OCTOBER 26 - DAILY CHRONICLES OF HISTORY

OCTOBER 26

1939

Hans Frank was appointed German Governor of the General Government of Poland. After the joint invasion of Poland by Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, the General Government of Poland was one of three zones of the Nazi occupation in central Poland. The other two sections were western Polish areas annexed into the Third Reich, and the eastern territories annexed by the Soviet Union. Hans Frank was the chief jurist in the "General Government". He spread a reign of terror against the Polish civlian population (Jews and ethnic Poles).  Frank directed the policy of the segregation of the Jews into ghettos, in particular that of the Warsaw Ghetto, and used Polish civilians as forced slave labor.  The Polish Underground attempted to assassinate Frank on the night of January  29/30, 1944 (the night preceding the 11th anniversary of Hitler's appointment as Chancellor of Germany) but the attempt failed.  Frank was travelling in a special train to Lviv when it was derailed  after the explosion. Nobody was killed however. (NB.  At the Nuremberg trials following the end of WW2, he was tried,found guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity and was executed.)

1952

On October 26, 1952, Poland held its first legislative election by one-party rule.  It was the first elections to the Sejm (Polish Parliament) of the People's Republic of Poland. It was also the first election under undisguised communists, but it was blatantly rigged, and the results falsified on a massive scale.  All opposition parties were either eliminated, or sought refuge underground.  Opponents were subject to arrest and torture. Voters were presented with a single list from the Front of National Unity, comprising the PZPR and its two satellite parties, the Democratic Party and the ZSL. The number of candidates permitted to run in the elections was equal to the number of seats in parliament.  PZPR "won" by a landslide with 99.8% of the vote. The PZPR, (Polish United Workers' Party ) held iron control over Poland from 1948 to 1989.

1983

Alfred Tarski ( nee Alfred Teitelbaum) died on this day. He was a Polish-American logician and mathematician of Polish-Jewish descent, and was educated in Poland at the University of Warsaw. He was a member of the Lwów–Warsaw school of logic and the Warsaw school of mathematics. Tarski immigrated to the United States in 1939 and became an American citizen. He did research in math and taught at the University of California, Berkeley from 1942 until his death in 1983. Tarski was best known for his work on model theory, metamathematics, and algebraic logic, as well as his contributions to abstract algebra, topology, geometry, measure theory, mathematical logic, set theory, and analytic philosophy. His biographers Anita and Solomon Feferman state that, "Along with his contemporary, Kurt Gödel, he changed the face of logic in the twentieth century, especially through his work on the concept of truth and the theory of models.