soldier-farmers that the Nazi leaders had envisaged for the population of Germany’s new eastern borders. The Umwandererzentralsteele or UWZ, would be involved in the removal of hundreds of thousands of Poles and Jews that where to be expelled from the Warthegau to make way for ethnic Germans into the rump that was left of Poland [the General-government].

20 December 1939: The Radomsko ghetto is set up in central Poland and all local Jews were ordered to move into it.

22 December 1939: Women working in the arms industry in Britain demand that they get the same pay levels as their male counterparts.

23 December 1939: Stalin sacks General Meretzkov after the Red army’s poor performance against the Finns.

24 December 1939: Hitler spends Christmas with the troops on the western front.

28 December 193: In Britain, rationing is to be extended to incorporate sugar and meat.

28/29 December 1939: Hitler receives a letter from the German industrialist Fritz Thyssen, condemning his Soviet pact and the Nazi persecution of Christians and Jews in Germany. Thyssen had supported the Nazis between 1932 up to 1935. Thyssen had already complained to Hitler in letters in the past.

31 December 1939: The Finns claim that they have managed to push the Soviet forces back over the border on a 150-mile front.

 

1940

Early January 1940: Some 2,000 Polish prisoners of war are sealed up within railway cattle trucks in Warsaw. The prisoners are kept in these conditions for 13 days. When the doors are finally opened, at least 211 prisoners are found frozen to death and many more die soon after. Many of the prisoners had been driven insane by their ordeal.

January 1940: France establishes its first two armoured divisions.

January 1940: The Nazis establish a Judenrat [Jewish Council] in Lublin.

01 January 1940: The Finnish 9th Division attacks the Soviet 44th Division and inflicts serious damage to it.

03 January 1940: In the evening, the German U-boat U-25 moors un-noticed next to the German merchant ship Thalia in the Spanish port of Cadiz for refuelling and to take on supply’s which is in breach of Spanish neutrality. The Australian government promises planes and some 3,000 airmen to the allied cause.

05 January 1940: Leslie Hore-Belisha is replaced as the British Secretary of State for War by Oliver Stanley. Britain and France agreed to send an expeditionary force to help prop-up the Finns against their Soviet oppressors.

07 January 1940: It is reported that 50,000 Soviet soldiers have died since the USSR’s armed aggression against Finland.

08/09 January 1940: More than 300,000 British schoolchildren return to their homes after being evacuated to the countryside at the outbreak of the war.

09 January 1940: Some 152 people are killed when the liner ‘Union Castle’ is sunk by a mine off the south-east coast of Britain. - Dr Hildebrandt, SS-Chief and Chief of the Police of Greater Danzig-West Prussia, informs Himmler that two of his units have eliminated about 6,000 mental patients within his jurisdiction.

10 January 1940: Hitler chooses the 17th January to be the date for his offensive against France and Britain, stating that mass attacks on French airfields would begin on January 14th. - The Luftwaffe attack 12 ships, sinking three and killing 35 people off Britain’s shores. Soviet forces launch another assault on the Finnish Mannerheim line, this time breaching it in some places. The Finns withdraw to a second defensive line. - The Nazi authorities order that all Czech shops owned by Jews are to close down and that they as a people have to cease all economic activity.

11 January 1940: Sweden promises to help Finland by supplying it with much needed aid. - Moscow signs a commercial agreement with Berlin, in which the Soviet Union will supply Germany with oil and agricultural products in exchange for manufactured goods and arms.

13 January 1940: Due to bad weather forecasts, Hitler orders a three-day postponement for his attack in the West. Colonel Hans Oster, deputy chief of the German Secret Service, passes on Germany’s plans of invasion to the Dutch military attaché in Berlin. The British government get the go-ahead from the Swedish authorities to allow their volunteers, embarked to fight with the Finns against the Soviets pass through Swedish territory, provided that they travel unarmed and out of uniform. This volunteer force was to be known as ‘Stratford.’ - Soviet troops in Finland launch an assault on the Finns secondary defensive line and manage to break it.

16 January 1940: Hitler again postpones his assault on the West until spring. This is due to the worsening weather forecasts. - British destroyers spot the German freighter the Altmark, which was transferring British crews, whose ships had been sunk at sea, back to Germany as prisoners of war. The British destroyers gave chase and the Altmark sought safety in Norwegian waters. Britain violated Norway’s neutrality by continuing their pursuit which ended with the capture of the German ship and by doing so, released British seamen who had been taken captive when their ships had been sunk. Norway protested about this breach of neutrality but the British government ignored their complaints. Hitler realised that Britain would continue to breach other nations neutrality when it needed to do so and decided that Germany had to control Norwegian waters as she totally relied on their waters to gain her precious iron ore which was supplied to her by Sweden. - In Finland, the Red Army breach the Finnish Mannerheim defences.

Mid-January 1940: Allied cryptographers make a breakthrough in being able to read German secret communications that are being sent via their Enigma machines. The Germans always believed that the Enigma code was unbreakable.

18 January 1940: Sweden, Norway and Denmark reaffirm their countries neutrality. Some 255 Jews are arrested and taken to Palmiry woods, located just outside Warsaw they are shot by the Germans. - The Red Army claim to have captured four Finnish towns.

24 January 1940: In occupied Poland (Generalgouvernement) all property owned by Jews are to be registered.

25 January 1940: Hans Frank informs the people of Poland that they will have to supply Germany with all raw materials, chemicals and manpower that the Reich needs. This manpower is to be used within the industrial and agricultural areas of production. Some 750,000 men and women would be used as slave labour within the Reich. - British planes start a six-day intensive mission over Berlin. Dropping leaflets not bombs on the citizens of Berlin. The leaflets, known in the Air Ministry as ‘White bombs’ which warned the German people about the evils of Nazism. - The first squadron of the Royal Canadian Air Force arrive in Britain.

26 January 1940: In Warsaw, the Nazis fine the Jewish Judenrat after some ethnic Germans are beaten up in the street.  In Germany, the Nazi government warns its citizens that listening to foreign broadcasts is a crime punishable by death.

29 January 1940: The Soviet government begins secret negotiations with the Swedish government. - Norway, Sweden and Denmark lodge complaints against Germany after her U-boats sink neutral shipping.

30 January 1940: Reinhardt Heydrich establishes a new government department, which is situated in Berlin. The new department is named IV-D-4, whose task was to complete the deportation plans of Jews within the annexed regions of Western Poland and to handle further deportations elsewhere.

01 February 1940: A large-scale Soviet assault on the Finnish Mannerheim line is attempted.

06 February 1940: In Poland, Generaloberst [General], Johannes Blaskowitz, writing a memorandum, protests about the harsh treatment meted out against the local population by the German occupation forces. General Vinogradov, commander of the Soviet 44th Division that recently been attacked by the Finnish 9th Division, authorises the remnants of the Division to pull back into Soviet territory. The British government warns Norway that they intend to mine their waters as an attempt to disrupt Germany’s shipment of iron ore. They claimed that Germany has been flouting Norwegian neutrality since the start of the war.

08 February 1940: The German authorities within the city of Łódź issues a decree ordering that the city's Jewish population move into a specified area of the city (the ghetto).  Chaim Rumkowski, already Chairman of the Judenrat, begins his new assignment as leader of the ghetto population. Rumkowski, did everything he could to please his Nazi masters and abused his new found powers within the ghetto and he soon became despised by many of the ghettos Jews.

12 February 1940: First transports of Germany's Jews are sent to the concentration camps and ghettos in the east. - Three Enigma rotors are captured by the crew of HMS Gleaner from the German U-boat U-33.

15 February 1940: In Berlin, some senior Wehrmacht officers are reported to have complained about the savage behaviour of the SS in Poland against the local people, especially against the Jews.

19 February 1940: The British destroyer HMS Daring is sunk just off British mainland.

20 February 1940: Hitler informs General von Falkenhorst, that he is to be given the responsibility of the planning and the execution of the invasion of Norway.

21 February 1940: Richard Glücks informs Himmler that he has found a suitable site to incarcerate Poles. The site is a former Austro-Hungarian cavalry barracks, on the outskirts of the town of Oswiecim. The site was known to the Germans as Auschwitz.

23 February 1940: The USSR offers Finland its peace terms

27 February 1940: British volunteers who have chosen to assist the Finns against The Soviets leave for Finland.

01 March 1940: Sumner Welles, President Roosevelt’s special peace envoy meets Hitler and von Ribbentrop in Berlin. - Hitler issues his new directive ‘Weser Exercise’ for the capture of Denmark and Norway.

04 March 1940: The Allied Expeditionary Force ‘Stratford’ which was earmarked to help Finland in their struggles against the Soviet Union is abandoned before they could leave for Finland.

05 March 1940: The Royal Navy seizes seven Italian ships that was carrying coal to Nazi Germany in the English Channel. Italy protests against this act.

06 March 1940: In London, MPs complain about the government policy of giving Palestinian land to Jews.

07 March 1940: After another Soviet onslaught against the Finnish defences, the Finnish government accepts the chance of a negotiated settlement for peace. The Finnish Prime Minister Risto Ryti travels to Moscow to discuss the peace options.

08 March 1940: A member of the Gestapo shoots a Polish citizen dead in the street for whistling the Polish national anthem. -  Martial law is declared throughout Holland.

09 March 1940: Britain releases the seven Italian ships which the Royal Navy had intercepted carrying coal to Germany.

12 March 1940: The Finnish-Soviet officially war ends.

13 March 1940: Finland signs the Russo-Finnish treaty in Moscow, thus ending the Russo-Finnish war. Finland is forced to cede large tracts of territory along the Baltic coast and leasing the Hango Peninsula to Russia for thirty years.

14 March 1940:  Some 500,000 Finns are evacuated from the areas that had been ceded to the USSR as part of the peace terms.

16 March 1940: German bombers attack the British naval base at Scapa Flow.

17 March 1940: Dr Fritz Todt is officially named as ‘Reich Minister for Weapons and Munitions’.

18 March 1940:  Hitler meets Mussolini at the Brenner Pass, on the border between Greater Germany and Italy. Mussolini tries in vain to get Hitler to delay his attack on the West.

19 March 1940: In response to the German attack on Scapa Flow, British planes attack the German air base at Hornum, on the island of Sylt. This was the RAF’s first real bombing attack of the war.

20 March 1940: Daladier’s French government collapses and is quickly replaced by one set up by

Paul Reynauld. - French General Maurice-Gustave Gamelin issues orders that if Germany launches an attack through the Low Countries, then seven ‘Allied Divisions’ are to push through Belgium and towards the Dutch border.

22 March 1940:  Hans Frank, complains to Berlin that the General Government (un-annexed areas of Poland) is being used as a dustbin for Jews by the SS.  - In France, the French counterintelligence officer, Colonel Paul Paillole reports that the Germans are studying routes from the Sedan to Abbeville. He concludes in his report that an attack through Belgium towards the English Channel looks imminent.

23 March 1940: Hermann Göring, in support of Hans Frank, orders Heinrich Himmler to halt further transports of Jews to the General Government.  However, this suspension doesn't last long. 

27 March 1940: Two notorious German bank robbers, Erich and Franz Sass, who had both received lengthy prison sentences by a German court after being extradited back to Germany from Denmark in 1938 were taken to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp by order of Heinrich Himmler and executed.

28 March 1940: The French Premier, Paul Reynauld flies to London to meet the Supreme War Council. There he urged for the reactivation of the Narvik-Gallivare operation. It was also agreed at the meeting that they had to cut Germany’s oil supply, maybe by attacking the Soviet oil fields in the Caucasus. They also agree not to make a separate peace settlement with Germany.

01 April 1940: In Germany a law in passed which completes the annexation of Austria. Austria is now known as Ostmark.

02 April 1940:  Hitler gives the order to invade Denmark and Norway. - In Holland, Dutch troops are placed on full alert along the Dutch-German border. -  Mussolini orders the mobilisation of all Italians over the age of 14 years old.

03 April 1940: Colonel Oster passes on secret information to the Dutch military attaché colonel Jacobus Sas. Who in turn passed the information onto the Dutch and Norwegian naval Attaches. The Danes at once passed the invasion information onto their superiors in Copenhagen, whilst the Norwegian attaché kept the information to himself. Later Sas was to discover that he was sympathetic to the German cause. - Ernst Heilmann, a distinguished German Social Democrat, dies in Buchenwald concentration camp. Heilmann, of Jewish descent was deputy of the German Reichstag from 1928 to 1933. He was arrested soon after the Nazis came to power. He was confined in several concentration camps prior to his death. He was subjected to harsh treatment. On one occasion, he was attacked by bloodhounds that mangled his arms and hands. The death report stated that he had died of weakness from old age. He was only 59 years old.

05 April 1940: The Soviet secret police take groups of Polish officers, whom had been held as prisoners of war after the Polish campaign, to a small wooded area near the village of Katyn. It was here that the Polish officers were shot and dumped in a mass grave.

08 April 1940: The British initiate ‘Operation Wilfred’. The mining of Norwegians coastal waters. The Norwegians lodge a complaint. The British claim that the mining is to prevent Germany from acquiring its precious iron ore that was being transported through Norwegian waters. -  A British plane locates a German naval force off Norway heading west. In response to the report, the British Admiralty, believing that the Germans are attempting to break out into the Atlantic, decides to send the Home Fleet after them - In the evening, Norwegian coastal batteries open fire on German warships.

09 April 1940: Hitler launches ‘Operation Weser’ against Denmark and Norway at 0410 hours. Germany claims the invasion was necessary to prevent Britain from invading her. At 0600 hours, German planes drop leaflets on the Danish Capital announcing German intentions to occupy their country as well as Norway, in an attempt to prevent British plans coming to fruition and at 0620 hours, King Christian X of Denmark announces to the nation that their country has surrendered to Germany.

10 April 1940: Five British destroyers enter the harbour at Narvik and sink two of the ten German destroyers.

11 April 1940: An Allied Expeditionary Force leaves for Narvik in Norway from the Clyde.

12 April 1940: The Allies send some 23 Blenheim bombers, 36 Wellington bombers and 24 Hampden bombers to attack German ships off Kristiansand in Norway. Only one bomber finds its target. Nine bombers are lost in the skirmish to a loss of only five German planes.

13 April 1940: The British launch ‘Operation Gardening’ when they send Hampden bombers to lay mines in Danish and German waters. - President Roosevelt protests against Germany’s invasion of Denmark and Norway.

14 April 1940: The British Expeditionary Forces land near Trondheim, Namsos and at Narvik in Norway. - The Soviet Foreign Minister Vyadieslav Molotov states that Russia has a vital interest in Sweden remaining neutral. - French intelligence are notified by the Belgians that the Germans seem to have turned their attention to the Ardennes area.  Heinrich Himmer relents to Reinhardt Heydrich’s persistent requests to take part in military campaigns against Germany’s enemies.

15 April 1940: Heydrich joins Jagdgeschwader 77, which was also known as the ‘Ace of Hearts’, in Norway and began flying missions there.  He, however, did not neglect his roles as the leader of the SD and had numerous Norwegians whom he deemed as a national threat arrested. 

18 April 1940: Allied troops land off Andalsnes in Norway.  - Hitler appoints Artur Seyss-Inquart as his Commissioner in the Netherlands.

19 April 1940: The Swiss government issues instructions for mobilisation in case of a German invasion of Switzerland.

20 April 1940:  Heinrich Himmler gets Hitler’s go-ahead to form Germany’s first non-German Waffen SS unit (SS-Standarte Nordland) for volunteers in Norway and Denmark, Hitler also allows him to send an Einsatzgruppen unit to Norway. Himmler appoints Dr. Franz Walter Stahlecker as his higher SS and Police leader to oversee the Einsatzgruppen activities in Norway.

29 April 1940: President Roosevelt asks Mussolini to assist him in halting the war in Europe. - Hauptsturmführer [captain] Rudolf Höss, along with five other SS officers arrived just outside a Polish town called Oświęcim (Auschwitz) for the sole purpose of looking to build a concentration camp there. - Dr. Franz Walter Stahlecker as Himmler’s higher SS and Police leader arrives in Norway with some 200 security and police officers [Einsatzgruppen unit].

30 April 1940: Some 30 non-Jewish German prisoners are sent from the concentration camp at Sachsenhausen to Auschwitz. Their primary role will be to act as Kapos and barrack room leaders (overseers). The camp [Auschwitz I] would be built by some 300 local Jewish prisoners within the next few days. Łódź ghetto is sealed off from the rest of the city of Łódź, Poland. The ghetto has well over 150,000 Jews contained within its walls. - Samuel Harden Church, President of the Carnegie Institute in Pittsburg, Pennsylvania, USA, offers a one-million-dollar reward for the capture of Adolf Hitler in a letter to the New York Times. - SS-Hauptsturmführer Rudolf Hoess is officially appointed commandant of Auschwitz concentration camp. At this stage Auschwitz was not the main killing centre that it would one day become. - The French military attaché in Berne, Switzerland passes on information to the French intelligence services stating that a German attack on the West has been set for the 8th to the 10th of May 1940, focussing on the Sedan.

April-May 1940: At Katyn, Poland, the Soviets massacre thousands of Polish officers whom had been taken prisoner after The USSR’s invasion of Poland.

May 1940: British cryptographers break the Germans Enigma codes which had only been changed three weeks previously.

01 May 1940: French counterintelligence in Switzerland confirms the report dated 30 April 1940, stating that the German assault on the West will take place between the 8th and 10th of May 1940 and focussing on the Sedan. At the same time, Paul Thümmel, an Abwehr agent and someone who had spied for the Czechoslovakian government before Hitler’s takeover of that country and then for the Czech government-in-exile in London [Agent A-54] informs the French intelligence via the Haig that Germany plans to launch an attack on the West on the 10th May 1940. - The Germans change the key settings on their Enigma machines.

03 May 1940: The Allied Expeditionary Forces in Norway withdraws from Namsos and Andalsnes.

06 May 1940: Reserve Police Battalion 101, part of the Order Police (Ordnungspolizei). Is sent from Hamburg to the Warthegau (an area of Poland annexed by Germany). Its role is to police enemy civilian populations which have fallen under German control and to assist in the expulsion of Poles from other locales as well as to help in the liquidation of ghettos and the murder of Jews.

07 May 1940: The British Admiral Sir Roger Keyes leads a House of Commons revolt against Prime Minister Chamberlain after the debacle in Norway. - The French supreme commander restores leave for the army as Hitler sets 10th May as the date for ‘Operation Sichelschnitt’ (Cut of the Sickle) which would entail 45 German divisions would advance through the Ardennes.

09 May 1940: At 2150 hours, General Hans Oster warns the Dutch military attaché in Berlin for the third time in a week that a full-scale offensive against the West is imminent.  - Britain occupies the Danish possessions of Iceland and the Faroe Islands to prevent them falling into German hands. - A Bill in introduced in the British Parliament which proposes the death penalty for sabotage acts.

10 May 1940: Britain begins to intern all German and Austrian men between the ages of 16 to 50. - Sometime between 0300 and 0400 hours, Adolf Hitler arrives at his bunker near Aachen to direct Operation Fall Gelb (Case Yellow), the assault on the West. ‘Operation Sichelschnitt’ is launched. At 0400 hours as the Luftwaffe attacks targets in the West and at 0430 hours, German parachutists and other airborne units secure key bridges in Holland and Belgium. At sunrise 77 German troops land on top of Belgium’s impregnable fortress of Eben Emael and within twenty minutes it has been neutralised. At 0500 hours 76 German divisions invade the Low Countries. The British reply by sending 32 bombers against the advancing German columns in Luxembourg. The Germans bring down 13 of the bombers and all the others are damaged. At 1800 hours British Prime Minister Chamberlain resigns from office and King George VI asks Winston Churchill to form a new government.  Reinhard Heydrich had been hoping to send in his Einsatzgruppens units behind the advancing Wehrmacht, not Hitler had refused this, the war in the West, would not be the same kind of war that they were engaged in with those enemies in the east, the western campaigns would be traditional warfare not the barbaric version of it that was employed against the Poles.

11 May 1940: In Luxembourg, 8 British bombers attack a German column, 7 bombers are shot down and the 8th crashed on landing in England. - Hermann Göring, chief of the Luftwaffe demands that Sweden allows German artillery and supplies access to Norway via Swedish territory. Sweden refuses.

12 May 1940: The Germans shoot down 7 out of the 9 British Blenheim bombers that attacked their column on the Maastrict-Tongres road. the Allies attack bridges over the Albert Canal with 5 British bombers. They manage to destroy one bridge but they lose 4 planes trying. In an attempt to destroy bridges and roads in Maastricht, 10 out of 24 British Blenheim bombers are also lost.

13 May 1940: The Luftwaffe concentrates its attack on Rotterdam, many civilians die in the raids. - General Erwin Rommel, commander of the 7th Panzer Division crosses the Meuse River at Dinant and General Heinz Guderian’s XIX Armoured Corps crosses the Meuse River at Sedan. - The Dutch queen Wilhelmina arrives in London as an exile. – In Norway, Reinhardt Heydrich’ Messerschmitt 109 overshoots the runway during take-off and crashes, Heydrich suffers minor cuts and abrasions.

14 May 1940: Some 71 British bombers attack German bridgeheads over the Meuse River at the cost of losing 40 of their planes. - In Holland, all Dutch soldiers are ordered to cease fighting by their government. – Reinhardt Heydrich returns to Berlin from his active service with Jagdgeschwader 77 in Norway. When he returns to Germany, he is sporting an iron cross 2^nd Class. 

15 May 1940: the Dutch army as a whole surrender to Hitler's invading forces and the German’s occupy the Hague. - The French Premier Paul Reynaud telephones the British Prime Minister to inform him that France has been defeated but at the same time he also requests that Britain send as many troops and planes as they can, Churchill decides to go to France to assess the situation for himself, he also gives the go-ahead for the RAF to bomb the Ruhr area of Germany. - The French supreme commander General Gamelin orders a retreat from Belgium.

16 May 1940: President Roosevelt asks Congress for 285 million dollars for defence spending. - The Royal Air Force sends an extra 10 fighter squadrons to help France, with 6 of them operating out of Kent.

17 May 1940: Some 12 British Blenheim bombers attack German columns near Gembloux. 11 are shot down. - Hitler’s Panzers reach the Serre River in France where they stop. Some 48 British bombers attack the oil refineries at Hamburg.

18 May 1940:  The German Panzer forces that had stopped at the Serre River start moving again, this time heading north, away from Paris. - Sweden decides not to sell arms to Germany.

19 May 1940: The Italian Ambassador, Dino Alfieri presents Hermann Göring with the ‘Collar of the Order of the Annunciation’, which he had been coveting for some time.

19/20 May 1940: In Paris General Maxime Weygand replaces General Maurice Gamelin as Allied Commander-in-Chief and orders an attack on General Guderian’s southern flank.

20 May 1940: German troops reach the sea near Abbeville in France thus splitting the Allied forces and trapping many Allied soldiers in a pocket.

23 May 1940:  In France, Boulogne falls to the Germans and they lay siege to Calais. 

24 May 1940: Canada sends four destroyers, Restigouche, St Laurent, Skeena and Fraser to aid the Royal Navy. - Field Marshal von Rundstedt issues orders for his panzer tank division to halt their advance. This halt was due to maintenance problems and to allow the infantry and supplies to catch up. - The last of the British Expeditionary forces withdraws from Norway.

25 May 1940: In France, British commander Gort orders his troops to head north so that they can embark for England. - Himmler visits Hitler at his Felsennest (Rocky Eyrie) lair near Bad Münstereifel, in West Germany and obtains permission to recruit Belgians as well as Dutchmen into his Waffen-SS, he also hands Hitler his memorandum titled: 'Some Thoughts on the Treatment of the Alien Population in the East’, in which he discusses at length a possible plan to relocate all European Jews to Africa or some other captured colony, this way he argued, would see a Jew-free Europe, and other suggestions on the Germanization of the annexed Poland, where Poles could to be used as nothing but a source of slave labour for their German masters, and the rest could be expelled to the rump of what was left of Poland, [General Government], which was governed by Hans Frank, and any child deemed Aryan , i.e., those who could be used as German stock, will be seized from their parents and be raised as Germans within German families, preferably SS families.

26 May 1940: Operation Dynamo begins (the evacuation of the British Expeditionary Force and its allies from the beaches at Dunkirk) after the Germans swarm into Northern France.

27 May 1940: Members of the Waffen-SS Totenkopf carry out one of the first recorded massacres of the war where they gunned down in cold blood nearly 100 British Prisoners of War, who belonged to the 2nd Royal Norfolk’s at Le Paradis, a small village in northern France.  Field Marshal von Rundstedt orders his troops to advance again. - The evacuation of Allied troops from Dunkirk, ‘Operation Dynamo’ to England begins. During the dogfights over Dunkirk between the 27th and 30th May the RAF shoot down some 179 Luftwaffe planes to a loss of only 29.

28 May 1940: The Belgian army surrenders to superior German forces. - Dr Rudolf Lange and is special commando unit murders some 1,558 mentally disabled people in specially built gas vans in the east as part of Hitler’s T4 Programme (Nazi euthanasia policy) Lange would eventually become the first commandant of the death camp at Chełmno.

29 May 1940: Arthur Seyss-Inquart is made Reich Commissioner of the Netherlands. 

Early June 1940: Thirty German prisoners [criminals - green triangles] from the Nazi concentration camp of Sachsenhausen are transferred to Auschwitz concentration camp in occupied Poland as the camps first Kapo’s. Kapo’s are fellow prisoners, who are given a privileged role within the camp system. Their job is to assist the camp authorities in maintaining order and to help in the day-to-day running of the camp. A lot of Kapo’s were more feared than the SS, and their brutality against fellow inmates were at times worse than their jailers.

June 1940: Germany sets up its first specialized night-fighter plane unit.

01 June 1940: The Luftwaffe bomb Marseilles in France. - Luftwaffe planes sink 4 allied destroyers and a passenger ship at Dunkirk.

02 June 1940: The British Expeditionary Force evacuate from Norway.

03 June 1940:  German forces begin their advance towards Paris. – Franz Rademacher, the German Foreign Office’s new expert on Jewish affairs, submits a document to the Under Secretary Martin Luther proposing that all of Europe’s Jews be deported to the French colony of Madagascar which will be in German hands once France capitulates.  Madagascar will in effect become one large Jewish ghetto Island, controlled by the SS. 

04 June 1940: The last of the Allied troops caught up in the hell that was Dunkirk is evacuated. Some 338,000 troops reached England safely. - The German battle cruisers Scharnhorst, Gneisenau and Hipper set out from Kiel for Harsted in Norway to attack the Allied Forces still at the Port City.

05 June 1940: The French General Beaufrere surrenders the remaining French troops that were defending Dunkirk during the evacuation, the Germans now control the whole of Dunkirk. - The British government puts a ban on strikes. -  In Paris Brigadier-General Charles de Gaulle is made Under Secretary of War.

06 June 1940:  The British Prime Minister proposes that Britain develop a parachute corps with some 5,000 men.

08 June 1940: The French town of Rouen falls into German hands.

09 June 1940:  Norway surrenders to Germany as King Haakon flees to England.

10 June 1940: The French government leaves Paris for Tours as the Germans come within 35 miles of Paris. – Not to lose out on the spoils of war, Mussolini declares war on France and Britain.

11 June 1940: South Africa declares war on Italy. The French town of Reims falls to the Germans as Paris is declared an open city. - Some 34 British bombers attack bases in Italy from their airfields on the Channel Islands.

12 June 1940:  Winston Churchill meets with the French General Weygand at Tours.

13 June 1940: Franco of Spain changes his country’s status from neutral to non-belligerent[1].

14 June 1940: Auschwitz concentration camp (Auschwitz I) is opened in Poland. - German troops roll into Paris march triumphantly down the Champs-Elysees. - British General Brooke in Brest, France, orders that Canadian forces to pull out of France. Much of their equipment had to be left behind. – In Poland, the first deportations to the Auschwitz concentration camp begins. Some 728 non-Jewish Poles from a prison in Tarnow (about 110km east of Auschwitz) and 3 Jews (Emil Wieder, Issac Holzer whom were both lawyers and Maximilian Rosenbusch who was the director of the Hebrew school in Tarnow).

15 June 1940: The Canadians lose their first merchant ship that was sailing with convoy HX-48 across the Atlantic to England at the hands of the German submarine U-38. No lives were lost during this sinking.

16 June 1940:  The Reynaud government collapses and the aged Marshal of France, Philippe Pétain becomes France’s new Premier and immediately sues for peace with the Germans. Hitler tells the French that he will have to consult with his ally Mussolini first.

17 June 1940: Knowing that the new Premier of France wishes to capitulate to the Germans, Churchill proposes that France’s General de Gaulle is recognized as being the true voice of France. - The RAF launches 138 bombers against targets in Germany. Only one plane fails to return home. - The Allied ship RMS Lancastria is sunk whilst evacuating troops and refugees. Some 2,800 are feared dead.

18 June 1940: The Prime Minister of Canada, Mackenzie King introduces the ‘National Resources Mobilization Act’ in the Canadian parliament. The Bill requires all Canadians to register for national service and gives the government of Canada control of Canadian property for the duration of the war. - The Swedish Minister in Berlin is told by the German Foreign Minister von Ribbentrop that if Sweden continues to resist Germany’s wish to use the Swedish railway network to transport troops and supplies to Norway, it may have to face dire consequences. With this threat Sweden allows the Germans to transport their troops and equipment through Sweden to Norway.  Hitler meets his ally Mussolini in Munich and informs him of his intentions concerning Frances’s capitulation. He also tells him that all the Jews of Europe are going to be resettled on the island of Madagascar as soon as the war is over (Madagascar was a French Colony and therefore, it was going to become a German colony which would be used as a huge concentration/work camp for the Jews). - General de Gaulle broadcasts an appeal to French officers and men using the BBC radio in London to join him in Britain to carry on the fight against Germany.

19 June 1940:  The RAF attack German airfields at Rouen and Amiens. All 30 bombers return safely home.

20 June 1940:  Bomber Command in Britain receives a directive from the Air Ministry instructing it to focus future attacks primarily on German aircraft. The RAF attacks the German airfields at Rouen and Schipol. All 47 bombers return home. - The first Australian and New Zealand troops arrive in Britain

21 June 1940: Italy launches a military attack on France.

22 June 1940: France signs a humiliating armistice with Germany at Compiègne.  The reason for this location to accept France’s request for an armistice was because this place was the place that Germany had signed its surrender in 1918. Hitler, in another act of humiliation, had the original train carriage that was used to accept Germany’s defeat brought out of a museum where it was kept to the forest at Compiègne and had the French delegation sign their surrender in that carriage. He then ordered that the area where Germany’s humiliation had taken place be blown up. - The French government of France, which had fled Paris to Vichy and which is now under the control of Philippe Pétain, the Victor or Verdun, now begins to use his powers to go after the Free Masons then the Communists and then the Jews as chief collaborator of the Nazis, but first, he removes naturalization rights from all who have been naturalized since 1927. Over the next few weeks, Vichy would revoke laws that that gave rights to Jews, including Jews from Algeria, and it would formulate decrees which would be used to define what a Jew is, and restrict their also began their activities.  - The Royal Assent is given to the National Resources Mobilization Act that had been approved by the Canadian government on the 18th June 1940. All males over the age of 16 are now required to register for national service.

23 June 1940: Now that the Battle for France is over, Hitler orders that plans be drafted for the invasion of the Soviet Union. - Hitler flies into Paris at 5.30am accompanied by Wilhelm Keitel and Albert Speer. After visiting the Eiffel Tower, La Madeleine, the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier at the Arc de Triomphe, Napoleon’s tomb as well as a few other land marks, heads back to the airport. His visit lasted  barely three hours.

24 June 1940: France signs an armistice with Italy.

25 June 1940: The Canadian cruiser the ‘Fraser’, which while en route from St-Jean-de-Luz in France to Plymouth in England collides in the Bay of Biscay with the British cruiser Calcutta and sinks killing 47 men. - In Germany, troops are issued with English phrase books in preparation for an invasion of the British Isles.

28 June 1940: General De Gaulle is recognised as the leader of the ‘Free French’ with their headquarters in London. The Soviet Union occupies the Romanian provinces of Bessarabia and northern Bukovina.

30 June 1940: The Wehrmacht occupies the Channel Islands; this is the only British soil that Germany would seize control over.

July 1940: The German Commander-in-Chief Walter Brauchitsch orders the men under his command not to interfere with the agencies which has been instructed to carry out the racial struggle in any of occupied territories.

01 July 1940: In France, Petain’s government moves to Vichy.

02 July 1940: The Canadian destroyer St. Laurent rescues 857 survivors from the British passenger ship, the SS Arandora Star which had been torpedoed. - Hitler orders that plans be prepared for the invasion of Britain.

03 July 1940: The French fleet at Mers-el-Kebir, in Oran Bay, Algeria is sunk by the British to prevent it being used by Germany.

04 July 1940: Bomber Command receives new instructions from the British Air Ministry. They are now to focus their attention on German shipping.

05 July 1940: The Canadian merchant ship Magog is shelled and torpedoed off the coast of Ireland.

July 1940: The Luftwaffe supremo Hermann Göring orders that the night-fighter units to be increased to division strength.

08 July 1940: Hans Frank, learns from Hitler that there is a plan being set up to forcibly settle Europe's Jews on the Island of Madagascar, which will be under the control of the SS.  The news of the Madagascar plan put a temporary stop to the building of ghettos. - The British merchant ship Humber Arm is torpedoed whilst sailing in convoy HX-53 in the North Atlantic by a German U-boat.

09 July 1940: The RAF lose 8 Blenheim bombers out of a total of 12 as German Me-109’s and 110’s attack them after their attack on German aircraft at Stavanger.

10 July 1940: The Luftwaffe begin the Battle of Britain. What is left of the ‘French National Assembly’, and now under the watchful eyes of the Nazi occupation forces, revoke the Constitution of the Third Republic which hands dictatorial powers to Marshall Pétain as well as Pierre Laval, his deputy.  They would run their collaborative government from Vichy, within the unoccupied zone of France. - The French Nazi puppet ‘Vichy’ regime is established to administer the non-occupied Southern area of France. -  Just after 1 pm, British radar stations along the southeast detected a build-up of German aircraft just behind Calais. The RAF at Biggin Hill, which was based south-east of London send a group of fighters up to intercept them, and other fighters from Manston in Kent where dispatched as reinforcements as well as 9 other fighters from Croydon in London. The German target that day was the large convoy of coasters sailing from Dover to Dungeness. 120 German planes where in the sky to do battle. After a brief dogfight the Germans withdrew, after sinking only one of the ships. All but one of the RAF planes returned home. The first stage of the Battle of Britain had begun.  - President Roosevelt asks the US Congress for 4.8 billion dollars to be spent strengthening its own military power.  - German aircraft sink the Canadian merchant ship Waterloo close to Great Yarmouth in the North Sea. - The British Union of Fascists are banned in Britain.

14 July 1940: Stalin seizes the Baltic state of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia. 

16 July 1940: Hitler issues a provisional directive for the invasion of Britain to his armed forces. - The French government in Vichy strips Jews of their citizenship.

19 July 1940:  Adolf Hitler promotes Field Marshal Hermann Göring to ‘Reich’s Marshal of the Greater German Reich’, he also offers Britain a chance for peace during his speech in the Reichstag - In Britain, General Sir Alan Brooke becomes commander-in-chief of the British home forces.

20 July 1940: The British government bans the buying and selling of new cars.

21 July 1940: Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia vote to become part of the USSR.

22 July 1940: Britain reject Hitler’s peace offer as “a mere summons to capitulate.

25 July 1940: The German’s torpedo a French ship in the English Channel whilst carrying French sailors to Britain.

30 July 1940: The British government states that all of Europe and North Africa are to be blockaded.

31 July 1940:  After a meeting with Keitel, Jodl, Brauchitsch and Halder, Hitler decides that the assault on the USSR should take place next May. - The French government in Vichy passes a law stating that any French citizen who joins foreign armies will face the death sentence.

Late July 1940: The German Foreign Minister von Ribbentrop proposes a plan to kidnap the former king of England, (Edward VIII) now known as the Duke of Windsor whilst he is in Portugal.

August 1940:  With the fall of France, the British Intelligence unit that had been deciphering German Police codes in France, move into the main building at Bletchley Park in England.

01 August 1940: Hitler issues a decree to his armed forces stating that all preparations for Operation Sealion (the Invasion of Britain) must be completed by September 1940)

02 August 1940: Camillien Houde, the Mayor of Montreal in Canada publicly urges people not to register for national service.

02 August 1940: In London, Lord Beaverbrook is appointed to the War Cabinet.

04 August 1940: The Italians in East Africa attack the British Somaliland from Abyssinia. - The merchant ship Geraldine Mary, sailing with convoy HX-60 is torpedoed by a German U-boat.

05 August 1940: Camillien Houde, the Mayor of Montreal in Canada is arrested under the Defense of Canada Regulations and is imprisoned at Camp Petawawa in Ontario.

07 August 1940: Germany incorporates Alsace-Lorraine and Luxembourg into the Reich.

08 August 1940: In London, Winston Churchill signs an alliance with de Gaulle’s Free France movement.

10 August 1940: The Romanian government passes a set of racial laws which are targeted against the Jews. Their citizenship rights are curtailed and they are removed from state employment and forced to do unpaid labour as well as forced to pay a special tax.

12 January 1940: A revolt against Italian rule flares up in Albania.

13 August 1940: The Luftwaffe launches ‘Operation Aldertag’ (Eagle Day) against Britain in preparation of Hitler’s planned invasion of Britain. The date had originally been set for 10th August 1940 but owing to bad weather had to be delayed until today’s date. British radar stations and RAF airfields are the primary targets, the overall purpose of ‘Operation Aldertag’ is to seize control over the skies of southern Britain. - August 1940 The RAF bomb a crucial aqueduct over the River Ems in Germany. Out of the 5 bombers used three return home whilst another 12 Blenheim bombers attack Haamstede airfield in Holland with only one plane returning.

15 August 1940: Adolf Eichmann’s Madagascar Plan (forced Jewish emigration to the island of Madagascar) is presented as a blueprint for the removal of all of Europe’s Jews. But because of Britain's refusal to surrender, this plan was never implemented as Britian still controlled the sea lanes which were required to transport the Jews to the Island of Madagascar.  The Italians open up the Campagna concentration camp in Italy. - The Luftwaffe sends 20 JU88 aircraft to attack the RAF base at Driffield in Yorkshire. The manage to destroy 10 Whitley planes on the ground.

17 August 1940: Germany declares a total blockade of Great Britain.

19 August 1940: British Somaliland falls to the Italians.

22 August 1940: A Canadian merchant ship is attacked and bombed by the Luftwaffe whilst sailing in the South Irish Sea just off Milford Haven.

24 August 1940: London is bombed by the Luftwaffe for the first time since the war began. Two Luftwaffe bombers had lost their flight leaders by the time they reached the Thames. With heavy flak, the crews panicked and dropped their bomb load onto the city. As soon as Hitler and Göring hear about the bombing they both flew into a rage and a telegram was dispatched to the Luftwaffe commanders…the telegram read: ‘An immediate report is required identifying those crews who dropped bombs within the perimeter of London: Luftwaffe High Command will itself undertake the punishment of each aircraft captain involved. They will be posted to infantry regiments.

25 August 1940: In retaliation for the bombing of London by the Luftwaffe the previous night, the RAF send 80 bombers against Berlin.

27 August 1940: The Vichy government in France overturns a piece of pre-war legislation which made it a crime to incite race hate.

28 August 1940: In Holland, the ‘College of Secretaries-General’ is told by the German authorities that they are not to appoint or promote any member of staff that has Jewish blood within the civil service.

28-29 August 1940: The RAF attack Berlin killing 10 and injuring 29. These attacks would become more frequent as war progressed.

29 August 1940: The Italian air force bomb targets within the Suez Canal.

30 August 1940: In a fit of rage at the RAF’s bombing attack on Berlin a few nights ago; Hitler rescinds his order not to bomb London and orders Göring to start a bombing campaign against London.

September 1940: Himmler orders all SS personnel to see the anti-Semitic film ‘Jud Suss’ (The Jew Suss) as a way to prepare his men for ‘special duties’ still to come.’ The film is based on the 18th century Jewish financier Joseph Suss. In the film Suss is executed and all Jews are banned from Württemberg.

01 September 1940: The RAF bomb Munich for the first time in the war.

02 September 1940: Germany orders that France pay them 400 million francs (£2.3 million) to help maintain German occupying forces.

03 September 1940:  In France, anti-Jewish statutes are enacted.

04 September 1940: Hitler announces that British cities will be attacked night and day.

05 September 1940: The occupying German authorities in Luxembourg impose Nuremberg-style laws onto the country aimed specifically at the Jews.  - The RAF attack targets across the Channel that could be used for a German invasion. - A Royal Navy sub sinks the German ship Marion in the Baltic with a reported loss of some 4,000 German troops.

06 September 1940: King Carol II of Romania abdicates, King Michael I, who had abdicated from the throne in June 1930 is reinstalled as the King of Romania. The Romanian fascist group, The Iron Guard, in alliance with General Antonescu take power. Straight away, large swathes of antisemitic legislation are passed, legislation which allowed the Romanian government to seize Jewish properties and to oust them from certain professions.

07 September 1940: In Britain, the codeword ‘Cromwell’ is passed nationwide, church bells are to be rung out in warning that a German invasion was underway. - The Luftwaffe launch a bombing campaign against London, this is the beginning of ‘The Blitz.’ Air Marshal Dowding and his staff welcome this change of tactics, as the RAF had been seriously over-stretched and was about to collapse and this new strategy gave the RAF the time it need to repair their airfields and regroup their losses.  Had the Luftwaffe kept attacking RAF targets, the Germans may well have seized control of the skies over southern Britain, which was a prerequisite for any land invasion. 

09 September 1940: The RAF bomb Hamburg.

11 September 1940: The Luftwaffe attack London again and this time causing damage to Buckingham Palace and St Paul’s Cathedral.

12 September 1940: Mussolini's forces launch an invasion of Egypt from Libya.

12/13 September 1940: In an attempt to seize the Suez Canal, Italy invades Egypt.

14 September 1940: In Holland, Jews are banned from various markets in Amsterdam.

15 September 1940: The Luftwaffe sends some 1700 planes against Britain. - The Canadian merchant ship Kenordoc which was en-route to Bristol is torpedoed by a German U-boat in the mid-Atlantic.

16 September 1940: In Egypt, the invading Italian army stops to await supplies at Sidi Barrani

17 September 1940: Due the failure of the Luftwaffe securing dominance over British skies, Hitler postpones Operation Sealion (the invasion of Britain). The failure to knock out Britain, prevented the Nazis' plans to deport Europe's Jews to the island of Madagascar as the British navy continued to dominate the seas. The Nazis would now have to search for an alternative solution to the Jewish question.

18 September 1940: After the failure of the Luftwaffe to win the air war against the RAF, Hitler postpones Operation Sealion indefinitely.

20 September 1940: In Rome, Mussolini meets the German Foreign Minister von Ribbentrop to discuss the division of North Africa.

21 September 1940: Italy, Germany and Japan sign the Tripartite Pact.

22 September 1940: The Germans sink the evacuee ship City of Benares with a reported loss of 306 people in the Atlantic.

23 September 1940: The Royal Navy lands a force of Free French troops led by General De Gaulle at Dakar in Senegal.

24 September 1940: The anti-Jewish film 'Jew Suss' is shown within German cinemas. - The British King in London introduces the George Cross and the George Medal for valour and outstanding gallantry.

25 September 1940: The German merchant ship Weser is captured just off Manzillo, Mexico by the RCN armed merchant cruiser Prince Robert. - General De Gaulle stops his Free French attack on Dakar in Senegal.

26 September 1940: Some 46 survivors are found after their ship City of Benares was sunk by the Germans in the Atlantic a few days earlier.

30 September 1940: In Holland, a circular is sent to all local authorities defining anyone who has a Jewish grandparent as also being Jewish.

October 1940: The new Vichy French government under Marshal Pétain proclaims under a new statute that all Jews are forbidden to work within certain professions.

01 October 1940: Finland signs a military and economic treaty with Germany in Helsinki.

02 October 1940: Ludwig Fischer, German district governor instructs the Jews of Warsaw that they have until the end of the month to move themselves and their families into the newly established ghetto within the city. The Germans would extend the deadline by two weeks, and Adam Czerniaków was instructed to establish a Jewish Police force for the ghetto as well as act as the Judenrat’s first chairman of the ghetto. 

03 October 1940: The Vichy government in France passes more race laws primarily aimed at its Jewish population. - In London, Neville Chamberlain resigns from the government on health reasons.

04 October 1940: The Vichy government in France issues a decree ordering the arrest and detainment of all foreign Jews. - Hitler meets with Mussolini for three hours at the Brenner Pass.

05 October 1940: In Holland, all civil servants are forced to sign ‘Aryan attestation’.

08 October 1940: Germany invades Romania.

07 October 1940: The German collaborationist Vichy government in France repeals an 1870 decree giving Algerian Jews French citizenship. -  October 1940: Germany and Italy invade Romania

09 October 1940: Winston Churchill is elected leader of the Tory Party after Neville Chamberlain’s resignation.

12 October 1940:  Axis troops occupy Bucharest in Romania. - The German U-boat 101 torpedoes and sinks the merchant ship Saint-Malo as she travelled in convoy in the North Atlantic.

16 October 1940: The merchant ship Trevisa is sunk by the German U-boat-124 just south of Iceland as she travelled in Convoy SC-7 to Aberdeen in Scotland.

18 October 1940: The Vichy government in France bans Jews from the public services and from high places in industry and the press.

21 October 1940:  The RAF bomb Berlin causing considerable damage.

22 October 1940: Jews from Baden, the Saar and Alace-Lorraine are deported to concentration camps in the East. - Due to poor visibility the Royal Canadian destroyer Margaree collides with the freighter Port Fairy some 400 miles west of Ireland. This was the first convoy mission Margaree had been on. Some 140 seamen lose their lives due the accident. - The Germans in Holland issue an order that all Jewish businesses be registered at the Wirtschaftsprufstelle [Audit Office].

23 October 1940: At 1500 hours, Hitler meets with Spain’s General Franco at Hendaye on the Franco-Spanish border. Here Hitler tries to woe the Spanish into declaring war on Britain but fails.

28 October 1940: Mussolini's Italy invades Greece from Italian occupied Alania. - The occupying German forces in Belgium, impose racial laws onto the country, the German authorities also issue a decree ordering all Jews in Belgium to register.

30 October 1930: The Vichy government calls on all Frenchmen and women to collaborate with the Nazis to help maintain French unity.

November 1940: In Switzerland, the government bans the Communist Party and the pro-Nazi ‘National Movement’ organisation.

04 November 1940: Greek troops push back the Italian invaders.

06 November 1940: The British destroyer Harvester and the Canadian destroyer Ottawa attack and sink the Italian submarine Faa di Bruno off Ireland.

09 November 1940: The ex-British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain dies of cancer. - The Vichy government bans all trade unions and employers’ organisations.

12-13 November 1940: Hitler meets the Soviet Foreign Minister Molotov in Berlin.

14/15 November 1940: The Luftwaffe attack Coventry which results in the deaths of some 380 and wounding 865 people.

15 November 1940: The Warsaw ghetto is sealed off from the rest of the city. Like all ghettos, the Jews require special permits before they could leave or re-enter the ghetto.  - The RAF launches a bombing attack on targets in Hamburg. All aircraft returned safely home.

16 November 1940: The RAF drops some 2,000 bombs on the German city of Hamburg.

19 November 1940: In Warsaw, a Christian who threw a sack of bread over the wall into the Warsaw Ghetto is shot dead by the Germans.

20 November 1940: Hungary Joins the Tripartite Pact. - The Luftwaffe bomb Birmingham and other towns in the English Midlands.

21 November 1940: The exiled Belgian government in Britain declares war on Italy.

23 November 1940: Slovakia joins the Tripartite Pact.

24 November 1940: In Bratislava, the Slovakian government joins the Axis.

28 November 1940: The anti-Jewish film 'Der Ewige Jude' (The Eternal Jew) is shown in German cinemas. - Seven Italian warships are torpedoed by the British just off Sardinia.

29 November 1940: The Luftwaffe bomb Liverpool.

30 November 1940: The Luftwaffe bomb Southampton.

Early December 1940: British cryptographers break one of the Enigma keys that was being used by the SS Economic Administrative Main Office (WVHA). The WVHA organisation oversees concentration camps, and labour camps and a variety of other SS economic enterprises.

December 1940: Bulgaria and Yugoslavia reject an invitation to join the Tripartite Pact.

December 1940: The 17-year-old Hans Stark, after serving in an SS Deaths Head unit as a guard at the concentration camp of Oranienburg near Berlin is transferred to the Auschwitz concentration camp in occupied Poland as head of Admissions.

December 1940: The RAF accidentally bombs the railway station in Basil, Switzerland.

01 December 1940: An Italian submarine torpedoes the RCN destroyer Saguenay 300 miles west of Ireland, though the ship does not sink she does however lose 21 men in the attack.

02 December 1940: Pope Pius XII, protests the murder of Germany's mentally and physically handicapped patients within the euthanasia programme [T4].

06 December 1940: Marshal Pietro Badoglio is sacked as Italian chief of staff after the Italians poor performance in Greece and Albania.

09 December 1940: The Italians are routed by the British at Sidi Barrani.

16 December 1940: The RAF sends 134 bombers to attack Mannheim in Germany.

18 December 1940: Hitler issues his Directive 21 (Operation Barbarossa) laying out his plans to crush the Soviet Union. 

22 December 1940: In London, Anthony Eden becomes Foreign Secretary as Lord Halifax is made ambassador to the United States.

23 December 1940: The Greeks capture some 800 Italian troops after seizing Chimera in Albania.

 

 

1941

01 January 1941: The RAF attack targets at Taranto and Naples in Italy as well as launching attacks against axis bases within Libya

03 January 1941:  Australian troops begin an assault on Italian troops at Bardia in Libya.

04 January 1941: The German actress Marlene Dietrich becomes a citizen of the United States.

05 January 1941: Australian troops capture Bardia in Lydia taking some 25,000 Italian prisoners including six generals.

06 January 1941: The German authorities in the Netherlands order the registration of all Jews.

07 January 1941: Allied troops capture Tobruk airport in Libya from the Italians. - In Holland, the Dutch Cinema Association bans all Jews from attending cinemas

09 January 1941: The German Foreign Minister von Ribbentrop is deeply shocked and disturbed when he discovers That Hitler is planning an attack on the Soviet Union. Ribbentrop tries unsuccessfully to persuade Hitler to strengthen his Pact with the Soviets instead of going to war with them.

10 January 1941: Italian and German planes attack British bases on the Island of Malta. - In German occupied Holland; all Jews are forced to register themselves to the authorities.

14 January 1941: Romania’s Regent General Ion Antonescu agrees to allow his country to be used as a launching pad for German troops to attack Greece for ‘Operation Marita.’

20 January 1941: In Washington Franklin D. Roosevelt is inaugurated for his third term as President of the United States.

21 January 1941: In Romania, the Fascist ‘Iron Guard’ attempt a coup but fail but for three days they attack Jews in the streets whilst destroying hundreds of Jewish own shops and 25 synagogues. 

22 January 1941: The Allies capture Tobruk in North Africa.  - The Germans deport some 400 Jews from occupied Amsterdam.

30 January 1941: The Allied forces within Libya capture Derna after a fierce three-day battle.

01 February 1941: In Holland, the authorities introduce a numbers clause to limit the number of Jewish students attending Dutch education facilities.

05 February 1941: The German controlled authorities in occupied Holland orders that all doctors that are of Jewish decent declare themselves.

08 February 1941: General Metaxas, the Greek Prime Minister dies and is replaced by M. Koryzis.

12 February 1941: Erwin Rommel arrives in Tripoli to direct the war against the Allies in North Africa. - The Germans seal off the new Jewish Quarter of Amsterdam.

19 February 1941: Members of the Grune Polizei and volunteers from the Dutch Nazi NSB (National-Socialistische Beweging) movement raid the Jewish owned Koco Cafe in Amsterdam. The police and NSB members were sprayed with ammonia and in return the police started shooting. The owners, and some of their customers who had incited the attack on the police and NSB members were arrested. After torture, one of the owners was executed by firing squad.

22 February 1941: Stalin appoints General Dimitri Pavlov as Chief of Staff.

22-23 February 1941: In Amsterdam, the Jewish quarter is raided and 425 young men are arrested as retaliation for the attack on the police and NSB members as they raided Koco’s cafe a few days earlier.

25 February 1941: An anti-Nazi strike in Amsterdam takes place in protest to Jews being arrested.

01 March 1941: The Reichsführer-SS, Heinrich Himmler visits Auschwitz to inspect progress of the concentration camp and orders its commandant Rudolf Höss to enlarge the camp and to build a new compound at Birkenau (Auschwitz 2) to accommodate some 100,000 Soviet prisoners-of-war. He has to also prepare facilities for IG Farben running its Buna plant just three miles east of the camp. This part of the Auschwitz complex would become known as Monowitz (Auschwitz 3) - Bulgaria joins the Tripartite pact with Germany. Bulgaria was hoping to gain territorially at the expense of Yugoslavia and Greece.

02 March 1941: German troops move into Bulgaria in preparation of their intervention in Yugoslavia and a base to attack Greece.

07 March 1941: Some Jews are used for forced labour inside Germany.

11 March 1941: The US Congress passes the pro-British ‘Lend-Lease Act’.

13 March 1941: In one of Hitler’s Barbarossa Directives (Invasion of the USSR), Himmler and his SS are given special instructions to liquidate all political enemies in the Soviet Union and are given total independence to achieve this aim.

17 March 1941: In Germany, Franz Halder, Chief of the Army General Staff records in his diary that in Russia: ‘force must be used in its most brutal form’ and that ‘The intelligentsia, put in by Stalin must be exterminated’.

24 March 1941: Rommel's Africa Korps capture El Agheila in Libya from the British. - Hitler calls a meeting with Göring, Colonel Hans Jeschonnek and General Kurt Student, the commander of the Parachute Division at the Berghof to discuss airborne operations in Greece and also the island of Crete.

25 March 1941: The Pro-Hitler government in Yugoslavia joins the Tripartite Pact.  Many Yugoslavs have been demanding that their country align itself with Greece and Great Britain, whilst others (the Communists) wanted closer ties with Stalin's Soviet Union. 

26 March 1941: Hermann Göring instructs Reinhard Heydrich to produce a document for senior Wehrmacht officers which will justicy the immediate executions of members of Russia’s secret police, the ‘People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs’ or as they were better known: the NKVD alongside Political Commissars and Jews during ‘Operation Barbarossa’. In fact, anyone that the Nazis deemed a potential threat would be automatically liquidated by the SS and SD.  The Wehrmacht would comb through their Soviet captives and hand over all NKVD, Commissars and Jews to the local Einsatzgruppe working within their areas for disposal. When political commissars and NKVD officers were captured, they were to be interrogated by either the SS or the SD or even the Abwehr in an effort to gain valuable information on the enemy who were still in the field prior to liquidation.

27 March 1941: The pro-German government in Yugoslavia is toppled and the conspirators proclaim the end of the regency and declare that King Peter has come of age, when Hitler hears of the coup in Yugoslavia, he believes it to be a practical joke but when he realises that the pro-German government had indeed fallen in a coup he flew into a rage and called for the total destruction of Yugoslavia. - The camp commandant of Auschwitz concentration camp, Rudolf Höss, meets with representatives of IG Farben to discuss the new camp at Monowitz (Auschwitz 3). IG Farben agree to pay the SS 3 Reichsmarks per unskilled slave worker and 4 Reichsmarks per Skilled slave workers.

30 March 1941: Generaloberst Franz Halder, Chief of the Army General Staff records a speech given by Hitler to his Wehrmacht leadership: ‘Struggle between a weltanschauung (worldview). Devastating assessment of Bolshevism: it is the equivalent of social delinquency. Communism is a tremendous danger for the future. We must get away from the standpoint of soldierly comradeship. The Communist is from first to last no comrade. It is a war of extermination. If we do not regard it as much, we may defeat the enemy, but in thirty years’ time we will again be confronted by the Communist enemy…The struggle will be very different from that in the West. In the East toughness now means mildness in the future. The leaders must make sacrifices and overcome their scruples’.

End March 1941: Hermann Göring, head of the Luftwaffe and Hitler’s economic Four-Year plan discusses the problems and solutions to the Jewish problem in the east especially concerning the Soviet Union with Reinhard Heydrich.

April 1941: Himmler appoints Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski as Higher Police Leader for Southeast (Silesia)

April 1941: In preparation for the invasion of the Soviet Union, Reinhard Heydrich starts a recruiting drive for his Einsatzgruppen (special task forces). The main functions of these units are to liquidate all political and racial opponents of Hitler’s Third Reich within the conquered areas of the USSR.

06 April 1941: Germany invades Yugoslavia and then Greece and as the Wehrmacht invades, they are followed closely behind by two of Heydrich’s Einsatzgruppen units (one for Yugoslavia and one for Greece) which will carry out the liquidation of all potential threats from the civilian population (political elites, Communists and Jews etc) in each of the country’s that have to be subdued.

08 April 1941: Kurt Daluege discusses with Himmler potential roles for his Order Police in the forthcoming attack on the Soviet Union.

11 April 1941: Rommel's Africa Korps lay siege to Tobruk in Libya.

13 April 1941: The German army seize Belgrade, Yugoslavia.

15 April 1941: General Lohr, GOC 4th Air Fleet submits his plan for an airborne attack against the Allied forces located on the island of Crete to Hermann Göring. -  All Jews in Amsterdam are ordered to hand in their radio sets to the authorities.

16 April 1941: The Germans take control of Sarajevo in Yugoslavia and along with their Muslim supporters, demolishes the city's main synagogue. - Hermann Göring discusses General Lohr’s plan for an attack on the Allied forces based in Crete with Hitler. - Himmler, Heydrich, Wolff, Daluege and Hans Juttner meet with Eduard Wagner, the Quartermaster-General to discuss any remaining issues between the SS and police squads prior to the invasion of the Soviet Union.

17 April 1941: The Yugoslavian army capitulates to the German forces.

21 April 1941: Hitler meets with Göring and General Student, Commander of XI Air Corps and tells them that though the plan to attack the Allied forces on the island of Crete is sound, he believes that it is not practical. Göring tries his best to persuade Hitler to go with the plan but to no avail.

23 April 1941: The BEF (British Expeditionary Force) already stationed in Greece begins to withdraw to the island of Crete because of German pressure.

24 April 1940: In Poland, the Nazis seal off the Jewish Ghetto of Lublin.

25 April 1941: Hitler decides to go with the plan to attack the allied forces on Crete and issues ‘Directive 28’, an operation to use Crete as an air base to attack British forces in the Mediterranean.

27 April 1941: The Wehrmacht occupies Athens Greece.

May 1941: Himmler removes Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski as Higher SS and Police Leader for Southeast (Silesia) and orders him to report to him on 26 May 1941.

1 May 1941: The Decree on the ‘Exercise of Military Jurisdiction’ signed by Wilhelm Keitel, Chief of the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht (OKW), the High Command of Germany's armed forces, gave powers to individual officers by removing any requirement to hold court martials when dealing with suspected or actual saboteurs or any other suspects believed to have been involved in any type of resistance of any type against the German occupation forces on Soviet territory. This order gave German officers the power to execute suspects on the spot, also available to these officers, was the right to carry out ‘collective measures’ (mass executions) against a population suspected of being involved in aiding and abetting any resistance fighters.  - In Holland, all Jewish doctors are banned from practising medicine on non-Jews.

02 May 1941: In Germany, General Georg Thomas of the War Economy ad Armaments Office confirms that the Wehrmacht will have to seize soviet food stuffs in order to feed their own men in the field during the forthcoming invasion of the Soviet Union, and this policy may result in the death through starvation of millions of Soviets civilians.

10 May 1941: Hitler's deputy, Rudolf Hess flies out on a secret mission to the UK.  His plane, a Messerschmitt Me-110 crashes in Renfrewshire, Scotland, He is captured by a local farm worker and handed to the army. Initially he gave his name as Captain Alfred Horn and claimed to have an important message for the Duke of Hamilton. His mission was to try to negotiate peace with Britain.

13 May 1941: The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) announces the capture of Rudolf Hess. As soon as Hitler hears of Hess’ capture, he flies into an uncontrollable rage and claims that Hess was insane and had no authorization to go to Britain seeking peace. - The German High Command (OKW) issues it’s ‘Order Concerning the exercise of Military Jurisdiction and Procedures in the Area of Barbarossa, and Special Military Measures’. The order allows soldiers to shoot any civilians that are deemed a threat to German rule, and sets out a ‘Collective punishment’ for areas where insidious and malicious attacks are carried out.’

14 May 1941: In Paris the Germans seize some 3,600 Jews. After Rudolf Hess's flight to Scotland, Martin Bormann is named his successor.

16 May 1941: The Vichy government under Marshal Pétain informs the French people via a radio broadcast, that his administration will actively collaborate with Nazi Germany.

18 May 1941: The Gestapo are given powers to hold suspects in the so-called ‘educative work camps. These work camps were created by a decree in August 1940.

20 May 1941: The central office in Berlin dealing with Jewish immigration and under the authority of Hermann Göring forbids the immigration of Jews from all occupied lands.  The term 'final solution' is found within his communique, and this may well be in relation to the future plan to exterminate Europe's Jewish population. - German paratroops, including Max Schmeling, Germany’s famous boxing champion descend on Crete and are met with stiff resistance from British and colonial troops based on the island.

23 May 1941: Economic and Political Guidelines are issued to the German army in relation to their future military actions within the Soviet Union. 

27 May 1941: In the North Atlantic, the Royal Navy sink the German battleship Bismarck.

31 May 1941: In Holland, Jews are banned from using public baths and swimming pools.

May/June 1941: Himmler appoints Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski as Higher Police Leader for Central Russia.

June 1941: The Hungarian Pro-German government prepare the groundwork to seize and expel alien Jews to the German occupied Ukraine.

June 1941: Rudolf Höss, Commandant of Auschwitz concentration camp meets with Heinrich Himmler to discuss the plans to build an industrial plant for IG Farben at Auschwitz.

01 June 1941: Crete falls to the Germans whilst the remaining British forces flee to North Africa.

02 June 1941: Hitler meets Benito Mussolini at the Brenner Pass.

06 June 1941: 'Guidelines for the Treatment of Political Commissars' (Commissar Order) is issued which instructs that all political Commissars who fall into German hands are to be separated from other Prisoners of War and executed on the spot.

07 June 1941: Heinrich Himmler visits the Łódź ghetto. - Reinhardt Heydrich meets with his Einsatzgruppens leaders to discuss their mission in the forthcoming war with the Soviet Union, all enemies that they have been delegated to deal with are to be executed, and this included the Jews. 

12 June 1941: Marshal Ion Antonescu, the Romanian dictator meets with Adolf Hitler and discusses the on-coming assault against the Soviet Union, which Romania will be involved in, as well as Romania's war against its own Jewish population.

14 June 1941: Hitler holds his last briefing conference with his Commanders-in-chief and Generals prior to the invasion of the Soviet Union.  - The order 'Hay Action' (Heu Aktion) is issued by Alfred Rosenberg. The Hay Action called for some 50,000 foreign youths, aged between 10 and 14 years old to be seized and taken to Germany and used as slave labourers. They were first placed within a Kindererziehungslager (Children’s Education Camp), if they looked Aryan, they were selected for ‘Germanisation’ (adopted by Germans and raised as Germans), all the other children were used as slave labour. 

Mid-June 1941: In Holland, Jewish lawyers are banned from representing non-Jewish clients.

22 June 1941: Hitler takes on the biggest gamble of his life by launching a surprise attack on the Soviet Union, 'Operation Barbarossa' at 0330 hours. Herbert Backe, the German State Secretary for Food and Agriculture and head of Hermann Göring’s ‘Food Division’ in the ‘Four-Year Plan’ which had already warned that Germany could not sustain the Wehrmacht with food stuffs for any length of time during Operation Barbarossa and advised that the army take whatever they need from the land that they occupy.  He estimated that tens of millions of Soviet citizens would have to be left to starve to death so that German troops can eat.  The German Generals voiced no objections to such a genocidal policy.  Under the jurisdiction Himmler, Einsatzgruppens move into the areas behind the German Wehrmacht, with the sole purpose of liquidating Soviet intellectuals, political Commissars and Jews.  Like Yugoslavia and Greece, but on a much larger scale, local pogroms against the Jews are initiated. Thousands of Jews die at the hands of German collaborators within each of the countries or areas [Soviets] that the Germany seized large tracts of Soviet territory. The German army groups, North, Centre and South smash into the Soviet defences which cause the Soviet troops to panic and flee. On hearing the news, Josef Stalin refuses to believe that Hitler has really attacked the Soviet Union. - Himmler promotes Hans-Adolf Prützmann to Higher SS and Police Leader for Northern Russia and Friedrich Jeckeln as Higher SS and Police Leader for the Ukraine.

23 June 1941: Stalin sets up a new ‘High Command HQ’ – the Stavka Glavno Komandovaniya and becomes its chairman. - German troops occupy Kaunas (Kovno), whilst members of the Himmler’s Einsatzgruppen (specialised murder squads) also enter the city. - The T-34 tank makes its first combat debut against the Germans. The anti-tank gunners of the German 197th Infantry Division soon discover that their 37mm anti-tank guns cannot penetrate the T-34s armour, and after these guns become simply known as the ‘door knockers against the T-34s.

23-24 June 1941: Heinrich Müller, head of the Gestapo, issues directives to the Gestapo office in the City of Tilsit. The directive orders the setting up of a mobile killing unit (Einsatzkommando Tilsit) to remove all Jews within the Lithuanian border area.

24 June 1941: In his special train ‘Amerika’, Hitler heads for his new headquarters known as the Wolfsschanze (Wolf’s Lair)[2] in East Prussia, which was located within Görlitz Forest some 5 miles from the Prussian town of Rastenburg.  It will be here that he oversees Operation Barbarossa.

25 June 1941: In Lithuania, Einsatzkommandos from Einsatzgruppen 'A' reach Kaunas. It doesn’t take long before Lithuanian nationalists, especially those members of the Lithuanian ‘Activist Front’ began to butcher their Jewish neighbours on the streets, whilst the Germans and Civilians stood by and watched.

26 June 1941: Hundreds of Jews living in and around Kaunas in Lithuania are dragged from their homes and taken to one of the old forts (The Ninth Fort) which had originally been built to defend the city and murdered by members of the local Lithuanian pro-Nazi-militia. - German panzers reach the river Dvina.

27 June 1941: A colonel within Army Group North, witnesses the ‘Death Dealer of Kovno’ at work. Surrounded by a crowd of men, women and children, most of them laughing and cheering as the young Lithuanian ‘Death Dealer’ enthusiastically murders his Jewish victims: ‘On the concrete forecourt of the petrol station a blond man of medium height, aged about twenty-five, stood leaning on a wooden club, resting. The club was thick as his arm and came up to his chest. At his feet lay about twenty dead or dying people. Water continuously from a hose washed blood away into the drainage gully. Just a few steps behind this man some twenty men, guarded by armed civilians, stood waiting for their cruel execution in silent submission. In response to a cursory wave, the next man stepped forward silently and was beaten to death with the wooden club in the bestial manner, each low accompanied by enthusiastic shouts from the audience’. - The German Order Police Battalion 309 forces some 700 Jews into the city of Bialystok’s main synagogue and then sets fire to the building killing all inside.

28 June 1941: In Kaunas, mobs of Lithuanians, including local police officers comb the city for Jews whom they can beat to death with iron bars. - In Belarus, Minsk falls to the Germans. A pogrom against the Jews within the Romanian province of Moldavia is initiated, others pogrom soon follow.  The Romanians raped, plundered and killed as many Jews they could get their hands on, members of the pro-Nazi Romanian ‘Iron Guard’ murder 1,500 Jews in Lasi.

29 June 1941: Hitler publicly names Göring to be his successor to the offices of Fuhrer and Reich Chancellor in the event of his death. - Stalin leaves Moscow for his dacha; it is believed that he has had a nervous breakdown.

29 June - 06 July 1941: Romanian soldiers and some police officers murder over 13,000 Jews in the Romanian city of Jassy. 

30 June 1941: The Germans enter Lvov within the Ukraine and before the day was over, Ukrainian nationalists, encouraged by the Germans search the city for Jews to slaughter. -  After a bomb attack against the Germans in Amsterdam, Holland, the Germans, in retaliation, seize 300 Jewish men and send them to Mauthausen concentration camp. - In Lithuania, the Germans capture Vilnius, the country's capital. - Himmler and Heydrich set out on an inspection tour of the newly conquered territories in the east. - Einsatzgruppen 4a and local Ukrainians murder some 300 Jews in Lutsk.

July 1941: Jewish newspapers in New York report that the Germans have murdered hundreds of Jews in Minsk, Lvov and Brest-Litovsk.

July 1941: Boris Shaposhnikov becomes the Soviet Union’s Chief of the General Staff.

July 1941: Field-marshal Wilhelm von Leeb, commander of Army Group North reports that large numbers of Red Army troops, caught within the German advance, wearing peasant clothing are roaming local swamps and forests.

July 1941: The Spanish provide Hitler with enough volunteers to create a division for the war against the Soviet Union. This division becomes the 250th Division (Azul –Blue, also known as Division Blue). These Spanish volunteers began operations against the Soviet Union as part of the German military machine that was part of Army Group Centre, though it would also serve as part of Amry Group North later in the war.  

July 1941: Paul Thümmel, an Abwehr official, who has been secretly passing on secret information onto the Czech government-in-exile informs them that his government are murdering Jews in the Ukraine. This information is subsequently passed on to the British government.

July 1941: The Soviet navy loses two of their destroyers (Serdity and Smely) to enemy mines.

01 July 1941: The German army captures Riga in Latvia.

02 July 1941: The Germans enter the village of Lubieszów in the Ukraine and by the end of the month, a small cavalry unit had managed to slaughter the village's Jews. - Reinhardt Heydrich issues a directive instructing his Einsatzgruppens that all Communist politicians, political commissars, Jews, partisans and anyone suspected of working for the Communist Party and state are to be executed. - Mass killings begin in Vilnius, Lithuania after the arrival of a German Einsatzkommando.

03 July 1941: In a radio speech to the Soviet people, the first since the German invasion, Stalin orders a scorched earth policy against the German invaders stating that Russia is fighting for her very existence and calls for guerrilla warfare to be carried against the Germans in all occupied areas, no-one, he demands should fall into the enemies’ hands. - In Germany, General Halder notes in his diary that he believes that operation Barbarossa has been won within a space of two weeks.

04 July 1941: The Nazis establish a Judenrat in Vilna.

05 July 1941: The German army reach the river Dnieper and arrive in Trembowla.

06 July 1941: In Poland, in around the eastern town of Radziłów, Poles attack local Jews with axes and knives, culminating in the deaths of up to 1000 Jews

07 July 1941: SS-Obersturmführer (lieutenant) Joachim Hamann, commander of Einsatzkommando 3 begins a systematic search for Jews in Lithuania to kill. - The German Order Police Battalion 322 arrives at the former Soviet controlled city of Bialystok in Poland.

08 July 1941: The Einsatzkommandos in Lithuania massacre some 5,000 Vilna Jews. Later, those Jews who hadn't managed to flee, where soon rounded up and shot. - The Soviet destroyer, the Karl Marx is destroyed by a German air attack. - In Romania an order is submitted by Mihai Antonescu to deport all the Jews from Bessarabia and Bukovina

09 July 1941: The rivers Dvina and the Dnieper are crossed by the German troops and the Soviet city of Smolensk is threatened. - An Einsatzkommando reaches the Ukrainian city of Zhitomir only to find that most of the city's Jews had managed to escape thanks to strong Soviet resistance, but they still manage to slaughter thousands of Jews. - The German Order Police Battalion 322 carries out a raid on the Jewish sector of the city of Bialystok in Poland and later in the afternoon Himmler and Bach-Zelewski inspect the booty that the Battalion had seized from their victims during the raid.

10 July 1941: In Lithuania, the Jews from Kaunas begin to move into the city's ghetto. They had until the 15 August 1941 to have move into the ghetto.

11 July 1941: In Central Russia, Max Montua, Police Lieutenant-Colonel passes on an order to his men from Higher SS and Police Leader Bach-Zelewski stating that all male Jews from the ages from 17 to 45 years old, who have been accused of looting are to be immediately executed and their corpses buried in an unmarked grave. - In the town of Tarnopol, Einsatzkommando 4B reports that it has carried out 127 executions and a further 600 have been killed in pogroms.

12 July 1941: The Luftwaffe bomb Moscow for the first time.

14 July 1941: The Soviet secret police (NKVD) arrest some 35,000 Lithuanian citizens and deport them to their gulags (Soviet style concentration camps). - The German army reach the river Luga.

15 July 1941: Believing that the war against the Soviet Union will soon be over Hitler orders arms manufacturing priority be switched from the army to the navy and air force in preparation for the final showdown with Britain.

16 July 1941: Rolf-Heinz Höppner, who worked in Hans Frank’s General Government, wrote to Adolf Eichmann suggesting that it might be feasible to eradicate those Jews unfit for work (useless mouths) in the Łódź Ghetto by the use of some "fast-acting agent", such as gas.  This was the first time a reference to gassing the Jews as a means to eradicate them was mentioned.  It also helped pave the way for the use of gas vans that would be used at ‘Chełmno’ death camp but was first tested out on of a group of Soviet prisoners at Sachsenhausen concentration camp.

17 July 1941: Alfred Rosenberg is appointed as Reich Minister for the Eastern Occupied Territories.

20 July 1941: The Nazis set up a Jewish Ghetto in Minsk. - Reinhard Heydrich returns to serve with Jagdgeschwader 77 whilst they were engaged in Operation Barbarossa [the invasion of the USSR. but returned to Berlin after he was forced to land his damaged plane (it was hit by anti-aircraft flak) in Russian held territory but managed to escape capture after just a few days of his arrival. As such, Himmler forbade him from taking an active role in the fighting of Germany’s enemies, instead, he was expected to kill those enemies from his desk in Berlin.

21 July 1941: The death camp of Majdanek is established in Poland. - Losovsk, Stalin’s head of the Soviet propaganda machine announces that hundreds of partisans are constantly attacking German lines of communications.

23 July 1941: The 1st SS Infantry Brigade enters the Ukraine in order to support the Einsatzgruppen in the murder local Jews.

24 July 1941: In Kishinev [Moldova], the Nazis set up a Jewish ghetto.

25 July 1941: Heinrich Himmler, establishes a foreign auxiliary force known as the 'Schutzmannschaften' within the Baltic regions under German control to assist in carrying out security measures and to assist the Einsatzgruppen in their murderous task of murdering those deemed those unworthy of life, which included the Jewish populations.  - The first report on Soviet guerrilla activity is issued from the German High Command stating that their supply lines are in danger.

25-28 July 1941: In Lwów, local Ukrainians stage another pogrom against the city's Jewish population. At a roll call in the concentration camp of Auschwitz, the SS inform the inmates that all the sick will be transported out of the camp to a place where their illnesses can be treated properly. Some 500 sick inmates leave the camp by train to the mental hospital at Sonnenstein near Danzig, where they are put into specially constructed gas chambers and gassed. These are the first inmates of Auschwitz to be gassed.

26 July 1941: The German army reach Smolensk. 

31 July 1941: 31 July 1941: The German Army Group North reaches Lake Ilimen in Russia. - Heydrich receives authorisation from Göring to pursue the ‘final solution to the Jewish question.  The document read: In completion of the task entrusted to you in the edict dated January 24th 1939 of solving the Jewish question by means of migration or evacuation in the most convenient way possible, given the present conditions. I herewith charge you with making all necessary preparations with regard to organizational, practical and financial aspects for an overall solution of the Jewish question in the German sphere of influence in Europe. Insofar as the competences of other central organizations are affected, these should be involved. I further charge you with submitting to me promptly an overall plan of the preliminary organizational, practical and financial measures for the execution of the intended final solution of the Jewish question.

Late July 1941: A report from the 256 Infantry Division operating in Belorussia indicates that partisans have established themselves in the area and that sniping and assassination are becoming more frequent.

August 1941: Two companies of Police Battalion 322 arrest some 322 Jews in the Minsk ghetto and place them into one of their local prisons prior to their execution.

August 1941: Hitler visits Army Group Centre and South’s Headquarters in the East.

01 August 1941: The Red Army launches a counter-attack from the Pripet Marshes. - In Holland, Jewish estate agents are banned from working with non-Jews. - Konstantin von Neurath’s, the ‘Reichsprotektor of occupied Bohemia and Moravia’, edict that all Jews over the age of six-years-old must wear the Star of David whilst in the public square comes into effect. Only those Jews who were deemed to be in privileged mixed marriages were exempt from having to wear the star.

03 August 1941: The Bishop of Munster in Westphalia denounces Hitler’s euthanasia policy (T4) by claiming that the recent spate of RAF bombing on their cities was a sign that God was punishing them for breaking the sixth commandment.

04 August 1941:  The Jewish ghetto in Kovno is sealed by the Nazis. -  Several thousand Jews are murdered by elements of the 1st SS Infantry Brigade in the Western Ukraine. They are first taken to the town of Ostrog and then to a pre-arranged killing area where they are forced to strip before being shot.

05 August 1941: Romanian and German forces lay siege to the Ukrainian city of Odessa.

05-08 August 1941: The Nazis murder some 10,000 Jews in and around Pińsk [Belarus].

07 August 1941: At the Wolfs Lair, those close to Hitler begin to see that his health seemed to be deteriorating. D. Morell, his personal physician, had to treat him for bacillary dysentery[3] which he may have contracted due to his headquarters being built near swampland. Later at one military conference, Hitler would complain of headaches and buzzing in his ears, Morell, placed leeches on Hitler in an attempt to lower his blood pressure[4].

7-8 August 1941: The Soviet air force manages their first air raid on Berlin.

08 August 941: Stalin announces that he is making himself the Supreme Commander of the Soviet armed forces. - The Soviet destroyer, the Karl Marx is destroyed by German air attack.

11 August 1941: General Franz Halder admits in his diary that he and Hitler had seriously underestimated the size and ability of the Soviet armed forces. He goes on to state that he believed that they could only field some 200 divisions and already they have encountered 360.

14-15 August 1941: At Rokiškis, Lithuania, Jewish men are escort to a nearby village by an Einsatzgruppe where mass graves had been prepared for them and murdered.

15 August 1941: Heinrich Himmler, during a visit to one of his special detachments (Einsatzgruppen) in the field near Minsk, witnesses a mass execution of Jews. He also observed as patients were gassed within a nearby hospital at Nowinki. Ambassador Count Werner von der Schulenburg, the last ambassador to the Soviet Union prior to the invasion, is told by Hitler that the war with the Soviet Union will be over by 1st October 1041.  - Leopold Gutterer, Goebbels’s State Secretary, pushes for the Jews in Berlin to be deported. - Reinhard Heydrich sends a coded message to his Einsatzgruppen leaders, telling them to make sure that no unauthorised persons gain access to their orders and instructions.

18 August 1941: The German Propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels meets his own officials where it's agreed that Germany's Jews should be forced to wear some identification mark so as to mark them out as Jews. He also raises this issue with Hitler and straight after his meeting and achieve his support which he got; German Jews would now to be forced to wear the Star of David in public spaces which will come into effect as soon as the system catches up with Hitler’s wishes.

Mid-August: Himmler’s Order Police in occupied Soviet territory start killing Jewish children for the first time.

Mid-August 1941: Bach-Zelewski informs Himmler of the psychological problems his men are suffering because of the of the executions they are involved in, Himmler promises that he will do what he can.

19-22 August 1941: The German Police Battalion 45, part of police regiment South murder 1,059 Jews in or near the area of Slavuta [Ukraine] in the east.

23 August 1941: Due to public hostility at home, Hitler publicly announces that he has called a stop to the "euthanasia" programme, but secretly it continues. - In Poland the German Police Battalion 314, part of Police regiment South liquidates 367 Jews in the area in and around Kowel.

24 August 1941: The British Prime Minister Winston Churchill broadcasts a speech to the nation about German aggression in the Soviet Union. In his speech he states: ‘The aggressor is surprised, startled, staggered, for the first time in his experience mass murder has become unprofitable. He retaliates by the most frightful cruelties. As his armies’ advance, whole districts are being exterminated. Scores of thousands, literally scores of thousands of executions in cold blood are being perpetrated by the German police troops upon the Russian patriots who defend their native soil.  Since the Mongol invasions of Europe in the sixteenth century, there has never been methodical, merciless butchery on a scale or approaching such a scale. And this is but the beginning, famine and pestilence have yet to follow in the bloody ruts of Hitler’s tanks…We are in the presence of a crime without a name.’

25 August 1941: Jewish women and children, and the elderly of Rokiškis in Lithuania are murdered by the same Einsatzgruppe who had just recently murdered their menfolk. – Benito Mussolini visits Hitler at the Wolf’s Lair for the first time.  Hitler admits that his intelligence services had missed a lot in relation to size of the Red Army and their capabilities, but he was still convinced that they [the Red Army] were on their knees and would soon be no more by the spring 1942.

27-28 August 1941: Police Battalion 320 (Polizeibattalion 320), alongside Einsatzkommandos from Friedrich Jeckeln's Einsatzgruppen and members from the Ukrainian auxiliaries’ massacre over 26,000 Jews (including Hungarian Jews who had been deported from Hungary) from city of Kamianets-Podilskyi within the Ukraine.

28 August 1941: At Kėdainiai, in Lithuania, Einsatzkommandos force some 2,000 Jews into a ditch in preparation for killing them, a Jewish butcher grabbed a hold of one the killers and dragged him into the ditch where he dug his teeth into the man's neck causing the man's death.  All the Jews, including the butcher were all gunned down. – Hitler and Mussolini visits General von Rundstedt at his headquarters at Uman in the Ukraine until early September.  

29 August 1941: Germany’s ally Finland captures Viipuri.

30 August 1941: Reinhard Heydrich reminds his Einsatzgruppen leaders to prevent civilian and military spectators from entering mass execution sites.

31 August 1941: The British Prime Minister Winston Churchill reads decoded German messages which indicate that the German Police Battalions 45 and 314 have just recently murdered 355 Jews in the east.

September 1941: The Nazi's T4 Euthanasia Programme is temporarily suspended.

September 1941: The decision is made begin expanding the Auschwitz concentration camp by building another large enclosure close by as a POW camp. The camp is located at what the Poles called Brzezinka, which the German’s called Birkenau [Auschwitz II]. The camp is approximately 2 miles from the main camp [Auschwitz I]. The task of building the new camp fell to SS-Hauptsturmführer Karl Bischoff, newly appointed chief of Auschwitz Construction Office and the architect SS-Rottenführer (corporal) Fritz Ertl. Some 10,000 Soviet POWs were sent to Auschwitz to be used as slave labour to build the camp. These prisoners were the first prisoners to have their numbers tattooed onto their bodies.

01 September 1941: Reinhardt Heydrich issues orders that all Jews aged six and over are to wear the Star of David with the word 'Jew' printed onto it within the Reich and all annexed areas. - Members of the German Order Police execute some 290 Jewish men and 40 Jewess’s in Minsk. - In Holland, Jewish children are forced to attend separate schools.

03 September 1941: Zyklon-B (crystalline hydrogen cyanide turns to a poisonous gas when exposed to the air) is tested for the first time at Auschwitz on Soviet prisoners of war as well as some other selected inmates.  A cell within Block 11, which was located within the Auschwitz I camp, was turned into an improvised gas chamber. Afterwards, Zyklon-B, which was mass produced by the Frankfurt based German company I.G. Farben, was used to kill millions of men, women and children.  Using gas to kill millions of defenceless people of all ages was seen by the Nazi leadership as a more humane way to deal with the problems that came with slaughtering women and children, and this humane way of doing things, wasn’t to help alleviate the suffering that the victims suffered whilst being slaughtered, but to alleviate the suffering caused to the murderers when they had the task of shooting down those women and children.

05 September 1941: Edvard Beneš, the President of Czechoslovakia in exile communicates via radio  to the ‘Central Leadership of Home Resistance’ [ÚVOD] in an effort to get them to carry out resistance attacks against the Nazi occupiers, as Czechoslovakia was doing very little to disrupt Nazi operations within their country, and pressure from the Allies (the UK and the Soviet Union) to mount attacks so as to force the Nazis to divert much needed military personnel and equipment away from the front lines. - In Vilna, the Nazis establish two Jewish ghettos and have them sealed off.

09 September 1941: In the Slovak Republic, Jews are forced to wear the Star of David.

10 September 1941: Josef Antonius Heinrich Terboven, the Reichskommissar for Norway imposes martial law in Oslo and the surrounding areas after Norwegians went on strike against the German occupation.

12 September 1941: The Germans manage to trap a large number of Soviet troops in a pocket at Kiev.

13 September 1941: Kurt Daluege informs his Higher SS and Police leaders that messages deemed top secret, i.e., execution statistics are to be sent by courier, all other messages could be sent by field radio.

15 September 1941: The Germans manage to cut off Leningrad from the rest of the Soviet Union. -  The Gauleiter of Hamburg, Karl Kaufmann sends a letter to Hitler requesting his permission to deport the city’s Jewish population so that he can allocate their homes to non-Jews whom had recently lost their homes in a British air raid. Hitler decides that the time has come to start deporting Germany’s Jews eastwards, and authorises the removal of Reich Jews from German soil.

17 September 1941: The deportation to the east begins for Germany's Jewish population. In Kovno, Lithuania, the Nazis round up thousands of Jews, mostly women and children, and hold them prisoner within a local synagogue. From there they are taken to a nearby sports field where mass graves are awaiting them.  All are murdered. 

18 September 1941: - Himmler instructs Arthur Greiser, Gauleiter of the Warthegau in Poland to prepare the Łódź ghetto for the arrival of some 60,000 Jews from the Old Reich.

19 September 1941: In Germany, Jews are ordered to wear the ‘Star of David’. - The German's seize Kiev in the Ukraine. - Karl Schlegelhofer, the German field commander, orders the establishment of a Jewish ghetto in Minsk, Ukraine. - The Nazis liquidate the ghetto of Zhitomir killing some 10,000 Jews in the process.

22 September 1941: In Holland, all Jews are banned from all non-economic organisations and associations.

23 September 1941: Joseph Goebbels visits the Wolf’s Lair for the second time. This time he asks the Führer to return to Berlin and make a speech to the German nation in an attempt to lift their spirits. Hitler promises Goebbels that he will make a speech in the Berlin Sportpalast on 3rd October 1941.

25 September 1941: The Germans lay siege to Sevastopol.

26 September 1941: The Germans finally manage to eliminate all resistance with the Kiev pocket.

27 September 1941: Hitler orders Konstantin von Neurath, Reich Protector of Bohemia and Moravia to go on indefinite sick leave and appoints Reinhardt Heydrich as acting Protector of Bohemia and Moravia.  Hitler had been unhappy at the way Neurath governed the Protectorate and wanted a man who was willing to use whatever means at his disposal to maintain German authority and discipline the Czechs when they stepped out of line.  Hitler believed that Heydrich would put an end to the endless strikes, go-slow policies employed by some workers as well as a growing tide of other resistance activities in the country. Heydrich is also promoted to SS- Obergruppenführer [ Lieutenant-general].

29 September 1941: In the Protectorate, Reinhard Heydrich strips those Czech Jews in mixed marriages from the right of not having to wear the Star of David in public spaces, from now on, they too would have to show their Czech neighbours that they were indeed Jews too. 

29 - 30 September 1941: Massacre at Babi Yar. With the German army in control of the Ukrainian capital of Kiev. The Nazi murder machine rolls up its sleeves to carry out yet another Aktion. They start by posting decrees all over Kiev demanding that all Jews, regardless of age or sex, report for resettlement.  Some 33,871 turn up as ordered, believing that they would be resettled. Personnel from The Order Police Battalion 45 cordons off the area whilst the other members of the killing squads escort the victims to a ravine known as Babi Yar just a few kilometres outside Kiev. Here the Jews are ordered to hand over all their valuables and to undress (The nazis didn’t’ want bullet holes or blood on the Jews clothes because these clothes were deemed valuable war-booty).  In groups, men, women and children of all ages are herded into the ravine, where a unit of the death squad, Sonderkommando 4a [Einsatzkommandos] await them. There the 33,871 Jews are systematically murdered within a space of a couple of days. Sonderkommando 4a which was under the command of Paul Blobel and Otto Rasch who commanded Einsatzgruppen C.

October 1941: The Soviet General Georgi Konstantinovich Zhukov reorganises the city of Leningrad’s defence

October 1941: Paul Thümmel, Paul, aka Code name A 54 -who was a long-standing nazi veteran and an Abwehr operative and a spy for Edvard Beneš, the leader of the Czech government-in-exile in London is arrested by the gestapo, but due to pressures from many supporters within the party, he is released from gestapo custody.

October 1941: The first transport of Jews to the newly established death camp at Majdanek takes place.

October 1941: Reinhard Heydrich notes down his wishes to deport the Protectorate’s gyspsy community, at first, he viewed them simply as asocial elements, but later defined them as a racial problem too.

02 October 1941: The German 'Army Group Centre' launch Operation Taifun [Typhoon], the assault on Moscow.  - he Ninth Company with staff from Higher SS and Police leader Bach-Zelewski, plus some 23 Ukrainian policemen seize 2,208 Jews from the Mogilev ghetto and executed them the following day.

03 October 1941: Frank Nelson head of Britain’s ‘Special Operations Executive’ [SOE] and František Moravec, head of the Czech government-in-exile’ intelligence network and a group of high-ranking SOE executives meet to discuss a plan to assassinate a high ranking nazi official in Czechoslovakia. A potential target was Reinhard Heydrich, the Reich Protector of Bohemia and Moravia. The operation would be given the codename ‘Operation Anthropoid.’ - Hitler addresses the German nation in the Sportpalast in Berlin. He lays the blame for the war on Britain and international Jewry.

04 October 1941:  Hitler leaves Berlin to return to his Wolf’s Lair in the east.

06 October 1941:  Paul Ludwig Ewald von Kleist’s German forces reach the Sea of Azov in the Crimea. – In the Protectorate, Reinhard Heydrich instructs his ministers within the Czech government to dismiss all those whom have been declared as ‘Mischlinge’ [Half-Jews] from all government agencies. The only exceptions were those Mischlinges who have been working for the state prior to 1914 and those fought in the Austrian army during the Great War, these people, Heydrich would make a decision on each and every case presented.

08 October 1941: The Vitebsk ghetto is liquidated by the Nazis; some 16,000 Jews are murdered in the process.

13 October 1941: The SS and Police Leader in the Lublin region of Poland, Odilo Globocnik, the ex-Gauleiter of Vienna, proposes to Heinrich Himmler that a gas chamber be built at a place called Bełżec in the south-eastern part of the Lublin as a way to liquidate Jews within the Lulin region who were deemed ‘unproductive’. (see 1^st November 1941).  At this stage, the Nazis still had no overall plan to liquidate all Jews within Europe, killing Jews in centres such as Bełżec was designed to make space for incoming Jews, especially from the Reich and the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia.

14 October 1941: German troops reach Kalinin in Russia. - Kurt Daluege, Chief of the Order Police and a close friend to Joseph Goebbels, signs a directive ordering the first deportation of Berlin’s Jewish community to the east.

15 October 1941: Himmler returns to his East Prussian HQ from Mogilev and meets with Odilo Globocnik, SS and Police leader in Lublin. Globocnik informs Himmler about the difficulties he is having with the Governor of occupied Poland (General Government), Hans Frank. - In Prague, Reinhard Heydrich begins to deport the city’s Jews to the east.

16 October 1941: Romanian and German forces capture the Ukrainian city of Odessa after a 74-day siege. - German advance units are now only some sixty miles from the gates of Moscow.  - The Soviet Secret State Police (the NKVD) murder some 200 prisoners held within detention centres in Moscow so that they wouldn't fall into German hands if Moscow was overrun. - The Germans occupy Odessa and the Odessa Jews are murdered in the process. - Himmler has 20,000 German, Austrian and some Luxembourgian Jews, along with 5,000 Gypsies sent from the Reich to the Łódź ghetto.

18 October 1941: It was decided by Himmler and Heydrich that Jews would no longer be permitted to emigrate to overseas countries, instead they would be dealt with in Europe itself and it will be they who deal with them. 

19 October 1941: German Order Police murder 3,726 Jews from the Mogilev ghetto.

20 October 1941: A state of emergency is declared within Moscow and Stalin informs the capital's citizens that he plans to remain in the city. – Reinhard Heydrich proposes to Himmler that Leningrad and Moscow be completely wiped of the face of the earth, as these two places represented the heart of Jewish-Communism, that these two symbols of everything the Nazis detested should be erased from history. 

Mid-October 1941: Himmler orders Friedrich Jeckeln, Higher SS and Police leader switch places with his counterpart Prützmann in the Ukraine.

Mid-October 1941: The Polish government-in-exile in London receives a report from one of their agents in Poland about the murder of some 6,000 Jews at Czyzew near Lomza.

21 October 1941: Around 1500 Jews are massacred in the white Russian town of Koidanov by Einsatzkommandos which was made up primarily of Lithuanians.  (This was the massacre which Mark Kurzem (The Mascot) managed to survive. See Einsatzgruppen page for further information)

22 - 23 October 1941: An explosion destroys the former NKVD (Soviet Secret State Police) building in Odessa, killing dozens of Romanian officers who had been using the building as their headquarters. The building had been booby-trapped by the retreating Soviets but the blame of sabotage was firmly laid at the feet of the Jewish population and Communists. In retaliation, an Einsatzgruppe arrived in the city and the next day they murdered up to 10,000 hostages, which were predominantly made up of Jews.

23 October 1941: In Germany, the policy of allowing any Jews to emigrate is officially suspended indefinitely, this includes Jews that are in occupied countries also, all Jews will now be dealt with under the terms of the final solution, whatever shape that is to take - Himmler visits the operational headquarters of Bach-Zelewski in Mogilev, and visits the newly established forced labour camp in the area.

24-25 October 1941: In Odessa, Ukraine, thousands of Jews are massacred mostly by Romanian soldiers who under the orders of Ion Antonescu.

25 October 1941: Hitler’s commander-in-chief of the army, field-marshal Walther von Brauchitsch, issues the first directive detailing how partisan activity should be combated.  -  A member of Alfred Rosenberg's ministry, Erhard Wetzel, requests that members of the T4 Euthanasia Programme be transferred to the East so that their expertise in the use of murdering people with poisonous gas be employed in the gassing of Jews and other undesirables. It is here that gas vans are used to kill those deemed unworthy of life. - President Roosevelt denounces the executions of French hostages at the hands of the German authorities in occupied France.

26 October 1941: Friedrich Jeckeln, Higher SS and Police leader arrives in Riga to carry out his new duties. - The New York Times reports the massacre of least 15,000 Jews in Galicia by Germans and Ukrainians.

27 October 1941:  In an attempt to pacify the Czech workforce, Heydrich increases their fat rations to 400grams.  He had also promised to help increase their living standards so long as they stop trying to disrupt the country’s economy and later, he increased tobacco rations for certain workers.  Czech black-market foodstuffs that the Nazis had seized were handed to canteens that operated within the country’s armaments factories, and this policy of Heydrich’s would begin to make dividends as productivity, especially within these Czech armaments factories, gradually rose.

28 October 1941: The 11th Lithuanian Police Battalion arrive in Slutsk in order to liquidate the Jewish population, however, the district commissioner Heinrich Carl pleads with the police commander to allow him some time to sort out those essential Jewish workers from those who are not, at the beginning it looked like Carl had got his way but the police commander had a sudden change of heart and had all the Jews massacred.

29 October 1941: In Lithuania, some 9,000 Lithuanian Jewish men, women and children are taken from the Kaunas ghetto to the Ninth Fort near Kaunas and murdered.

30 October 1941: Bratislav Jews are expelled to rural Slovakia.

Late October 1941: Due to the horrendous wet and muddy weather conditions, the German assault towards Moscow comes to a virtual standstill. But when the frost arrives in November the German juggernaut continues to roll forward again.

Late October 1941: The Jewish Chronicle in London reports that thousands of Jews in the Ukraine have been murdered during pogroms.

November 1941: Alfred Rosenberg, Hitler’s Reich minister for the occupied territories notes: ‘Soviet rule has been eradicated in the occupied territories; the building of a new empire has begun’.

01 November 1941: The Nazis begin the construction of the death camp near the Polish village of Bełżec on the south-eastern border of Lublin district. The camp is 265m long and 275m wide and consisted of three areas: administrative area, reception zone, and extermination zone. Police Captain Christian Wirth, who had already gained particle experience with the T 4 euthanasia programme, became the camp’s first commander.

03 November 1941: In Amsterdam, Jewish markets are set-up.

07 November 1941: Up to 17,000 Jews from the ghetto in Minsk, Ukraine are taken to the Tuchinka ravine where they are murdered by the Nazis. - In Holland, Jews are banned from travelling or moving house without first gaining official permission.

09 November 1941: The Germans capture Yalta within the Crimean Peninsula

12 November 1941: In Romania, over 47,000 Jews are forced into forced labour, these slave labourers would be used for military projects.

14 November 1941: Generaloberst Erich von Manstein, commander of the 11th army operating in the Crimea is informed by his counter-intelligence that there is a well organised, centrally-controlled partisan unit operating in the southern part of the region, as a result he forms anti-partisan units to deal with the threat.

17 November 1941: Ernst Udet, one of Hermann Göring’s top Luftwaffe officials, commits suicide. - Some 944 Jews are deported from Berlin on transport train DO26 to the ghetto in Kovno (Kaunas).

18 November 1941: The Allies in North Africa begin their counteroffensive against Rommel's Africa Korps. - In Bremen, the German authorities deport some 971 Jews to Minsk on transport train DO56. – In Berlin, Joseph Goebbels notes in his diary that Reinhard Heydrich, Protector of Bohemia and Moravia plans to covert Theresienstadt into ghetto that will house German and Austrian Jewish war veteran pensioners until they can be successfully deported to the east.  The purpose of this policy was to pacify those citizens who objected to these Jews being sent eastwards.  The ghetto was to be used primary as an OAP ghetto and act as a transit centre for those Jews earmarked to be sent east wards.

Mid-November 1941: The New York Journal American reports of the murder of some 25,000 Jews (the figure was actually higher) by Germany’s allies, the Romanians in and around Odessa within the Soviet Union.

21 November 1941: In the east, Rostov falls to the Germans.

23 November 1941: In the east, Klin falls to the Germans.

24 November 1941: The Germans evacuate Rostov in the face of a Soviet counter-attack. - Theresienstadt ghetto is established in Czechoslovakia as a transit site for Czech Jews prior to their deportation to the killing centres in the East.

25 November 1941: At the Ninth Fort near Kaunas in Lithuania and under the jurisdiction of Karl Jäger, head of Einsatzkommando 3, (a unit of Einsatzgruppe A), had nearly 3,000 Jewish men, women and children murdered. These Jews were part of a trainload of Jews deported from the Reich and were the first group of Reich Jews to be massacred by members of Himmler's Einsatzgruppen. (See 29 November 1941).

29 November 1941: Karl Jäger, head of Einsatzkommando 3, has 2,000 Reich Jews shot within the Ninth Fort just outside Kaunas in Lithuania. This was the second batch of German Jews massacred at the fort within the space of a few day (see 25 November). After Himmler learnt of the killings, he put a temporary halt to the mass killing of German Jews as it was well known that veterans of the German army who had served the Fatherland during the Great War had also been butchered. It turned out these Reich Jews were originally meant to be put into existing ghettos and therefore not suffer death at the hands of Himmler's killing squads. As to date, no-one knows exactly who made the decision to have these Jews killed. Reinhardt Heydrich invited some high-ranking civil servants to a secret meeting tabled for the 9th December 1941 to discuss the ‘final solution to the Jewish question.’  However, due to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour on the 7th December, Heydrich reschedules the meeting to the 20^th January 1942 at Wannsee, just outside Berlin. - The Germans cross the Moska-Volga canal.

30 November 1941: The Nazis murder some 30,000 Jews at Rumbula, Latvia.

04 December 1941: Albert Speer meets with Reinhard Heydrich in Prague so as to secure more Czech slave labourers for the Reich’s arms industries.

04-05 December 1941: Operation Typhoon (the Germans drive towards Moscow) comes to a grinding halt as freezing weather sets in. - In Holland, all non-Dutch Jews are ordered to register for voluntary emigration.

06 December 1941: Using fresh divisions transferred from Siberia and under the command of Marshal Georgi Zhukov, the Soviets launch a counter attack against Army Group Centre, halting their assault on Moscow.

07 December 1941: Japan attacks Pearl Harbour.

08 December 1941: The Nazi authorities establish their first death camp at Chełmno (Kulmhof to the Germans). The camp was situated 60 km northwest of Lodz in Poland. The camps first commandant was SS-Hauptsturmführer (captain) Herbert Lange. Lange had gained valuable experience in the murder of mentally disabled people in Poland prior to his taking of command of the death camp. He had learnt to utilise the Nazis new invention, gas vans, where people were locked inside and exhaust fumes from the vehicle were piped into the back (carbon Monoxide). However, this killing process had its faults as the engines would break down whilst in use from time-to-time, and on numerous occasions the SS found would find some people still breathing after the gassing had taken place. The bodies would be then disposed of within the Rutkowski Forest which was located about 4 km away from the camp.

09 December 1941: Heydrich postpones a meeting concerning the final solution to the Jewish question after learning about the Japanese attack on the US base on Pearl Harbour.

10 December 1941: The German siege of Tobruk is lifted by the Allies.

11 December 1941: The German Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop summons the American charge d'affaires, Leland Morris and reads to him Germany’s declaration of War on the United States of America. Hitler had promised that if the Jews ever dragged Germany another World War, they would all be liquidated (see 30^th January 1939).  – Italy declares war on the USA.

12 December 1941: Hitler meets with some of his top party and government dignitaries where he reflected on the prophecy he gave on 30^th January 1939 where the Jews would see their destruction if they dragged Germany into another World War in relation to this, he asserted that it had indeed been the Jews fault that Germany was now engaged in a world-wide conflict and therefore they, as a race, must be dealt with accordingly.  Up to now, Jews were being either held in Nazi holding pens, such as ghettoes or concentration camps, or they were being liquidated within certain locales in an effort to deal with localised issues. With Hitler’s prophesy, the Jews were now in a more perilous situation, no matter where they were in Europe or North Africa. 

13 December 1941: Hungary alongside Bulgaria declare war on the United States.

14 December 1941: Heinrich Himmler meets with Victor Brack, a key member of Dr Karl Brandt's T4 Euthanasia Programme to discuss the further use of poisonous gas to kill those groups of people selected for death, such as the Jews.

15 December 1941: Klin and Kalinin are recaptured by the Red Army.

17 December 1941: German assault on Sevastopol begins.

18 December 1941: Himmler notes in his diary after a meeting with Hitler that the Jews are to be exterminated as partisans.

19 December 1941: Hitler appoints himself as commander of the Wehrmacht after sacking General Walther von Brauchitsch.

21 December 1941: Some 40,000 Jews are murdered by the Nazis at Bogdanovka.

22 December 1941: ‘Arcadia’ the code name for the Washington Conference which will last until 14th January 1942 begins. Here Winston Churchill and President Roosevelt, along with their military advisors plan out future strategies so as to co-ordinate their war efforts.

26 December 1941: The Red Army launches a counter-attack against the German forces in the Crimea.

28 December 1941: Teams of SOE trained Czech agents are parachuted into Czechoslovakia to help assist the Czech underground to reestablish communications with London and to be carry out ‘Operation Anthropoid’, the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich. Later, when the leaders of the Czech underground discovered that Heydrich was the target of Operation Anthropoid, they tried to get London to pull the plug on the operation fearing that the reprisals would cost thousands of Czech lives and maybe even wipe out any resistance groups operating within the country, they even asked for a different target if a political assassination had to take place.  London and the Czech President in exile Edvard Beneš, refused to cancel the operation or its target. 

30 December 1941: Soviet troops recapture Tula from the Germans.

 

[1] A non-belligerent state differs from a neutral one in that it may support certain belligerents in a war but is not directly involved in military operations (source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nonbelligerent#:~:text=A%20non%2Dbelligerent%20state%20differs,combat%20or%20aggression%20is%20likely.

[2] Adolf Hitler chose the name ‘Wolf’ for his headquarters as the name ‘Adolf’ is translated as ‘noble or majestic wolf’ in old German and as a child was occasionally referred to by his friends as ‘Wolfy’.

[3] Bacillary dysentery is a gastrointestinal disease caused by bacterial infection. Symptoms include severe diarrhoea, fever, stomach pain, nausea and vomiting. Source: https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/diseases/22617-bacillary-dysentery

[4] Wolf’s Lair. Inside Hitler’s East Prussian HQ. (2021 Reprint) Ian Baxter. The History Press. Cheltenham, UK. P.33-34.