April 4

 

1882 Birth: Kurt von Schleicher, German general and the last Chancellor of Germany during the era of the Weimar Republic: his name translated from the German is 'Sneak.' His cynical and inept dabbling at politics will allow the triumph of Hitler, and he will ultimately lose his life during the Night of the Long Knives.

1884 Birth: Isoroku Yamamoto, Japanese naval commander. Yamamoto was among the Imperial Japanese Navy's most able admirals and is highly respected in Japan. In the United States he is widely regarded as a clever, intelligent and dangerous opponent who resisted going to war, but once the decision was made did his utmost for his country. However, some American survivors of the war maintain their condemnation of him for the surprise character of the attack on Pearl Harbor.

1917 WW1: The US Senate votes 90-6 to enter WW1 on the Allied side.

1918 WW1: Second Battle of the Somme ends.

1919 Weimar: Max Hofweber, a comrade of Rudolf Hess at the training airfield at Lechfeld, introduces him to Dr. Karl Haushofer, beginning a long and intimate friendship. (Missing Years)

1919 The Jewish Chronicle in London states, " The conceptions of Bolshevism are in harmony in most points with the ideas of Judaism." Soon afterward, Victor Marsden the London Morning Post's reporter in Russia will write that 477 of the leading 545 Bolshevik officials are Jews. Once again, conservatives and anti-Semites used these words to stir up anti-Jewish sentiments.

1933 Church and Reich: The Central Association of Catholic fraternities withdraws its ban on membership in the Nazi party.

1933 Robert Weltsch publishes an article in the Juedische Rundschau (Jewish Review) under the banner headline, "Wear the Yellow Star with Pride," in reaction to the Nazi boycott of Jewish businesses in Germany. (Edelheit)

1934 The German state of Baden bans Jewish ritual slaughter (shechita).

1933 The US Dirigible Akron crashes off the coast of New Jersey, killing 73.

 

1934 The three Legionaries (Iron Guardsmen) who assassinated Romanian Prime Minister Ion Duca are given life sentences.

 

 

1939 Faisal II becomes King of Iraq.

 

1941 WW2: Field Marshal Erwin Rommel captures the British held town of Benghazi in North Africa.

 

 

1941 WW2: From two letters addressed to the German Armistice Commission at Wiesbaden by the ex-Ambassador Scapini: "4 April 1941. "M. Georges Scapini, Ambassador of France. To his Excellency Monsieur Abetz, German Ambassador in Paris. Subject: Men captured after the coming into force of the Armistice Convention and treated as prisoners of war...I. The Geneva Convention applies only during a state of war as far as captures are concerned. Armistice, however, suspends war operations; therefore, any man captured after the Armistice Convention came into force and treated as a prisoner of war, is wrongfully retained in captivity...The Armistice Convention, in its second paragraph, states only that the French Armed Forces stationed in regions to be occupied by Germany are to be brought back quickly into unoccupied territory and demobilized, but does not say that they are to be taken into captivity, which would be contrary to the Geneva Convention...1. Civilians. If it is admitted that civilians captured before the armistice cannot be treated as prisoners of war, as discussed in my previous letter, surely there is all the more reason not to consider as such those captured after the armistice. I note in this respect that captures, some of which were collective, were carried out several months after the end of hostilities....To the categories of civilians defined in my first letter, I wish to add one more-that of demobilized civilians who were going back to their homes in the occupied zone after the armistice and who, more often than not, were captured on their way home and sent into captivity as a result of the initiative of local military authorities. ...T. Soldiers. As such I would define, by convention, men who, though freed after the armistice, could not for some reason due to the difficult circumstances of that period-be provided with the regular demobilization papers. Many of them were captured and taken into captivity under the same condition as those mentioned above...A. Civilians not subject to military service. It is obvious that these men could not be considered soldiers according to French law. They can be classified, according to age, into three groups: (a) Men under 21 not yet called to the colors. Example: Flanquart, Alexandre, 18 years old, captured by the German troops at Courrieres, Pas-de-Calais, at the time of the arrival of the latter in that region. His address in captivity was Number 65/388, Stalag II-B. (b) Men between 21 and 48 who were not mobilized, who were demobilized, or who were considered unfit for service...(c) Men specially assigned to the army. I will classify them into two groups: 1. Men mobilized into special corps, which are military formations established at the time of the mobilization by different ministerial departments...2. Men specially assigned, who at mobilization were kept in the positions which they held in time of peace in military services or establishments. Example: Workmen in artillery depots. Civilians specially assigned. Contrary to those mentioned above, the civilians who were specially assigned did not belong to military formations and were not subject to military authority. Nevertheless they were arrested..."

1942

1943 WW2: Eisenhower's US First Army joins Montgomery's Eighth Army near Gafsa.

1944 Holocaust: An American reconnaissance plane flies over Auschwitz, photographing the I.G. Farben synthetic rubber (Buna) plant at Monowitz. Both the plant and the nearby main camp are clearly visible, but the gas chambers at Birkenau are not recognized for what they really are. (Apparatus)

1944 WW2: British troops capture Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.

1945 WW2: Hungary is liberated from Nazi occupation: Now a Hungarian National Day.

1945 WW2: US troops on Okinawa encounter the first significant resistance from Japanese forces.

1945 WW2: Kassel, Germany, is taken by troops from Patton's Third Army.

1945 Holocaust: American troops discover mass graves in Ohrdruf. "...The Ohrdruf camp was a subcamp of the Buchenwald concentration camp, and the first Nazi camp liberated by U.S. troops. Created in November 1944 near the town of Gotha, Germany, Ohrdruf supplied forced labor in the form of concentration camp prisoners for railway construction leading to a proposed communications center, which was never completed due to the rapid American advance. In late March 1945, the camp had a prisoner population of some 11,700, but in early April the SS evacuated almost all the prisoners on death marches to Buchenwald. The SS guards killed many of the remaining prisoners who were too ill to walk to the railcars. When the soldiers of the 4th Armored Division entered the camp, they discovered piles of bodies, some covered with lime, and others partially incinerated on pyres. The ghastly nature of their discovery led General Dwight D. Eisenhower, Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces in Europe, to visit the camp on April 12, with Generals George S. Patton and Omar Bradley. After his visit, Eisenhower cabled General George C. Marshall, the head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in Washington, describing his trip to Ohrdruf: ". . .the most interesting--although horrible--sight that I encountered during the trip was a visit to a German internment camp near Gotha. The things I saw beggar description. While I was touring the camp I encountered three men who had been inmates and by one ruse or another had made their escape. I interviewed them through an interpreter. The visual evidence and the verbal testimony of starvation, cruelty and bestiality were so overpowering as to leave me a bit sick. In one room, where they were piled up twenty or thirty naked men, killed by starvation, George Patton would not even enter. He said that he would get sick if he did so. I made the visit deliberately, in order to be in a position to give first-hand evidence of these things if ever, in the future, there develops a tendency to charge these allegations merely to "propaganda..."

1946 Dr Marcelle Petiot is sentenced to death in Paris, for murdering by injection 27 people whom he had told he was a Resistance member helping them flee Nazi-occupied France.

1949 Cold War: Twelve nations sign The North Atlantic Treaty creating the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation.

1960 Death: Alfred Naujocks, SS Sturmbannfuehrer, secret-service veteran and member of the SD since its founding in 1934 who is believed to have organized the "faked attack" on the German radio station at Gleiwitz on the German-Polish border on the night of August 31, 1939. After surrendering to the Americans in late 1944, he signed a sworn affidavit at Nuremberg on November 20, 1945, saying he had been given his orders personally by Heydrich and was accompanied during his mission by Heinrich Mueller. Shortly after signing his affidavit, he mysteriously disappeared. He died on this day, a successful Hamburg businessman.

1970 April 4-5 Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev orders the bodies of Hitler and his entourage exhumed from their hiding place at Magdeburg, and incinerated. "...In a move personally approved by Leonid Brezhnev, then the Soviet leader, Andropov gave the order to dig up the remains and destroy them for fear that they would one day be discovered and the site turned into a shrine to Hitler. The KGB first secured the area around the Magdeburg camp to guard against curious neighbors. A small tent was erected over the grave and five officers dug through the night, first with pickaxes, then with shovels. They found five cases containing the remains of ten bodies. After counting the leg bones to ensure that no body was missing, they loaded the cases onto a lorry and drove them to a nearby training camp, where they were burnt. Skull fragments, including his jawbone, are all that remain of Hitler. They were sent in secret to Moscow in 1945, together with parts of a blood-soaked leather couch on which the Führer is believed to have died. Blood from the couch matched Hitler's blood type and the skull was painstakingly reconstructed except for a missing cheekbone and other fragments destroyed when his corpse was doused in petrol and set alight by an aide. After months of research, based mainly on the dictator's teeth, the Russians concluded the remains were indeed Hitler's. "We concluded that first Hitler took an ampoule of poison and then shot himself," said Kondrashev. "He was then burnt and buried, first by the Nazis and then by the Russians." The skull is still in the hands of the FSB, the KGB's successor organisation, and is believed to be held in an archive on the outskirts of Moscow. According to the latest reports, it is stored in a small cardboard box originally used for ballpoint pen refills..."