Allies surrender at Tobruk, Libya

Year
1942
Month Day
June 21

On June 21, 1942, General Erwin Rommel turns his assault on the British-Allied garrison at Tobruk, Libya, into victory, as his panzer division occupies the North African port.

Britain had established control of Tobruk after routing the Italians in 1940. But the Germans attempted to win it back by reinforcing Italian troops with the Afrika Korps of Erwin Rommel, who continually charged the British Eighth Army in battles around Tobruk, finally forcing the Brits to retreat into Egypt. All that was left to take back the port was the garrison now manned by the South African Division, which also included the Eleventh Indian Brigade. With the use of artillery, dive-bombers, and his panzer forces, Rommel pushed past the Allies. 

Unable to resist any longer, South African General Henrik Klopper ordered his officers to surrender early on the morning of the 21st. Rommel took more than 30,000 prisoners, 2,000 vehicles, 2,000 tons of fuel, and 5,000 tons of rations. Adolf Hitler awarded Rommel the field marshal’s baton as reward for his victory. “I am going on to Suez,” was Rommel’s promise.

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Allies prepare for D-Day

Year
1944
Month Day
June 05

On June 5, 1944, more than 1,000 British bombers drop 5,000 tons of bombs on German gun batteries placed at the Normandy assault area, while 3,000 Allied ships cross the English Channel in preparation for the invasion of Normandy—D-Day.

READ MORE: How D-Day Changed the Course of WWII

The day of the invasion of occupied France had been postponed repeatedly since May, mostly because of bad weather and the enormous tactical obstacles involved. Finally, despite less than ideal weather conditions—or perhaps because of them—General Eisenhower decided on June 5 to set the next day as D-Day, the launch of the largest amphibious operation in history. Ike knew that the Germans would be expecting postponements beyond the sixth, precisely because weather conditions were still poor.

Among those Germans confident that an Allied invasion could not be pulled off on the sixth was Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, who was still debating tactics with Field Marshal Karl Rundstedt. Runstedt was convinced that the Allies would come in at the narrowest point of the Channel, between Calais and Dieppe; Rommel, following Hitler’s intuition, believed it would be Normandy. Rommel’s greatest fear was that German air inferiority would prevent an adequate defense on the ground; it was his plan to meet the Allies on the coast—before the Allies had a chance to come ashore. Rommel began constructing underwater obstacles and minefields, and set off for Germany to demand from Hitler personally more panzer divisions in the area.

READ MORE: D:Day: An Interactive

Bad weather and an order to conserve fuel grounded much of the German air force on June 5; consequently, its reconnaissance flights were spotty. That night, more than 1,000 British bombers unleashed a massive assault on German gun batteries on the coast. At the same time, an Allied armada headed for the Normandy beaches in Operation Neptune, an attempt to capture the port at Cherbourg. But that was not all. In order to deceive the Germans, phony operations were run; dummy parachutists and radar-jamming devices were dropped into strategically key areas so as to make German radar screens believe there was an Allied convoy already on the move. One dummy parachute drop succeeded in drawing an entire German infantry regiment away from its position just six miles from the actual Normandy landing beaches. All this effort was to scatter the German defenses and make way for Operation Overlord, the Allied invasion of Normandy.

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All American forces in the Philippines surrender unconditionally

Year
1942
Month Day
May 06

On May 6, 1942, U.S. Lieutenant General Jonathan Wainwright surrenders all U.S. troops in the Philippines to the Japanese.

The island of Corregidor remained the last Allied stronghold in the Philippines after the Japanese victory at Bataan (from which General Wainwright had managed to flee, to Corregidor). Constant artillery shelling and aerial bombardment attacks ate away at the American and Filipino defenders. Although still managing to sink many Japanese barges as they approached the northern shores of the island, the Allied troops could hold the invader off no longer. General Wainwright, only recently promoted to the rank of lieutenant general and commander of the U.S. armed forces in the Philippines, offered to surrender Corregidor to Japanese General Homma, but Homma wanted the complete, unconditional capitulation of all American forces throughout the Philippines. Wainwright had little choice given the odds against him and the poor physical condition of his troops (he had already lost 800 men). He surrendered at midnight. All 11,500 surviving Allied troops were evacuated to a prison stockade in Manila.

General Wainwright remained a POW until 1945. As a sort of consolation for the massive defeat he suffered, he was present on the USS Missouri for the formal Japanese surrender ceremony on September 2, 1945. He would also be awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor by President Harry S. Truman. Wainwright died in 1953—exactly eight years to the day of the Japanese surrender ceremony.

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Alfred Rosenberg is executed

Year
1946
Month Day
October 16

On this day in 1946, Alfred Rosenberg, the primary fabricator and disseminator of Nazi ideology, is hanged as a war criminal.

Born in Estonia in 1893, Rosenberg studied architecture at the University of Moscow. After receiving his degree, he stayed in Russia through the early days of the Russian Revolution and may have even flirted with communism briefly. In 1919, he immigrated to Munich, and met up with Dietrich Eckart, the poet-turned-editor of the Voelkischer Beobachter, the propagandistic newspaper of the Nazi Party. Through Eckart, Rosenberg met Adolf Hitler and Rudolf Hess and joined the newly formed Nazi Party. Hitler replaced Eckart with Rosenberg as editor of the paper, so impressed was Hitler with the “intellectual” architect.

Rosenberg immediately began using the news organ to disseminate his racist philosophy, now also the official Nazi philosophy, which was cobbled together from the writings of two men extremely influential on Germany’s growing anti-Semitism, racism, and grandiose self-perception: Houston Stewart Chamberlain, an Englishman, and Count Joseph Arthur de Gobineau, a French diplomat, both of whom believed that the Aryan Germans were destined to be the masters of Europe.

When the 1923 Munich Beer Hall Putsch collapsed, and Hitler was thrown in jail, he turned the reins of the party over to Rosenberg, whom Hitler believed would prove feckless as a leader and thus no ultimate threat to his own authority. And there was nothing to fear-for the Nazi Party would be banned and dismissed as a laughingstock until Hitler took control again upon his release.

Rosenberg’s literary output continued as the Nazis fought for legitimacy and power. The Future Direction of a German Foreign Policy argued for the invasion and occupation of Poland and the Soviet Union. The Myth of the 20th Century laid out the convoluted notions of Nordic racial superiority once again, also describing in no uncertain terms who the enemies of a German-Nazi Europe were: “Russian Tartars” (that is, Slavs), and Semites, which included not merely Jews but all the Latin ethnic groups—as well as Christianity, especially the Roman Catholic Church. This “blueprint” for a “natural right” of conquest fueled Hitler’s already violent prejudices and megalomaniac character.

Rosenberg’s roles during the war included working, from his Office of Foreign Affairs, with Norwegian fascist Vidkun Quisling in the overthrow of Norway’s government. Rosenberg was also responsible for overseeing the transportation of stolen artworks from Vichy France to Germany.

At the Nuremberg trials, Rosenberg was found guilty of war crimes and ordered hanged.

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Adolf and Eva marry

Year
1945
Month Day
April 29

During the night of April 28-29, Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun marry, only hours before they both died by suicide. Braun met Hitler while employed as an assistant to Hitler’s official photographer. Of a middle-class Catholic background, Braun spent her time with Hitler out of public view, entertaining herself by skiing and swimming. She had no discernible influence on Hitler’s political career but provided a certain domesticity to the life of the dictator. Loyal to the end, she refused to leave the Berlin bunker buried beneath the chancellery as the Russians closed in.

READ MORE: Hitler’s Teeth Reveal Nazi Dictator’s Cause of Death 

Also on this day in 1945, the Americans liberate the concentration camp at Dachau. Five hundred German garrison troops guarding the camp are killed within an hour, some by inmates, but most by the American liberators, who are horrified by what they bear witness to, including huge piles of emaciated dead bodies found in railway cars and near the crematorium.

There were 33,000 survivors of the camp, 2,539 of them Jewish. Dachau, about 12 miles north of Munich, was the first concentration camp established by the Nazi regime, only five weeks after Hitler came to power. At least 160,000 prisoners passed through the main camp and another 90,000 through its 150 branches scattered throughout southern Germany and Austria. Medical experiments, ranging from studying the effects of freezing on warm-blooded creatures to treating intentionally inflicted malaria, were carried out on prisoners. At least 32,000 prisoners died of malnutrition and mistreatment at the camp itself; innumerable more were transported to the Auschwitz gas chambers. A memorial was established at the campsite on September 11, 1956.

READ MORE: Holocaust Photos Reveal Horrors of Nazi Concentration Camps

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Adolf Hitler becomes president of Germany

Year
1934
Month Day
August 19

On August 19, 1934, Adolf Hitler, already chancellor, is also elected president of Germany in an unprecedented consolidation of power in the short history of the republic.

In 1932, German President Paul von Hindenburg, old, tired, and a bit senile, had won re-election as president, but had lost a considerable portion of his right/conservative support to the Nazi Party. Those close to the president wanted a cozier relationship to Hitler and the Nazis. Hindenburg had contempt for the Nazis’ lawlessness, but ultimately agreed to oust his chancellor, Heinrich Bruning, for Franz von Papen, who was willing to appease the Nazis by lifting the ban on Hitler’s Brown Shirts and unilaterally canceling Germany’s reparation payments, imposed by the Treaty of Versailles at the close of World War I.

But Hitler was not appeased. He wanted the chancellorship for himself. Papen’s policies failed on another front: His authoritarian rule alienated his supporters, and he too was forced to resign. He then made common cause with Hitler, persuading President Hindenburg to appoint Hitler chancellor and himself vice-chancellor. He promised the president that he would restrain Hitler’s worst tendencies and that a majority of the Cabinet would go to non-Nazis. As Hindenburg’s current chancellor could no longer gain a majority in the Reichstag, and Hitler could bring together a larger swath of the masses and a unified right/conservative/nationalist coalition, the president gave in. In January 1933, Hitler was named chancellor of Germany.

But that was not enough for Hitler either. In February 1933, Hitler blamed a devastating Reichstag fire on the communists (its true cause remains a mystery) and convinced President Hindenburg to sign a decree suspending individual and civil liberties, a decree Hitler used to silence his political enemies with false arrests. Hitler then proceeded to purge the Brown Shirts (his storm troopers), the head of which, Ernst Röhm, had began voicing opposition to the Nazi Party’s terror tactics. Hitler had Röhm executed without trial, which encouraged the army and other reactionary forces within the country to urge Hitler to further consolidate his power by merging the presidency and the chancellorship. Hindenburg died of lung cancer on August 2, 1934. A plebiscite vote was held on August 19. Intimidation, and fear of the communists, brought Hitler a 90 percent majority. He was now, for all intents and purposes, dictator.

READ MORE: The Nazi Party

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