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WWII On This Day: September 21

What happened on September 21 during World War II? This date brings together 3 events from 1939, 1940 and 1944, with period photographs and links to the full operations documented across WW2 Theatres.

1939
Child survivors of Auschwitz, wearing adult-size prisoner jackets, stand behind a barbed wire fence.
USHMM
The Holocaust: Timeline and Evidence

German authorities order concentration and registration

After the invasion of Poland, Reinhard Heydrich instructed security police commanders to concentrate Jewish communities in larger towns near railway lines and to establish Jewish councils under German control. The orders established administrative structures for concentration, forced labour, confiscation and later ghettoisation and deportation. Those mechanisms were expanded as German policy in occupied Poland became more systematic and coercive.

Continue in The Holocaust: Timeline and Evidence →
1940
German Type IXA submarine U-37 in dock at Lorient in 1940 after the French Atlantic ports became U-boat bases.
Mannewitz · Bundesarchiv Bild 101II-MW-1032-11A · CC BY-SA 3.0 DE
The Happy Time and the Wolfpacks

U-100 attacks inside HX 72

Joachim Schepke's U-100 attacked HX 72 on the surface at night, moving among the convoy columns and firing repeatedly until its torpedoes were exhausted. The convoy battle cost eleven merchant ships overall and showed how difficult it was for escorts to regain a low, fast surface target once it had entered the convoy. The British interrogation report later reconstructed the attack from survivors of U-100. It also exposed the gap between wartime claims and confirmed results: the crew and German communiqués credited Schepke with more sinkings than could always be…

1944
Allied transport aircraft and gliders overhead while paratroops descend over the Netherlands during Operation Market Garden on 17 September 1944.
U.S. Army Air Forces / National Archives, NAID 531308 · Public domain in the United States · Source
Operation Market Garden

The Polish brigade drops at Driel

Delayed four days by weather, Sosabowski's brigade dropped south of the river at Driel, opposite the Oosterbeek perimeter. The ferry they were to have used had been destroyed and its operator killed. They were left on the wrong bank of the Nederrijn, in sight of a division they could see but could not reach except by boat at night.

Continue in Operation Market Garden →