February 14

On Valentine's Day 1945, the 91st and 398th Bomber Groups of the US Air Force accidentally unleashed a 3-minute barrage of bombs on Prague. After becoming disoriented, the bomber crews allegedly mistook the city for the German city Dresden, which was then being firebombed by British and American forces 100 kilometers away; the bombers, the US initially claimed, had only dropped leaflets on the city. Over 700 Czech civilians died in the raid, while an additional 1200 were wounded. In his diary, the American engineer and tail gunner George Forsyth wrote the following

It took us three days to complete this mission. We bombed the Capitol of Czechoslovakia, Prague. We were supposed to go to Dresden. We ran out of gas on the way home and landed at Brussels. We really had a lot of fun there. We went to town in our flying clothes.

Meantime, the bombing of Dresden, which concluded on February 15, claimed tens of thousands of lives.

***

As the bubonic plague began its catastrophic depopulation of Europe in 1348, Jews were scapegoated for the horrific disease that eventually killed 25 million people. On the orders of Amadaeus VI, the Count of Savoy, Jews living along the shores of Lake Geneva were tortured and predictably confessed to the erroneous charges and named others whom they claimed as co-conspirators in the fictitious plot to poison Christendom. News of the confessions spread throughout Europe, and mobs organized and carried out the predictable reprisals. In Strasbourg, the mass murder was organized by craftsmen and the nobility, whose economic resentments were at least as strong as their religious bigotry. On St. Valentine’s Day 1349, the city’s Jews were burnt in their own cemetery. As Jacob von Königshofen, a Swiss historian who would have been seven years old at the time, wrote years later,

There were about two thousand people of them. Those who wanted to baptize themselves were spared. . . . Many small children were taken out of the fire and baptized against the will of their fathers and mothers. And everything that was owed to the Jews was cancelled, and the Jews had to surrender all pledges and notes that they had taken for debts. The council, however, took the cash that the Jews possessed and divided it among the working-men proportionately. The money was indeed the thing that killed the Jews. If they had been poor and if the feudal lords had not been in debt to them, they would not have been burnt. After this wealth was divided among the artisans some gave their share to the Cathedral or to the Church on the advice of their confessors.

Thus were the Jews burnt at Strasbourg, and in the same year in all the cities of the Rhine, whether Free Cities or Imperial Cities or cities belonging to the lords. In some towns they burnt the Jews after a trial, in others, without a trial. In some cities the Jews themselves set fire to their houses and cremated themselves.

After the mass immolation, the magistrates of Strasbourg banished Jews from the city for a century. Twenty years later, that decision was rescinded.

November 9

On November 9, 1938, Ernst Vom Rath -- a German official living in Paris -- died from a gunshot wound he’d sustained several days before. Vom Rath’s killer, a Polish Jew named Herschel Grynszpan, shot him out of frustration over the expulsion of thousands of Polish Jews -- including his own sister -- from their homes in Germany. Unwilling to accept the refugees either, the Polish government herded the deportees into squalid camps. After making his way to the German Embassy, Grynszpan shot Vom Rath on the morning of November 7.

After Von Rath died, Nazi mobs erupted throughout Germany and Austria. In an event known ever since as Kristallnacht -- usually translated as "the night of broken glass" -- Jewish property and community institutions were sacked with the approval and encouragement of German and Austrian authorities, who issued orders that police were not to interrupt the pogroms. More than 8,000 Jewish shops were damaged or destroyed, as civilians and SA stormtroopers attacked buildings with sledgehammers, leaving the streets covered in shards of broken windows. Jews were beaten to death; 30,000 Jewish men were taken to concentration camps; and 1,668 synagogues were ransacked, with 267 set on fire.

In Dinslaker, an industrial city in western Germany, a Jewish orphanage came under assault.

I opened the door: about 50 men stormed into the house, many of them with their coat- or jacket-collars turned up. At first they rushed into the dining room, which fortunately was empty, and there they began their work of destruction, which was carried out with the utmost precision. The frightened and fearful cries of the children resounded through the building. In a stentorian voice I shouted: "Children, go out into the street immediately!". . . .

Facing the back of the building, we were able to watch how everything in the house was being systematically destroyed under the supervision of the men of law and order – the police. At short intervals we could hear the crunching of glass or the hammering against wood as windows and doors were broken. Books, chairs, beds, tables, linen, chests, parts of a piano, a radiogram, and maps were thrown through apertures in the wall, which a short while ago had been windows or doors.

In the meantime the mob standing around the building had grown to several hundred. Among these people I recognized some familiar faces, suppliers of the orphanage or tradespeople, who only a day or a week earlier had been happy to deal with us as customers. This time they were passive, watching the destruction without much emotion.

In the aftermath of the two days of rioting, a police report from Muggendorf observed that "[o]ne segment of the people is of the opinion that the conscious actions and associated arrests and destruction were far too mild."

Indeed, Kristallnacht only marked the beginning of worse things to come. In the ten months before Germany invaded Poland and launched the second World War, well over 100,000 Jews fled the country.

November 8

On the evening of November 8, 1923, several hundred young German national socialists led by Adolf Hitler attempted to seize control of the German state. Descending on a Munich beer hall, the young Nazis attempted to seize the Bavarian commissar and other government officials while they were attending a political meeting; over the next 24 hours, the plot unraveled spectacularly, and 20 people -- 16 plotters and four Bavarian police officers -- lost their lives. Hitler and the leaders of the putsch were tried, convicted and sentenced to five years in prison. During his confinement, Hitler passed his time working on a book.

On 8 November 1937, an art and documentary exhibit Der Ewige Jude ("The Eternal Jew") opened at Munich's German Museum, as the Nazi party escalated its political scapegoating of European Jews. Over 412,000 visitors viewed the exhibit, which lasted three months in Munich before traveling to Vienna and Berlin for extended runs throughout 1938 and into early 1939. Representing the most extensive collection of anti-semitic propaganda in pre-war Germany, Der Ewige Jude was loaded with vile caricatures of Jews, who were depicted as Asiatic, sadistic Bolshevists with hooked noses, sloping brows and thick lips. Pseudo-scientific charts, attesting to the perils of race-mixing and the physical inferiority of Jews, also lined the halls of the German Museum. The exhibit followed on the heels of a similar display of over 600 examples of "degenerate," cosmopolitan art inspired -- or so it was alleged -- by the decline of "heroic" classical forms and the Aryan virtues they possessed. Several weeks after the opening of Der Ewige Jude, the Reich Propaganda Directorate assumed control over the degenerate art exhibit along with the Great Bolshevik Exhibition, thus clarifying the three perceived dangers to the German volk.

Before Der Ewige Jude closed its run in Berlin on 31 January 1939, German Jewish children were expelled from public schools; the Kristallnacht occurred, as anti-Jewish pogroms erupted in Germany and Austria in early November 1938; the compulsory "Aryanization" of the German market was completed, as Jewish merchants were obliged by law to sell their businesses for minimal compensation; and tens of thousands of Austrian and German Jews were arrested and sent to concentration camps, including Mauthausen and Dachau.

February 14

On Valentine's Day 1945, the 91st and 398th Bomber Groups of the US Air Force accidentally unleashed a 3-minute barrage of bombs on Prague. After becoming disoriented, the bomber crews allegedly mistook the city for the German city Dresden, which was then being firebombed by British and American forces 100 kilometers away; the bombers, the US initially claimed, had only dropped leaflets on the city. Over 700 Czech civilians died in the raid, while an additional 1200 were wounded. In his diary, the American engineer and tail gunner George Forsyth wrote the following

It took us three days to complete this mission. We bombed the Capitol of Czechoslovakia, Prague. We were supposed to go to Dresden. We ran out of gas on the way home and landed at Brussels. We really had a lot of fun there. We went to town in our flying clothes.

Meantime, the bombing of Dresden, which concluded on February 15, claimed tens of thousands of lives.

***

As the bubonic plague began its catastrophic depopulation of Europe in 1348, Jews were scapegoated for the horrific disease that eventually killed 25 million people. On the orders of Amadaeus VI, the Count of Savoy, Jews living along the shores of Lake Geneva were tortured and predictably confessed to the erroneous charges and named others whom they claimed as co-conspirators in the fictitious plot to poison Christendom. News of the confessions spread throughout Europe, and mobs organized and carried out the predictable reprisals. In Strasbourg, the mass murder was organized by craftsmen and the nobility, whose economic resentments were at least as strong as their religious bigotry. On St. Valentine’s Day 1349, the city’s Jews were burnt in their own cemetery. As Jacob von Königshofen, a Swiss historian who would have been seven years old at the time, wrote years later,

There were about two thousand people of them. Those who wanted to baptize themselves were spared. . . . Many small children were taken out of the fire and baptized against the will of their fathers and mothers. And everything that was owed to the Jews was cancelled, and the Jews had to surrender all pledges and notes that they had taken for debts. The council, however, took the cash that the Jews possessed and divided it among the working-men proportionately. The money was indeed the thing that killed the Jews. If they had been poor and if the feudal lords had not been in debt to them, they would not have been burnt. After this wealth was divided among the artisans some gave their share to the Cathedral or to the Church on the advice of their confessors.

Thus were the Jews burnt at Strasbourg, and in the same year in all the cities of the Rhine, whether Free Cities or Imperial Cities or cities belonging to the lords. In some towns they burnt the Jews after a trial, in others, without a trial. In some cities the Jews themselves set fire to their houses and cremated themselves.

After the mass immolation, the magistrates of Strasbourg banished Jews from the city for a century. Twenty years later, that decision was rescinded.

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