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WWII On This Day: November 30

What happened on November 30 during World War II? This date brings together 2 events from 1939 and 1941, with period photographs and links to the full operations documented across WW2 Theatres.

1939
Bomb damage on Kansakoulukatu in Helsinki on 30 November 1939, the first day of the Winter War.
Bomb damage on Kansakoulukatu in Helsinki on 30 November 1939, the first day of the Winter War. Finnish Army / SA-kuva · public-domain status per exact file record Source
The Winter War

The Red Army invades and Helsinki is bombed

About 450,000 Soviet troops in roughly twenty-one divisions opened operations along the Finnish frontier on 30 November. The principal concentration faced the Karelian Isthmus, with additional armies advancing north of Lake Ladoga, through central Finland and toward the Arctic coast. Soviet aircraft attacked Helsinki and other Finnish towns on the first day. Ninety-one people were killed in Helsinki, where bombs struck streets, public buildings and residential areas during the opening raids. Finnish mobilisation had produced an army able to man the frontier and the Isthmus defences, yet Soviet material superiority…

Continue in The Winter War →
1941
Child survivors of Auschwitz, wearing adult-size prisoner jackets, stand behind a barbed wire fence.
USHMM
The Holocaust: Timeline and Evidence

The Riga ghetto is emptied into the Rumbula killing site

German SS and police units, assisted by Latvian auxiliaries, marched Jews from the Riga ghetto to prepared pits at Rumbula Forest on 30 November 1941 and murdered them by shooting. A second major action followed on 8–9 December. About 25,000 Jews from the Riga ghetto were murdered in the two actions. The killings cleared space for transports arriving from the German Reich, directly connecting deportation from central Europe with mass shooting in the occupied Soviet territories.

Continue in The Holocaust: Timeline and Evidence →