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Adolf Hitler was appointed Chancellor of Germany, and the first Nazi concentration camp was established. -
New President Franklin D. Roosevelt launched the New Deal to combat the effects of The Great Depression. -
Prohibition against alcohol ended in the United Sates. -
Social Security was enacted in the United States. -
In a harbinger of the horror to come, Germany issued the Anti-Jewish Nuremberg Laws. -
The Civil War novel "Gone With the Wind" was published. -
The so-called "Nazi Olympics" took place in Berlin. -
The Hindenberg burst into flames as it neared landing in New Jersey and killed 36 of the 97 people onboard. -
Britain's Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain announced "Peace for Our Time" in a speech after he signed a pact with Hitler's Germany. (Almost exactly a year later, Britain was at war with Germany.) -
World War II began when Hitler's Nazis invaded Poland on Sept. 1, and Britain and France declared war on Germany two days later. -
The Germans opened the Auschwitz concentration camp, where at least 1.1 million people would be killed. -
The Katyn Forest massacre of 22,000 Polish military officers and intelligentsia was conducted in Russia by the Soviet Union. -
The British battle-cruiser HMS Hood was sunk by the Bismarck during the Battle of Denmark Strait; the Royal Navy sunk the Bismarck three days later. -
Operation Barbarossa, an Axis invasion of the Soviet Union, took place. The plan was to conquer the western Soviet Union and repopulate it with Germans; and in the process, the German armies captured some five million troops and starved or otherwise killed 3.3 million prisoners of war. Despite the horrific bloodshed, the operation failed. -
The Battle of Stalingrad began, the largest confrontation of Germany and its allies against the Soviet Union in an attempt to gain control of the city. -
One month after surrendering to Allied forces, the government of Italy under Pietro Badoglio joined the Allies and declared war on Germany. -
German military officers led by Claus von Stauffenberg led Operation Valkyrie, a plot to kill German chancellor Adolf Hitler inside his Wolf's Lair field headquarters, but failed. -
U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt died at his Warm Springs, Georgia estate. His vice president Harry S. Truman took office. -
Winston Churchill gave his "Iron Curtain" speech, condemning Soviet Union policies in Europe. -
The post-Holocaust outbreak of violence known as the Kielce Pogrom in Poland was conducted by Polish soldiers, police officers and civilians who killed between 38 and 42 people. -
Postwar Baby Boom begins as birthrate rises dramatically -
Harry S. Truman ordered the building of the hydrogen bomb -
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In a landmark decision on May 17, and after two rounds of argument, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled segregation was illegal in the Brown v. Board of Education decision. -
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The civil rights movement began with the August 28 murder of Emmett Till, the refusal on December 1 by Rosa Parks to give up her seat on the bus to a white man, and the subsequent Montgomery Bus Boycott. -
Internationally, the world saw the explosion of the Hungarian Revolution on October 23, a revolution against the Soviet-backed Hungarian People's Republic. -
Launch of the Soviet satellite Sputnik, which orbited for three weeks and began the space race and the space age. -
Boris Pasternak was awarded a Nobel Prize for Literature, but the Soviet government, which had attempted to ban his novel Doctor Zhivago, forced him to reject it. -
Kitchen Debate on July 24 between Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev and U.S. Vice President Richard Nixon, one of a series of impromptu discussions between the two.