Today 30 April 2015. On this day in military history:
In 1941:
Hitler the last time moved the day of the attack on the Soviet Union (because of the war in Yugoslavia and Greece) for 5 weeks and has appointed 22 June.
In 1942:
According to official sources, the losses of our troops since the war began amounted to: 4 million 90 thousand killed and 2 million 748 thousand wounded.
For 3 months, since February, in Kaunas and Vilna in German sentences of courts-martial executed several resistance groups numbering from 16 to 42 people each. They were accused of creation of the organizations involved in the harboring of escaped Soviet prisoners of war, sabotage, arson, sabotage, anti-German propaganda, assistance to the Jews.
For the first 4 months of 1942, German submarines sank 80 merchant ships of the allies.
Japanese troops captured the Burmese city of Mandalay.
In 1943:
British intelligence carried out a successful operation on misinformation of the German command. On a deserted shore near the Spanish city of Huelva was seen the corpse of a British naval officer, apparently the victim of a plane crash, EN route from England to North Africa. If the deceased was secret documents for a planned allied operation under the code name "Husky". Operation under this name really was planned in Sicily, not in Greece, as pointed out by the papers of the deceased. The Germans fell for the trick.
In 1944:
During April the allied air forces dropped 81 400 tons of bombs on Germany and German-occupied countries of Europe. From January to April, the German aircraft carried out 12 air strikes on London and the South of England. By April, the struggle for air supremacy was decided in favor of the allies: only in January-March the Germans lost 3.5 thousand istrebitelej.
In 1945:
Soviet troops at the Reichstag. But the building that day several times passed from hand to hand, the Germans tore down the flag. The battle for the Reichstag lasted until the morning of 1 may and the last of the Germans surrendered on the night of 2 may.
The last day of the 56-year-old führer Adolf Hitler and his 32-year-old wife Eva Braun. After lunch, private chauffeur of Hitler was taken in the garden of the Reich Chancellery cans of 200 liters of gasoline. In the conference room Hitler and Eva said farewell to Bormann, Goebbels, with secretaries, then everyone except the Fuhrer and his wife, came out. Further events are set out in 2 versions. The first is that based on the testimony of a personal Valet to Hitler, the führer and Eva at 15.30 minutes shot. According to the second, they were poisoned with potassium cyanide. Body by order of Bormann wrapped in blankets, carried to the yard, laid in the crater, doused with gasoline, burned and then buried.
According to witnesses, Reichsleiter Martin Bormann in the evening got out of Hitler's bunker, hoping under cover of darkness to sneak through the battle formations of Soviet troops. Some claimed that he died the same night, others that saw him in 1973 in Argentina. In April 1973 the West German court officially declared him dead on the basis of the identification of the skeleton excavated near Hitler's bunket. But some doubt whether the excavated bones belonged to Bormann, still remain.
Troops of the 4th Ukrainian front liberated in Czechoslovakia, moravská-Ostrava.
Soviet troops liberated the prisoners of the female camp Ravensbruck.
American troops occupied Munich.
British 8th army in Italy, reached Verona, Padua, Venice, the Italian resistance to the Nazis has begun to decline, they surrendered in droves.
The newspaper "Pravda" reported: as a result of repatriation to the USSR from Nazi captivity returned more than 1 600 thousand people.
