/ es.wikipedia.org
At the age of forty-five he became Foreign Minister and Chancellor of Germany. He was a Roman Catholic member of the Centre Party and became Chancellor during the Great Depression (q.v.). There were three million unemployed in Germany, and Brüning tried to deal with this by deflation, increasing taxation and cutting government expenditure – the classic 3-pointed economists’ dream – which rarely works. (more…)
The historic meeting at Bad Godesberg / collections.yadvashem.org
Many years before The Czech Republic and Slovakia freed themselves from the yoke of being simply Czechoslovakia, this crisis evolved from territorial demands made by Adolf Hitler. One of the results of the Treaty of Versailles of unhappy memory was that over three million Germans were living in the Sudetenland, bordering with Germany and Austria. When Hitler became Chancellor in 1933, he stated that he wanted the inclusion of these three million in Germany. (more…)
German sailors revolt in Kiev / www.history.com
This was not a socialist revolution, as in Russia and France; nor was it anti-colonial, as it was in North America. It began just one month before the end of the Great War – on October 29, 1918, when sailors of the Imperial Fleet firmly refused to put out to sea from Kiev to engage the British fleet. Not wishing to commit suicide, they formed sailors’ councils which multiplied and spread by 6 November to all major cities, ports and garrisons in Germany and on the Western Front. Unlike Russian, French and American revolutions it was bloodless, as the German regime could not resist it. It was moderate – no-one wished to throw out the existing social system by murdering the nobility. Most members of the Councils based their ideas on new Bolshevik notions. What they wanted to do, they repeated, was to maintain law and order in a country which appeared to be losing the four-year war. (more…)
/ thisdaythen.blogspot.com
This dubious process began in Germany in February 1933, when civil liberties were suppressed. The newly established Hitler dictatorship meant to rid itself of all independent institutions. In March of the same year The Enabling Act (always a suspicious phrase) made Hitler free of any attempts at restraint by the Reichstag (q.v.). The rights of German separate states (Länder) were removed; eighteen commissioners, members of the National Socialist Party, were put in charge of the Länder; later state parliaments were abolished. The next move was to replace elected bodies by party nominees; in practice the originally sovereign powers of the Länder were transferred to the Reich’s Minister of the Interior. In April, Jews and any others thought politically unreliable, for example non-members of the party were purged, and party members took over their jobs. Hitler was showing his ability to move extraordinarily fast politically, as he would later militarily. In May the Gauleiter of Cologne (Köln) swallowed up all labour unions in the ‘Labour Front’. (more…)
Russian P.O.W. after Tannenberg /probertencyclopaedia.com
The battle of Tannenberg. In one of the better Hollywood attempts to re-produce the Second War on celluloid, The Night of the Generals had Peter O’Toole at his best playing a German general called ‘Tannenberg’ who mixes winning war strategies with a double life as a serial murderer. The name is well-chosen: Tannenberg (26 – 29 August, 1914) had the fresh German armies defeating numerically superior Russian soldiers at the beginning of the Great War. (more…)
Hohenschwangau – one of the Wittelsbach homes / es-wikipedia.org
The Wittelsbach Dynasty. This once-regal Bavarian family can trace their ancestry, like so many other grand families back to the Emperor Charlemagne, but more direct ancestry can be found in the family Scheyern, which ruled a diminutive but autonomous territory around their castle at Pfaffenhofen. When Europe was in chaos (around 1180) through crusades and intercenine wars the Emperor Barbarossa made the head of the Scheyern family Count Otto the new Duke of Bavaria. The Wittelsbachs are unique in Europe because they never gained territory or power through wars. (more…)
Yuan Shikai of China / es.wikipedia.org
The 21 Demands (of Japan). In 1915 Japan came up with the odd idea of trying to make the whole of China a protectorate – a protectorate of Japan of course. The Great War started in 1914 and Japan promptly declared war on Germany, in order to take over that country’s leased territory in China. As a part of the so-called ‘Scramble for Possessions’ Japanese soldiers landed at Quindao Port in Shandung province, and soon controlled the important port, plus German mining and railway concessions. Having completed this with their usual efficiency, the Japanese presented China with its ‘Twenty-One Demands’, threatening total war if they were to be rejected.
The Demands included an extension of Japan’s lease of Port Arthur, and the South Manchurian Railway, and the grant of mining, commercial and residential rights in South Manchuria and parts of Mongolia; China must recognise Japan’s dominant position in Shandung province, and promise that she would not make any territorial concessions on her coasts to any other foreign power. China must also accept a huge infringement of her sovereignty, with Japanese political and military ‘advisers’, and the creation of a combined Sino-Japanese police force. The Chinese played for time, with the expectation of help to come from the United States and Britain. All these two major powers did was to protest feebly at the last demand (the mixed police force) – and Japan accepted postponement – but not for long.
In a disgraceful turn of events, both the US and Great Britain were not prepared to antagonise Japan: China was thus forced to agree to the demands, which the Prime Minister did on May 25, 1915. Chinese university students called this ‘The National Humiliation Day’, unsurprisingly, and youthful demonstrations were followed by more serious ones and a boycott of Japanese imports. The United States now showed an increasing worry about expansionism, and strongly suggested Japan should control this instinct, as America would not tolerate any infringement of China’s political and territorial integrity. Britain and France meanwhile looked through the telescope with their blind eye and approved Japanese claims in Shandong in 1917.
Maximilian, father of Ludwig II, looking for something to kill / unofficial royalty.com
Munich is the capital of what was originally the largest principality (and later kingdom) in all Germany, Bavaria. In the 19th century the city was an odd mixture of ancient and modern – medieval half-timbered houses and cobbled, narrow streets, but already encouraging a rapidly growing industrial sector. Visitors were surprised by this split personality, because there was more than a hint of the purely provincial among the fine buildings springing up everywhere, and yet Munich enjoyed a high academic and cultural reputation. Horse-drawn carts filled with food from the luxuriant surrounding countryside filled the wide streets, driven by peasants. Later the drovers filled the beer halls, where brass bands thumped, and people from the nearby Tyrol danced. Salzburg, leading town in south-western Austria, is less than one hundred kilometres away.
But Salzburg was rather gloomy, and Berlin (Prussia), a great distance to the north was even worse. Munich, or München as it should properly be called, was founded before the eleventh century as, of all things, a place of asylum for the Roman Catholic Church: the town often found itself in the path of invading armies from north and south. Frequently occupied by foreign powers, Munich was with numbing regularity burned by Austrians, Dutch, Swedes, Italians and of course the French. High walls and seven strong towers surrounded the older part of the town, testimony to its riotous and violent past. (more…)
Tommy Brown, 1926 – 1945
Incident at sea, 30 October, 1942
During the Second World War the British had been reading top-secret German codes messages sending orders to their Navy, Army and Airforce, thanks to the team at Bletchley using their Ultra machine to crack the difficult codes set by the Nazi Enigma machine. Millions of tons of shipping in the Battle of the Atlantic had been saved by the Ultra code-cracker, and the German High Command did not know until 1945 that their orders were being read by the Allies. But in February 1942 it had been the Germans’ turn; they had cracked British Naval Cipher No. 3 and soon could see the size, destination and leaving times of Allied convoys. At the same time, the Germans added an extra rotor wheel to their Enigma machines used by U-Boats in the Atlantic, thus greatly increasing the number of solutions to their encrypted text. They knew this had happened at Bletchley, even calling the new effort Shark. They set about finding a way to crack it, but for more than ten months Bletchley was in the dark, its de-codifier producing rubbish. German submarines in the Atlantic sank 7 million tons of Allied shipping in 1942 at a cost of eighty-six U-Boats. In November alone 860,000 tons of shipping went to the bottom. It was more than essential to get hold, somehow, of one of the new data and associated documents from a German submarine, but how? (more…)
Dwight D. Eisenhower was born in 1890, of Dutch-American stock. He became a general and the 34th President of the United States. He saw war in a quite different way than another American officer, George Patton (q.v.): ‘I hate war,’ he often said, ‘as only a soldier who has lived it can, only as one who has seen its brutality, its futility, its stupidity.’ (more…)