JUNE 15 - DAILY CHRONICLES OF HISTORY

JUNE 15

1574

Polish King Henryk of Anjou abandoned Poland: Henry III was the first elected King of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth from 1573 to 1575 and King of France from 1574 until his death. At the age of 22  Henry abandoned Poland-Lithuania upon inheriting the French throne when his brother, Charles IX, died without issue. Henry's absence "provoked a constitutional crisis" that the Parliament attempted to resolve by notifying Henry that his throne would be lost if he did not return from France by May 12,  1575. His failure to return caused Parliament to declare his throne vacant.

1934

Colonel Bronislaw Pieracki, Minister of the Interior was assassinated by Ukrainian nationalists of the OUN.  Just two days later,the Polish Sanacja government created the Bereza Kartuska Detention Camp. Its first prisoners were almost the entire leadership of the Polish nationalist far-right National Radical Camp (ONR) arrested on July 6 and 7, 1934.  Stephan Bandera and Mykola Lebed were also sentenced to death for the assassination. Their sentences were commuted to life imprisonment but Lebed escaped when the Germans invaded Poland in 1939.

1940

The Soviet Union invaded and annexed Lithuania, according to the secret protocols of Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact. The occupation was followed by mass arrests and deportations of over 34,000 citizens. According to a Lithuanian government official, this was the start of a planned removal of 700,000 from Lithuania.

1942

Deportation of Jews from the Netherlands to Poland and Germany began:  All non-Dutch Jews were also sent to Westerbork (deportations ending on September 13, 1944)  Ultimately about 101,000 Jews were deported in 98 transports from Westerbork to Auschwitz (57,800; 65 transports), Sobibor (34,313; 19 transports), Bergen-Belsen (3,724; 8 transports) and Theresienstadt (4,466; 6 transports), where most of them were murdered.

1952

Krystna Skarbek died on this day.  Also known as Christine Granville, she was a Polish secret agent working for the British Special Operations Executive (SOE) during the Second World War. She became celebrated especially for her daring exploits in under-cover intelligence and irregular-warfare missions in Nazi-occupied Poland and France.  Ian Fleming, in his first James Bond novel, Casino Royale (1953), modeled the character Vesper Lynd on her. After the WW2 ended, Krystyna  had begun to work as a liner stewardess. On June 15, 1952, Skarbek was stabbed to death in the Shelbourne Hotel, Earls Court, in London by Dennis George Muldowney, an obsessed Reform Club porter and former merchant marine steward, whose advances she previously rejected. Muldowney was convicted of her murder and hanged at HMP Pentonville on September 30, 1952.