The Russians encircling Stalingrad begin a devastating air assault and artillery bombardment of the city in January 1943, forcing Paulus’s February 2 surrender of his 100,000 starving survivors; 300,000 more German soldiers lie dead in the rubble.

By this point, Germany has lost a total 850,000 dead or captured since the beginning of the Soviet invasion in the summer of 1941.

Iran declares war on Germany in 1943, but participates in no active hostilities.

In 1943, Nazi Admiral Karl Doenitz allegedly boasts that the German submarine fleet has built, in another part of the world, a Shangri-La on land, an impregnable fortress.

After the Casablanca Conference, the Allies launch the Combined Bomber Offensive, resulting in better organized and more intensive bombing runs over German cities.

On April 19, 1943, a heavily armed force of over 2,000 German troops, supported by Lithuanian militiamen and Polish police and firemen, attack the remaining Jews of the Warsaw ghetto.

The barely-armed Jews resist heroically, but 20,000 are shot in the streets, burned in their homes, or drowned in the bombing of the sewers used as escape routes.

By May 16, according to Nazi general Juergen Stroop, “the former Jerwish quarter of Warsaw is no longer in existence.” 36,000 of the 40,00 survivors will die in the camps.

Partisan resistance weakens Nazi control in France and Yugoslavia.

By July of 1943, Nazi Germany retains direct control of all of continental Europe save neutral Sweden, Switzerland, Portugal and (ostensibly neutral) Spain.

Allied bombers begin to demolish German cities.

In the summer of 1943, combined allied raids destroy three-quarters of Hamburg.

Round-the-clock bombing increases, eventually covering all of Germany.

US fighter escorts render the Luftwaffe increasingly unable to counter the raids.

German general Erich von Manstein mounts a desperate summer counteroffensive against the Soviets in the south, striking with new Tiger and Panther tanks at a bulge in the Soviet salient near Kursk on July 5, 1943.

Hitler commits more than 1,000 planes to support what becomes one of the largest and most brutal armored engagements yet waged, involving 3,000 tanks on the steppes.

When the Soviets move in fresh tank divisions on July 12, Manstein, having lost 70,000 men, half his tanks and more than 1,000 planes, withdraws to strong defensive lines.

The Red Army launches a new offensive northward toward Orel, taking the city on August 4, 1943, Kharkov on August 23, Poltava on September 22 and Smolensk on September 25.

The Soviets liberate Kiev in early November.

Hitler does not permit Manstein a full witdrawal of his now-outnumbered troops, who suffer further reductions by the Soviet war machine.

Swiss chemist Albert Hofmann synthesizes LSD-25 in 1943.

Stalin meets with Roosevelt and Churchill for the first time at the Tehran Conference from November 28 to December 1, 1943, in which the date for the Normandy invasion, code-named Operation Overlord, is confirmed.

The Anglo-Americans also assure Hitler that a simultaneous second invasion of France (from the Mediterranean) code-named Operation Anvil, will take place.

Stalin reassures Churchill and Roosevelt that the Soviet Union will declare war on Japan following Germany’s defeat in return for an Allied pledge to give the USSR Sakhalin, the Kuril Islands and a year-round Pacific port on the Asian mainland.

The conferees also discuss the postwar disposition of Iran, their host country.