You will need to create a function to extract the date parts and use them with the Date constructor.

Note that this constructor treats months as zero based numbers (0=Jan, 1=Feb, ..., 11=Dec).

For example:

function parseDate(input) {
  var parts = input.match(/(\d+)/g);
  // note parts[1]-1
  return new Date(parts[2], parts[1]-1, parts[0]);
}

parseDate('31.05.2010');
// Mon May 31 2010 00:00:00

Edit: For handling a variable format you could do something like this:

function parseDate(input, format) {
  format = format || 'yyyy-mm-dd'; // default format
  var parts = input.match(/(\d+)/g), 
      i = 0, fmt = {};
  // extract date-part indexes from the format
  format.replace(/(yyyy|dd|mm)/g, function(part) { fmt[part] = i++; });

  return new Date(parts[fmt['yyyy']], parts[fmt['mm']]-1, parts[fmt['dd']]);
}

parseDate('05.31.2010', 'mm.dd.yyyy');
parseDate('31.05.2010', 'dd.mm.yyyy');
parseDate('2010-05-31');

The above function accepts a format parameter, that should include the yyyy mm and dd placeholders, the separators are not really important, since only digits are captured by the RegExp.

You might also give a look to DateJS, a small library that makes date parsing painless...

You should use corresponding moment-locales dependency to be able to recognize dates in other languages. You can find the list of locales here and use it from the CDN, or download and bundle it yourself from momentjs (get the one that says moment-with-locales.js)

And in that case use the following parse method (as you've tried it already):

let momentObj = moment(DATE_STRING, FORMAT, LOCALE);

Demo

let momentObj = moment("04. Juli 2016 05:00", 'LLL', 'de');
console.log(momentObj);

<script src="https://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/moment.js/2.14.1/moment.min.js"></script>
<script src="https://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/moment.js/2.14.1/locale/de.js"></script>

You could reorder the values for an ISO date string and get the instance with this value.

let dateStr = "01.04.1990"
let date = new Date(dateStr.replace(/(.*)\.(.*)\.(.*)/, '2-$1'));

console.log(date);

You can parse 13. Dezember 2017 using moment(String, String, String) and then use toISOString().

Since your input is neither in ISO 8601 recognized format, neither in RFC 2822 you have to provide format parameter. DD stands for day of the month, MMMM stands for month's name and YYYY stands for 4 digit year.

The third parameter tells moment to parse input using given locale:

As of version 2.0.0, a locale key can be passed as the third parameter to moment() and moment.utc().

Note that you have to import de locale to make it work (using moment-with-locales.js or /locales/de.js in browser or following Loading locales in NodeJS section for node).

Here a live example:

var m = moment('13. Dezember 2017', 'DD MMMM YYYY', 'de');
console.log( m.toISOString() );

<script src="https://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/moment.js/2.20.1/moment-with-locales.min.js"></script>

Formatting of javascript dates is covered in numerous other questions. A particular timezone can be specified using the timeZone option with toLocaleString or for more control use the Intl.DateTimeFormat constructor and format option (timezones are specified using an IANA representative location to apply historic and DST changes), e.g.

let d = new Date();

// toLocaleString, default format for language de
console.log(d.toLocaleString('de',{timeZone:'Europe/Berlin', timeZoneName: 'long'}));

// DateTimeFormat.format with specific options
let f = new Intl.DateTimeFormat('de', {
  year: 'numeric',
  month: 'short',
  day: 'numeric',
  hour: '2-digit',
  hour12: false,
  minute: '2-digit',
  timeZone: 'Europe/Berlin',
  timeZoneName: 'short'
});
console.log(f.format(d));

You might also be interested in this answer.

See:

• Mozilla Core JavaScript Reference: Date object
• Mozilla Core JavaScript Reference: String.Split

Code:

var strDate = "03.09.1979";
var dateParts = strDate.split(".");

var date = new Date(dateParts[2], (dateParts[1] - 1), dateParts[0]);