Rotterdam Blitz

Disaster · 1940 CE · in Europe

On 14 May 1940 German bombers destroyed the centre of Rotterdam, killing some 900 people. Threatened with the same for Utrecht, the Netherlands surrendered the next day and were occupied for five years.

Related

• Auschwitz concentration camp (1940–1945 CE): The largest Nazi concentration and extermination camp, built in occupied Poland. About 1.1 million people, the great majority of them Jews, were murdered there before its liberation in January 1945.
• Battle of Britain (1940 CE): The Royal Air Force defended Britain against large-scale attacks by the German Luftwaffe in summer and autumn 1940, forcing Hitler to postpone his planned invasion.
• World War II in Europe (1939–1945 CE): The European theatre of the deadliest war in history, from Germany's invasion of Poland in 1939 to its surrender in May 1945. Tens of millions died, including six million Jews in the Holocaust.
• Invasion of Poland (1939 CE): Germany invaded Poland on 1 September 1939, with the first shots fired at Westerplatte near Danzig, starting World War II in Europe. The Soviet Union invaded from the east on 17 September.
• Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact (1939 CE): A non-aggression pact between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union signed in Moscow in August 1939. A secret protocol divided eastern Europe into spheres of influence.
• Winter War (1939–1940 CE): The Soviet Union invaded Finland in November 1939. Despite fierce Finnish resistance on the Karelian Isthmus, Finland ceded territory in the peace of March 1940.
• Attack on Pearl Harbor (1941 CE): Surprise Japanese air attack on the US Pacific Fleet on 7 December 1941 that killed about 2,400 Americans and brought the United States into World War II.
• Operation Barbarossa (1941 CE): Germany and its allies invaded the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941 along a front from the Baltic to the Black Sea. The largest land invasion in history, it failed to take Moscow.
• Siege of Leningrad (1941–1944 CE): German and Finnish forces blockaded Leningrad for 872 days from September 1941 to January 1944. Around a million civilians died, mostly from starvation.
• Babi Yar massacre (1941 CE): In a ravine on the edge of Kyiv, German forces shot 33,771 Jews over two days in September 1941, one of the largest single massacres of the Holocaust.

Around the same time and place

• Albert Einstein (1879 CE – 1955 CE): German-born theoretical physicist who developed the special and general theories of relativity and explained the photoelectric effect, for which he won the 1921 Nobel Prize in Physics.
• Adolf Hitler (1889 CE – 1945 CE): Austrian-born dictator of Nazi Germany from 1933 to 1945. He started World War II in Europe and bears chief responsibility for the Holocaust. He died by suicide in Berlin.
• Einstein's special relativity (1905 CE): In 1905, while working at the patent office in Bern, Albert Einstein published his theory of special relativity and, in a follow-up paper, E = mc². It transformed ideas of space and time.
• World War I (1914–1918 CE): A global war from 1914 to 1918 between the Allies and the Central Powers, fought largely in trenches on Europe's Western and Eastern Fronts. Around 9 million soldiers died, and four empires collapsed.
• Penicillin (1928 CE): In 1928 Alexander Fleming at St Mary's Hospital in London noticed that a Penicillium mould killed bacteria. Developed into a drug in the 1940s, penicillin became the first widely used antibiotic.
• D-Day (Normandy landings) (1944 CE): On 6 June 1944 Allied forces landed on five beaches in Normandy, the largest seaborne invasion in history. It opened the Western Front and led to the liberation of France.
• Cold War (1947–1991 CE): The rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union and their allies, fought through an arms race, proxy wars and the space race rather than direct war. Divided Berlin was its emblem; it ended with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.
• Fall of the Berlin Wall (1989 CE): On 9 November 1989 East Germany opened its border crossings, and crowds began tearing down the Berlin Wall. It symbolised the end of the Cold War.

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