Time Line #3 Jan 1942 - 08 may 1945

TimeLine #3 - 1942-08 may 1945

 

1942

January 1942: Nine governments-in-exile meet at St James’s Palace in London to discuss and sign a resolution condemning Germany’s naked aggression. They also call for a war-crimes trial to be set up after the war to try all Germans involved in atrocities during the conflict.

01 January 1942: In Holland, Jews are no longer allowed to employ non-Jewish domestic servants.

02 January 1942: The German 9th Army which has just retreated from Kalinin is ordered by Hitler to make no further withdrawals.

05 January 1942: Some 900 soviet partisans, including Red Army soldiers launch a large-scale offensive against the German 11th Army on the shore of the Black Sea. - In Holland, the Dutch council of Churches protest against German oppression against Jews.

07 January 1942: In Yugoslavia, Tito’s partisan forces are driven from Olovo by the Germans anti-partisan offensive. - The Red Army launches a counter-offensive north of Novgorod. Many of the German defenders are unable to fight because of frostbite.

09 January 1942: In Theresienstadt, nine Jewish men are hanged after being accused of trying to smuggle letters out of the ghetto, also in Theresienstadt, the first deportations from the ghetto to the east began - In Holland, Jews are banned from all public education facilities.

10 January 1942: In Amsterdam, the first transport of Jews is sent to work camps in the east.

12 January 1942: In Kiev, according to the ‘Operational Situation Report USSR No. 173’, the Germans execute 104 political prisoners, 75 saboteurs and looters, and about 8,000 Jews. The killings last 12 days. -  In Kovno, 5,000 Jews, who had been brought by train to the former Lithuanian capital from Germany and Austria are taken to the Ninth Fort in Lithuania and shot. -  The Germans deport some 19,582 Jews from Odessa to concentration camps. - The British merchant ship Cyclops is sunk off the eastern seaboard of the United States of America.

13 January 1942: Allied governments, including those in exile, sign the 'St James's Declaration' stating that members of the Axis forces guilty of committing war crimes will, after the war, be brought before a military tribunal to face judgement.  - In London, representatives of nine occupied countries meet to sign a declaration stating that people who commit war crimes will be brought to justice after the war. Among these nine was General de Gaulle of France and General Sikorski for Poland.

14 January 1942: In the White Russian village of Ushachi, the German killing squads murder some 807 Jews by driving them to an edge of a pit and shooting them. Local peasants who had witnessed the executions jumped into the pit to search the dead and dying for gold teeth to extract. - The Germans near the village of Kublichi, in Russia murder some 925 Jews. Like the peasants from Ushachi, the local peasants also search the dead and dying for their valuables. - The concentration and deportation begin of all Jews in occupied Holland begins.

16 January 1942: The Nazis deport more than 10,000 Jews from the ghetto of Łódź to the death camp at Chełmno.

16-29 January 1942: In Łódź, Chaim Rumkowski and his Judenrat [ghetto Council] along with the Jewish ghetto police assist the Nazis in rounding up some 10,000 Jews earmarked for deportation to the death camp at Chełmno. Most of those picked by Rumkowski and his friends on the council were opponents or were simply those deemed as criminals, many others were picked because they were weak or poor and others because they were labelled 'workshy'. No friends or sponsors of Rumkowski were selected. 

17 January 1942: The British destroyer Matabele, whilst on escort duty with the Murmansk convoy, is torpedoed and sunk with the loss of 247 men.

18 January 1942: The Red Army parachute 1,643 soldiers behind German lines south-east and south-west of Vyazma, were they link up with partisan units. Their aim is to disrupt enemy communications and supply lines.

19 January 1942: Reinhard Heydrich dismisses members of the Czech government that he had inherited and which had been kept in place to help administer the country when he had taken over as the country’s Protectorate and puts most of his own men in place, men who would ask no questions or attempt to delay or sabotage his policies concerning the Protectorate. Those Czech’s that remained in the government that Heydrich didn’t fully trust, but was seen as an extremely important tool, was watched carefully so as to ensure their compliance. 

20 Jan 1942: A secret meeting is held at Grossen-Wannsee in Berlin where top bureaucrats met to discuss Reinhard Heydrich’s policy concerning the Endlösung (the Final Solution of the Jewish question) and the role German state departments will be expected to play in that final solution.  The meeting was chaired by Himmler’s number two, SS-Obergruppenführer (lt-general) Reinhardt Heydrich. Adolf Eichmann was also present at this meeting. - The Red Army recaptures the German positions at Mozhaisk, thus acting as a shield against any German drive against Moscow. - Jakub Grojanowski, a young Jew, having escaped from a work detail at the death camp at Chełmno, which was being forced to bury the bodies of Jews whom had just been gassed within sealed vans, reached the nearby village of Grabow. Seeking out the local rabbi, Grojanowski told him what he had seen and what he had been forced to do, which also included the burial of his own family.

21-22 January 1942: At Novi Sad (Ujvidék), Serbia, Hungarian troops murdered some 700 Jews. 

23 January 1942: Hungarian soldiers at Novi Sad on the Danube, force 550 Jews and 292 Serbs onto the frozen part of the river. Then they shelled them until the ice broke from under their feet and all drowned in the ice-cold water. - A group of young Lithuanian Jews in Vilna meet to set up a resistance group. They intend to target German military installations within the area. -  In Holland, Jews are banned from using motor vehicles and they are ordered to carry identification cards with the letter ‘J’ imprinted on it. -  The Red Army recapture Kholm and virtually encircle the German controlled Rzhev.

24 January 1942: The Red Army re-crosses the river Donets. -  The Nazis deport a further 30,000 Jews from the ghetto of Lodz to the death camp at Chełmno.

26 January 1942: The Irish Prime Minister protests at the arrival of American troops that are to be stationed in Northern Ireland. - In Yugoslavia, the Germans force several hundred Jewish men, women and children on a forced march through blistering winter weather from Ruma to a concentration camp at Sajmiste. Mothers try to keep their children warm but to no avail.  The children whom freeze to death are quickly buried in the snow, their mothers hoping that come spring, and other people will give their children a decent burial.

27 February 1942: Rudolf Höss, with his architect Karl Bischoff and Hans Kammler, head of the SS Central Building Office decides to move the location of the crematorium, which had been planned for Auschwitz 1 to the new camp at Birkenau (Auschwitz II).

29 January 1942: In North Africa, Germany’s Erwin Rommel’s Afrika Korps occupies Benghazi.

30 January 1942: Phillip Bouhler and Joseph Goebbels discuss the making of an educational film to promote and justify a state sponsored euthanasia programme which should be shown to the general population in an effort to get them to become sympathetic to such a policy. 

31 January 1942: An Operational Situation Report USSR No. 170 is sent from Berlin to more than 60 recipients. The reports states that within the last six days, in the Crimea, 3,601 people were shot; 3,286 of these were Jews, 152 Communists and NKVD (secret police) agents, 84 partisans and 79 looters, saboteurs, and asocial elements. In all, to date 85,201’ have been murdered. - Since the siege of Leningrad began, it is estimated that some 200, 00 civilians have either frozen or starved to death.

01 February 1942: In Loknya, Russia, the Germans murder the last remaining 38 Jews and Gypsies of that area. - British intelligence suffers from its worse setback of the war when the German Submarine Command, as part of its internal security drive, changed its Enigma settings in such a way that made it impossible for the British to read their secret messages for the rest of the year.

08 February 1942:  Fritz Todt, the Reich Minister for Armaments and War Production dies as the plane he is traveling on crashes on take-off near Hitler's headquarters at Rastenburg, east Prussia.

09 February 1942: Hitler appoints Albert Speer Minister of Armaments and War Production. - The German anthropologist and surgeon, Auguste Hirte, head of the Anatomy Institute, which had just been set up at the University of Strasbourg, writes to Heinrich Himmler. In the letter he states, ‘By procuring the skulls of the Jewish-Bolshevik commissars, who represent the prototype of the repulsive but characteristic subhuman, one has the chance to obtain palpable scientific data. The best practical method is to turn over alive all such individuals. Followed induced death of the Jew, the head, which should not be damaged, should be separated from the body and sent in a hermetically sealed tin can filled with preservative fluid’. Himmler gave Hirte the authority he needed. Hirte used the skulls of more than a hundred murdered Jews to pursue his medical-scientific work.

16 February 1942: Five of Germany’s largest submarines are sent across the Atlantic to attack Allied shipping off the coast of America, from Trinidad to New York.

19 February 1942: The British government receives a report from Sweden, which had been sent by a leading Swedish expert on euthanasia, who had just returned from a visit to Germany. He writes about one asylum where the Nazis have murdered 1,200 people by poison.

20 February 1942: In the east, the Soviet offensive against the German lines runs out of steam and comes to a halt.

23 February 1942: A British submarine the ‘Trident’ torpedoes the German heavy cruiser Prinz Eugen. Though the Eugen is not sunk, she losses 50 men from the attack.

24 February 1942: Russian forces surround a German Army Corps South-east of Staraya.

March 1942: In Warsaw, the Gestapo arrests a German musician on his way to Prague.  A search of his suitcase uncovered a sniper’s rifle and a silencer attachment.  After a few days of intensive interrogations [torture], the man confessed to be an assassin who had been sent by Mocow to Prague to assassinate Reinhard Heydrich.

March 1942: In Russia, the Nazis launch Operation Marsh Fever, an anti-partisan sweep. Its commander, General Friedrich Jeckeln, is able to report to Berlin at the successful conclusion of the operation. Some 389 partisans killed, 1,274 persons shot on suspicion, 8,350 Jews liquidated.

March 1942: Paul Thümmel, (agent A-54) is rearrested by the Gestapo and held within the Theresienstadt concentration camp.

March 1942: The German doctor, Sigmund Rascher, conducts a medical experiment on a 37-year-old Jew, who was deemed ‘to be in good condition.’ Dr Rascher placed the man alive in a specially built chamber in which the doctor simulated altitude gradually reaching 12 kilometres. The suffering and death of the Jew was meticulously recorded. His notes indicated that the Jew perspired, then he developed cramp, after which he became breathless before becoming unconscious and in turn died. Dr Rascher informs Himmler that this experiment was the first observed experiment on a live human being. The above-described actions, Rascher went on to explain, will merit particular scientific interest because they were recorded until the very last moment by an electro- cardiogram. Dr Rascher conducted 200 such experiments and it is believed that at least 80 victims died. In his 24-page report to Himmler, he sets out his conclusions. He stated with assurance that flying without pressure suits and oxygen was impossible above 12 kilometres.

March-April 1942: The Germans establish the Sobibor death camp in the Lublin area of Poland. The camp’s function is to liquidate the local Jewish population primarily by gassing within specially built chambers. The carbon monoxide which was generated by diesel engines placed outside the gas chambers was piped into the rooms. The camp had at its peak 6 gas chambers, each being able to hold at least 180 men, women and children. The camp’s first commandant Franz Stangl had been involved in Hitler’s euthanasia programme (T4). Stangl commanded at least 30 SS men and some 200 to 300 Ukrainian guards.

01 March 1942: The Soviets launch a new offensive in the Crimea against the Germans still holding out. - Field Marshal Fedor von Bock, the recently appointed commander of Army Group South, informs Hitler that despite their huge losses in battle, the Russians might still be able, not only to draw on enough reserve troops to counter the German spring offensive, but also to create new armies east of Moscow. General Halder disagrees with Bock’s assessment. General Halder gives Hitler an estimated account of German casualties thus far on the eastern front. In the eight months since June 1941, 202,257 German soldiers have been killed, 725,642 wounded and 112,617 incapacitated by frostbite. A further 400,000 have been taken prisoners by the Soviets.

02 March 1942: At least 5,000 Jews are taken from the Minsk ghetto by the Nazis and murdered.

03 March 1942: The RAF attacks the German controlled Renault factory at Billan Court, just outside Paris. Some 623 people lay dead with a further 1,500 injured.

04 March 1942: In White Russia, 3,000 Jews are taken from the ghetto at Baranowicze by the Nazis and murdered. Within the last 48 hours, the Nazis have murdered some 12,000 people.

05 March 1942: In the Crimean town of Feodosiya, the Germans launch three anti-partisan sweeps, and according to the Operation Situation Report No 184, ‘678 were Jews, 359 Communist officials, 153 partisans and 810 asocial elements, i.e., Gypsies, mentally ill and saboteurs.

06 March 1942: At Klinstsy, 30 Gypsies and 270 Jews are brought by truck to a ditch outside the town, ordered to undress and shot.

07 March 1942: In Zagreb, Archbishop Stepinac, writes to the Croatian Minister of the Interior about rumours of a Nazi round up of Jews in the area. Stepinac pleads with the Minister to try to stop the round up if true, stating that these citizens are not guilty of any crime. His appeal is in vain.

08 March 1942: The RAF, using 211 bombers carries out a raid on Essen in Germany.

16 March 1942: Operation Reinhard (Aktion Reinhard) is put into action. This operation was simply the systematic slaughter of Europe’s undesirables within specially built death camps [Chełmno, Sobibor, Treblinka, Majdanek, Bełżec and Auschwitz-Birkenau], starting off with Poland’s Jews.

17 March 1942: Bełżec extermination camp becomes operational.

18 April 42: The SD, in a report mentions rumours concerning parachutists who have already landed in the Protectorate of Moravia and Bohemia to carry out acts of sabotage, and these rumours suggested that theses parachutists were also in the country to formulate a plan to assassinate the Reich Protector himself. 

19 March 1942: Hitler summons Goebbels to the Wolfs Lair to discuss food rationing.  - The Germans launch ‘Operation Munich’, an assault on partisan bases throughout the Yelnya-Dorogobuzh area of Russia.

20 March 1942: In the Polish town of Zgierz, one hundred Poles are seized and taken to a nearby labour camp to be shot. All 6,000 inhabitants of Zgierz are marched to the market place and forced to watch the execution. - In Holland, Jews are no longer allowed to dispose of furniture or other household goods.

21 March 1942: Hitler appoints Ernst Friedrich Christoph Fritz Sauckel as General Plenipotentiary for Labour Deployment (Generalbevollmächtigter für den Arbeitseinsatz). He would use his new powers to conscript millions of foreign workers as virtual slave labour in German factories at home and within the occupied territories.

24 March 1942: The first deportations of Slovakian Jews to Auschwitz-Birkenau begins.

25 March 1942: The Luftwaffe carries out its first test flight of their Me-262 twinjet fighter.  - In Holland, The German controlled administration bans marriage between Jews and non-Jews.

26 March 1942: The Slovakian Jews who have been deported from Slovakia a few days prior arrive within Auschwitz-Birkenau. 

26-27 March 1942: Some 1,112 Jews are deported from France to Auschwitz.

27 March 1942: The French and Germans send their first transport of Jews to Auschwitz.  This transport is predominately made up of foreign Jews. - In Holland, the Nazi-style Nuremberg Laws come into effect.

28 March 1942: British naval and commando forces carry out ‘Operation Chariot’, an attack on the German dry-docks at St Nazaire. - In an attempt to tie down as many Russian troops as possible, Joachim von Ribbentrop presses the Japanese Ambassador in Berlin, Count Oshima, to secure a Japanese attack on Russia. The Japanese ignore Ribbentrop’s request. - The RAF launches 234 bombers against the German Baltic Port of Lubeck.

April 1942: Auguste Spitz, Marianne Grunfeld and Therese Steiner, three Jews living on occupied Guernsey are deported to Nazi controlled Eastern Europe. Like most occupied territories, local government and police officials co-operated with the Nazi persecution and deportation of their Jew communities, British territory was exception.

01 April 1942: In Amsterdam, Jews are no longer allowed to use the town hall to get married in.

08 April 1942: According to a German Einsatzgruppen report, there are no more Jews left in the Crimea.

10 April 1942: In an agreement with the Slovakian Prime Minister Vojtech Tuka, Heydrich agrees to take all of Slovakia's unwanted Jews with the provision that the Slovakian government pay the Reich 500 Reichsmarks per-Jew so as to cover costs of their removal. 

20 April 1942: In Germany, Jews are forbidden to use public transport.

23 April 1942: Himmler meets with Hitler, possibly to discuss the systematic murder of Europe’s Jews and other undesirables.  Though no record has survived, some historians believe that it was at this meeting alongside the next meeting which took place on the 3^rd may, that the decision to murder all Jews was cemented[1].

 24 April 1942:  In Holland, the Nazis close down most Jewish butchers.

26 April 1942: Hitler reconvenes the Reichstag in Berlin with the sole purpose of attaining the legal right to dismiss from office anyone he wished, especially judges. In doing so, Hitler has now become the law of the land.

30 April 1942: The Nazis establish a Jewish ghetto at Pińsk, Western Belarus.

Early May 1942: The Nazis carry out their first mass killing of Jews at the Sobibor death camp.

03 May 1942: Hitler meets again with Himmler (see 23 April 1942) - Jews in the Netherlands are forced to wear the Star of David.

12 May 1942: In Holland, Jews are banned from holding any post office accounts.

18 May 1942: The New York Times publishes an article claiming that the Germans have murdered some 200,000 Jews in eastern Europe.

21 May 1942: The Jewish underground movement within the Warsaw Ghetto manage to get a letter to London claiming that the Germans were systematically murdering the Jewish population and that the Germans were using gas vans to help liquidate thousands of Jews. - In Holland, Jews are ordered to hand in all assets and possessions valued at fl.250 and above by.

27 March 1942: Reinhard Heydrich is severally wounded in an assassination attempt in Prague, Czechoslovakia.  - In France, the first trainload of Jews from Paris to Auschwitz begins. - Four Allied ships, scattered from their destroyer escort by a ferocious storm, are attacked and sunk by the Germans.

29 May 1942: In Holland, Jews are banned from fishing.

30 May 1942: The Italians open the Mamula concentration camp within Montenegro.

31 may 1942: Heinrich Himmler visits Reinhard Heydrich in his hospital room in Prague and has a brief conversation with him. - An angry Hitler telephones Hermann Göring, commander of the Luftwaffe, demanding to know how the RAF could launch a massive bombing raid on Cologne. Göring dismisses the number of planes that were used claiming that no more than 70 planes had taken part in the bombing even though Goebbels had put the figure to about 250-300 and with Churchill stating that at least 1,000 planes at taken part in the raid.

01 June 1942: In France and the Netherlands, the wearing of the Star of David becomes compulsory for the Jews.  The Italians open the Monigo concentration camp in northern Italy. This camp was established to hold Jews because they were Jews, but to hold civilians deemed a threat to the fascist authority.

02 June 1942: The BBC's European station broadcasts report on the mass murder of Europe's Jews at the hands of the Nazis.  - The Germans launch a fresh assault on the Soviet controlled city of Sevastopol. - The Nazis start to deport German Jews to Theresienstadt.

03 June 1942: Reinhard Heydrich’s condition worsens sharply due to doctors’ inability to deal with his septicaemia. 

04 June 1942: Reinhard Heydrich succumbs to his wounds and dies at 9 o’clock in the morning. - 

07 June 1942: German authorities in occupied France order all Jews over the age of six to wear the Star of David with the word 'Juif ' (Jew) on it.

09 June 1942: The mobile gassing vans are used in the Latvian capital, Riga, to help liquidate the city’s Jews. - Heinrich Himmler is informed by Horst Böhme, who was the chief of the Protectorate’s Security Police and SD, alleging some people from the Czech village of Lidice had given the assassins of Reinhard Heydrich support when they were dropped by parachute into the country and that a couple of households there had links to the Czech resistance movement.

10 June 1942: In revenge for the assassination of Heydrich, the Czech village of Lidice is razed to the ground with all of its men executed and the women and children sent to concentration camps. Some of the children, whom the Nazis deemed suitable for Germanisation were sent to live with German families within the Reich (only 9 children were sent to be raised as good Germans). All livestock, including family pets were destroyed.

11 June 1942: Michael Kitzelmann, a serving German officer who had been serving on the Eastern Front is executed by firing squad for making anti-Nazi comments in which he said, “If these criminals should win, I would have no wish to live any longer." - A meeting in Berlin, which is chaired by Adolf Eichmann; spells out that some 10,000 Belgian Jews, 15,000 Dutch Jews and 100,000 French Jews are to transported to the death Auschwitz.

12 June 1942: In Holland, Jews are banned from purchasing fruit and vegetables from non-Jewish shops. They are also ordered to hand in all bicycles and any other forms of transport that they may have. On top of this They are forbidden to take part in any sports. Anne Frank begins keeping a diary.

16 June 1942: New transports of Jews are shipped off from Slovakia to Auschwitz in Poland. The first transports are mainly carrying able-bodied men whom the Nazis have decided to use as slave labour, the rest are mostly earmarked for the death. - Karel Čurda, one of the Czech parachutists that had been dropped into the Protectorate a few months back, walked into Petscek Palace, the headquarters of the gestapo and in an effort to protect his family from serious reprisals that were being meted out in relation to the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich, handed himself in.  Čurda did not know where his co-assassins were hiding but did hand over the names of the Czech resistance fighters alongside their addresses, which included the details of the Moravec family in Žižkov in Prague who had allowed their own home to be used as a safe house for Jozef Gabčík and Jan Kubiš, the two men who carried out the assassination.

17 June 1942: The Gestapo round up all the people that Karel Čurda, one of the Czech parachutists dropped in the Protectorate earlier in the year had given them in an effort to have the Gestapo to spare his own family, including members of the Moravec family (those who gave shelter to the assassins). Marie Moravec managed to commit suicide when the Gestapo arrived, however they managed to seize her husband, who was unaware that his wife was involved within the resistance movement and he also didn’t know what Jozef Gabčík and Jan Kubiš had been planning, they also captured her son Vlastimil, and after hours of torture, the Gestapo showed the teenager his mother’s decapitated head sitting in a fishtank and promised him that his father’s head would be removed next if he did not supply them with all the relevant information they required. This cruel act broke Vlastimil, and he told them that they were hiding out within the church of St Cyril and Methodius in the centre of Prague.

18 June 1942: The Gestapo and other security agencies surrounded the church of St Cyril and Methodius in the centre of Prague in an effort to capture the assassins of Reinhard Heydrich alive.  After managing to kill the Czech resistance fighters who were on watch above the crypt, they discovered that other members of the resistance were hiding within the crypt itself and after those trapped below refused to give themselves up, the Germans used tear gas and even flooded the crypt, hoping that they would be forced to surrender, but no avail and the firefight resumed. Eventually, those fighters who survived the gassing and flooding decided to commit suicide rather than be caught, and as a result, they shot themselves in the head. The priest who ran the church, Vladimir Petrek was arrested and held for further questioning.

19 June 1942: Alois Eliáš, the ex-puppet Prime Minister for German occupied Bohemia and Moravia [the Czech Protectorate] is executed by the Nazis because of his continued links with the Czech government -in-exile and because he also supported the resistance movement within the Protectorate.

20 June 1942: Kazimierz (Kazik) Piechowski, a polish political prisoner; Eugeniusz (Genek) Bendera, a Ukrainian who worked in the SS garage, Josef Lempart a priest and Stanislaw Jaster, a youth from Warsaw, manage to acquire SS uniforms and a vehicle and successfully drive out of Auschwitz to freedom. The only person to be punished for the escape of these four prisoners was their block Kapo, who was sent to Block 11 to be starved to death.

22 June 1942: The Nazis carry out their first transport of Jews from Drancy concentration camp to Auschwitz death camp.

25 June 1942: The British daily newspaper the Daily Telegraph reported that, according to its sources, hundreds of thousands of Polish Jews had been murdered in such places as Chełmno. – The Czech village of Ležáky, is destroyed and most of its inhabitants are shot by the Nazis and their Czech collaborators after a radio transmitter had been discovered in the village which belong to the resistance group known as, ‘Operation Siver A’ that had also been parachuted into the country around the same time as the team that had assassinated Reinhard Heydrich.  Those children of Ležáky, who could not be Germanized [raised as Germans] were dispatched to the gas chambers at Chełmno.

26 June 1942: In the Ukraine, a German death squad shoots some 8,000 Jews from the Lwów Ghetto within the interior of the Janowska concentration camp, situated just on the outskirts of the city. - The Nazis inform the Dutch Jewish Council of the first planned deportation of Jews from Holland.

28 June 1942: In Croatia, the Italians open up the Molat concentration camp to hold civilians deemed a threat to their authority. - Hitler launches’ Operation Blue’, the codename for the second summer offensive in the Soviet Union. The operational plan is to drive south towards Stalingrad and into the Caucasus. If successful, Stalin would be deprived of his much-needed oil supplies that came from the Caucus region thus delivering a devastating economic blow against the Soviet Union’s ability to wage war against Hitler’s attacking armies.

30 June 1942: In Holland, an 8pm curfew on Jews is imposed and they are also banned from using public transport.

01 July 1942: In Holland, the German security police take control of the Dutch-run Westerbork concentration camp which had been set-up to hold German-born Jews who had fled Germany to Holland prior to the war, it would now to be used as a transit camp where Jews would be held for a short period of time before being shipped off to the east.

02 July 1942: At a meeting between the Vichy police chief, Rene Bousquet and Nazi officials, Bousquet notifies his guests that only foreign Jews in France could be deported and that the Germans would have to deport them without the assistance of the French police. The Germans protest strongly and use threats to persuade the French to change their minds. The Police chief buckles under the pressure from the Nazi officials and the Vichy French agree to help the Germans deport all their foreign Jews.

03 July 1942: The German army finally captures Sevastopol from the Soviets.

04 July 1942: Systematic selections begin at the rail ramps at Auschwitz-Birkenau after the arrival of transports. Those deemed unfit, too young or too old or sick are sent to their deaths in the gas chambers, the others are used as slave labourers.

06 July 1942: In Holland, Jews are no longer allowed to use telephones or visit non-Jews.

10 July 1942:  In a cable to Adolf Eichmann, he was asked what is to be done with the 4,000 children held at the Drancy concentration camp in France. He replies by stating that as soon as transportation can be dispatched to the east, "Transports of children would be able to roll." A later cable from Eichmann's office determined the children would be transported to Auschwitz.

14 July 1942: Jews from the occupied Low Countries (Belgium, Holland and Luxemburg) are deported to the death camps in the east.

15 July 1942: In Holland, the first deportation of Jews from Westerbork to Auschwitz begins.

16 July 1942: Hitler moves his headquarters temporary from the Wolf’s Lair to a secret location at Vinnitsa in the Ukraine which was known by its codename ‘Werewolf’. The Germans and the French police in Paris begin the round up of Jews within the city.

17 July 1942: In Holland, the Nazis impose new restrictions on the Jews. They may only shop between the hours 3pm and 5pm and from certain streets within The Hague and Scheveningen. - 17/18 July 1942: Heinrich Himmler visits Auschwitz-Birkenau to inspect the way in which his lieutenants-of-death are carrying out his murderous instructions. He witnesses the selection of newly arrived prisoners and their death in a gas chamber and authorises a flogging of one of the women in the camp. He is so impressed that he promotes the camp commandant Rudolf Höss to Obersturmbannführer (Lt-Colonel).

19 July 1942: Himmler instructs his Higher SS-und polizeiführer (HSSPF) Wilhelm Kruger who was based in Cracow, to resettle the entire Jewish population of the General-Government (occupied Poland) by 31 December 1942. What the instructions meant to the Jewish population was death within one of the Nazi’s six death camps.

21 July 1942: After a string of rumours about an appending 'action', Adam Czerniaków, chairman of the Warsaw Ghetto's Judenrat (Jewish Council) is held along with his wife by the Germans.  He is later released. - In America there is a mass rally against German brutality within the occupied countries. - In Poland, the Nazis finish building the death camp at Treblinka and mass deportations from Warsaw ghetto to Treblinka begins the next day.

23 July 1942: Treblinka opens up its doors and begins to systematically murder the Jews deported from the Warsaw ghetto and as a result of the deportations the Warsaw Judenrat Chairman, Adam Czerniaków, commits suicide because of the deportations and Mark Lichtenbaum replaces him as chairman and begins assisting SS-Sturmbannführer (Major) Hermann Höfle, who had set up his headquarters inside the ghetto on Leszno Street, in clearing the ghetto of Jews. Over the next few weeks many of the Jewish Order police, which helped the Germans to round up their co-religionists are regarded as beasts as they beat and stole from their fellow captives.

25 July 1942: In a radio broadcast from London, the Dutch Prime Minister urges his countrymen to help the Jews as much as they can.

28 July 1942: The Jewish Fighting Organisation (ZOB) is formed in Warsaw to combat against the deportations.

30 July 1942: The German industrialist Eduard Schulte, from Breslau meets with a Swiss business acquaintance in Zurich where the German informs the Swiss about the Nazi policy of concentrating all of Europe’s Jews in the east so that they could kill them in specially built gas chambers and dispose their bodies in crematoriums specially built for the purpose. He estimated that between 3.5 million and 4 million Jews are to be murdered by the Nazis. He urges the Swiss man to get this information to the British Prime Minister, Winston Churchill and to the American President as soon as possible.

August 1942: The three crematorium ovens that had been earmarked for Mogilev are sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau to be used in the disposal of murdered victims.

01 August 1942: Adolf Eichmann instructs the SD in Brussels that all stateless Jews from Belgium are to be deported. The final destination of these Jews is Auschwitz.

05 August 1942: Dr Korczak, leads 200 children from the orphanage within the Warsaw ghetto to the Umschlagplatz (collection point) to await deportation and death.

09 August 1942: German Army Group ‘A’ reaches the Maikop oilfields in the Caucasus.

10 August 1942: Jews from Lvov are deported to the German death camp at Belzec.

11 August 1942: The German 6th Army reaches the Don.

19 August 1942: The Allies launch an amphibious assault on the Normandy coast at Dieppe. The assault was a disaster with the Allies losing nearly 50 percent of their force to the German defenders.

20 August 1942: Jozef Szerynski, Commander of the Jewish ghetto police (Order Service) is shot and wounded by a member of the Jewish resistance organisation ZOB (Zydowska Organizacja Bejowa) for collaborating with the Germans. 

23 August 1942: The German 14th Panzer Corp reaches Stalingrad as the Luftwaffe launches 600 bombers against the city.

26 - 28 August 1942: In Vichy France, some 7,000 Jews are seized and handed over to the Germans for deportation to the east.

26 August 1942: In Bulgaria, Jews are ordered to wear the Star of David.

End August 1942: Stalin makes Zhukov Deputy Supreme Commander and answerable only to him.

Aug-September 1942: The killing process at the Sobibor death camp is stopped whilst the main rail line undergoes repairs.

September 1942: Franz Stangle replaces the incompetent Irmfried Eberl as camp commandant at the Treblinka death camp.

02 September 1942: The Battle for Stalingrad begins.

03 September 1942: An armed Jewish resistance to the Germans takes place in Lachva, Belarus.

05 September 1942: The Orthodox priest, Vladimir Petrek, who had allowed his church to be used to hide the assassins of Reinhard Heydrich and other Czech resistance fighters is executed by the Germans at Kobylisy, Prague. Other clergy members, including Bishop Gorazd Pavlík, who had accepted responsibility for his church being used to hide the assassins were also executed a day or two before Petrek’s execution.

10 September 1942: The German 48th Panzer Corp joins in for the battle for Stalingrad.

18 September 1942: In Germany, food rations for the Jewish population is greatly reduced.

22 September 1942: The entire 6th Army, some 200,000 men under the command of General von Paulus are completely encircled by Soviet troops at Stalingrad.

24 September 1942: As part of the ongoing actions within France to deport non-French Jews, the French police round up some 1,594 Romanian Jews.  - General Franz Halder, Chief of Staff is sacked after telling Hitler that the Soviets are producing no fewer than 1,200 tanks a month and could easily recruit at least 1.5 million fresh troops to combat the German advance. Hitler, unhappy at what he sees as Halder’s defeatist attitude replaces him with the 47-year-old Major-General Kurt Zeitzler. Keitel believed that Hitler had promoted the wrong man but Göring backed the appointment. Zeitzler was simply a ‘yes man’ and would do exactly as told. - A Jewish uprising against the Germans in the Tuchin ghetto begins.

Early October 1942: Joseph Goebbels and Albert Speer present their joint plan for total mobilisation of the country’s manpower and resources. Hitler promises to act but fails to do so.

07 October 1942: The United Kingdom government alongside the United States government announce that a United Nations War Crimes Commission will to be set up with the sole purpose of collecting evidence of war crimes and to ensure that all those accused of such crimes would one day be brought to justice.

15-23 October 1942: The Tractor factory in Stalingrad is heavily fought over but finally taken by the Germans.

18 October 1942: Hitler issues his 'Commando Order' which stipulated that all British commandos or parachutists apprehended by the Wehrmacht were to be immediately handed over to the Sicherheitsdienst (SD) for liquidation.

23 October 1942: The British launch a counter-offensive against Rommel’s Afrika Korp at El Alamein.

27 October 1942: The roundup of all adult male Jews in Norway begins.

28 October 1942: The Germans start to deport the Jews from Theresienstadt to Auschwitz.

29 October 1942: In Pińsk, Belarus some 16,000 ghetto Jews are murdered by the Nazis.

November 1942: British cryptologists read a top-secret message that had been sent from the concentration camp of Auschwitz asking for 600 gas masks to equip its new guards

01 November 1942: Hitler Leaves his headquarters within the Ukraine [Werewolf] and returns to the Wolf’s Lair near Rastenburg. - The Germans start to deport the Jews from the Bialystok district to Auschwitz.

05 November 1942: The German Afrika Korps suffers a massive defeat at the Battle of El Alamein as Erwin Rommel orders his Axis forces to begin retreating.  In France and in collaboration with the Germans, the French police seize some 1,060 Greek Jews for deportation east. 

06 November 1942: Heinrich Himmler gives his support to a plan to set up a collection of Jewish skeletons especially the skulls at the Reich Anatomical Institute in Strasbourg near Natzweiler.

08 November 1942: The Allied forces in North Africa invade Morocco and Algeria which was still under the control of France.

10 November 1942: The last attempt to clear Stalingrad from Soviet troops by von Paulus’s troops begins.

11 November 1942: In response to the Allies moving into French Morocco and Algeria the Germans occupy Vichy France. - Heinrich Himmler instructs SS-Obergruppenführer Friedrich Jeckeln to exterminate all remaining Jews in the Baltic States (renamed by the Nazis to Ostland). Some high-ranking Nazi officials became alarmed at the thought of liquidating their Jewish slave labour and tried to get a reprieve for their much-needed Jewish labour force.

16 November 1942: German Gypsies are deported to Auschwitz.

17 November 1942: Adolf Eichmann sends a letter to the Foreign Ministry requesting that Bulgaria be approached so that deportation of Bulgarian Jewry can begin, "As part of the process of the general solution of the European Jewish problem."

19 November 1942: Zhukov launches ‘Operation Uranus’; a major counter-offensive around Stalingrad. The German 6th Army becomes entrapped within the city.

20 November 1942: Hitler discusses the situation about his 6th Army’s entrapment in Stalingrad with Göring by telephone. Göring was unduly alarmed by the news and felt things would improve in time.

23 November 1942: Hitler, after spending time at Berchtesgaden, returns to his Wolf’s Lair near Rastenburg.

25 November 1942: Adolf Eichmann’s office informs the commander of the SD in Oslo that all Norwegian Jews are to be deported to Auschwitz.

26 November 1942: In Norway, the Germans alongside their Norwegian collaborators begin the deportations of the country's Jewish population. Some 532 men, women and children are shipped off to Auschwitz onboard the cargo ship SS Donau with a further 26 from Oslo onboard the passenger ship the MS Monte Rosa.

27 November 1942: The French scuttle all their ships anchored at the Toulon naval base to prevent them falling into enemy hands as the German troops and tanks roll into the naval base.  - The Polish government-in-exile in London receive a report from the Polish underground on the liquidation of thousands of Jews and Soviet POWs in specially built gas chambers in the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp complex.

30 November 1942: The Nazis begin the liquidation of the Jewish Ghetto in Riga.

12 December 1942: Operation ‘Winter Storm’ begins as Erich von Manstein attempts to relieve von Paulus’s beleaguered troops caught in Stalingrad but the operation ends in failure.

17 December 1942: The Allied governments issue a joint declaration denouncing Nazi-Germany’s mass killing of Europe’s Jews and promises to bring all those responsible to justice after the war.

18 December 1942: Count Galeazzo Cianon, the Italian foreign minister arrives at the Wolf’s Lair, Hitler rants at him, accusing the Italians of being too weak a fighting force at Stalingrad, thus allowing the Russians to encircle Stalingrad, entrapping Paulis and his men. Whilst having tea, Cianon informed Hitler that Mussolini was considering looking for a political settlement with Stalin, but Hitler ruled this out and made it clear that Mussolini too must also rule out that idea.  

24 December 1942: Operation ‘Winter Storm’ fails to achieve its aim and so the attempt to relieve the 6^th Army trapped in Stalingrad is called off.

31 December 1942: The 'Bakar' concentration camp in Yugoslavia is opened. - A cable is intercepted by the British which contains the statistics of the death tally of the Operation Reinhard death camps. They are: Majdanek 24,733; Sobibor 101,370; Bełżec 434,508; Treblinka 713,555. Total murdered to date 1,274,166.

 

1943

02 January 1943: Friedrich von Bodelschwingh, Christian theologian from the Bethel psychiatric hospital contacts Dr Karl Brandt after hearing rumours that all patients, within all Reich institutions will have to be registered and those lists be sent to Brandt's office. Bodelschwingh, wanted clarification and if they were planning to restart the euthanasia programme.  Bodelschwingh warned Brandt that local people and families would find out and advised him against such a policy.

08 January 1943: Joseph Goebbels, Albert Speer and Walther Funk goes through the draft document for total war with Hans Lammers, Wilhelm Keitel and Hitler’s personal secretary Martin Bormann

10 January 1943: The Soviets initiate ‘Operation Ring’. The operation is designed to squeeze the remainder of von Paulus’s 6th Army, still trapped in Stalingrad.

13 January 1943: Hitler signs a decree ordering the German nation to adopt total war.

14 January 1943: Field Marshal Erhard Milch is ordered by Hitler to take personal command for the Stalingrad airlift.

14-24 January 1943: Prime Minister Winston Churchill, and President Franklin D. Roosevelt and General Charles de Gaulle representing the Free French, attend a conference at Casablanca in Free French Morocco, to discuss the next phase of the war. Due to the ongoing battle at Stalingrad, Joseph Stalin decided not to attend. It was at this conference that the leaders agreed that there would be no separate peace treaties signed with Nazi Germany, and that all were all unanimous in calling for the unconditional surrender of Germany.

16 January 1943: In Holland, the first Jews arrive in the Vught concentration camp.

18 January 1943: Hitler appoints a committee to oversee his decree for ‘total war.’ - Jews from the Warsaw Ghetto rebel against forced deportations. After fierce fighting the Germans withdrew from the Ghetto bewildered and humiliated.

18-22 January 1943: A revolt begins in the Warsaw Ghetto against the deportations to Treblinka. With assistance from the Jewish Order Police, a raid is initiated within the ghetto which was designed to seize Jews without valid work papers. Thinking this was something bigger, a handful of members from the Jewish resistance movement (ZOB) opened fire on the Germans and their Jewish auxiliaries with whatever weapons they managed to lay their hands on. Most of the resistance fighters were gunned down but not before a dozen Germans had been killed. During and after this revolt, Jews began to prepare hidden bunkers in preparation for the next open confrontation with the Germans, and members of ZOB began securing more guns and grenades from Polish resistance fighters.   In Munich, brother and sister, Hans and Sophie Scholl, members of the White Rose group are arrested by the Gestapo for distributing anti-Nazi leaflets within a local university.

23 January 1943: The British 8th Army in North Africa captures Tripoli from the Germans.

25 January 1943: Heinrich Himmler instructs the head of the SS Finance and Administration Head Office, Oswald Pohl, to begin experiments on inmates from within the concentration camp system, especially individuals from captured POWs who belonged to Mongol tribes. He wanted to see if dehydrated meats would have a positive or negative effect on those eating it, as it was believed that Genghis khan had used such methods to preserve food.

26 January 1943: Dr Karl Brandt speaks with SS-Obergruppenführer (Colonel-General) Karl Wolff requesting experiments be done on live human subjects from within the concentration camp system in an effort to ascertain the possibility of doing extensive nutrition studies.

30 January 1943: Ernst Kaltenbrunner becomes the chief of the SD, the Security Police as well as the Reichssicherheitshauptamt (RSHA, Reich Central Security Office). - von Paulus radios a message of greeting to Hitler on the anniversary of his assumption of power. He tells him that the Swastika still flutters over Stalingrad, he states that ‘May our struggle stand as an example to generations yet unborn never to surrender, no matter how desperate the odds’. That same night Hitler promotes von Paulus to Field Marshal.

30/31 January 1943: The Germans discover that the Allies are using on-board radar in their bombers after one is shot over Rotterdam.

31 January 1943: The battle for Stalingrad ends when von Paulus surrenders what remains of his 6th Army to the Soviets even though a handful of German soldiers decide to fight on. - The battle for Stalingrad ends when von Paulus surrenders what remains of his 6th Army to the Soviets even though a handful of German soldiers decide to fight on.

End January 1943: Benito Mussolini dismisses Marshal Cavallero as his Chief of the High Command.

02 February 1943: The German 6th Army at Stalingrad surrenders to the Soviets.

16 February 1943: Heinrich Himmler orders the liquidation of the Warsaw Ghetto.

17 February 1943:  Hitler visits Army Group South’s headquarters near the Ukrainian town of Zaporozhe on the Dnieper River so as to see speak with von Manstein in relation to the problems that Army Group South are facing.  He stays only a few days and heads to his Werewolf Headquarters, also within the Ukraine.

22 February 1943: In Munich, students Hans and Sophie Scholl along with Christoph Probst, another member of the ‘White Rose’ resistance group are sentenced to death by the notorious Nazi judge, Roland Freisler.  They are taken straight to the local prison that afternoon, where all three are guillotined immediately.  Himmler, not wanting to turn them into martyrs tried to get a stay of execution, but it was too late to save them.  German security forces alongside their French counterpart’s launch 'Operation Tiger'. The operation's aim was halt resistance activities within the Port of Marseilles. Thousands of Jews were rounded up as resistance activists as a result of the operation, and at least half of those netted are sent to the deaths in the camps in the east.

25 February 1943: The final deportation of Norway's Jews takes place as some 158 people aboard the ship MS Gutenland which will take them over the sea to Auschwitz.

27 February 1943: In Berlin, Jews who had been working within the German armaments factories are put onto trains and sent to Auschwitz.

06 March 1943: The Battle of Medenine begins in North Africa, where Erwin Rommel’s Afrika Korp faced Montgomery’s 8th Army in Southern Tunisia. After the German’s defeat, Rommel became convinced that his plans had been somehow compromised.

13 March 1943: The first new crematorium in Auschwitz-Birkenau is put into use in incinerate all the victims that the Nazis have just killed. - Hitler leaves his Werewolf headquarters within the Ukraine and returns to his Wolf’s Lair via Army Group Centre’s headquarters.   Hitler never sets foot within his Werewolf headquarters again.

17 March 1943:  Germany’s ally, Bulgaria, refuses to deport her Jewish population to German concentration camps in Poland.

20 March 1943: Obergruppenführer Karl Wolff finally responds to Dr Karl Brandt's letter dated 26 January and explains to him that they already understand nutritional requirements for the combat soldier, which they had gleaned from active field studies, and that no new information could be gained by using concentration camp inmates, also, concentration camp life would not be able to replicate the true conditions of field life.  With this, Wolff rejected Brant's proposal. However, the SS did in fact carry out various nutritional experiments on prisoners within various camps, but it seems that they didn't like the thought of Brandt meddling in their affairs and therefore sent him packing.  – Hitler leaves his Wolf’s Lair headquarters to spend some time at the Berghof.

22 March 1943: In Auschwitz-Birkenau, crematorium IV becomes operational.

23 March 1943: 10-day deportations of Jews from Greece to the death camps in Poland begins. - The Directorate of Civilian Resistance in Poland reports that a new crematorium in Auschwitz- Birkenau is disposing of about 3,000 murdered people per-day.

April 1943:  In Auschwitz-Birkenau, crematorium V becomes operational.

April 1943: Yakov Stalin, Josef Stalin’s son, who had fallen into German hands and had been sent to Sachsenhausen concentration camp throws himself onto one of the camps wire fences and is shot dead by a guard.

05 April 1943: The German pastor, Dietrich Bonhoeffer is arrested by the Nazis for anti-Nazi activities.

07 April 1943: Hungary informs Germany that they have no intention to co-operate with their request to deport their country’s Jewish population to German concentration camps. - Hitler meets with Mussolini at Salzburg. Hitler stresses to him that Africa will be defended against the Allies. -  Claus von Stauffenberg is wounded in Tunisia.

14 April 1943: The Main Directorate for Counter-Intelligence (SMERSH) is established in the Soviet Union.

19 April 1943: Jewish resistance inside the Warsaw Ghetto is finally crushed; remainder of Jews are rounded up and sent to Treblinka. The ghetto is destroyed by German troops. 

May 1943:  Doctor Joseph Mengele, now a Hauptsturmführer (captain) is transferred Auschwitz as a chief medical officer. Megle would become known by the inmates as the ‘Angel of Death.’

May 1943: The Polish government-in-exile in London gives the British Foreign Office a document about the killing process in the Nazi death camp at Treblinka.

May 1943: The Waffen-SS Doctor, Josef Mengele arrives in Auschwitz as one of the camps chief doctors. His main tasks are to select prisoners deemed fit for work and to choose which ones are to be executed straight away within the gas chambers. Mengele earned the infamous label ‘The Angel of Death’ by prisoners. He simply saw Auschwitz as his own personal laboratory where he could freely carry out inhumane experiments on live men, women and children.

12 May 1943: Some 238,000 Italian and German prisoners are taken by the Allies after the Axis forces in North Africa surrender. – Hitler leaves the Berghof and returns to his Wolf’s Lair headquarters.

13 May 1943: The final elements of the German Afrika Korps surrender to the Allies in North Africa.

15 May 1943:  Hitler, desperate to turn the fortunes of war in his favour, he discusses with his top military personal within the Wolf’s Lair his wish to attack the Soviets within the Kursk salient [Operation Citadel].  This operation would become the largest tank battle in history. 

16 May 1943: SS-Brigadeführer Jurgen Stroop, Commander of the German forces during the Warsaw Ghetto uprising sends a message to Himmler stating that resistance within the Ghetto is at an end and that the Jewish residential quarter is no longer a reality.

19 May 1943: Berlin is declared 'Jew free’.

June 1943: Himmler orders that corpses buried in mass graves be dug up and cremated. This is the start of Himmler’s attempt to obliterate evidence of mass murder.

21 May 1943: Hitler returns to the Berghof from the Wolf’s Lair.

25 May 1943: At Auschwitz, Doctor Josef Mengele sends 507 Gypsies from one hut and a further 528 Gypsy women whom were suspected of having typhus to the gas chambers rather than trying to treat them.

09 June 1943: The entire Jewish population on the Greek island of Corfu are held at the Old Fort within Corfu City prior to being shipped to mainland Greece, from there, they were dispatched to Auschwitz.

11 June 1943: Himmler orders that all Jews still within the confines of Ghettos be moved to either concentration or death camp.

19 June 1943: Himmler's proposal to liquidate the entire Jewish populations under the German sphere of influence is given the green light from Hitler, however, the killings had already been taken place in various sites throughout occupied Europe. - Himmler informs Hitler that the clearing of Jews within the General-Government (occupied Poland) area is firmly underway.

21 June 1943: In Auschwitz 103 Jews were selected to be sent to Natzweiler concentration camp in Alsace where they were all measured, weighed and then murdered by gassing. Their bodies were sent to the Anatomical Institute in Strasbourg for testing.

July 1943: The head of the SS, Heinrich Himmler visits the Death camp of Sobibor in Poland.

01 July 1943: Hitler returns to his wolf’s Lair in East Prussia.

05 July 1943: Hitler launches ‘Operation Citadel’ in the east. The aim of the operation is to destroy soviet armies within the Kursk salient.

09 July 1943: The Allied forces launch 'Operation Husky', the invasion of in Sicily. 

11 July 1943: The Allies start their invasion of Sicily.

13 July 1943: The German Professor Kurt Huber, a supporter of the ‘White Rose’ student resistance group is beheaded for treason.

18 July 1943: Hitler leaves the wolf’s Lair and returns to Berchtesgaden and from there to meet Benito Mussolini in the North of Italy, after of a few days, he returns to The Wolf’s Lair.

July 1943:  Biscari Massacre. Two separate incidents during the Sicilian Campaign of July-August 1943. Some 76 German and Italian prisoners of war were murdered (shot) by American troops.

24 July 1943: In Italy, the Fascist Grand Council vote to give the King of Italy full power as a way to save their country from disaster.

24/25 July 1943: The RAF and USAAF start a bombing campaign on Hamburg.

25 July 1943: With the Italians suffering under constant allied air-raids and now Sicily being invaded, King Victor Emmanuel III, persuades Mussolini to resign from office, and is taken straight into custody.  The RAF launch 791 aircraft against Hamburg.

August 1943: More than 2,000 Jews are deported from Holland to the Nazi death camp of Auschwitz in Poland.

August 1943: The Polish government-in-exile informs the British government about the forced deportations of the Jews of Lublin as well as parts of the province of Bialystok. Most of the deportees are all murdered.

August 1943: The chairman of the British Joint Intelligence Committee believes the Poles and Jews are exaggerating about Nazi atrocities in the east as a way to encourage the Allied governments to come to their aid much more quickly.

02 August 1943: Revolt of the slave labourers in Treblinka begins, with some 140 managing to flee to the nearby woods.  However, fewer than 50 would avoid being captured in the subsequent manhunts.

10 August 1943: Hitler, in an attempt to keep domestic dissent of the regime at bay, appoints Heinrich Himmler as minister for the interior.

13 August 1943: In Munich, Alexander Schmorell, Willi Graf and Professor Kurt Huber are executed for their role within the anti-Nazi White Rose group.

17 August 1943: At a meeting in Berlin, attended by psychiatrists who had been actively involved in the T4 programme, were informed that the euthanasia programme was authorised to begin killing again. 

18-19 August 1943: Some 8,000 Jews who had been deported from Bialystok are murdered within the gas chambers of Treblinka.

20 August 1943: The ghetto of Glebokie (near Vilna, Belarus) is liquidated with its remaining inhabitants sent to the death camp is Majdanek. - Hitler sacks Wilhelm Frick as his Minister of the Interior and replaces him with Himmler.

21 August 1943: Eleven Jewish children and teenagers, from the ages of 7 to 15 years old, are transferred from Auschwitz to Sachsenhausen concentration camp to be used as fodder for Dr Arnold Dohmen's experiments. Dohmen' told these children what he was planning to do with them, and promised them that their health was not at risk and that he wanted to test out a new vaccine that could fight against hepatitis (epatitis epidemica).  These children were deliberately infected with the disease and then given the vaccine to see if it works.  The experiments began sometime in October, but for unknown reasons, the experiments stopped suddenly. However, during a bombing raid by the Allies, the Robert-Koch Institute was heavily damaged and most of Dohmen's research work was lost.  It is believed that Dohmen's conscience was bothering him and that this could have been the explanation why he stopped the experiments on the children, children who were still kept at Sachsenhausen.  However, these experiments would be resumed in September 1944 when pressure to continue the research was put onto Dohmen.

23 August 1943: British Lancaster bombers drop over 1800 tons of bombs on Berlin. - August 1943: The Red Army retakes Kharkov.

25 August 1943: Wilhelm Frick, Reich Minister of the Interior is removed from his post and Heinrich Himmler is made his replacement. Konstantin von Neurath steps down as Reich Protector of Bohemia and Moravia after a long spell away.

27 August 1943:  Due to major Soviet assaults against the German front lines, Hitler leaves his headquarters at the Wolf’s Lair and flies to meet von Manstein whose forces were struggling to hold on in Crimea.  Manstein had asked for reinforcements, or permission to withdraw. Hitler promised to give Manstein that he would give him the resources he needs to maintain German control of the parts of Crimea they already have, but as soon as he returned to his headquarters, the promises made to von Manstein evaporated, due to pressures that Army Group Centre was experiencing as the Red Army punched through three of their sectors.

29 August 1943: The Germans assume full powers in Denmark after the Danes refuse to take repressive action against acts of resistance to German occupation. Since the occupation had begun, the Danes had been left alone and allowed to administer their own country without too much interference from the Nazis.

03 September 1943: The Allies land on mainland Italy.  Secret negotiations had already been taken place between General Pietro Badoglio, who was made Italian Premier after the arrest of Mussolini, and the Allies to end the war between Italy and the Allies.

05 September 1943: Hitler gives Dr Karl Brandt extra powers which places him as the most powerful man within the German medical and health services within the Reich.  His rival, Dr Leonardo Conti, who was more experienced, effectively becomes his subordinate with little influence over how the German health system is to be managed.

08 September 1943: The Bolzano concentration camp in Italy is opened. – Hitler flies out to von Manstein’s field headquarters in the Ukraine.  He spends less than two hours and then heads back to his Wolf’s Lair.  This was Hitler’s last visit to the Ukraine.

09 September 1943: 'Operation Avalanche’ the Allied landings near the port of Salerno is launched.

10 September 1943: The Germans seize control of Rome. – Hitler addresses the nation via the radio in an attempt to shore up morale after Italy’s withdrawal from the Axis Alliance.

11 September 1943: The first Jewish families currently being held at the Theresienstadt concentration camp are deported to Auschwitz for liquidation.

13 September 1943: Code named Operation Eiche, Otto Skorzeny leads a German airborne force of commandos by gliders to rescue Mussolini from his Italian captures. The mission was a complete success and Mussolini is freed.

15 September 1943: The Kovno (Kaunus) ghetto is converted into a concentration camp.

22 September 1943: Generalkommissar for Weißruthenien (area included Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and the western region of Byelorussia) Wilhelm Kube is assassinated by Soviet partisans after they had planted a bomb within his bedroom.

22 or 23 September 1943: Soviet prisoners of war, all Jewish, are sent to the death camp of Sobibor as slave labour from Minsk.

23 September 1943: The Vilna ghetto is liquidated.

25 September 1943: The Soviet army retake Smolensk.

28 September 1943: Italy surrenders to the Allies.

30 September 1943: The 33,771 Nazi victims who had been murdered and buried at Babi Yar near Kiev are exhumed and cremated by 325 Jewish and Soviet prisoners-of-war. After the work is done, the prisoners realise that the German’s plan to murder them also so they stage a rebellion. Out of the 325 only 15 prisoners managed to survive the revolt.

End September 1943: The Red Army retake the Donbas area from the Germans and they reach Dnieper River.

October 1943: In Germany, General-Field Marchall Milch attempts to build up the Luftwaffe’s fighter strength to protect the Reich from the increased threat of Allied air attacks, but is reprimanded by Reich marshal Göring, who believes that the West do not have the number of aircraft that Milch believes.

01 October 1943: The Allies enter the Italian city of Naples.  The German security police in Denmark begin an 'Aktion' to round up the country's Jews.  However, the planned assault on the Jewish communities was leaked to a sympathetic Danish official by a sympathetic German diplomat who in turn leaked it to the Jewish leadership, and with Sweden promising an open-door policy, most of the country's Jews managed to pay mariners to take them by boat to sanctuary in Sweden.  Thousands were saved whilst only five hundred and eighty Jews had fell into German hands.  Denmark became the only country within Europe, where the Germans had influence, to actively refuse to persecute the country's Jews and then went on to help them survive.

01/02 October 1943: In Denmark the Nazi authorities attempt to round up the country’s Jews for deportation. The German Plenipotentiary in Denmark had alerted the Jews of the impending round-ups so that they could have time to escape. The Germans managed to capture just 284 Jews on the night of the 1st October, out of a Jewish population of 8,000. At the end of the action, the Nazis only managed to capture 500 Jews thanks to the bravery of the Danish population whom helped their fellow countrymen to escape.

02 October 1943: The Cretan town of Koustoyerako is burnt out by the German occupation forces after a revolt led by Mandi Bandervas fails.

04 October 1943: Heinrich Himmler gives a major speech to high-ranking SS personnel and other leading Nazis in the German occupied town of Posen, Poland.  In his speech he stated: "Today I am going to refer quite frankly to a very brave chapter.  We can mention it now among ourselves quite openly and yet we shall never talk about it in public.  I'm referring to the evacuation of the Jews, the extermination of the Jewish people.  Most of you will know what it is like to see one hundred corpses lying side by side or five hundred or, one thousand of them.  To have coped with this and - except for cases of human weakness - to have remained decent, that has made us tough. This is an unwritten - never to be written - and yet glorious page in our history."

13 October 1943: The new government in Italy under Marshal Pietro Badoglio declare war on its former ally, Germany.

14 October 1943:  Inmates at the death camp at Sobibor initiate a mass breakout. Some 11 0r 12 SS men and more than 12 Ukrainian Guards are killed during the escape. Out of the 600 inmates 200 were shot during the breakout with a further 100 being captured during the manhunt that the Nazis initiated afterwards. A few of the survivors of the breakout joined local partisan groups and were killed during skirmishes with the Germans with only 64 surviving the war. In response to the breakout, Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler orders that the camp be dismantled, and in an attempt to hide the fact that a death camp had been there, the SS disguise the area as a farm complex. During the lifetime of the camp, it is estimated that no fewer than 250,000 people were murdered within its interior.

16 October 1943:  German security police seize over a 1,000 Jews in Rome. Soon after this raid, the Germans carried out further raids against Italy's Jewish populations throughout the areas under their control.  Throughout these raids on Italian soil, Pope Pius XII remained silent. 

18 October 1943: Jews from Rome are deported by train to Auschwitz and the Vatican remains silent.

21 October 1943: The Germans liquidate the ghetto in Minsk.

30 October 1943: The Declaration of Moscow is signed between President Franklin D. Roosevelt, Prime Minister Winston Churchill and the Soviet leader Joseph Stalin. The document took note of the atrocities committed by Hitler's forces, and that they would not go unpunished. Those guilty of such crimes would be sent back to the country from which the atrocities took place to stand trial. Others would face a joint Allied tribunal. There would be a further three Moscow declarations issued later.

November 1943: Arthur Liebehenschel takes over command of Auschwitz.

03–04 November 1943: The SS launch 'Operation Harvest Festival' where some 43,000 Jewish slave labourers held within concentration camps are liquidated.

06 November 1943: The Soviets retake Kiev from the Germans.

November 1943: Rudolf Hoss, the Commandant of Auschwitz is promoted to head the Economics and Administrative Main Office in Berlin.

09 Nov 1943: Deportations of Italian Jews to Auschwitz begins.

18 November 1943: Some 411 RAF Lancaster bombers drop 1,593 tons of bombs on Berlin.

19 November 1943: Polish medical student Jerzy Tabeau along with fellow Pole, Roman Cieliczko escapes from Auschwitz. - Heinz Siegfried Heydrich, the younger brother of Reinhard Heydrich commits suicide.  (see Did You Kown on the Homepage).

19-25 November 1943: At Buchenwald concentration camp, five prisoners were deliberately burnt with phosphorus which had been removed from British bombs.  The purpose was to test a new ointment which had been made strictly for phosphorus burn victims.  The prisoners subjected to such brutal experiments suffered huge amounts of pain, and all would be dead by the end of the experiments.

22-23 November 1943: The RAF attack Berlin with no fewer than 775 bombers.

27 November 1943: The Sonderkommando (Jewish forced labour) in one of the crematoriums within Auschwitz-Birkenau carry out a revolt and the crematorium is destroyed in the process.

December 1943: Göring informs Erhard Milch that the Me-262 Jet aircraft is to be used as a jet bomber not as a fighter.

December 1943: Hermann Göring sets off for Paris to organise Germany’s retaliatory raids (Operation Capricorn) against London.

18 December 1943: The Soviets conclude the first war crimes trial of the war in Kharkov, Ukraine.  Four individuals stood trial, three were German [Wilhelm Langheld, Reinhard Retzlaff, and Hans Ritz] and the other was a Soviet collaborator Mikhail Bulanov.  All four were accused of murdering numerous Soviet citizens and all four plead guilty but claimed that they were simply following orders.  The next day, all four were hanged in front of a jubilant crowd.

21 December 1943: Hitler appoints Goebbels head of the newly created Reich Inspectorate of Civilian Air Protection Measures.

29 December 1943: Anne Frank writes in her diary ‘My fear makes me want to scream aloud...I have not enough faith in God...’

Late 1943: In Auschwitz, Doctor Mengele decides to use a radical way to disinfect block houses from typhus. He evicts some 600 Jewish women from one block, sends them to the gas chambers, disinfects the vacant block then moves another block of women prisoners into it and then goes on to disinfect their now vacant block and so on until all the blocks of huts are all disinfected. However, this does not remove the typhus epidemic running rampant throughout the camp.

 

1944

January 1944:  Hermann Göring gives the Fieseler company a contract to mass produces the V1 rockets, Hitler’s new vengeance weapon.

03 January 1944: The Soviets reach Poland.

11 January 1944: In Italy, Count Galeazzo Ciano is executed by firing squad on the orders of Mussolini. The execution was filmed.

19 January 1944: German siege of Leningrad is broken.

20 January 1944: The RAF attack Berlin with some 2,400 tons of bombs.

21 January 1944: Göring’s ‘Operation Capricorn’ (retaliatory bombing raids) begins against London. The operation caused very little damage.

22 January 1944: In Italy, to bypass the German defensive line, the Allies land at Anzio. - An Allied army land at Anzio in Italy.

26 Januar7 1944:  Due to major military setbacks on the eastern front, and with troop morale at its lowest ebb, Hitler has all his top generals from the eastern front meet him within his Wolf’s Lair headquarters where he ordered them to instil ‘national socialist fervour’ into all of their men and to believe in the final victory over the Red Army.   Hitler, it seemed, believed that being ardent national socialists, his army could overcome whatever the enemy threw at them, even if they were severely outmanned and outgunned. Field Marshal von Manstein, it seems made a sarcastic comment during Hitler’s speech, Hitler, became red faced and extremely angry, he ended the meeting by leaving the room without finishing his speech.  Later, he called for Manstein before him in a bid to reprimand him.

27 January 1944: The Siege of Leningrad is finally lifted after the German army is forced to withdraw by advancing Soviet troops.

Late January 1944: Hitler leaves the Wolf’s Lair for Berchtesgaden.

February 1944: The American Airforce resumes their daylight bombing attacks against German cities.

03 February 1944: Roland Freisler, known as the hanging Judge is killed in Berlin whilst presiding over a trial during an air raid by American bombers.  - Within the last 2 years the Germans send their 67th deportation train to Auschwitz from Paris.

19-20 February 1944: The British lose 78 out of their 816 bombers after attacking targets in Leipzig.

20 February 1944: American planes begin their five-day attack on German aircraft industry targets dropping some 10,000 tons of bombs. - An order from Luftwaffe High Command is issued with an order to form a special force to carry out specialist operations. This force is known as Kampfgeschwader 200 (KG200)

07 March 1944: The Jewish historian Emanuel Ringelblum, who had been hiding from the Nazis in the Aryan part of Warsaw is discovered and arrested by the Gestapo. Ringelblum had been documenting everything that he could about the fate of the Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto. Alongside his family, he is tortured and killed.

08 March 1944: The American Airforce attacks the German Erkner ball bearing factory in Berlin with 590 aircraft. The raid put the factory out of commission for some time.

11 March 1944: In Croatia, the Germans deport some 300 women and children from northern Dalmatia to the concentration camp at Jasenovac in Croatia Not one of these people survives the war.

12 March 1944: The SS in Germany start to plan out how to deal with Hungary’s Jews.

15 March 1944: The Red Army crosses the River Bug, which had been the Germans main jumping off point for ‘Operation Barbarossa’.  -  The Germans begin a systematic search for more than 10,000 Jews in occupied Greece. At least half escape to the mountains where they either find shelter with local peasants or join local partisan units. Some mange to flee into neighbouring neutral Turkey.

18 March 1944: At the request of Hitler, Hungary’s Regent, Admiral Horthy visits him at the castle of Klessheim in Salzburg. At the meeting Hitler accuses the Regent of secretly holding peace talks with the allies and demanding him to sign a piece of paper which would allow German troops to occupy Hungary. After denying Hitler’s accusations Horthy attempts to leave but he is prevented from doing so by a mock air raid which had been staged by the SS. After threats had been made against his family, Horthy capitulated and signed the document which allowed Germany to temporary occupy Hungary until a new pro-Nazi government is installed.  - The Red Army reaches the Romanian border.

19 March 1944: Nazi total control is imposed on Hungary.

20 March 1944: German troops cross into Hungary so as to keep the Hungarians part of the Axis forces. - The Germans evacuate all prisoners from the Majdanek death camp in Poland prior to it being over-run by the advancing Soviet armies. Those prisoners who were too sick to take part in the withdrawal were sent to the gas chambers in Auschwitz whilst those who could be evacuated would later be sent to the concentration camps of Gross-Rosen, Ravensbrück or Natzweiler.

23 March 1944: The Germans begin the forced deportations of all of Greece’s Jews to the death camps. The deportation last ten days.

30-31 March 1944: The RAF suffer heavy losses after 96 out of 795 of their planes are shot down after attacking targets at Nuremberg.

April 1944: Dr Karl Brandt is promoted to the rank of Gruppenführer.

April 1944: A German reconnaissance plane spots the allies landing craft and other support vessels at Portsmouth, Southampton and the Isle of Wight. Göring passes this information onto Hitler.

April 1944: Jews in Albania are interned at Pristina and then deported to the concentration camp of Bergen-Belsen. Of the 400 deported only 100 survived the war.

07 April 1944: Two Slovakian inmates, Walter Rosenberg (known as Rudolf Vrba) and Alfred Wetzler begin their planned escape from Auschwitz by hiding in a pre-dugout hollow within a woodpile within the perimeter of the camp known as 'Mexico' which was itself outside the camp's main perimeter fences. To prevent the guard dogs being able to sniff them out, a mixture of paraffin and tobacco were smeared over the wood pile. They would remain there for a couple of days before trying to make it to safety as they knew a tight cordon would be put into place for at least three days in an effort to catch them. 

09 April 1944: Two Jews, Rudolf Vrba and Alfred Wetzl, who had hidden themselves within a part of the camp that was being built for a couple of days, manage to breakout of Auschwitz and carry news of what is going on within that camp to the Allies in the West.

13 April 1944: In Paris, the Germans send some 1,500 Jews, whom 148 where children under the age of 12, to the death camp at Auschwitz.

14 April 1944: The Nazis send the first transport of Athens Jews to be liquidated at Auschwitz.

15 April 1944: The Jewish population of Hungary are forced to leave their homes and move into specified ghettos. - Some 40 inmates of the Ponary Sonderkommando, who were forced to dig up the bodies of Nazi victims for cremation manage to escape after digging a tunnel with either spoons or their bare hands, however, 25 of them where later caught and executed whilst the other 15 managed to escape their pursuers.

20 April 1944: The remaining members of the group that the Germans had used to exhume and cremate people whom they had murdered on an earlier date are they themselves murdered by their guards at Ponary in Poland.

22 April 1944: The Soviets invade Romania.

24 April 1944: Walter Rosenberg and Alfred Wetzler, the two escapees from Auschwitz meet up with a Slovakian resistance group after they cross into Slovakia, and then meet fellow Jews who listened intently to what they had to say and then they were asked to write down their testimonies separately concerning what they had witnessed at Auschwitz as well as what they knew. What they wrote became known as the 'Vrba-Wetzler Report' which took up some thirty-two pages. They also handed over Zyklon-B labels to show which gas was being used to murder the people.

25 April 1944: The Luftwaffe launches an attack on the allies’ landing craft that had been reported a few days earlier. The German raid caused little damage and disruption.  - Adolf Eichmann meets a Hungarian Jew by the name of Joel Brand, who is a leading figure in the Relief and Rescue Committee, an organisation committed in helping Jews escape Nazi persecution. Eichmann offers to sell him one million Jews.

29 April 1944: The first trains carrying Hungarian Jews to Auschwitz-Birkenau begins.

May 1944: Large scale production of Hitler’s vengeance weapon, the V1 begins.

02 May 1944: Erich Knauf, a former publicist and journalist and an outspoken critic of the Nazis is executed after calling Joseph Goebbels ‘a little rat’, and for claiming that Himmler only kept his job because of the amount of people he has murdered, he even stated that if Germany won the war, it would be the greatest misfortune.  - In Britain, Major John Howard, commander of ‘D’ company, 2^nd Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire light Infantry, which is part of the Air Landing Brigade of the 6^th Airborne Division is issued with Top Secret Orders marked ‘Bigot’. Howard and his men are to seize and hold at all costs, two strategically important bridges. One over the river Orne and the other at the Canal at Benouville and Ranville in Normandy, France. Howard and his men are to be the spearhead for the invasion of France which had been set to take place in June 1944. Howard is given 2 extra platoons from his regiment plus 30 Sappers, a wing of glider pilots and 6 Horsa gliders to achieve his objectives. One of Howard’s officers, Lt ‘Den’ Brotheridge becomes the first allied soldier to be killed-in-action on D-Day.

09 May 1944: At Auschwitz in Poland, Rudolf Höss orders preparations for the arrival of Hungarian Jews to be accelerated. He also orders that the furnaces at crematorium number 5 be repaired and that 5 pits be dug nearby to assist in the burning of corpses as he is fully aware of the numbers of Hungarians to be murdered and that the amps crematoriums would not be able to dispose of all the bodies in a short period of time. 

15 May 1944: Hungarian Jews deported to Auschwitz.

27 May 1944: The Polish Jew Czesław Mordowicz and Arnošt Rosin escape from Auschwitz. Their written record of what was happening within Birkenau became part of what was dubbed 'The Auschwitz Protocols'.

June 1944: With the advancing Red Army in the east, the Germans initiate its first ‘death marches’ of prisoners from its concentration camps in the east.

June 1944: The War Refugee Board in Washington receives a request from Jacob Rosenheim of the Agudas Israel World Organisation to bomb the railway lines feeding Auschwitz.

04 June 1944:  The Germans evacuate their troops from Rome and the city is taken over by US troops.

05 June 1944: The American 5^th Army march into Rome.

06 June 1944: The Allies land on the beaches of northern France in ‘Operation Overlord’ (D-Day), thus initiating the liberation of France and the rest of western Europe. The Allies assembled a combat force of some 150,000 men, 20 million tons of war supplies. The Germans, who believed that the invasion would come through the Straights of Dover had strengthened their coastal defences there. The invasion however took place at the beaches of Normandy. (Utah, Omaha, Gold, Juno and Sword) and it was the largest ever amphibian invasion ever to take place. It consisted of 7 battleships, 23 cruisers, 105 destroyers, 1,073 smaller warships, 4,126 landing craft and nearly 14,000 aeroplanes were deployed to support the landing. To combat this, the Luftwaffe could only manage to muster some 90 bombers and 70 fighters and their navy were just as bad. They had 3 warships, 36 high speed launchers and 309 mine-sweepers. The Allied landing forces met with the German army groups ‘B’ and ‘G’ Army group ‘B’ came under the supreme command of Field Marshal Erwin Rommel whilst army group ‘G’ came under the supreme command of Field Marshal von Rundstedt. All-in-all, the Germans had 30 infantry divisions and 6 tank divisions to throw against the landings, however, most of these units were badly equipped, and most of the men had the minimum of training and virtually no combat experience.

09 June 1944:  Heinrich Himmler tells Dr Brandt that he had received a letter from Gauleiter Koch requesting his assistance in euthanizing a four-year-old child by the name of Rüdiger Poeck, who was suffering from incurable meningitis.  (It is not known if Poeck was admitted into one the clinics to be euthanized)

10 June 1944: Elements of the Das Reich Panzer Division (Der Führer Regiment of the 2nd Waffen-SS Panzer Division) murder 642 men, women and children in the French town of Oradour-sur-Glane and then went on to completely destroy the town itself. Those not killed were sent to concentration camps. The reason for the atrocity is still unclear. 

12 June 1944: The Germans launch their first V-1 rockets against the UK.

18 June 1944: The British Broadcasting Authority (BBC) broadcast news about Auschwitz.

20 June 1944: The New York Times publishes the first of three articles about life in Auschwitz.

22 June 1944: The Soviets launch ‘Operation Bagration’, a massive offensive against the German Army Group Centre in Belorussia.

23 June 1944: Three members of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) visit the ghetto at Theresienstadt. What they saw was a healthy and vibrant community of Jews living within the walls, boys playing football, shops full of food and wares, a bandstand and old people enjoying the rays from the Sun, however it was all a con designed to placate the ICRC. The members of the ICRC made no attempt to ask any member of the Jewish Council, such as Paul Eppstein where the previous inhabitants where, or what they knew about the violent deportations. In the report produced by the ICRC later expressed no concerns and the deportations and killings started up again.

26 June 1944: The Americans reject Jacob Rosenheim’s request to bomb the railway lines leading to Auschwitz, stating other targets have a higher priority need.

30 June 1944: Some 1683 Hungarian Jews are allowed to board a train that will take them to safety. This was organised by Adolf Eichmann, as a good will gesture for ‘Jews for Trucks’ deal that he was trying to set up with the Western Allies via the Relief and Rescue Committee. The Western Allies had no interest in giving the Nazi war machine trucks in exchange for Jews. They knew that this could damage relations with their Soviet allies. Instead of taking the Jews to safety, the train took them to the concentration camp of Bergen-Belsen in Germany.

03 July 1944: The Soviet army retake Minsk from the Germans.

04 - 06 July 1944: In Germany, the Gestapo arrest former members of the Social Democratic Party alongside known Communists.

07 July 1944: London is asked to bomb Auschwitz. Churchill writes to his Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden, asking him to see what can be done.

09 July 1944: In Hungary, Horthy finally orders a stop to the deportation of his country’s Jewish population after threats from the Western Allies stating that they would hold him to count as a war criminal.

10-12 July 1944: The SS liquidate the Jewish family camp (BIIb) within Auschwitz-Birkenau by sending some 7,000 men, women and children to the gas chambers within crematorium 5. 

11 July 1944:  Soviet armies enter the Baltic countries of Latvia and Lithuania as they continue to push the Germans back.

15 July 1944: Sir Archibald Sinclair, the Secretary of State for War, replies to Churchill and Anthony Eden stating that due to the distance of Auschwitz, no bombing raid could be launched. He in his letter suggested that the Americans be asked to do the job.

20 July 1944: Major plot to assassinate Hitler fails at his headquarters at Rastenburg.  Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg had placed a bomb within the briefing room where Hitler was discussing the war with his Generals. Hitler suffered minor injuries, but was well enough to meet Benito Mussolini later that same day.  As a result of the attempted assassination, Hitler's paladins acted swiftly.  Stauffenberg along with other leading members of the plot were summarily executed and others connected to the conspiracy were arrested alongside their families.  Many of them would pay with their lives in a brutal fashion.

22 July 1944: Joseph Goebbels visits Hitler at the Wolf’s Lain in east Prussia. 

23 July 1944: Soviet troops liberate Majdanek death camp in Poland. – The Reichsmarshal, Herman Göring, in a bid to shore up Hitler’s trust in his subordinates, proposed that all members of the German army adopt the Nazi salute instead of the usual army salute.  

24 July 1944: The Nazi salute becomes compulsory for all members of the Wehrmacht. - The Ear, nose and throat specialist, Erwin Giesing, the doctor who had been called in to help treat Hitler after the failed assassination attempt, picked up two tablets from Hitler's breakfast table. Those tablets were being prescribed by Dr Morell to the führer for some time now. Later, those tablets were analysed and it was discovered that they contained traces of strychnine and belladonna. As it turned out, Hitler had been consuming about eight tablets per day. A request that Hitler supply blood and urine was made so that evidence could be collected which would confirm the allegation against Morell, but Dr Morrel managed to prevent Hitler's blood and urine from being examined. 

August 1944: In Slovakia, Jews take part in an uprising against the Germans.

August 1944: Himmler orders that the ‘Kith and Kin system’ be adopted by the Gestapo when dealing with traitors. This allowed them to arrest the families of anyone suspected of treasonous activity. Family members of traitors could either be executed or be imprisoned in a concentration camp.

01 August 1944: The Polish underground rise up against their German occupiers in Warsaw.  Stalin refuses to aid them in their fight against the Germans, on account that they support the Polish government in exile in London, and because of the lack of support from the Red Army, the Germans quickly quash the uprising and then begin to systematically destroy the city in retaliation.  Stalin, it seems, has other plans for Poland.  The Red Army liberates Kovno.  - Anne Frank unknowingly makes her last entry into her diary. 

02 - 03 Aug 1944: The Nazis close-down the gypsy family camp (BIIe) within Birkenau by sending 2,897 of them to the gas chambers at Crematoria 5. The rest, 1,408 are transferred to Buchenwald.

04 August 1944: In Amsterdam, Anne Frank along with her father Otto, mother Edith, her sister Margot, the van Pels (Hermann, Auguste and their son Peter) and Fritz Pfeffer are discovered in their hiding place (the Secret Annex - an empty storage room at the back her father's office at 263 Prinsengracht) and arrested.

06 August 1944: Jews remaining in the Lodz ghetto are finally deported to Auschwitz.

07 August 1944: The Soviet advance Westward comes to a halt just east of Warsaw due to pressures concerning their supply lines which becoming extremely stretched.

15 August 1944: The Allies land troops in Southern France.

18 August 1944: The Dutch resistance fighter Henri Scharrer, codenamed 'Sandberg' is arrested by the Gestapo whilst travelling on the train from Haarlem to the Hague.

19 August 1944: Günther Adolf Ferdinand von Kluge, whom Hitler had decided to sack and replace him with Walter Model in the West, is ordered back to Berlin, He decides to commit suicide by taking potassium cyanide.  He was afraid that he was going to be accused of being part of the July Plot and therefore he was fearful of what would happen to him on his return to capital.

20 August 1944: American planes bomb Auschwitz-Monowitz (Auschwitz III).

23 August 1944: The Fascist government in Romania is brought down and replaced by the 'National Democratic Bloc', which quickly disassociates itself with Nazi Germany and it makes contact with the Soviet Union to bring its participation in the war on Hitler's side to an end.

25 August 1944: General Dr Gaulle with his free-French troops officially liberates Paris. - Dr Karl Brandt is appointed as Reich Commissioner

26 August 1944: The anti-Nazi German diplomat Otto Karl Kiep, who had been accused of treason by attending the Solf Kreis (Solf Circle) meetings is executed in Plötzensee Prison in Berlin.

28 August 1944: The last Jewish transport arrives in Auschwitz from the Łódź ghetto - On board was Mordecai Chaim Rumkowski, the corrupt Chairman of the ghetto along with his family - they all went straight to the gas chambers with all the other Jews selected for death.

31 August 1944: The prisoners within Natzweiler concentration camp in Alsace are liberated as the Allied armies continue to push forward. It is estimated that at least 25,000 Nazi victims perished within the confines of this camp during its existence.

Sept 1944: (see 21 August 1943) Dr Arnold Dohmen restarts his experiments on the 11 children at the Sachsenhausen concentration camp. The children were isolated from other prisoners.  They were injected with hepatitis and carefully monitored.  He also chose two of the children and performed liver punctures to see if they had been infected by hepatitis. 

01 September 1944: The Red Army reach the Bulgarian border.

03 September 1944: The Allies liberate Brussels.

04 September 1944: Finland negotiates an armistice with the Soviet Union. - The Allies liberate Antwerp and Brussels in Belgium.

08 September 1944: Germany launches their first V-2 rockets against the UK.  Elizabeth von Thadden, anti-Nazi and a member of the resistance group known as the Solf Kreis (Solf Circle) is executed for treason.  Bulgaria and Romania abandoned their alliances with Germany and both declared war on Germany.

09 September 1944: Bulgaria negotiates an armistice with the Allies.

Finland signed an armistice with the Soviet Union.

12 September 1944: First allied troops enter German territory for the first time in the West.

13 September 1944: Auschwitz-Monowitz (Auschwitz III) is bombed by the American air force. 

17 September 1944: The Allies launch ‘Operation Market Garden’. The operation is designed to outflank the German defensive line known as the ‘West Wall’ by establishing a bridgehead across the Lower Rhine at the Dutch town of Arnhem. If successful, it is believed that it will shorten the war, but unknown to the Allies, the remnants of the 2nd SS Panzer Division (9^th and 10^th) were refitting in the area and had just completed an exercise on how to repel an airborne landing. ‘Operation Market’ (or Battle of Arnhem) failed to gain a bridgehead across the Lower Rhine, but the Allies did manage to attain a valuable salient from which ‘Operation Veritable’ was launched during the battle for Germany in February 1945.

19 September 1944: Hans-Adolf Prützmann, Higher-SS and Police leader who had carried out political and racial murders in the east, is appointed General-Inspector for Special Abwehr with the Reichsführer-SS.  This job entailed the setting up of guerrilla resistance fighters, nicknamed ‘Werewolves’. Their task was to establish quasi-style military units that were capable of harassing enemy troops on German soil. They also have been given the power to assassinate any German whom collaborates with occupying enemy forces, regardless of their position in that community. 

27 September 1944: Hitler, suffering from fatigue and suffering from a jaundice infection, is forced to recuperate by taking some bed rest.

02 October 1944: The Warsaw Uprising finally comes to an end after 63 days of fighting.  The Germans begin to raise Warsaw to the ground. Adolf Eichmann rejects the Swedish attempt at saving 60 Jewish spouses of mixed marriages.

03 October 1944: Dr Brandt accuses Dr Morell of poisoning the führer, but Dr Morell complains about Brandt to Hitler.

06 - 07 October 1944: The Jewish prisoners of the Sonderkommando working at the Crematoria IV, Auschwitz revolt after they believed that they were about to be 'selected' for liquidation.  They managed to destroy the crematoria and a couple of barrack rooms.  Other prisoners within Crematoria II seized a Kapo (fellow prisoner who acted as a supervisor for the SS) and threw him alive into one of the furnaces. The SS soon quell the uprising but not before some 200 prisoners managed to escape.  The prisoners were all eventually caught and killed. 

08 October 1944: Adolf Hitler informs Dr Morell that Dr Brant has been permanently dismissed from his side and instructed him [Brant]to concentrate on his job as Reich Commissioner. 

14 October 1944: To protect his family, Field Marshal Erwin Rommel commits suicide after being linked to the July Plot to assassinate Hitler. Rommel had refused to take part in the plot itself, but this fact did not save him.

15 October 1944: The Hungarian fascist group, the 'Arrow Cross' seizes power after Horthy had broadcasted a message that he was taking his country out of the alliance with Germany. - Himmler orders the Anatomical Institute in Strasbourg to destroy all the skeletons that they have assembled before they can fall into Allied hands.

16 October 1944:  The Red Army roles into East Prussia.

20 October 1944: The Soviets capture Belgrade, Yugoslavia. - With the steady advance of the Red Army towards the Prussian soil, Hitler leaves the Wolfsschanze [Wolf's Lair] for the last time and retreats to Berlin. 

18 November 1944: Hitler informs his staff that he and they would be leaving the Wolf’s Lair so that he can be closer to his oncoming Ardennes Offensive.

20 October 1844: Hitler and his entourage leaves the Wolf’s Lair for the last time and heads to Berlin.

22 November 1944: Hitler instructs Keitel to ensure that his east Prussian headquarters does not fall into the Soviets hands and orders him to have the entire site blown up under the codename ‘Inselspung’.

26 November 1944: Heinrich Himmler, in an effort to destroy the evidence of mass murder, orders the destruction of the crematoria at Auschwitz.

30 October 1944:  Reich Youth Leader Arthur Axmann instructs Oberbannführer Kloos, one of his Hitler Youth [HJ] Leaders in Western Germany, to organise the Hitler Youth into a large-scale resistance movement, aimed at attacking the allies as they penetrated into the Reich.

28 October 1944: The last train full of Jews leaves the Theresienstadt ghetto for Auschwitz-Birkenau.

Nov 1944: Death marches begin in Eastern Europe as the SS force thousands of starving and disease-ridden concentration camp inmates westward, in an attempt to prevent them falling into Soviet hands.

10 December 1944: Hitler leaves Berlin for his new headquarters just under forty kilometres from Frankfurt am Main. This new field headquarters’ is named Alderhorst (Eagles’ Eyrie) and it is here that he plans to oversee the main German attack against the Allies in the West. The codename for the Ardennes offensive was given as ‘Unternehmen Wacht am Rhein’ [Watch on the Rhine].

16 December 1944: In a desperate attempt to regain the initiative, Hitler launches this last gambit, the Ardennes Offensive, known as The Battle of the Bulge against the Western allies in France.

17 December 1944:  Eighty-six US prisoners of war are murdered at Baugnez, near Malmédy in Belgium by members of SS-Standartenführer Joachim Pieper's battle group (Kampfgruppe) during Hitler's Ardennes offensive.

18 December 1944: The US launch another bombing raid against Auschwitz-Monowitz (Auschwitz III).

26 December 1944: The Red Army begin to lay siege to Hungarian capital of Budapest. The Americans bomb Auschwitz-Monowitz (Auschwitz III) for the last time.

31 December 1944: Hungary declares war on Germany.

 

1945

January 1945: Around 9,000 Nazi murder victims are exhumed at the Płaszów concentration camp in Poland (about 55km east of Auschwitz and some 10km south-east of Cracow) and cremated. This was a desperate attempt by the Nazis to hide evidence of their murderous activities. This scene is repeated at various sites around the east.

January 1945: Joseph Mengele leaves Auschwitz to avoid the advancing Soviet army.

01 January 1945: The British government refuses to recognise the Stalin backed provisional Polish government in Lublin.

05 January 1945: Montgomery is appointed as Supreme Allied Commander north of the Ardennes.

09 January 1945: General Guderian visits Hitler at his at Ziegenberg headquarters and informs him that his intelligence indicates that the soviets have some 8,000 planes concentrated on the Vistula and East Prussian fronts. Göring, who was in attendance, denies that the Russians have so many planes and claims that most of these planes are decoys. Keitel also in attendance backs Göring’s assessment. Hitler agrees with Göring and Keitel and dismisses Guderian’s numbers.

12 January 1945: At 5am Moscow time the Red Army launch their Vistula offensive with Konev’s 1st Ukrainian Front attacking the German lines out of the Sandomierz bridgehead.

14 January 1945: Soviet armies invade East Prussia.

17 January 1945: Jewish inmates capable of walking are forced onto death marches from the death camp at Auschwitz to the West. Himmler does not want one single victim falling into the arms of the advancing Red Army alive. - Soviet troops enter Warsaw. They also overrun the Silesian coalfields thus removing around 60 per cent of Germany’s supply of coal.

18 January 1945: The Nazis begin a forced march of prisoners from Auschwitz to Germany. Soviet troops enter Warsaw.  - Soviet troops free some 80,000 Jews who had been held in Budapest.

20 January 1945: The Hungarian government signs an armistice with the Soviet Union.       

21 January 1945: The Hungarian government declares war on Germany.

23 January 1945: The SS execute Count Helmuth James von Moltke, Erwin Planck and Eugen Bolz alongside other conspirators linked with the July plot to assassinate Hitler. The executions took place within the walls of plötzensee prison in Berlin.

25 January 1945: The Germans at the Stutthof concentration camp begin to evacuate the prisoners, via a forced march towards the Reich in an effort to flee from the advancing Soviet army, however, some 5,000 prisoners from the camp's sub-camps are taken to the Baltic coast where they are murdered.

27 January 1945: The Red Army reaches the river Oder. -  The Red Army liberates Auschwitz.

30 January 1945: Hitler gives his last address to the nation. - Albert Speer, Hitler’s chief architect and Minister for Armaments and War Production sends Hitler a memorandum pointing out that raw materials are dangerously low in supply and he bluntly points out that ‘the war is lost’. -  During a distribution of food within the working class of Neukollen in Berlin, a riot broke out as cold and hungry citizens tried to seize the supplies. Several women were killed by the police when they overturned a wagon full of potatoes.

31 January 1945: The Red Army crosses the Oder River just north of Frankfurt an der Oder. They are now just some forty miles from Berlin.

February 1945: The Hungarian capital, Budapest is captured by the Red Army.

February 1945: ‘Argonaut’, the codename for the Allied conference in Yalta begins in the Crimea. The aim of the conference is to discuss the division of a post-war Germany.

02 February 1945: Ecuador declares war on Germany. –  The Red Army capture Stettin - The Germans launch punitive counterattacks against the newly established Soviet Oder bridgeheads.

03 February 1945: In Malta, President Roosevelt and the British Prime Minister Winston Churchill board planes that will take them to the Yalta Conference where they meet up with the Soviet leader, Josef Stalin. -  Berlin suffers from a severely heavy bombing raid from the US Air Force where it is estimated that some 3,000 died. One of the victims of the raid was the notorious Nazi Judge and President of the People’s Court, Roland Freisler who was crushed to death whilst sheltering in the court’s cellar.

06 February 1945: Eva Braun celebrates her last birthday.

08 February 1945: Paraguay declares war on Germany.

09 February 1945: Eva Braun leaves Berlin for Berchtesgaden with her sister Gretl Fegelein. - British and Canadian forces reach the Rhine.

12 February 1945: The German hospital ship, the General von Steuben with some2,680 wounded on board is torpedoed after leaving Pillau. Most of the passengers drown.

13 February 1945: The Hungarians and their German allies within the besieged city of Budapest surrender.  Some 38,000 civilians lay dead as a result of the siege. - Peru declares war on Germany.

14 February 1945: Chile declares war on Germany. - Dresden is bombed to rubble as the Allies launch a day and night air attack on the city. - In Southern Pomerania, the so-called Fortress town of Schneidemuhl falls to the Red Army.

16 February 1945: Venezuela declares war on Germany. - The Pomeranian offensive. ‘Operation Sonnenwende’ otherwise known as the ‘Stargard tank battle’ is launched under General Wenck. The aim of the operation is to smash into Zhukov’s right flank thus maintaining a link between East Prussia and Pomerania as well as deterring the Red Army from pushing straight onto Berlin from their current positions and thereby allowing time to prepare strong defences for defence of Berlin.

17 February 1945: After a military briefing with Hitler, General Walther Wenck is badly hurt as he fell asleep at the wheel of his motor vehicle and crashed as he returned to his headquarters on the eastern front.

18 February 1945: The German offensive in the east, ‘Operation Sonnenwende’ becomes bogged down in the mud.

23 February 1945: Uruguay and Turkey declare war on Germany.

24 February 1945: In Cairo, Premier Ahmed Maher is shot dead after reading his country’s declaration of war on Germany and Japan.

26 February 1945: Syria declares war on Germany.

27 February 1945: Lebanon declares war on Germany. -  The Western Allies enter Monchengladbach in West Germany.

28 February 1945: The United States of America signs a lend-lease with France.

March 1945: Anne Frank and her sister Margot, dies of typhus in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.

01 March 1945: Saudi Arabia declares war on Germany. - Monchengladbach, west of Düsseldorf, falls into Allied hands as the German army cease fighting in and around the city.

03 March 1945: Finland declares war on Germany.         

06 March 1945: The Western Allies capture Cologne.

07 March 1945: American troops cross the Rhine using the bridge at Remagen.  -Eva Braun arrives in Berlin to spend her remaining days with Hitler.

08 March 1945: The commander of the Allied 3rd Armoured Division, General Maurice Ross is assassinated by Werewolf members in Paderborn in Germany.

12 March 1945: With the war unwinnable, the SS-Reichsführer signs an agreement (Himmler-Kersten Agreement) behind Hitler's back with his personal physical therapist Dr. Felix Kerstin within the Hohenlychen sanatorium in Lychen (Flößerstadt), town in the Uckermark district, in Brandenburg, Germany, where Himmler agrees to stop killing the Jews, and promises to treat them like all other prisoners. He also agreed to surrender all the concentration camps intact. The Swedish Red Cross would also be allowed to send individual Jewish prisoners food parcels. 

18 March 1945: The United States Air Force attack 8 Soviet planes flying between Berlin and Kustrin thinking them to be German. The Soviet authorities protest claiming that they lost 6 of their planes in the dog fight.

18-23 March 1945: On the Eastern Front, the Red Army fails to break through the German 18th Army lines.

19 March 1945: Hitler orders a scorched earth policy as the Allies push deep into Germany.

20 March 1945: Heinz Guderian convinces Himmler to give up his command of an army group, pleading that he’s overtaxed. Hitler reluctantly agrees and at Guderian’s suggestion appoints Colonel General Gotthard Heinrici the new commander. Heinrici’s job is to defend 280 km (175 miles) of land from the Baltic south along the Oder to its confluence with the Neisse River in Silesia. -The Yugoslavians launch an offensive in against the Germans in Dalmatia.

21 March 1945: Berlin, as a city has been reduced to rubble. Nearly 314 air raids on the city have utterly destroyed its infrastructure. More than half of its housing stock is now uninhabitable, with over 50,000 of its inhabitants dead and a further 100,000 injured. - Guderian is told to take sick leave by Hitler after a heated argument. Guderian tells Hitler that he could not take any sick leave on the grounds that General Wenck was still recovering from injuries sustained from his car accident and General Krebs wounded in a bombing raid whilst in Zossen the week before.

22 March 1945: In Germany Albert Kesselring replaces von Rundstedt as commander in the west.

23 March 1945: British and American troops as part of ‘Operation Plunder’ cross the Rhine River at Rees and Wesel and head for the Ruhr. - The Soviets split the German 2nd Army into three groups, that being on Hela, Gotenhafen and Danzig. - Colonel General Loehr is made the German Supreme Commander South-East.

24 March 1945: The US appointed Mayor of Aachen Karl Oppenhoff is assassinated by a group of youths claiming to represent the resistance group the ‘Werewolves’.

26 March 1945: Britain’s Field Marshal Montgomery issues an order to his troops forbidding fraternisation with German civilians. - Albert Speer returns to Berlin where he is confronted by Hitler who accuses him of believing that then war is lost, which he sees as treasonous. Hitler tells him that he should go on leave but Speer offers his resignation as his armaments minister instead which Hitler bluntly rejects.

27 March 1945: Hitler issues new orders demanding the total destruction of all transport and communication systems before they fall into enemy hand. -  Argentina declares war on Germany - Britain’s Field Marshal Montgomery sends an urgent cable to Supreme HQ of the Allied Expeditionary Force, pleading with Eisenhower for permission to lead a powerful thrust towards Berlin. The request is denied. - The last V2 Rocket falls on London. -  Leaders from the Polish underground resistance movement are invited to meet Marshal Zhukov, and are immediately arrested and imprisoned.

29 March 1945: Hitler appoints Lt-General Hans Krebs as head of the General Staff after dismissing Heinz Guderian from the role.  - Albert Speer returns to Berlin and approaches sympathetic generals and Gauleiters’ to try to dissuade them from carrying out Hitler’s scorched earth policy arguing that Germany will need an infrastructure to rebuild their country after the war is over.  -  Zhukov boards a plane to fly back to Moscow but due to bad weather his plane has to land at Minsk and later takes a train straight to Moscow to attend a meeting with Stalin.30 March 1945: The Commander of the Allied 3rd Armoured Division, General Maurice Rose is assassinated by Werewolf resistance members in Paderborn, Germany.  - The Red Army crosses into Austria.

30 March 1945: The Red Army captures Danzig.

31 March 1945: General Eisenhower issues an order preventing Field Marshal Montgomery from advancing on Berlin.

End of March 1945: Two Hitler Youth members, one 16 years old and the other 17 years old are sentenced to death by a US court-martial in Germany. It was claimed that both of the boys were part of a Werewolf unit sniping at Allied troops in and around Aachen. (see 5th June 1945)

Early April 1945: Himmler issues an order stating that anyone who displaces a white flag from their homes are to be shot.

01 April 1945: The German Army Group B is encircled by the 1st and 9th US Armies at Lippstadt in the Ruhr.  - A special appeal is broadcasted to the German people urging them to enlist within the newly established partisan units (Werewolf) within their area. - Marshals’ Zhukov and Konev meet Stalin in the Kremlin in Moscow to discuss the final push on Berlin.

01-15 April 1945: Some 96,000 German wounded, 81,000 refugees and 66,000 other German soldiers are evacuated by sea from the Hela pocket in the East.

02 April 1945: General Bradley’s 12th Army group and the US 9th Army complete the encirclement of the Ruhr, trapping Field Marshal Walter Model’s Army Group B’s 325,000 men.

03 April 1945: Zhukov leaves Moscow to return to his headquarters to make final preparations for the assault on Berlin.

04 April 1945: In Lower Saxony, Osnabrück falls to the Allies.

05 April 1945:  Hitler transfers 4 of Heinrici’s panzer units to defend Prague. The Reich’s-chancellery is now under complete bombardment from Russian artillery. - The last V2 rockets of the war are fired at Liege, Antwerp and Brussels. - The Soviets launch their assault on Vienna.

06 April 1945: The Red Army launches their attack on Konigsberg in East Prussia.

07 April 1945: At the Luftwaffe base at Stendal in Germany, 184 ME109s and 2 ME262s (a new jet plane) begins ‘Operation Werewolf’ against US bombers cruising over Germany. The two ME262s deliberately lure the bomber’s fighter escort away thus allowing the ME109s to carry out a ramming operation against the unprotected bombers. 133 German fighters were destroyed in the attack with only 77 of their pilots survived whilst the Americans lost only 23 heavy bombers and six fighters. Operation Werewolf had been an attempt to inflict heavy damage on the attacking American bombers but it had failed miserably.

09 April 1945: Ewald von Kleist-Schmenzin, a vocal opponent of Hitler and the Nazis and who had allowed his country estate home to be used for resistance meetings is beheaded at Plötzensee Prison. - The Red Army captures Konigsberg in East Prussia. - The British 8th Army launches its offensive on the Adriatic coast of Italy. -  A number of Himmler’s ‘special prisoners’ still being held within the concentration camp system are executed; among them is Johann Georg Elser, the communist who came near to assassinating Hitler on the 8th November 1939, after he planted a bomb in the Bürgerbräukeller in Munich. Also Executed is Dietrich Bonhoeffer, General Oster and Admiral Canaris.

10 April 1945: The US 2nd Armoured Division takes Magdeburg on the Elbe River, 140Km (87 miles) south-west of Berlin. -  In Paris the Vichy police chief and collaborator Lucien Rottee is sentenced to death. -  US troops capture Buchenwald concentration camp.

11 April 1945: The US Army reach Magdeburg in Germany. 

12 April 1945: President Roosevelt dies and the Vice President, Harry S. Truman assumes the Presidency.  Hitler’s Propaganda Minister, Joseph Goebbels see’s Roosevelt death as a good omen, and this lifts Hitler morale, for a few hours at least. - The Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra gives its final performance within the ruined German capital city. The concert had been organised by Hitler’s Armaments Minister Albert Speer. -  Martin Bormann, along with Keitel and Himmler sign an order demanding that all German cities be defended to the utmost.

13 April 1945:  The Soviet Army occupy Vienna. -  A second bridgehead is established by the US 9th Army on the Elbe River. - The Allies liberate the concentration camps of Bergen-Belsen and Buchenwald. - Prisoners from the concentration camp at Dora-Mittelbau are murdered by the German police and members of the Hitler Youth. ‘One night we stopped near the town of Gardelegen. We lay down in a field and several Germans went to consult about what they should do. They returned with a lot of young people from the Hitler Youth and with members of the police force from the town. They chased us all into a large barn. Since we were 5-6,000 people, the wall of the barn collapsed from the pressure of the mass of people, and many of us fled. The Germans poured out petrol and set the barn on fire. Several thousand people were burned alive. Those of us who had managed to escape, lay down in the nearby wood and heard the heart-rending screams of the victims. This was April 13th. One day later the place was conquered by Eisenhower’s army. When the Americans got there; the bodies were still burning[2]’.

14 April 1945: The 5th US Army launches an offensive in Italy against the German defenders. - Arnhem is liberated by British troops.

15 April 1945: Bergen- Belsen concentration camp is liberated by British troops. - General Wenck, using the remnants of his Twelfth Army launch an unsuccessful counter-attack against the US 83rd Infantry Division near Zerbst. - Hitler rages against his personal doctor Karl Brandt after hearing that he was planning to move himself and his family to Thüringa which was about to fall into American hands, he accuses Brandt of ‘defeatism’ and orders Martin Bormann to investigate the matter. - The Soviet 9th Guards capture St Poelten in Austria and halts its advance westward. - The German Twelfth Army under General Wenck launches a strong counter-attack against the US 83rd Infantry Division near Zerbst but are successfully repulsed. - Hitler orders Field Marshal Busch to be the military commander in the north-west in the event that Germany is cut into two by the advancing Allied armies.

16 April 1945: The German 12th Army smashes the 9th US Army’s bridgeheads on the east bank of the Elbe River. -  The 1st Ukrainian and 1st White Russian Fronts open the attack on Berlin. - The hospital ship ‘Goya’ is sunk by a Soviet submarine. Out of 7,000 people on board, only 165 survived. -  Dr Karl Brandt is arrested and driven to a flat in Beelitz belonging to SS-Gruppenführer Heinrich Müller, head of the Gestapo.  He had been accused of defeatism and by deliberately moving his family closer to the advancing Americans so that they would fall into their hands, and thus find safety.  He is found guilty of defeatism and sentenced to death after a tribunal chaired by Axmann was convened to investigate his plans to move himself and his family towards the Americans, the sentence was never carried out. 

17 April 1945: Another court martial is convened against Dr Karl Brant within Joseph Goebbels apartment in Hermann-Göring-Strasser and which would be led by Goebbels himself.  Hitler had personally accused Brandt of treachery and thus sealed the decision of the court martial.  Goebbels and the rest of the court sanctioned that Brandt to put to death, again, a sentence that was never carried out. 

18 April 1945: Dr Karl Brandt is transferred to the Gestapo prison in Potsdam.  Brandt was informed that he would be shot sometime in the morning, however the execution doesn't take place as it postponed so that the court concerned can take a statement from another witness, Paul Rostock, who was an associate of Brandt's. As the Soviets moved closer to Berlin, Himmler had moved him [Brant] to northern Germany. Later, Brandt's friend, Albert Speer contacts the officers who were holding Brandt, claiming to be speaking on behalf of Heinrich Himmler and instructing them that under no circumstances should Brandt be executed.  Believing Speer, the Gestapo took Brandt with them further north to avoid falling into Soviet hand. 

18-19 April 1945: the last British air raid on Berlin takes place.

19 April 1945: The British 2nd Army reaches the Elbe River at Lauenberg.

20 April 1945: Dr Karl Brandt's office of the General Commissioner of the Führer for Health and Sanitation is dissolved. - Hitler celebrates his fifty-sixth birthday knowing it would be his last. -  Hitler divides Germany into a northern zone under Admiral Doenitz and a southern zone under Field Marshal Kesselring. -  Red Army artillery bombards the centre of Berlin. - The US 1st Army captures Leipzig.

21 April 1945: Polish troops serving with the British 8th Army seize Bologna. - Field Marshal Model commits suicide after his Army Group B surrenders to the Western Allies after it has been trapped in the Ruhr Pocket. -Joseph Goebbels holds his last meeting as Reich Propaganda chief with his subordinates.

22 April 1945: Hitler informs his staff that he intends to remain in Berlin.

23 April 1945: The British 2nd Army reaches Hamburg - Hermann Göring sends a message to Hitler asking the Führer to allow him to take over as Führer of Germany as he believed that Hitler was no longer in a position to lead Germany. He wrote: ‘My Fuhrer!’ In view of your decision to remain in the fortress of Berlin, do you agree that I take over at once the total leadership of the Reich, with full freedom of action at home and abroad as your deputy, in accordance with your decree of 29 June 1941. If no reply is received by 2200 hrs tonight. I shall take it for granted that you have lost your freedom of action, and shall consider your decree as fulfilled, and shall act for the best interests of our country and people. You know what I feel for you in this gravest hour of my life. Words fail me to express myself. May God protect you, and speed you quickly here in spite of all. You’re Loyal Hermann Göring’.  When Göring’s message reaches Hitler’s bunker, Martin Bormann uses it to enrage Hitler and to see it as treasonous. Hitler sends Göring his reply stating that Göring is now guilty of treason, and the penalty for treason is death, but in view of his long service to the Party and state, his life is spared, provided that he immediately resigns all his offices. The message required an immediate ‘yes’ or ‘no’. Bormann issues instructions in the name of the Führer to the SS HQ in Berchtesgaden which places Göring and his staff in SS custody by the morning of the next day. Hitler replaces Göring as commander of the now defunct Luftwaffe with the newly promoted Field Marshal Ritter von Greim. – Himmler along with SS-General Walther Schellenberg meets secretly with the Swedish Red Cross. Himmler, claiming for himself, the powers of the führer, proposed to contact the Western Allies with the offer of a ceasefire. Thus, allowing the fight to continue on the Eastern Front. Schellenberg had for months tried to get Himmler to break his ties with Hitler and to use his power to end the war. The Allies reject the offer.

24 April 1945: Konev’s Soviet forces break through Berlin’s defences and pushes into the city itself. In doing so enraged Zhukov, who wanted to be the man who entered Berlin first. - Obergruppenführer Dr Ernst-Robert Grawitz, commits suicide in Berlin after his request to leave Berlin was turned down by Hitler. - Keitel and Jodl leave Berlin for Rheinsberg where they try to organise a way to raise the siege of Berlin. - The British 8th Army takes Ferrara in Northern Italy. - The American 5th Army enters La Spezia and reach the Po north-west of Bologna in Italy.

25 April 1945: Berlin is completely surrounded and is now cut off from the rest of the Reich by the Red Army. - Units of the American 1st Army meets up with the Soviet 5th Guards at Torqau next to the Elbe River, south of Berlin. -  The Allies capture Mantua, Reggio and Parma in Italy. - The Charter of the United Nations is adopted in the San Francisco conference.

26 April 1945: The last remaining telephone lines in Berlin to the outside world are cut, communications are now only possible via radio. - The Red Army captures Bruenn in Czechoslovakia. - The American 5th Army capture Verona. - The British 2nd Army captures Bremen.

27 April 1945: SS-Gruppenführer Hermann Fegelein, Heinrich Himmler’s liaison officer at Führer headquarters, and brother-in-law to Eva Braun, leaves the bunker in Berlin without permission. - In Vienna, a provisional government is set up under Karl Renner. - The American 5th Army reaches Genoa in Italy. – The SS execute Paul Thümmel (agent A-54) at Theresienstadt concentration camp.

28 April 1945: The German 12th Army’s offensive to relieve Berlin fails. - Dachau concentration camp near Munich is liberated by American troops. - Hitler learns of Himmler’s secret negotiations with the Western Allies and flies into a rage. He orders Himmler’s arrest. - Mussolini and his mistress, Claretta Petacci, are brutally beaten and executed and their bodies hung upside down in the Piazza Loreto in Milan.  - Hermann Fegelein, Himmler's liaison officer at the führer headquarters is arrested and sentenced to death by a court martial for attempting to flee Berlin, he is taken into a nearby street and shot.

29 April 1945: Hitler Marries Eva Braun. After the wedding he summons his secretary and begins dictating his last will and testament. In it he strips Göring and Himmler of all offices and titles. Admiral Dönitz is named President of the Reich and Supreme Commander of the Armed Forces. Goebbels is given the post of Chancellor and Martin Bormann that of Party Minister. - The German military leadership of Army Group C sign the instrument of surrender, though the cessation of hostilities will not come into effect until 2nd May. - Venice is captured by the British 56th Division. - The American 7th Army liberates the concentration camp Dachau.

30 April 1945: Hitler and his newly wed commit suicide after having a light meal of spaghetti in a light sauce. The bodies are taken to the gardens above and cremated, however, the Red Army managed to remove Hitler’s skull and other bones from the bomb pit their bodies were burnt in for forensic tests. - Soviet troops hoist the ‘Red Banner’ over the Reichstag building at 1430 hrs. - The ‘Ulbricht Group’ set out from Moscow to Berlin to set up Stalin’s puppet government in the occupied Soviet zone of Germany. -The American 7th Army captures Munich. - In Italy, the US 5th Army seizes Turin. - The Yugoslavians reach the outskirts of Trieste.

01 May 1945: Goebbel’s tries to broker a ceasefire with the Russians and after he refuses their proposals: he orders the killing of his children by poison. Afterwards he and his wife Magda leave the bunker for the garden of the Chancellery and then commits suicide together by biting down on a cyanide capsule followed by shooting themselves. Petrol is thrown over their bodies and they are set alight; however, they are not totally cremated and the Red Army remove their charred remains for forensic tests later. - Karl Dönitz is informed that Hitler had promoted him to Reich’s President by Martin Bormann, Bormann also informs him that Hitler had committed suicide. - Field Marshal von Rundstedt is captured by the Allies. - At 2230 hrs, the German people are notified by a radio bulletin of Hitler’s death.

02 May 1945: At 4am, a new German delegation reaches the Russian side and begs the Russian commander, Zhukov for an end to hostilities. Hans Fritzsche, now Director of the Propaganda Ministry, informs Zhukov that Dr Goebbel’s is no longer among the living. At approximately 1500 hours, the guns fall silent, the Battle for Berlin is over.  Dönitz tries to keep the government going post-Hitler at Flensburg-Mürwick, Schleswig-Holstein. - Grand-Admiral Karl Dönitz, Hitler’s successor as President of the Reich and Supreme commander of the German armed forces issues an appeal to the German people and to members of the Military. The appeal read: ‘German men and women! Soldiers of the German army! Our Führer, Adolf Hitler has fallen. The German people bow their deepest mourning and reverence. He saw the terrible dangers of Bolshevism and he devoted all his life to the struggle against it. This struggle and his unshakeably straight path were ended by his historic death in the capital of the Reich. Until the very end, his life was devoted to the good of Germany. His struggle against Bolshevism was for Europe and the whole civilised world’ The Führer appointed me as his successor. With full responsibility, I assume the leadership of the German people at this difficult hour that will decide our fate. My first task is to save the German people from the attacking Bolshevik enemy. The armed struggle is being continued only for this aim. And as long as the British and the Americans are preventing it, we will have to continue our defence against them. In this case, the British and the Americans continue fighting, not in the interest of their own people but for the dissemination of Bolshevism in Europe. What the German people suffered during the war on the battlefield, as well as on the home front, is unmatched in history. In this trying time of need and hardship, I shall try my best to support tolerable living conditions for our heroic men, women and children. To do this I need your help. Believe me, because your path is my path. Support order and discipline in towns and villages. Each of you must perform your duties at your assigned post. In this way, we shall be able to lessen the suffering that will confront all of us in the near future. If we do our best, God will not abandon us after all this suffering and sacrifice.’ Signed Dönitz. -  The Red Cross take over the concentration camp at Theresienstadt.  An SS officer is sent to Rendsburg by the new German government under Karl Dönitz, where Karl Brandt was being held, and ordered his release. Brandt then fled to Flensburg with the new German government. - The German armed forces within Italy and Austria lay down their arms and surrender to the Western Allies. - Martin Bormann and Dr. Ludwig Stumpfegger die near the Weidendammer Bridge, while trying to escape from Berlin. Their bodies are not immediately identified and are later thrown into an unmarked grave.  It would not be until 1972 that their bodies would be rediscovered.  Facial reconstructions made in 1973 would show that one of those bodies was in deed Bormann, but it would be in 1999, that DNA testing showed beyond any reasonable doubt, that one of the bodies found at the bridge was Bormann. - The RAF launches their last bombing raids on German targets. Kiel is bombed whilst a raid is carried out upon Lübeck where a number of ships loaded with refugees and concentration camp prisoners are hit including the Arcona, where 7,000 prisoners are killed. - Elements of the US 6th Airborne Division link up with the Red Army at Wismar.

03 May 1945: The US 7th Army captures Innsbruck whilst element of VI Corps is sent to the Brenner Pass to link up with the American 5th Army. -  The British 2nd Army enters Hamburg.

04 May 1945: German forces within Northern Germany, the Netherlands and Denmark surrender to the Western Allies.  - German Army Group G surrenders to the American General Devers thus ending the war in Bavaria and western Austria.

05 May 1945: American forces liberate Mauthausen concentration camp.  The German armed forces in Norway surrenders to the Allies. - All German forces in southern Germany surrender to the Americans. - American troops capture Linz. - All German forces stationed in Norway surrender to the Allies. -  In Yugoslavia, the last remaining remnants of the German Army Group G move northward in an attempt to reach the Austrian border so that they can surrender to the western Allies. - In Prague, a rebellion takes place against the Germans.

06 May 1945: The last German convoys leave German ports for Hela in an attempt to rescue as many Germans that are fleeing from the advancing Red Army. Some 43,000 people are rescued in this operation but the Port of Hela is captured by the Soviets. - The Red Army launches its final assault on the remnants of Schörner’s Army Group in Czechoslovakia. - Breslau, which was regarded as a ‘fortress city’ falls to the Red Army. - Under Patton, the American V Corps captures Pilsen in Czechoslovakia. -  Eisenhower orders the 3rd Army to halt their advance into Czechoslovakia. -  The American 5th Army enters Austria from the south. -  Admiral Karl Dönitz relieves Himmler from all offices.

07 May 1945: Germany's unconditional surrender is signed at Reims by Gen. Alfred Jodl. - 07 May 1945: At Eisenhower’s headquarters at Reims, the Germans sign the document of unconditional surrender of all German armed forces throughout the Reich and occupied countries.

The capitulation will take effect at 0001 hrs on 9th May. - The battered remnants of the German 12th Army surrender to the Americans. -  Soviet forces reach the line at Wismar-Schwerin-Wittenberge. -  A 220,000 strong Croatian force that had been serving alongside the Germans try to fight their way out of Yugoslavia to Austria, but is stopped by the British 8th Army and by members of Tito’s Yugoslavian forces.

08 May 1945: Victory in Europe (VE) day. The war in Europe is officially over. - Oskar Schindler, along with his wife Emile and eight Jewish inmates leave his - Brünnlitz labor camp in his Mercedes followed by a truck pulling two trailers. Valuables are stuffed within the interior doors of the Mercedes. The Schindler Jews also sign a letter explaining his role in their survival.

 

[1] Hitler’s Hangman. The Life of Heydrich (2012). Robert Gerwarth Yale University Press (UK) p.263

[2] Second World War (New Edition) (2003) Martin Gilbert. Phoenix Press London. p663