German troops complete the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia…
1939 CE
German troops complete the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia in March 1939.
1939 marks the first attempted assassination of Hitler.
Hitler, in 1939, names Rudolf Hess second in succession after Herman Goering.
Hitler and Stalin sign the Nazi-Soviet Pact, officially merely a ten-year non-aggression agreement but secretly including a protocol to divide Poland between them, on August 23, 1939.
On September 1, Germany invades Poland in a blitzkrieg that starts the Second World War.
Hitler’s threats to take Poland’s free port of Danzig prompts Anglo-French intervention.
France and the British Commonwealth, sans Ireland, declare war on Sept. 3, 1939, two days after Germany’s invasion of Poland.
The Blitzkrieg crushes Polish resistance.
Soviet troops invade Poland from the East, and Hitler and Stalin divide the country between them.
Three million Polish Jews suffer a Blitzpogrom of murder and rape.
Himmler aide Reinhard Heydrich issues a ghetto decree to progressively isolate Jews from the rest of the Polish population.
The USSR invades Finland two days after its November 29, 1939 denunciation of its nonaggression pact with that country, initiating the Russo-Finnish War, or Winter War.
The League of Nations condemns the USSR for its Finnish adventure and expels it.
Hitler dissolves Czechoslovakia later in the year, makes Bohemia and Moravia protectorates, and encourages the formation of an independent Slovakia.
Interpol, grouped with the Gestapo in 1939, is either exiled or taken over by the Nazis.