This Day In History

May 10th 1941: Hess parachutes into Scotland

On this day in 1941 during the Second World War, Adolf Hitler’s deputy in the Nazi Party Rudolf Hess fled Germany and parachuted into Scotland in an attempt to negotiate peace with the United Kingdom. On 10th May he took off in a plane from Augsburg, Germany, evading capture by German forces. In the evening he arrived over the UK and parachuted down near the Scottish village of Eaglesham. He told authorities he had an important message and was handed to the army who took him as a prisoner of war. Winston Churchill sent Hess to the Tower of London, making him its last inmate. After the war he was tried at the Nuremberg Trials and sentenced to life imprisonment, which he served at Spandau Prison in Berlin. Despite calls for his release Hess died in prison in 1987, supposedly due to suicide by hanging, but many claim others helped in his death.

“I do not think I could have arrived at my final choice unless I had continually kept before my eyes the vision of an endless line of children’s coffins with weeping mothers behind them, both English and German, and another line of coffins of mothers with mourning children”
- Hess on why he flew to the UK

March 23rd 1933: Enabling Act passed

On this day in 1933, the German Reichstag passed the Enabling Act, which made Adolf Hitler dictator of Germany. The law gave Chancellor Hitler legal powers to establish his dictatorship as it gave the Cabinet the power to enact laws independently of the legislature (the Reichstag). Its formal name was ‘Law to Remedy the Distress of People and Reich’. Hitler had been appointed Chancellor on January 30th, and just before the scheduled election, the Reichstag fire occurred. The Nazis used the incident to suggest a Communist revolution was imminent and passed the Reichstag Fire Decree which suspended civil liberties and habeas corpus. The Nazis failed to gain an absolute  majority in the Reichstag and so Hitler drafted the Enabling Act to secure his position. The Nazis pressured and threatened representatives of the Reichstag to pass the bill, positioning SA men and Nazi swastikas in and around the Reichstag. With the bill’s passing, Hitler’s dictatorship was assured, and thus began a regime which would last until 1945. As Joseph Goebbels wrote after the  passing of the act:

“The authority of the Führer has now been wholly established. Votes are no longer taken. The Führer decides. All this is going much faster than we had dared to hope.”

March 14th 1943: Kraków Ghetto is ‘liquidated’

On this day in 1943 the last Jews in the Kraków Ghetto were killed or sent to concentration camps.  Kraków was one of the five major Jewish ghettos created by Nazi Germany during the German occupation of Poland during World War Two. The purpose of the ghettos was for the persecution, terror and exploitation of Polish Jews. Life in the ghetto was unimaginably hard; 15,000 Jews were crammed into the area which was previously inhabited by 3,000 people. From May 1942 onward, the Nazis had been deporting Jews from the ghetto to concentration camps, where they would likely be murdered. On this day, the final ‘liquidation’ of Kraków was completed, under the command of SS commander Amon Göth. 8,000 Jews were deemed able to work and were taken to Plaszow labour camp. 2,000 were deemed unable to work and they were either killed in the streets of taken to Auschwitz for extermination.

February 27th 1933: Reichstag fire

On this day in 1933 the Reichstag building in Berlin (which housed the German Parliament) was set on fire in an attempted arson attack. The newly instated Nazi government, led by Adolf Hitler as Chancellor, ordered a thorough hunt for the arsonist. The police identified the perpetrator as Marinus van der Lubbe, a Dutch communist; he and four Communist leaders were arrested. The Nazis used the event as evidence of a Communist plot against the German government, and Hitler urged President Hindenburg to pass an emergency decree to counter the Communist threat. With this passed, the Nazis were able to suspend civil liberties and arrest Communists. By arresting those who held seats in the German Parliament, the Nazis became the majority party and kept this majority in the subsequent elections, thus allowing the Nazi consolidation of power. Van der Lubbe and the others were tried in March in the famous ‘Reichstag Fire Trial’; Van der Lubbe was found guilty and executed by guillotine on January 10th 1934. However, his role has been questioned by historians with some even suggesting he was not responsible and that the fire was ordered by the Nazis themselves.

February 22nd 1943: Members of the White Rose group are executed in Nazi Germany

On this day in 1943 three members of the peaceful resistance movement in Nazi Germany, the White Rose, were executed. The White Rose comprised of students from the University of Munich and their philosophy professor and distributed leaflets protesting against the regime of Adolf Hitler. On 18th February 1943, the siblings Sophie and Hans Scholl were arrested by the Gestapo for being discovered distributing these leaflets. On the 22nd, the Scholls and Christoph Probst (the founding members of the group) were tried, found guilty of treason and sentenced to death. That same day the three were executed by guillotine at Stadelheim Prison. After their executions the remaining members were arrested and killed, thus ending their resistance movement.
The group’s motto was:

“We will not be silent. We are your bad conscience. The White Rose will not leave you in peace!”

February 2nd 1943: Battle of Stalingrad ends

On this day in 1943, German troops surrendered to the Soviet Red Army in Stalingrad, thus ending the 5 months of fighting. The Battle of Stalingrad is among the bloodiest battles in the history of warfare, with nearly 2 million casualties. The Germans had attempted to invade Russia and capture Stalingrad, but the Russians fought back and cut off and surrounded the German army. The Russian winter soon set in, with sub-zero temperatures weakening the German forces. Eventually, the remaining army surrendered, and 91,000 were taken prisoner (including 22 generals). The German failure at Stalingrad was a key turning point in the Second World War, as the army never recovered from their defeat.

On this day in 1945, the evacuation of the Auschwitz concentration camp begins as Soviet forces close in. The SS sent orders calling for the execution of all remaining prisoners, but due to the chaos of the Nazi retreat, this was never carried out. The Nazi personnel ordered the evacuation of Auschwitz, with 60,000 prisoners being forced on a death march toward Wodzisław Śląski (Loslau) where they would be sent to other camps, with the weak and sick being left behind. Around 15,000 died on the way. 7,500 remained, and they were liberated by the 322nd Rifle Division of the Soviet Red Army on January 27th 1945.

Auschwitz was a network of concentration and extermination camps operated by Nazi Germany (the largest of its kind), and was used as the place of the “final solution of the Jewish question in Europe” by Heinrich Himmler. Jews and other groups were sent to the camps from 1942 onwards, where many were sent to their death in the gas chambers. Most of those who escaped the gas chambers died of starvation, disease, and execution by the Nazi guards. It is estimated that around 1.3 million people died there.

As the prospect of German defeat in the war drew near, officials tried to hide the German crimes committed at the camps. Some of the gas chambers of Auschwitz-Birkenau had their rooves removed in November 1944 so that the cremation ovens could be removed, and the remainder were blown up in January 1945.

Auschwitz remains a symbol of the horrors committed by the Nazi regime under Adolf Hitler, and the stories of its victims and survivors continue to be told, in the hope that such tragedy shall never befall the world again.

On this day in 1941, at a Reich Chancellery meeting, German Chancellor Adolf Hitler declared the immiment destruction of the Jewish race. Hitler and all of the highest ranking officials of the Nazi Party were present. World War Two had recently escalated, with the entrance of the United States and Japan on 7th December and Germany’s declaration of war on the US on 11th December. The meeting took place in private rooms rather than Hitler’s office and thus the only records of it are in the diaries of Joseph Goebbels and Hans Frank.

Joseph Goebbels noted Hitler’s words in his records:
“Regarding the Jewish question, the Führer is determined to clear the table. He warned the Jews that if they were to cause another world war, it would lead to their own destruction. Those were not empty words. Now the world war has come. The destruction of the Jews must be its necessary consequence. This question is to be regarded without sentimentalism. We are not here to have sympathy with the Jews, but rather with our German people. If the German people have sacrificed 160,000 dead in the eastern campaign, so the authors of this bloody conflict will have to pay for it with their lives.”

The much more well-known Wannsee Conference in January 1942 marked the next step in the Nazis’ plans to exterminate the Jews, where senior bureaucrats worked on the ‘Final Solution to the Jewish problem’.  

The Reich Chancellery meeting marked a turning point in the Nazi regime’s attitude towards the Jewish people. It was part of a shift from propaganda, intimidation and attacks to outright and planned extermination.