Rome, Italy · November 17, 1938 On July 14, 1938, Italy’s Manifesto of Racial Scientists (Manifesto Degli Scienziati Razzisti) laid out a scientific explanation for the politics of biological racism. Signed by 42 eminent Italians, the manifesto, published in Il Giornale d’Italia, a newspaper strongly supporting Benito Mussolini’s Fascist regime, declared that Italians belonged to…
Paris, France · November 7, 1938 On this date in 1938, 17-year-old Herschel Grynszpan, an unemployed German-born Polish Jew living illegally in the French capital fatally wounded Ernst vom Rath, Third Secretary at the German embassy. He shot Rath, he told authorities, out “of love for my parents and for my people.” His was an…
Warsaw, Occupied Poland · November 4, 1939 On this date in 1939 in Nazi-occupied Poland, newly appointed Governor-General Hans Frank established the Warsaw ghetto and began forcing the city’s Jews into a single area. Ten days later Frank and his deputy Arthur Seyss-Inquart ordered Jews in Poland to wear a white bracelet bearing a hexagonal…
Kiev, Occupied Ukraine · September 29, 1941 By the end of 1940, sixteen months after Adolf Hitler had plunged Europe into war by invading Poland, the number of Jews killed by Nazi Germany approached 100,000. But in 1941 the death toll grew exponentially as mass murder of Jews became state policy. By the end of…
Brest-Litovsk, Occupied Eastern Poland · September 19, 1939 Adolf Hitler’s armies stormed over Poland’s border on September 1, 1939, in what became known as the world’s first blitzkrieg—“lightning war.” Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin hastened to claim his share of the spoils under the terms of a secret protocol in the Molotov-Ribbentrop Nonaggression Treaty signed in…
Nuremberg, Germany · September 10, 1935 On this date in 1935 the Nazis convened their annual Party congress in Nuremberg completely fixated on the charismatic savior-figure Adolf Hitler, Germany’s chancellor since January 1933. The 1935 “Rally of Freedom” (Reichsparteitag der Freiheit) touted Hitler’s wildly popular reintegration of the Saar region into the German Reich (from…
New York City, New York · July 26, 1935 On this date in 1935 in New York Harbor, a group of anti-Nazi activists boarded the German passenger liner Bremen, tore from the ship’s jackstay the red, white, and black Nazi party flag, its swastika emblazoned in the center, and pitched it into the Hudson River….
Rome, Italy · July 20, 1933 On this date in 1933 in Rome, representatives of German President Paul von Hindenburg (1847–1934) and Pope Pius XI (papacy 1922–1939), among them Vatican Secretary of State Eugenio Pacelli (later Pope Pius XII), announced that a concordat (treaty) had been forged between the Holy See and the German Reich. The Reichskonkordat…
Paris, Occupied France · July 16, 1942 On June 22, 1940, representatives of Marshal Philippe Pétain, premier of the French Third Republic, signed a ceasefire with Germany, 44 days after the Wehrmacht (German armed forces) had invaded France. Early in October Pétain’s collaborationist Vichy government—named after the resort community in which his administration had settled—approved…
Berlin, Germany · July 1, 1937 On this date in 1937 the Gestapo (German secret police) arrested outspoken Lutheran theologian and pastor Martin Niemoeller. The next year Niemoeller was tried for activities against the State. Released after the trial, Niemoeller was rearrested—presumably because Deputy Fuehrer Rudolf Hess decided to take “merciless action” against the clergyman…