MAY 10 - DAILY CHRONICLES OF HISTORY

MAY 10

1933

Nazi Campaign of Burning books in Berlin and throughout Germany.  The Nazi Party held the largest rally of book burning on May 10, 1933.  But it was preceded by other book burning demonstrations:  (On April 8, 1933, during the Wartburg Festival and on May 6, 1933 on Magnus Hirschfeld's Institute of Sex Research library.)  Among the 20,000 volumes hurled into the flames were books of famous writers such as Henri Barbusse, Franz Boas, John Dos Passos, Albert Einstein, Lion Feuchtwanger, Friedrich Förster, Sigmund Freud, John Galsworthy, André Gide, Ernst Glaeser, Maxim Gorki, Werner Hegemann, Ernest Hemingway, Erich Kästner, Helen Keller, Alfred Kerr, Jack London, Emil Ludwig, Heinrich Mann, Thomas Mann, Karl Marx, Hugo Preuss, Marcel Proust, Erich Maria Remarque, Walther Rathenau, Margaret Sanger, Arthur Schnitzler, Upton Sinclair, Kurt Tucholsky, Jakob Wassermann, H.G. Wells, Theodor Wolff, Emilé Zola, Arnold Zweig, and Stefan Zweig and many others.  A hundred years before the advent of Hitler, the German-Jewish poet, Heinrich Heine, had declared: "Wherever books are burned, human beings are destined to be burned too."

1940

German forces invaded France, Belgium, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands, and in 46 days defeated Allied forces in the Battle of France, or what was also called the Fall of France.  The German victory brought all Allied operations on the Western Front to a halt until June 6, 1944. The Polish Armed Forces were also a part of the Allies during the Battle; Polish troops numbered about 68,000 from various divisions, a motorized brigade and a Polish Squadron named the GC 1/145 "Warsaw".  When France fell, General Wladyslaw Sikorski ordered Polish troops to evacuate and headed for the UK to continue the fight.


Upon the resignation of Neville Chamberlain, Winston Churchill became the Prime Minister of  the United Kingdom, and remained in power until 1955.  In a radio broadcast the same evening Chamberlain addressed the nation, '…..For the hour has now come when we are to be put to the test, as the innocent people of Holland, Belgium, and France are being tested already. And you and I must rally behind our new leader, and with our united strength, and with unshakable courage fight, and work until this wild beast, which has sprung out of his lair upon us, has been finally disarmed and overthrown...." Chamberlain is best known for his foreign policy of appeasement regarding Adolf Hitler, and the signing of the Munich Agreement of  September 30, 1938, in which Britain conceded the territory of Sudetenland region of Czechoslovakia to Hitler.  On September 1, 1939, Germany invaded Poland on September 1, 1939, and three days later  the UK declared war on Germany. Chamberlain led Britain through the first eight months of World War II, in what was called the "Phoney War", where there was no major military land operations.

2015

Presidential election. Andrzej Duda became the 6th President of the Republic of Poland.  The victory of Duda's Law and Justice party was one of the latest in a series of electoral victories for eurosceptic centre-right and right-wing parties in Europe. His party received strong support in the eastern half of the country closest to Ukraine and had campaigned on a platform of tax cuts, continued privatization, continued social welfare spending, anti-corruption, constitutional reform, increased military spending and closer ties to NATO, limited support of EU integration, and restrictions on abortion, euthanasia, legal recognition of same-sex couples and media portrayals of sex and violence.