JULY 26 - DAILY CHRONICLES OF HISTORY

JULY 26

1939

Hermann Goring established another Zentrastelle in Prague, Central Office for Jewish Emigration, charged with the task of organizing the expulsion of Jews from Czechoslovakia.  There were also Zentrastelle centers located in Amsterdam and Vienna. Adolph Eichmann founded the Vienna branch in the autumn of 1938 and explained its process as follows, " ...I immediately said: this is like an automatic factory, let us say a flour mill connected to some bakery. You put in at the one end a Jew who still has capital and has, let us say, a factory or a shop or an account in a bank, and he passes through the entire building, from counter to counter, from office to office – he comes out at the other end, he has no money, he has no rights, only a passport in which is written: You must leave this country within two weeks; if you fail to do so, you will go to a concentration camp..."

 1941

Nazis Murdered Polish Prime Minister:  Kazimierz Władysław Bartel served as Poland's Prime Minister for three terms during the interwar period (1926 and 1930) and Senator, from 1937 until the outbreak of World War II). He returned to university as professor of mathematics. In 1930 he became rector of the Lwów Polytechnic and was awarded an honorary doctorate and membership in the Polish Mathematical Association.  After the invasion of Poland by the Soviets, he was permitted to continue his lectures at the university.  In 1940 he was summoned to Moscow and offered a seat in the Soviet parliament. On June 30, 1941, following Operation Barbarossa,  the German Wehrmacht entered Lwów and began arresting and killing the local intelligentsia. Two days later, the Gestapo imprisoned Bartel and pressured him to create a puppet government in Poland with himself as the head.  He refused and was charged with treason. Kazimierz Bartel was executed upon the order of Himmler, on July 26, 1941, three weeks after the Massacre of the Lwow.  (see July 4, 1941)

1942

Stefan Korbonski, the head of the Directorate of Civil Resistance (Secret Underground State)  in Poland sent a message to London informing them that the Germans had began mass deportation of Jews to the death camps at Treblinka, the slaughter of the Warsaw Ghetto, and shootings in the streets and in houses.  Over a month had passed before the BBC even broadcast it.  The United States press however was quick to respond and reported the news the next day. Korbonski was among the last officials to hold the post of Government Delegate for Poland.  He was arrested by the NKVD in 1945 but soon after was released and forced into exile. He settled in the United States where he was an active journalist and devoted his life work among the local Polish diaspora. Stefan Korbonski was among the few people whose names were completely eradicated by the communist censorship in Poland. (see June 12, 1980)