In this 46‐minute documentary, we learn about a lost ship full of cargo crucial to the Axis’s atomic bomb project, a merchant ship that caused Australia largest maritime loss, the Reich’s only aircraft carrier, and the Axis’s first stealth submarine.
Click here for events that happened today (May 23).
1938: Yevhen Konovalets, Ukrainian fascist, opened a box expecting chocolates but got a bomb instead, ending his life. Aside from that, Reich Ambassador Herbert von Dirksen (incorrectly) noted in London that the Third Reich had no intention of military aggression over Czechoslovakia.
1939: The Third Reich’s head of state held a long speech before his top military commanders, starting by noting Danzig as a means to engage Poland in a war to gain Lebensraum for the German folk, and then digressing to note the possibility of war with Britain and France, the need to occupy the Low Countries for their airfields, and strategies for a war in western Europe and the Atlantic.
1940: The Wehrmacht’s 6th Army crossed the Scheldt River in Belgium. In France, British General Lord Gort withdrew his troops from Arras despite being fit to halt Rommel’s momentum. Elsewhere, the 2nd Panzer Division attacked Boulogne while the 1st Panzer Division’s forward elements reached Calais. In Britain, the authorities arrested Oswald Mosley and seven hundred forty‐seven other BUF members (including ninety‐six women, such as Lady Diana) and interned them without charge.
1941: Berlin issued Directive 30 to send forces to aid Iraq in its war against the British. At Fallujah, Iraq, fighters of the Axis’s Fliegerführer Irak squadron strafed British positions. To make matters worse, Hermann Göring ordered the plunder and destruction of Soviet industrial centers since the conquered Soviet population would be no more than lowly laborers for the Third Reich. Lastly, Axis submarine U‐38 sank Allied ship Berhala two hundred miles off Guinea, French West Africa at 2020 hours, massacring three but leaving fifty‐nine survivors.
1942: Hans‐Joachim Marseille shot down two Baltimore bombers over Tobruk, Libya at 0720 and 0730 hours. As well, the Third Reich’s 14th Division and 16th Panzer Division, moving northward, and 3rd Panzer Division and 23rd Panzer Division, moving southward, linked up, thus completing the encirclement of the Soviet 6th Army and 57th Army at Izium, Ukraine. In the same area, the Axis captured Chepel to prevent the Soviet 38th Army from attacking the eastern side of the newly formed encirclement. Coincidentally, Axis and Chinese troops clashed along the Hsipaw‐Mogok road in northern Burma.
1943: The Axis installed Pang Bingxun as the commander of the 24th Army Group of the collaborationist régime in Nanjing, China.
1944: Four trains arrived at Auschwitz with 12,674 Hungarian Jews (3,023 from Viseu de Sus or Felsovisó, 3,272 from Nyiregyháza, 3,269 from Mukacevo or Munkács, and 3,110 from Oradea or Nagyvárad). The Axis registered only five women into the camp, and exterminated the remaining 12,669…
…I had to pause for several minutes after reading that, because it is so difficult to conceive of an adequate reaction to it. I shall add nothing else.