Forced labour camp for Jews established by the Hasag (Hugo Schneider Aktiengesellschaft) company in Częstochowa. For more information, click here. Wikimedia Commons.
By: Phil Kohn. Dedicated to the memory of his father, GM3 Walter Kohn, U.S. Navy Armed Guard, USNR, and all men and women who have answered the country’s call in time of need. Phil can be contacted at ww2remembered@yahoo.com.
The RAF conducts a heavy raid on Elberfeld, in Germany’s Ruhr, on June 25, 1943. In Washington, Congress passes the Smith-Connally Act over President Roosevelt’s veto. The legislation permits the federal government to seize and operate industries that are threatened by or under strikes that would interfere with war production. The French Resistance blows up a locomotive works near Lille.
More than 200 crewmen from six different German U-boats based in Norway mutiny on June 26. The men refuse orders to put to sea because Allied forces have been damaging and destroying German submarines at a great rate since May. The mutineers are arrested and incarcerated in a prison in Oslo. Fritz Schmidt, German Commissioner-General for Political Affairs and Propaganda in the Occupied Netherlands dies when he “falls, jumps or gets pushed from” a moving train. In Poland, a unit of the Jewish Fighting Organization launches an uprising in the Jewish ghetto of Częstochowa. The next day, the Nazis shoot 250 children and old people in reprisal. The uprising ends on June 30 with 1,500 Jews killed in the fighting. The Germans ship the 3,900 Jews who remain to various concentration camps.
On June 27, a U.S. Army Air Forces Lockheed P-38 Lightning fighter on a training flight — whose pilot had bailed out when the plane caught fire — crashes onto a crowd of beachgoers at Huntington Beach, California. The plane explodes on impact, injuring 49 people, three fatally, including two children.
The cathedral in Köln (Cologne), Germany, is badly damaged in an air raid on June 28. The edifice is the largest Gothic-style church in northern Europe. Construction was begun in 1248 and completed in 1880. (Work had been halted between 1473 and 1842.) On the coast of France, along the English Channel, the Germans begin building four reinforced-concrete rocket-launching complexes for firing missiles at the United Kingdom. Adolf Hitler visits the Peenemünde Army Research Center, on Usedom Island in the Baltic Sea, where he observes a successful test of the A4 rocket, later widely known as the V-2.
Germany begins withdrawing U-boats from the Atlantic on June 29 in anticipation of an Allied invasion of Europe. In the U.S., the Senate votes to establish a $20-million fund for providing federal child care for mothers who are engaged in war-production work.
In a continuation of “Operation Cartwheel,” Allied forces on June 30 invade Rendova Island, New Georgia, in the Solomon Islands. They run into heavy Japanese resistance at Vangunu, an island south of New Georgia.
In Germany on July 1, Martin Bormann — Nazi Party Minister and Hitler’s private secretary — gives SS Lt. Col. Adolf Eichmann full authority to use the Gestapo (Secret State Police) to enforce “the permanent elimination of Jews from the territories of Greater Germany.” Within hours an order goes out: All Jews are to report to the Gestapo. In the U.S., the Women’s Auxiliary Army Corps changes its name and status to the Women’s Army Corps, with U.S. Army Maj. Oveta Culp Hobby as Director.
