Read history

2 August 1932, in a Caltech cloud chamber

Carl D. Anderson photographed a cosmic-ray particle track in a magnetized cloud chamber at Caltech on 2 August 1932. It became the first clearly identified positive electron.

The track curved in the direction corresponding to positive charge, and its length and ionization ruled out a proton of the observed curvature.

Why the plate mattered

A lead plate across the chamber slowed the particle, so its path curved more sharply after it crossed. That change established that the particle was moving upward rather than being an ordinary electron moving downward.

In the published photograph the plate was 6 mm thick, and the particle entered at about 63 MeV and left at about 23. Without it, the track could have been read as an ordinary electron travelling the other way through the picture.

Five weeks of silence

The image recorded decisive evidence, but nothing was announced that day. Anderson's first short report appeared in Science on 9 September 1932.

His definitive paper, in Physical Review the following March, reported 15 positive light-particle tracks among 1,300 cosmic-ray photographs and constrained the particle's mass to less than 20 electron masses if it carried one positive elementary charge.

8 November 1932

On 8 November 1932, amid the Great Depression, American voters chose presidential electors pledged overwhelmingly to Franklin D. Roosevelt, the Democratic governor of New York, and his running mate, House Speaker John Nance Garner. They were rejecting President Herbert Hoover's record and Vice President Charles Curtis with him.

Roosevelt took 57.4 percent of the popular vote — 22,818,740 ballots — against Hoover's 39.6 percent and 15,760,425. The Socialist nominee Norman Thomas received 884,781 votes and no electoral votes.

Forty-two states out of forty-eight

Six states stayed with Hoover; Roosevelt carried the rest. The returns ultimately produced a 472–59 Electoral College result — nearly nine-tenths of the College.

The same voters gave Democrats substantial majorities in both houses of Congress. Roosevelt's campaign had used the phrase New Deal, but the developed package of programs later attached to the term did not yet exist; the Democratic platform had explicitly promised repeal of the Eighteenth Amendment.

Conceded that night, inaugurated in March

At approximately 9:30 p.m., Hoover sent Roosevelt a concession telegram from his home at Stanford University.

Election night selected pledged electors; the electors cast the formal constitutional votes later. Under the pre-Twentieth Amendment calendar, the inauguration waited until 4 March 1933.

December 1932, at the Saxon Palace

The documented breakthrough came during the last days of December 1932, after roughly ten weeks of work. Poland's Foreign Intelligence Agency dates the first successful decryption of German Enigma cryptograms at the Saxon Palace in Warsaw to 31 December 1932.

Marian Rejewski, then 27, had begun working against military Enigma in October 1932, alone and part-time after the other Cipher Bureau employees went home. Maksymilian Ciężki had assigned him the task in secret.

What arrived from Paris

French intelligence delivered past German daily-key tables — two months of them, for September and October 1932 — to Warsaw on 8 or 9 December.

Those photocopies contained obsolete keys, not the rotor wiring. They reduced the unknowns in Rejewski's permutation equations and enabled him to derive the military machine's rotor and reflector wiring mathematically.

The crucial packet reached him only about three weeks before the first successful decrypt.

Why 30 November does not work

The listed date is unsupported by any source consulted, and the material essential to the solution had not yet reached Rejewski by then. Sources differ by a day on the French delivery — 8 or 9 December — but both rule out a completed break in November.

"Breaking Enigma" was a process rather than a one-time solution: reconstructing the machine, recovering frequently changing daily settings and responding to German procedural changes were distinct achievements.

Rejewski performed the initial mathematical reconstruction alone; Jerzy Różycki and Henryk Zygalski were crucial to the continuing programme that followed.

June 1933: the apex

Demographic reconstructions place the peak of famine-related mortality in Soviet Ukraine in June 1933, at approximately 28,000 deaths per day — not the 30,000 stated in this event's earlier title. That is a reconstruction rather than a contemporary body count: death registration collapsed and was deliberately suppressed or distorted.

By that point confiscations had left collective farms and peasant households with little or no edible food. The limited state assistance that existed went chiefly to officials, farm managers and people still able to work.

Where it fell hardest

The geographic center was not simply Ukraine's most productive southern grain belt. Newly mapped reconstructions show losses particularly severe in the north-central Kyiv and Kharkiv oblasts.

The population was so weakened that ordinary burials often ceased; designated workers collected bodies by cart for common graves, while abandoned children sought food in towns.

The measures behind the figure

Excess deaths for 1932–34 are estimated at 3.9 million, plus about 0.6 million lost births — 4.5 million in total demographic losses. Direct losses came to 16.5 percent of the rural population against 4.0 percent of the urban.

Between 65 and 80 percent of rural famine deaths fell in the first six or seven months of 1933, depending on region. June was a statistical apex rather than a single-day turning point; mortality declined afterward as repression eased somewhat and the 1933 harvest approached, but famine-related deaths continued into 1934.

16 March 1935, in Berlin

Hitler's cabinet promulgated the Law for the Organization of the Armed Forces on 16 March 1935, declaring that service in Germany's armed forces would be based on compulsory military duty. The enacted German text organized the peacetime army into 12 corps commands and 36 divisions.

Versailles had limited Germany to 100,000 men, including no more than 4,000 officers, and to seven infantry and three cavalry divisions under no more than two corps headquarters. The law violated those provisions openly.

The ambassadors, then the Sportpalast

Later that afternoon Hitler informed the French, British, Italian and Polish ambassadors. Berlin's evening newspapers carried the announcement, and Joseph Goebbels publicized it at the Sportpalast.

The cabinet's proclamation invoked foreign rearmament and France's restoration of two-year military service as its justification, presenting an open treaty violation as an act of peace and restored national honor.

What the date does not mark

German rearmament had already been proceeding covertly, including the development of an air arm. What 16 March supplied was its open legal and diplomatic announcement, not its beginning.

It was also not the Rhineland: that operation came on 7 March 1936. Detailed conscription regulations still had to follow, and the law directed Defense Minister Werner von Blomberg to submit them.

17 July 1936, five in the afternoon, Melilla

At about 5 p.m. on 17 July 1936, conspiratorial officers in the Melilla garrison began the military uprising against Spain's Popular Front government.

The rebels moved against their own commander. General Manuel Romerales, who had remained loyal to the Republic, was deposed and arrested; he was subsequently tried and executed.

Among the conspirators leading the Melilla rising was Juan Seguí Almuzara, a retired lieutenant colonel.

Spanish Morocco by the next morning

The revolt spread rapidly from Melilla through Spanish Morocco. A contemporary US diplomatic telegram reported rebel control of the civil administrations in Larache and similar conditions in Tetouan, Ceuta and Alcazar Kebir by the following morning.

Francisco Franco, who later led the Nationalist camp, was still in the Canary Islands on 17 July and did not personally lead the seizure of Melilla. Emilio Mola directed the wider conspiracy, coordinating plans for risings across Spain and its North African protectorate.

The garrisons that moved first were those of Spanish Morocco, including Legion and Regulares units.

Why the 17th, and why it did not end there

Republican authorities in Melilla had begun investigating the local plot. Historians disagree over whether that discovery forced the conspirators to move early or whether Mola's timetable had always called for 5 p.m. on 17 July.

The coup is commonly commemorated on 18 July. The uprising reached the peninsula on 18–19 July but failed in several major cities.

That failure to seize state power quickly is what turned the coup into a civil war.

13 December 1937: the capital falls

Japanese forces under the Central China Area Army captured Nanjing, then China's capital, on 13 December 1937.

Tang Shengzhi, commanding the Nanjing garrison, had ordered a retreat the previous day. Chinese troops crowded toward the Yangtze; many discarded their weapons and uniforms or entered the Safety Zone among civilians.

That afternoon several hundred disarmed soldiers entered or approached the Safety Zone seeking help. John Rabe's International Committee warned that it could not protect them, but appealed for their treatment as prisoners of war.

The tribunal dated the killing to the capture itself

The International Military Tribunal for the Far East found that mass murder, rape, looting and arson began with the city's capture on 13 December — not after a cleanly separated battle.

Iwane Matsui, commander-in-chief of the Central China Area Army, was later convicted by that tribunal for failing to control his troops and protect Nanjing's civilians.

Prince Yasuhiko Asaka commanded the Shanghai Expeditionary Army during the final assault; his personal responsibility for an alleged order to kill captives remains disputed.

Counting depends on where the lines are drawn

The Tokyo tribunal estimated more than 200,000 civilians and prisoners murdered in Nanjing and its vicinity during the first six weeks, and approximately 20,000 rape cases inside the city during the first month.

Modern scholarship gives figures that move with the boundaries used: more than 100,000 but fewer than 200,000 across the broader city and six surrounding counties, and below 50,000 for six weeks inside the walled city.

A single casualty figure is misleading unless its geography, its period and its inclusion of prisoners of war are stated.

31 August 1939: a raid on a German station, by Germans

On the evening of 31 August 1939, acting on Reinhard Heydrich's order, Alfred Naujocks and a small SD party seized the German radio facility at Gleiwitz and pretended that Polish attackers were responsible.

In a sworn affidavit of November 1945, Naujocks said the group — himself plus five or six other SD men — delivered a Polish-language address through an emergency transmitter, fired pistol shots and departed.

Heydrich, he testified, had told him that tangible-looking evidence of Polish attacks was needed for foreign journalists and German propaganda.

The man left behind as proof

A drugged or unconscious man in civilian clothes was delivered to the station and left there as supposed evidence of the attack. Later historical research identifies him as Franz, or Franciszek, Honiok — a pro-Polish Upper Silesian arrested before the operation and killed to lend it credibility.

Naujocks's affidavit did not name the victim. It did record that Gestapo chief Heinrich Müller arranged the human "canned goods" intended as bodies for staged border incidents, describing 12 or 13 condemned criminals earmarked for a separate operation.

A broadcast almost nobody heard

Museum research in Gliwice concludes that technical problems reduced the supposed broadcast to only a few audible words in the immediate area, although the perpetrators believed they had succeeded. Naujocks had claimed a speech of three to four minutes.

German radio and the press nevertheless reported the supposed Polish attack. In his Reichstag address on 1 September, Hitler cited 14 alleged incidents during the preceding night and 21 during an earlier night; he did not name Gleiwitz.

The staged incidents supplied propaganda rather than a cause: Hitler had already decided on the invasion, which began that morning.

15 September 1939: the ring closes from the east

The German Third Army had broken through the Polish positions along the Narew on 12 September 1939 and marched south to cut Warsaw off from the east. On 15 September it reached the capital's eastern approaches and attacked the Praga district from both banks of the Vistula, completing the operational encirclement.

Intensive bombardment and heavy-artillery fire accompanied the closing ring; roughly 1,000 German guns were reported around the city.

On the Praga approaches, an assault begun during the night of 14–15 September was repelled by Polish defenders near the Warszawa Wschodnia freight station.

Three attacks thrown back, and a beating at Grochów

The Warsaw garrison repelled three major German attacks over the course of 15 September. The heaviest fighting on the eastern side ran through Grochów, where the Polish 21st “Children of Warsaw” Infantry Regiment under Colonel Stanisław Sosabowski defeated the German 23rd Infantry Regiment.

General Juliusz Zulauf entered the Praga bridgehead that day with his operational group — several infantry regiments and artillery — and took command of the sector, substantially strengthening Warsaw's eastern defences at the moment they were being tested.

By nightfall: besieged, not taken

No surrender demand was delivered on 15 September. German headquarters discussed one that day, along with a twelve-hour evacuation window for civilians toward Siedlce and Garwolin, but the planned leaflets were apparently not dropped and a proposal for an immediate assault was rejected that evening. The decision to send an officer with a formal demand was taken during the night of 15–16 September; Major Kiewitz went across under a flag of truce on the 16th, was kept waiting, and was sent back without an audience or having his papers accepted.

So the day ended with Warsaw under siege from the east as well as the west, still resisting and still not captured — and with the ring not yet airtight. A strip along the Vistula toward the Kampinos Forest and Modlin Fortress remained in Polish hands, and between 17 and 22 September units of the Poznań and Pomorze Armies walked into the city through it.

8 October 1939: a compulsory district in the Old Town

On 8 October 1939 — the conventional establishment date, though some sources give 5 or 28 October — the German occupation administrator Hans Drechsel established a compulsory Jewish residential district in Piotrków Trybunalski, generally identified as the first ghetto in Nazi-occupied Europe.

The designated district covered the Old Town and Podzamcze — 28 streets and squares, 182 houses and 4,187 rooms.

Jewish residents were ordered to relocate into it by 31 October and were permitted to bring only bedding.

Who was moved, and what it looked like

The first recorded ghetto population was 9,376. Piotrków's Jewish population in 1939 was about 18,000, and forced arrivals from elsewhere later increased the ghetto's numbers substantially.

The district was initially open, with no wall or fence; the familiar skull-and-crossbones boundary signs appeared about a month after its creation, per the Piotrków municipal account.

On 14 October the Germans appointed the Bund activist Zalman Tenenberg to head the imposed Jewish council.

Three dates, one lost decree

The 8 October date is the best-supported one, used by Yad Vashem and Polish institutional sources. The 5 October variant is the apparent date of Drechsel's decree; another reference tradition gives 28 October.

The decree itself has not survived, so the reported issuance on 5 October, the conventional establishment on 8 October and the 31 October relocation deadline should be kept distinct.

Piotrków was placed in the Radom District of the General Government, not Reichsgau Wartheland.

A convoy codenamed Bread

On 10 July 1940 German aircraft located and attacked coastal convoy CW3, codenamed “Bread,” as it passed through the Strait of Dover between Dover and Dungeness. RAF Fighter Command scrambled Hurricane squadrons 32, 56 and 111 and Spitfire squadrons 74 and 64 against Dornier Do 17 bombers and their Messerschmitt escorts.

Roughly 30 RAF fighters took part in the main convoy engagement. Flying Officer Peter Higgs of No. 111 Squadron was killed when his Hurricane collided with a Dornier during the fight.

Why Dowding chose this date

Air Chief Marshal Hugh Dowding, commanding Fighter Command, later selected 10 July as the battle's opening because Germany employed its first “really big formation” that day — approximately 70 aircraft, used primarily to draw his fighters into a large-scale battle.

Dowding acknowledged that any start date was partly subjective, and briefly considered 8 August before settling on 10 July. The official British battle dates run from 10 July to 31 October 1940.

Fighting that had already started

The date is the official British and commemorative one, not an uncontested operational beginning. German air units flying from newly occupied bases were already attacking British ports and Channel shipping, including destructive convoy raids on 4 July.

The RAF Museum treats 26 June to 16 July as an initial phase, while contemporary German framing separated July's Kanalkampf from the main air offensive beginning in August.

The 10 July attack neither destroyed the convoy nor broke Fighter Command; the convoy continued, one ship was reported sunk, and both air forces lost or damaged aircraft. Six days later Hitler issued Directive No. 16, ordering preparations for a possible invasion.

27 September 1940: three signatures in Berlin

Representatives of Germany, Italy and Japan signed the Tripartite Pact in Berlin on 27 September 1940: Joachim von Ribbentrop for Germany, Galeazzo Ciano for Italy, and Saburō Kurusu, Japan's ambassador and special representative, for Japan. Hitler was present at the signing.

Japan recognised German and Italian leadership in establishing a "new order" in Europe, while Germany and Italy recognised Japanese leadership in establishing one in Greater East Asia.

Article 6 put the pact into force immediately upon signature, for a ten-year term.

What Article 3 actually promised

Article 3 promised political, economic and military assistance if a signatory was attacked by a power not then involved in the European war or the Sino-Japanese conflict. It was not an unconditional promise to join any war a signatory began.

Article 5 added that the pact did not alter any signatory's existing political relationship with the Soviet Union.

The United States is not named anywhere in the six-article text, but contemporary purpose and later historical analysis identify it as the principal deterrence target.

Technical commissions, but no integrated command

The pact formalised an alignment that already existed: Germany and Italy had signed the Pact of Steel in May 1939, and the Anti-Comintern Pact dated from 1936, with Italy joining in 1937.

It called for joint technical commissions to meet without delay, yet the three principal Axis states never developed institutions comparable to the Allies' integrated military and diplomatic coordination.

When Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, the pact's wording did not oblige Germany to enter the resulting war, because Japan was the attacker; the German declaration of 11 December 1941 went beyond what the treaty required.