Historical timeline
Every item is placed by its original historical date, with precision recorded separately for approximate and partial dates.
David Irving HITLER’S WAR PART 4 TOTAL WAR Trauma and Tragedy Few events in World War II were to rouse greater controversy than Stalingrad ; around even fewer was to be woven a more intricate, yet durable, fabric of lies and legends in the postwar years. This is, however, understandable, for...
Read the recordDavid Irving HITLER’S WAR Africa and Stalingrad Hitler believed he had good reason to face the coming winter with optimism. The railway transport crisis had been overcome. The harvest throughout occupied Europe was better than expected. Albert Speer was harnessing Germany’s latent industrial might...
Read the recordDavid Irving HITLER’S WAR The Black Spot for Halder Once before, in July 1918, German troops had invaded the Caucasus. The Turks had caved in the Russian front and marched into Transcaucasia, and the Germans had followed from across the Black Sea ; then too the Ukraine had been in German hands. The...
Read the recordDavid Irving HITLER’S WAR “ Blue ” In mid-1942 Hitler launched his rebuilt armies into “Operation Blue”—the summer campaign that he hoped would leave him master of all Europe as far as Astrakhan, Stalingrad, and Baku. This was the big push that would indeed bring him to the Volga by September—and...
Read the recordDavid Irving HITLER’S WAR Hitler’s Word Is Law The first half of 1942 was again to bring the Soviet Union to the brink of defeat. From the intercepted messages passing between east and west, Hitler could follow Stalin’s exasperated demands for an Allied Second Front and his veiled threats to...
Read the recordDavid Irving HITLER’S WAR Hitler Takes Command In the dark months of that winter Hitler showed his iron determination and hypnotic powers of leadership. We shall see how these qualities and the German soldier’s legendary capacity for enduring hardship spared the eastern army from cruel defeat that...
Read the recordDavid Irving HITLER’S WAR Cold Harvest Only the weather could now thwart him. On October 2, 1941, as “Typhoon” began, lunch started fifty minutes late at his headquarters as he listened to the first reports on this last battle, designed to destroy Marshal Timoshenko’s armies. When the meal began,...
Read the recordDavid Irving HITLER’S WAR A Test of Endurance In Stalin, Hitler unquestionably now knew, he had met his match. As the Soviet resistance hardened despite each fresh catastrophe inflicted on its armies, Hitler’s admiration for his Bolshevik adversary grew. “This Stalin is obviously also a great man,”...
Read the recordDavid Irving HITLER’S WAR Kiev In his New Year proclamation Hitler had promised the German people the war would be over by the end of 1941. By mid-August he knew this promise would not be fulfilled. Indeed, by the end of the year none of even his interim objectives—Leningrad, Moscow, or Rostov—had...
Read the recordDavid Irving HITLER’S WAR PART 3 CRUSADE INTO RUSSIA The Country Poacher Thus Adolf Hitler at fifty-two set out to conquer Russia. In a terrible, unceasing onslaught his gray legions of Wehrmacht and Waffen SS troops fought forward across the drab and windswept plains, the glowing yellow fields of...
Read the recordDavid Irving HITLER’S WAR Pricking the Bubble The dazzling heat of high summer had come to the Berghof. It was now early June 1941 : with a suddenness that caused an almost perceptible lurch the last echelon of assault troops had set out from Germany for the eastern front—the twelve panzer...
Read the recordDavid Irving HITLER’S WAR Hess and Bormann “As a German and as a soldier I consider it beneath me ever to belittle a brave enemy,” exclaimed Hitler to his assembled Reichstag deputies on May 4, 1941. “But it seems necessary to me to do something to protect the Truth from the boastful lies of a man...
Read the recordDavid Irving HITLER’S WAR A Bitter Victory To the rest of the world Hitler’s lightning campaign against Greece and Yugoslavia proved once more the invincibility of the German Wehrmacht. Within the inner sanctum of his own headquarters, however, it demonstrated the grating lack of harmony within the...
Read the recordDavid Irving HITLER’S WAR Behind the Door One incident of the climactic summer of 1941 must be examined here lest it become submerged in the noisier events of Hitler’s attack on Russia. It serves to illustrate the atmosphere in which that year’s more controversial decisions were taken. A few days...
Read the recordDavid Irving HITLER’S WAR Let Europe Hold Its Breath Hitler entered the new year, 1941, with two distantly related ambitions : to knock out Soviet Russia and thus force Britain to submit with no injury to her empire, and to rescue fascism in Italy from threatened oblivion. All else was subsidiary...
Read the recordDavid Irving HITLER’S WAR The “ Barbarossa ” Directive After Molotov’s trainload of advisers and secret police officials had crossed the demarcation line back into Russia’s share of Europe, an air of uncertainty and gloom shrouded Hitler’s Chancellery. One of his adjutants recorded his conviction...
Read the recordDavid Irving HITLER’S WAR Molotov The six weeks preceding the doom-charged visit of Vyacheslav Molotov to Berlin in November 1940 are a period when Hitler’s foreign policy becomes almost impossible to disentangle. With the direct assault on the British Isles all but abandoned and the Luftwaffe’s...
Read the recordDavid Irving HITLER’S WAR The Dilemma Winston Churchill’s resistance in the summer of 1940 overthrew the very basis of Hitler’s calculations. For twenty years he had dreamed of an alliance with Britain. Until far into the war he clung to the dream with all the vain, slightly ridiculous tenacity of...
Read the recordDavid Irving HITLER’S WAR The Big Decision While Schmundt packed up the headquarters, and a never-ending stream of telegrams and congratulations reached the Chancellery in Berlin—from the exiled kaiser in Holland, from the crown prince, from Hindenburg’s daughter, and even one from Hitler’s old...
Read the recordDavid Irving HITLER’S WAR PART 2 “ WAR OF LIBERATION ” The Warlord at the Western Front On May 10, 1940, the Völkischer Beobachter —chief organ of the Nazi party—rolled off the presses in Berlin, Munich, and Vienna with red banner headlines : GERMANY’S DECISIVE STRUGGLE HAS BEGUN ! and THE FÐHRER...
Read the recordDavid Irving HITLER’S WAR Hors d’oeuvre On Easter Monday, March 25, 1940, Hitler drove with his staff down the winding road from the Berghof and returned to the Chancellery in Berlin. The next time he was to see the Obersalzberg mountain it would be high summer, and he would be master of all...
Read the recordDavid Irving HITLER’S WAR “ We Must Destroy Them, Too ! ” An icy winter descended on Germany. The canals froze, the railways were clogged with military movements, population and industry alike were starved for coal and the most elementary daily requisites. These domestic worries Hitler transferred...
Read the recordDavid Irving HITLER’S WAR Clearing the Decks Whether or not Hitler’s often expressed fears that time was working against Germany were a purely tactical device to spur his wary generals is uncertain. Until the spring of 1940, although delay after delay postponed the launching date of “Yellow”—his...
Read the recordDavid Irving HITLER’S WAR Incidents By November 1939 Adolf Hitler had faced up to the fact that the war would go on. In mid-October his propaganda ministry had already instructed editors to mute reporting of peace proposals from abroad so that no false hopes would be raised in the German public....
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