May 10
1796 First Coalition: Napoleon I of France wins a decisive victory against Austrian forces at Lodi bridge over the River Adda in Italy. The Austrians lose some 2,000 men. A month after the armistice of November 11, 1918, Stresemann formed the German People's Party, was elected to the national assembly which gathered at Weimar in 1919 to frame a new constitution, was elected to the new Reichstag in 1920 and spent the next three years in opposition. From August 13 to November 23, 1923, Stresemann was chancellor of a coalition government. In his short-lived ministry he dealt firmly with insurrection in Saxony, restored order in Bavaria after Hitler's Putsch failed, ended the passive resistance of Germans in the Ruhr to the French occupying forces, and began the work of stabilizing Germany's currency. In 1924 Stresemann's successor chose him as his secretary of foreign affairs, an office he was to fill with such distinction under four governments that he was called the greatest master of German foreign policy since Bismarck ...
1878 Birth: Gustav Stresemann, Weimar German chancellor 1923, Nobel 1926. ... Stresemann passionately supported Germanic policy both before and during World War I. He believed in force, in authority, in discipline. He argued as early as 1907 for the creation of a strong navy, seeing in it the instrument by which to extend and protect German overseas trade; in 1916, he supported unrestricted submarine warfare; he helped to defeat the government of Bethmann-Hollweg which he thought too temperate; he opposed the Treaty of Versailles. Dismayed, however, to discover Germany's true military position in the fall of 1918, Stresemann found his ideas of the world changing. Disillusioned with an imperial government that believed in force yet did not possess adequate force, and indeed realizing that the policy of force and conquest in itself is ultimately ruinous, he began to see the world as a jigsaw of political and commercial interrelationships, each nation an individual piece in the puzzle and each fitting into another.
... I was afraid that not only enemy soldiers who, to use the Fuehrer's expression, really behaved like bandits, but also decent enemy soldiers, would be wiped out. In addition-and this was especially repugnant to me ... it was ordered that soldiers were to be shot after they had been captured and had been interrogated. What was totally unclear to me was the general legal position, namely, whether a soldier who had acted like a bandit would upon capture enjoy the legal status of a prisoner of war, or whether on account of his earlier behavior he had already placed himself outside this legal status ...1897 Birth: Einar Gerhardsen, Prime minister of Norway. During World War II, Gerhardsen took part in the organized resistance against Nazi occupation and was interred in concentration camps at Grini in Norway and at Sachsenhausen in Germany. After the war, it fell upon Gerhardsen to form the interim government. During and after he held office he was a greatly respected figure in the eyes of the people, even amongst those not sharing his social democratic views. Often referred to as "Landsfaderen" (Father of the Nation), he is generally considered as one of the architects of the rebuilding of Norway. 1903 Birth: Otto Bradfisch, economist, jurist, SS Obersturmbannfuehrer, Leader of Einsatzkommando 8 of Einsatzgruppe B of the Security Police (Sicherheitspolizei) and the SD, and Commander of the Security Police in Litzmannstadt and Potsdam. Until 1953, Bradfisch managed to hide his true identity by using the name Karl Evers. He busied himself first in farming and then later in mining. When he became an insurance agent in Kaiserslautern, eventually for Hamburg-Mannheimer as a regional director, he once again began using his true name. On 21 April 1958, Bradfisch was temporarily seized and sentenced by the Munich State Court I on 21 July 1961 to 10 years in labor prison (Zuchthaus) for the crime, committed with Bradfisch as part of a group, of abetting collaborative murder in 15,000 cases. In 1963, he was sentenced to 13 years in prison.
1915 WW1: The first Zeppelin raids on Britain take place.
1915 WW1: Count von Bernstorff offers his condolences for the tragic loss of life upon the sinking of the Lusitania, but this only serves to rub salt into the wounds.... The government of the United States and most Americans regarded the war as an Old World squabble best avoided. The German ambassador, Count Johann von Bernstorff, protested the fact that the British, French, and Russians were buying armaments in America, but he received no satisfaction from official Washington. The United States was neutral, and willing to sell to anyone who could pay. President Woodrow Wilson sympathized with the British, despite his advice to Americans to remain neutral "in fact as well as in name during these days that are to try men's souls." Politicians and editorialists lamented the war in Europe and complained of the British blockade, but increasing exports to the Allies (swiftly turning America from a debtor to a creditor nation) gradually and surely yoked the nation's economy to the Allied cause ...1916 WW1: Germany announces abandonment of its extended submarine campaign. During this period Great Britain, seeking to maintain a blockade, illegally seizes American vessels with such frequency, that Wilson threatens to provide convoys for all American merchant ships to guarantee their neutrality rights. 1917 WW1: Allied merchant ships get destroyer escorts to fend off German attacks in the Atlantic, as the Allied convoy system is officially adopted.
1917 WW1: Alexander Guchkov on Military and Civil Unrest in Russia: Unfortunately the first feeling of radiant joy evoked by the revolution has given place to one of pain and anxiety. The Provisional Government explained the cause of this in its recent declaration, in which it was pointed out that the destruction of the old forms of public life, to which an end had been put by the revolution, had been effected more rapidly than had the creation of new forms to replace them. It is especially regrettable that the destruction has touched the political and social organization of the country before any life centre has had time to establish itself and to carry out the great creative work of regeneration. How will the State emerge
from this crisis ...
... It is not enough to say that the German economic distress is a phenomenon resulting from a world crisis, from a general economic distress, since, of course, exactly in the same way every other people could plead the same excuse, could adduce the same reason. It is clear that even so this distress cannot have its roots all over the world, those roots must always be found within the life of peoples. And though only one thing is probably true - that these roots are perhaps the same in the case of many peoples - yet one cannot hope to master this distress by the mere statement that the presence of a certain distress is a feature of the age; rather it is clearly a necessity to disclose these roots in the internal life of a single people and to cure the distress there where one can really effect a cure ...1936 The League of Nations votes to leave its sanctions against Italy in place.
1940 WW2: The first German bombs of the war fall on England at Chilham and Petham, in Kent.
1940 WW2: Winston Churchill is appointed Prime Minister of the United Kingdom.
1940 WW2 From Hans Frank's diary: General Field Marshal Goering some time ago pointed out, in his long speech, the necessity to deport into the Reich a million workers. The supply so far was 160,000. However, great difficulties had to be overcome here. Therefore it would be advisable to cooperate with the district and town chiefs in the execution of the compulsion, so that one could be sure from the start that this action would be reasonably expedient. The arrest of young Poles when leaving church service or the cinema would bring about an ever increasing nervousness of the Poles. Generally speaking, he had no objections at all to the rubbish, capable of work yet often loitering about, being snatched from the streets. The best method for this, however, would be the organization of a raid; and it would be absolutely justifiable to stop a Pole in the street and to question him as to what he was doing, where he was working ...Then the Governor General deals with the problem of the compulsory labor service of the Poles. Upon the pressure from the Reich it has now been decreed that compulsion may be exercised in view of the fact that sufficient manpower was not voluntarily available for service inside the German Reich. This compulsion means the possibility of arrest of male and female Poles. Because of these measures a certain disquietude had developed which, according to individual reports, was spreading very much and might produce difficulties everywhere.
... Why Rudolf Hess took the sky road to Scotland has never been revealed officially, principally because two leaders of Allied strategy, Winston Churchill and Franklin Delano Roosevelt, believed at the time that no useful purpose could be served by the telling. Hess was consigned to the limbo of hush-hush and all attempts to probe the craziest episode of the war were resolutely suppressed.messenger of peace ...Today, two years after, many Englishmen and a few Americans know exactly why Hess came to England, and most of those in possession of the true story feel that it should now be told. For one thing, it would place before critics of Anglo-American policy towards Soviet Russia the vital and silencing fact that at a difficult moment, when he might have withdrawn his country from the war at Russia's expense, Churchill pledged Britain to continue fighting as a full ally of the newest victim of Nazi duplicity. There would have been some semblance of poetic justice to such a withdrawal-was it not Stalin who set the war in motion by signing a friendship pact with Hitler in 1939? But the British Prime Minister never even considered such action.
A few details are still unclear-only British Intelligence and several top-flight officials, know them; a few facts must still be kept dark for reasons of policy. But the essential story can be safely, and usefully, told. It makes one of the most fascinating tales of superintrigue in the annals of international relations. It adds up to a supreme British coup that must have shattered the pride of the Nazis in their diplomacy and their Secret Service. In that domain, it is fair to say, the Hess incident is a defeat equivalent to Stalingrad in the military domain. Rudolf Hess did not "escape" from Germany. He came as a winged
1942 WW2: Thai Phayap Army invades the Shan States during the Burma Campaign.
1945 Death: Richard Glucks, a Generalleutnant of the Waffen-SS and head of Amt D: Konzentrationslagerwesen of the WVHA the highest-ranking "Inspector of Concentration Camps" in Nazi Germany. Close to Himmler, he was directly responsible for the forced labour of the camp inmates, and was also the supervisor for the medical practices in the camps, ranging from human experimentation to the implementation of the Endloesung, in particular the mass murder of the inmates by gassing with Zyklon-B. When the Nazi regime fell and Germany capitulated, Glucks committed suicide by swallowing a potassium cyanide capsule.
1945 WW2 Churchill to Field-Marshal Alexander (Italy): I have s
een the photograph. The man who murdered Mussolini made a confession, published in the Daily Express, gloating over the treacherous and cowardly method of his action. In particular he said he shot Mussolini's mistress. Was she on the list of war criminals? Had he had any authority from anybody to shoot this woman? It seems to me the cleansing hand of British military power should make inquiries on these points.
1981 In West Germany, the Social Democrats lose elections in West Berlin for the first time since WW2
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