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When the Nazis marched into Austrian on March 12, 1938, hundreds of thousands of Austrians turned out to welcome them. But after the war, the country preferred to see itself as just another of Hitler's victims.
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In the early hours of Sept. 30, 1938, leaders of Nazi Germany, Great Britain, France and Italy signed an agreement that allowed the Nazis to annex the Sudetenland, a region of Czechoslovakia that was home to many ethnic Germans.
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the Nazis unleashed a wave of pogroms against Germany's Jews. In the space of a few hours, thousands of synagogues and Jewish businesses and homes were damaged or destroyed. This event came to be called Kristallnacht ("Night of Broken Glass") for the shattered store windowpanes that carpeted German streets.
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On this day, Hitler's forces invade and occupy Czechoslovakia--a nation sacrificed on the altar of the Munich Pact, which was a vain attempt to prevent Germany's imperial aims.
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One of Adolf Hitler's first major foreign policy initiatives after coming to power was to sign a nonaggression pact with Poland in January 1934. This move was not popular with many Germans who supported Hitler but resented the fact that Poland had received the former German provinces of West Prussia, Poznan, and Upper Silesia under the Treaty of Versailles after World War I. However, Hitler sought the nonaggression pact in order to neutralize the possibility of a French-Polish military alliance
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The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, on December 7, 1941, stunned virtually everyone in the United States military. Japan’s carrier-launched bombers found Pearl Harbor totally unprepared
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General Dwight D. Eisenhower called the operation a crusade in which “we will accept nothing less than full victory.” More than 5,000 Ships and 13,000 aircraft supported the D-Day invasion, and by day’s end on June 6, the Allies gained a foot- hold in Normandy. The D-Day cost was high -more than 9,000 Allied Soldiers were killed or wounded -- but more than 100,000 Soldiers began the march across Europe to defeat Hitler.
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On this day, the Germans launch the last major offensive of the war, Operation Mist, also known as the Ardennes Offensive and the Battle of the Bulge, an attempt to push the Allied front line west from northern France to northwestern Belgium. The Battle of the Bulge, so-called because the Germans created a "bulge" around the area of the Ardennes forest in pushing through the American defensive line, was the largest fought on the Western front.
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Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin discuss their plans for Europe after the war, and Stalin agrees to declare war on Japan. In the Pacific, the Allies finally retake Manila in the Philippines after three years of brutal Japanese occupation.
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the United States used a massive, atomic weapon against Hiroshima, Japan. This atomic bomb, the equivalent of 20,000 tons of TNT, flattened the city, killing tens of thousands of civilians.
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While Japan was still trying to comprehend this devastation three days later, the United States struck again, this time, on Nagasaki.
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this surrender brought the hostilities of World War II to a close
