NOVEMBER 8 - DAILY CHRONICLES OF HISTORY

NOVEMBER 8

1937

The Eternal Jew (Der ewige Jude)was an exhibition held at the Library of German Museum in Munich, from November 8, 1937 to January 31, 1938. The display of photographs and caricatures focused on antisemitic stereotypes, for example representing Jewish attempts at bolshevising Nazi Germany, the illustration of an eastern Jew wearing a kaftan holding gold coins in one hand, and a whip in the other.  This type of degenerate art was created by a number of famous Nazi German avante garde artists such as Max Beckmann and Ernst Kirchner, among others. The exhibition attracted 412,300 visitors, over 5,000 per day. In the same year a book was published by the Nazi German party, of the same name, The Eternal Jew (Der ewige Jude) which contained 265 photographs each with a short caption denigrating Jewish people.

1939

Assassination Attempt on Hitler:  Eight minutes after Hitler concluded a speech at the Bürgerbräukeller in Munich on the 16th anniversary of the Beer Hall Putsch, a time bomb exploded near the speaking platform that killed eight people and injured sixty two others.  A carpenter, Johann Georg Elser was arrested with incriminating documents at the Swiss border and brought back to Munich for interrogation. His attempt to assassinate Hitler would have succeeded if Hitler's annual speech had not begun 30 minutes earlier than it did in previous years.  Elser was arrested and imprisoned for five years where he sustained torture, and  was injected with high dosages of Pervitin.  Hans Gisevius, a German diplomat (and covert opponent of the Nazi regime) wrote that Elser, "was just a shell of his former self because they (the Gestapo) had tried to squeeze information out of him by feeding him very salty herring and exposing him to heat, and then depriving him of liquids ... They wanted him to confess to some kind of connection, however vague, to Otto Strasser."  (Strasser broke from the Nazi Party due to disputes with the "Hitlerite" faction.  He founded the Black Front whose objective it was to split the Nazi Power and seize power from Hitler.)  On April 9, 1945, four weeks before the end of the war in Europe, Georg Elser was executed by gunfire, and his fully dressed body immediately burned in the crematorium of Dachau Concentration Camp. He was 42 years old.

1944

On November 8, 1944 upon the orders of Adolf Eichmann, tens of thousands of Hungarian Jews were forced on a death march from the Ujlaki brickyards in Obuda to the camps in Austria.  More than 70,000 Jews—men, women, and children walked over 100 miles in the rain and snow, suffering exhaustion, starvation, and exposure.  Thousands died as a result of the arduous passage, and thousands more were shot. The prisoners who survived the death march reached Austria in late December 1944.  The Nazi Germans transported the survivors to several concentration camps, in particular Dachau in southern Germany,  and to Mauthausen in northern Austria, and to Vienna, where they worked as slave labor in the construction of fortifications around the city.