Monday, August 7, 1944. German counter attack.

The British Operation Bluecoat, part of the Normandy breakout, ended in a British success.  Operation Totalize was launched as an immediate follow-up, spearheaded by Canadians.

The Battle for Brest began.

The Germans launched Operation Lüttich against the US 1st Army, seeking to split it into two zones.  The Germans retook Mortain. The offensive was launched a day prior to the date that Hitler preferred, given the rapid Allied advance.  Hitler was upset by the local commander ignoring his preference.  Heavy Allied air attacks arrested further German progress.

The Red Army captured Sambor southwest of Lvov.

Heavy fighting occurred on Guam.

The Nagara was sunk by the USS Croaker.

Production of the Volkswagen Beetle was halted.  Production would not resume until 1945, and at that time at the insistence of the British.

President Roosevelt visited Kodiak, Alaska.

Friday, August 5, 1944. The Wola Massacre.

Labels: 1940s, 1944, Collaborators, Freiwilligen SS, German SS, Heinrich Himmler, Normandy Breakout, Prisoners of War, Russian Liberation Army, Soviet Navy, The Holocaust, Waffen SS, Warsaw Uprising, World War Two

Monday, April 19, 1943. The end of the Warsaw Ghetto commences, SMERSH founded.

The final phase of the destruction and reoccupation of the Warsaw Ghetto commenced under SS Polizeifuhrer Jürgen Stroop.

Stroop was an unrepentant Nazi and was sentenced to death in a post-war war crimes trial in 1947, and then handed over to Poland, which also convicted him.  He was executed in Poland in 1952.

233 Belgian Jews bound for Auschwitz escaped when a raid by three members of the Belgian resistance attacked the train.  118 were able to ultimately escape.

Fourteen members of the White Rose resistance group are found guilty of crimes against the German state and executed.

The General Directorate of Counterintelligence ("SMERSH" СМЕРШ) of the People's Commissariat of Defense of the USSR came into existence, but secretly, and maybe actually earlier. It was a counterintelligence directorate.  Like most Soviet intelligence and counterintelligence agencies, it was sinister and scary by its nature, and average citizens of the USSR had reason to fear it, a fact that was compounded by circumstances inside contested and occupied regions of the Soviet Union which caused average Soviet citizens to collaborate with the Germans in large and small ways.

The British government removed the restriction on ringing church bells that had been put in effect when the UK was under threat of invasion.  The move marked the passing of that phase of the war.

RCAF P-40 being recovered at  Fort Greeley Kodiak Island, Alaska, on this day.  It had overshot the runway.