Thursday, February 4, 1943. The Afrika Korps retreats to Tunisia.

The Afrika Korps withdrew from Libya to Tunisia.

This event came within the week of the German's surrendering at Stalingrad and while it was not as momentous, it was certainly a sign to all who cared to read it that the German effort was now well past its high water mark.  The Germans were in a full, if controlled, retreat on the southern part of the Eastern Front, and were in a full, if controlled, retreat in North Africa as well.  Envisioning a scenario in which these could be reversed was difficult, and indeed it proved to be impossible.

That Rommel's forces were in retreat is noteworthy in and of itself, in that Rommel, given the separation from the continent, felt at liberty to ignore Hitler's no retreat orders and thereby avoid the same fate that had just fallen to Paulus.

Polish mountain climber Wanda Rutkiewicz (née Błaszkiewicz) was born on this day in German occupied Plungė, Lithuania.  After the Second World War the Polish family was part of the massive Soviet forced resettlement of Poland, and movement of its borders, and they moved to Poland.  She was highly athletic and turned to mountain climbing by accident when a motorcyclist stopped to help her when her own motorcycle broke down, and she met another mountaineer he was transporting.

Highly accomplished as a mountain climber, she was a difficult personality on expeditions.  She disappeared while on a climbing expedition to Kangchenjunga in 1992.

She was a computer engineer by occupation.

Also a computer engineer, and also born on this day, is American Ken Thompson, who invented Unix.