May 2, 1945: The Fall of Berlin

May 2, 1945: Nazi Generals Hans Krebs (47 years old) and Wilhelm Burgdorf (50) commit suicide in the Bunker of Chancellor Adolf Hitler, who had done so there 2 days earlier (56). Martin Bormann (44), Hitler's private secretary, tries to escape, but doesn't get far, and also kills himself.

It's all over. Berlin has fallen. The Soviet Red Army raises the Red Flag over the Reichstag, the home of the German national legislature. It's just a matter of what remains of the Nazi government surrendering. What Hitler called "The Thousand-Year Reich" was dead after 12 years.

Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin had seen the photograph of the U.S. Marines raising the American flag on the Japanese island of Iwo Jima, and wanted a similar picture of the Soviet red banner with the yellow hammer and sickle over Berlin. He got it. The photographer was Yevgeny Khaldei. The soldier was 18-year-old Aleksei Kovalov -- no relation to the later hockey player of the same name. He later became a fireman in Kiev. Both men were Ukrainians, and both lived until 1997.

In late 1941, the Soviets were, perhaps, a mile away from losing the Eastern Front of the European Theater of World War II. Now, they had won what they called The Great Patriotic War.

*

May 2, 1945 was a Wednesday. Football was out of season. The NBA hadn't been founded yet. The NHL season had ended 10 days earlier, when the Toronto Maple Leafs beat the Detroit Red Wings in Game 7 of the Stanley Cup Finals.

These baseball games were played:

* The New York Yankees beat the Philadelphia Athletics, 6-4 at Yankee Stadium.

* The New York Giants beat the Philadelphia Phillies, 9-8 at Shibe Park in Philadelphia.

* The Brooklyn Dodgers lost to the Boston Braves, 3-1 at Ebbets Field.

* The Boston Red Sox beat the Washington Senators, 4-0 at Fenway Park in Boston. Jim Wilson pitched a 4-hit shutout.

* A doubleheader was split at Forbes Field in Pittsburgh. The St. Louis Cardinals won the opener, 4-2. The Pittsburgh Pirates won the nightcap, 11-1.

* The Detroit Tigers beat the Chicago White Sox, 2-1 at Briggs Stadium (later Tiger Stadium) in Detroit.

* The Cleveland Indians beat the St. Louis Browns, 2-1 at Sportsman's Park in St. Louis.

* And the Chicago Cubs and the Cincinnati Reds were rained out at Wrigley Field in Chicago. The game was made up on June 8. The Cubs won, 7-3.

April 28, 1939: Hitler Mocks FDR -- Which He Will Live to Regret

April 28, 1939: We've all seen footage of Adolf Hitler when he was angry. Few people have seen him when he was having fun. On this day, the Chancellor of Nazi Germany speaks before the country's national legislature, the Reichstag, at the Kroll Opera House in Berlin, the building which served as the Reichstag's meeting place after the original building burned in 1933.

On this occasion, Hitler decides to have a little fun with Franklin D. Roosevelt, the President of the United States. Worried about his ambitions after he'd taken over Czechoslovakia the previous month, after promising to take only the Sudetenland section of it the previous September, FDR had sent Hitler a message asking, "Are you willing to give assurance that your armed forces will not attack or invade the territory or possessions of the following independent nations?" Thirty-one countries were then listed.

A lot of Americans who didn't want to go to war, just 21 years after World War I -- either because they were afraid of a potential World War II (this was true of people in both major parties); or because they were of German descent, and didn't want to go to war against their ancestral homeland (this was true of people in both major parties); or because they were of Irish descent, and didn't want to go to war on behalf of their historic oppressors, Great Britain (these people were mainly Democrats); or because they saw Hitler as having held off the Soviet Union abroad, and, domestically, restoring his country's economy while putting down labor unions (these people were mainly Republicans).

Between these various groups, they had elected majorities in both houses of Congress that didn't want to go to war. There was also a Neutrality Act, which prevented the federal government, including the President, from aiding either side in a war in certain ways.

Hitler was insane, and his stubbornness would eventually blind him to the obvious, but he wasn't stupid. He knew was why FDR didn't intervene in the Munich Conference the preceding September. He knew that FDR's hands were tied. And so, this is where the fun came in. Hitler told the Reichstag:

Herr Roosevelt demands that German troops shall not attack the following independent nations: Finland, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Netherlands, Belgium, Great Britain, Ireland, France, Portugal, Spain, Switzerland, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, Poland, Hungary, Romania, Yugoslavia, Russia, Bulgaria, Turkey, Iraq, Arabia, Syria, Palestine, Egypt!

By the time Hitler got to Ireland, the members of the Reichstag had started to laugh. And with each name Hitler rattled off, the members' laughter got louder and louder. This wasn't out of fear of their leader, Der Führer: They were enjoying it, too.

As historian Robert Dallek put it, in a documentary about FDR, of whom he'd written a biography, this response was Hitler's way of telling FDR, "You're not a player in this world political game. We don't count you for very much. And we know that you've got a big political headache: Your isolationists are not going to let you do anything. You have all these neutrality laws. If we go to war against Britain and France, you're not going to have a significant say in things." So it was best for him to stay out of it.

FDR did not stay out of it. Within weeks, he was entertaining King George VI and Queen Elizabeth at the White House and at his estate in Hyde Park, New York, beginning what Winston Churchill would later call "the special relationship" between the United States and the United Kingdom.

A little more than 6 years after this day, FDR would be dead -- but, shortly after that, so would Hitler, his Thousand Year Reich over after 12 years, and his continent-wide empire reduced to the size of his underground bunker in Berlin.

Over 75 million people, military and civilian combined, had died because of Hitler's ambition. No one was laughing anymore.

*

April 28, 1939 was a Friday. There were only 2 scores on this historic day, both of them baseball games, and both of them in Ohio. The St. Louis Browns beat the Cleveland Indians, 9-8 at League Park in Cleveland. Johnny Berardino, the Browns' 2nd baseman, went 3-for-4 with 5 RBIs. He would later drop the 2nd R in his name, becoming an actor under the name John Beradino, and played Dr. Steve Hardy on the ABC soap opera General Hospital from its 1963 premiere until his death in 1996.

And the Cincinnati Reds beat the Chicago Cubs, 7-6 at Crosley Field in Cincinnati. The Cubs led, 6-2, at the 7th inning stretch, but the Reds scored 2 runs in the 7th and 3 in the 9th to win it, on a home run by Ival Goodman.

February 27, 1933: The Reichstag Fire

February 27, 1933: The Reichstag, the German parliament building in Berlin, catches fire. Nobody dies from the fire itself.

The first report of the fire came shortly after 9:00 PM, when a Berlin fire station received an alarm call. By the time police and firefighters arrived, the Chamber of Deputies, the lower house, was engulfed in flames. The police conducted a thorough search inside the building and found Marinus Van der Lubbe, a Dutch "council communist," who was arrested.

It had been 28 days since Adolf Hitler had been appointed Chancellor of Germany. He attributed the fire to Communist agitators. He used it as a pretext to claim that Communists were plotting against the German government, and induced President Paul von Hindenburg to issue the Reichstag Fire Decree, suspending civil liberties, and pursuing what he called a "ruthless confrontation" with the Communists.

This made the fire pivotal in the establishment of Nazi Germany. After the Fire Decree was issued, the Nazi-controlled police made mass arrests of Communists, including all of the Communist delegates in the Reichstag (the governing body, which was now operating elsewhere, not the building itself).

This severely crippled Communist participation in elections that were scheduled for March 5. After those elections, their absence gave the Nazi Party something they had never been able to manage before: A majority in the Reichstag. This greatly assisted Hitler's seizure of total power.

On March 9, the Prussian state police arrested Georgi Dimitrov, Vasil Tanev and Blagoy Popov, all Bulgarians, and known Comintern operatives. Unknown to German police at the time of his arrest, Dimitrov was the head of all Comintern operations in Western Europe. Ernst Torgler, the head of Germany's Communist Party, had surrendered to police on February 28.

Van Der Lubbe and the 4 Communists were the defendants in a trial that started in September. It ended in the acquittal of the Communists, and the conviction of Van der Lubbe, who was executed.

The responsibility for the Reichstag Fire remains a topic of debate and research. Some historians believe, based on archive evidence, that the arson had been planned and ordered by the Nazis as a "false flag operation." The building remained in its damaged state until it was partially repaired from 1961 to 1964, and completely restored from 1995 to 1999, at which point it regained its status as the house of Germany's national legislature.

In 2008, Germany posthumously pardoned Van der Lubbe under a law introduced in 1998 to lift unjust verdicts dating from the Nazi era.

Since 1933, any time a political leader has asked for special powers after a disastrous incident, it has been called a "Reichstag Fire." The 2001 attack on the World Trade Center is the most notable, with George W. Bush getting the Patriot Act afterward.

*

February 27, 1933 was a Monday. Baseball and football were out of season. The NBA hadn't been founded yet. And while the NHL was in season, no games were scheduled. So there were no scores on this historic day.