NOVEMBER 6 - DAILY CHRONICLES OF HISTORY

NOVEMBER 6

1657

Brandenburg & Poland signed the Treaty of Bromberg.   It was agreed upon between John II Casimir of Polandof and Elector Frederick William of Brandenburg-Prussian and was ratified at Bromberg on November 6,  1657.  The treaty was a composite of several other treaties;  In exchange for military aid in the Second Northern War and the return of Ermland to Poland, the Polish King, Casimir granted the Hohenzollern dynasty of Brandenburg hereditary sovereignty in the Duchy of Prussia, pawned Draheim (Drahim) and Elbing (Elbląg) to Brandenburg, and handed over Lauenburg and Bütow Land to the Hohenzollerns as a hereditary fief.  Historians regard this treaty as one of the biggest mistakes in Polish foreign policy towards Prussia.  The consequences to Poland and Polish sovereignty were politically fatal. The First Partition of Poland took place on September 22, 1772.  The Second Partition was January 23, 1793. The Third Partition was October 24, 1795, and the Fourth Partition was September 1, 1939.

1939

Sonderaktion Krakau was the codename for a Nazi German operation against Polish professors and academics of the Jagiellonian University and other universities in German occupied Kraków. The Gestapo Chief Bruno Muller ordered the arrest of all 184 men and brought to a detention center on Montelupich street, and then to barracks at Mazowiecka.  From there they were shuttled to various detention centers, and in the end to Sachsenhausen and Dachau concentration camps. As a result of an international uproar, on February 8, 1940 the Gestapo released  101 professors (over the age of 40),  and a few others intermittently. Their living conditions were grim and inhumane.  Of those who were detained, 12 professors died in the camp, and 5 others upon release.

1941

Stalin Celebrated the 24th Anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution. He gave a speech on November 6, 1941 to Moscow party workers underground in the Mayakovsky metro station.  Here is a translated excerpt of this speech: "…..The period of the war of liberation from the German invaders has begun.....Already the very moral degradation of the German invaders, who have lost all human semblance, and long ago sunk to the level of wild beasts, this one circumstance is already evidence of the fact that they have doomed themselves to inevitable destruction....But the inevitable destruction of the Hitlerite invaders and their armies is not determined by moral factors alone...... Great Britain, the United States of America and the Soviet Union have united into a single camp, which has set itself the aim of smashing the Hitlerite imperialists and their predatory armies. The present war is a war of engines. The war will be won by the side that has an overwhelming preponderance in engine production. If we aggregate the production of engines in the U.S.A., Great Britain and the U.S.S.R., then we get a superiority of at least three times in comparison with Germany. That is one of the grounds for the inevitable doom of Hitler’s robber imperialism....For the complete rout of the German invaders! (Loud applause.) For the liberation of all the oppressed peoples groaning under the yoke of Hitler’s tyranny! (Loud applause.)......"