JULY 22 - DAILY CHRONICLES OF HISTORY

JULY 22

1940

Vichy Regime revoked citizenship:   The Deputy Secretary of State Raphael Alibert created a committee to review 500,000 naturalizations given since 1927. This resulted in 15,000 people having their French nationality revoked, of whom 40% were Jews. Alibert was the signatory of the Statutes on Jews.

1942

Beginning of massive deportations of Jews from the Warsaw Ghetto to the newly set up extermination camp, Treblinka.  Germans with Ukrainian and Latvian guards in SS uniforms surrounded the walls of the Ghetto.

1944

Polish National Committee of Liberation (PKWN, or Lublin Committee) was  formed by Stalin to assist in the "administration" of  liberated areas of Poland.  His objective was to undermine and usurp the power of the legitimate Polish Government in Exile, and install in its absence, a puppet regime. The Manifesto of the PKWN contained among its communist rhetoric, a denunciation of the Polish Government in Exile and the Polish Constitution. The Polish Government in Exile in London, instructed General "Bor" Komorowski, commander of Armia Krajowa (Home Army) to prepare for an armed uprising against the German occupation in Warsaw, beginning on August 1, 1944.  The Polish Government in Exile wanted to prevent the communist take-over of Poland, and was determined to reach Warsaw first, so that the city would be liberated by the Poles and not the Soviets.

1952

Adoption of Constitution of the People's Republic of Poland. The constitution was based on the 1936 Soviet Constitution (also known as Stalin Constitution), and it superseded the post-war provisional Small Constitution of 1947 which, in its turn, had declared null and void the pre-war April Constitution, defined as fascist. The Russian text of the Constitution was reviewed and corrected by Soviet premier Joseph Stalin and later translated into Polish. It "legalized" the communist legislature and practices as they had been introduced to Poland with the Polish Committee of National Liberation, in the wake of Red Army progress in 1944. The constitution of 1952 broke the tradition of separation of powers, and introduced instead the Soviet concept of "unity of the state's power"

1983

Martial Law Ended. It began on December 13, 1981.  During that time the communist regime in Poland tried to destroy democratic movement. Thousands of people were arrested and imprisoned, and up to 91 people were killed. But after the end of martial law, political prisoners were not released until a general amnesty in 1986.

2004

Karl Plagge was recognized as Righteous Among Nations by Yad Vashem. Plagge was a member of the German Nazi party in 1931, and was initially inspired by the promises of Adolf Hitler, to rebuild the German economy and restore national pride.  But he was soon removed from the Nazi party for refusing to teach their racial anti-semitic propaganda. The Nazis accused Plagge of being " a friend of the Jews and the Freemasons". Plagge used his position as a staff officer in the German Army to provide employment thereby protecting about 1,240 Jews (500 men, the others women and children). His intervention gave the Jews an improved chance for survival, during a time that resulted in the almost total annihilation of Lithuania’s Jews.(1941–1944)