June 20

1899 Birth: Jean Moulin, hero of the French Resistance during WW2.

Moulin refused to cooperate with the German Army when they occupied France in June 1940. He was arrested and tortured by the Gestapo and while in his cell he attempted to commit suicide by cutting his throat with a piece of broken glass. After recovering he was released from prison. In November 1940, the Vichy government ordered all prefects to dismiss left-wing mayors of towns and villages that had been elected to office. When Moulin refused to do this he was himself removed from office. Over the next few months Moulin began to make contact with other French people who wanted to overthrow the Vichy government and to drive the German Army out of France ...

1916 Volkishness: Frau Eliza von Moltke, the widow of General Moltke, begins "speaking in tongues" and soon begins writing hundreds of pages of what she claims are the General's supernatural "prophesies," delivered from beyond the grave. Frau Moltke allegedly names Adolf Hitler as the future leader of Germany, while Hitler is still an unknown messenger on the Western Front. Frau Moltke says it will be General von Ludendorff who will bring Hitler to power and the well-known English writer, Houston Stewart Chamberlain, who will name Hitler as the long-awaited German Messiah. (THP)

1934 Holocaust: The NDW, soon to be renamed the DFG, agrees to the creation of five posts for assistants to process the "scientific material," available in connection with sterilization, for Professor Fischer, Professor Radin (Director of the KWI of Psychiatry in Munich), and Professor von Verschuer (a department head at the KWI of Anthropology under Professor Fischer). (THP)

1935 The Soviet Union recognizes the right of Jews to own private property in Birobidjan.

1936 Church and Reich: The Bavarian Political Police issue orders to take into custody all priests who dare to criticize an order dismissing all nuns teaching in the public schools, which is scheduled to be announced the following day. Vicar General Buchwieser of Munich (in charge of the diocese in the absence of Cardinal Faulhaber) instructs the clergy to read a joint pastoral letter of the Bavarian bishops criticizing this order. That same evening the government gives in and instructs the police to merely record the names of priests who read the pastoral letter. (THP)

1936 Austria bans all political meetings and street demonstrations.

1937 The Czech government institutes compulsory military training for all citizens from six to sixty. Actual military call-up is from seventeen to thirty.

1937 Resistance: Jehovah's Witnesses throughout Germany secretly distribute the "Open Letter," which supplies detailed accounts of Nazi atrocities. (THP)

1939 General Walther von Brauchitsch issues a directive ordering cooperation between the Wehrmacht and the Waffen-SS (SS- Verfuegungstruppen).

1939 Holocaust: Professor Fischer declares in a lecture:

When a people wants, somehow or other, to preserve its own nature, it must reject alien racial elements, and when these have already insinuated themselves, it must suppress them and eliminate them. The Jew is such an alien and, therefore, when he wants to insinuate himself, he must be warded off. This is self-defense. In saying this, I do not characterize every Jew as inferior, as Negroes are, and I do not underestimate the greatest enemy with whom we have to fight. But I reject Jewry with every means in my power, and without reserve, in order to preserve the hereditary endowment of my people. (THP)

1940 WW2: June 20-21 378 Polish prisoners from Pawiak Prison (Warsaw) are executed by the Nazis near Palmiry. Meanwhile, most of the Polish 2nd Division, 14,000 soldiers, cross the Franco-Swiss border after the fall of France.

1940 WW2: The French delegation leaves for Compiegne to begin armistice negotiations with the Germans.

1940 WW2: Admiral Erich Raeder again brings up the invasion of Britain (Operation Sealion). Again Hitler fails to respond.

Hitler wanted Sea Lion to be over by mid-September. His naval chiefs believed that any invasion could not start until mid-September! Raeder supplied a list of reasons why the invasion could not go ahead before mid-September1940  (clearance of shipping lanes of mines, getting invasion barges ready etc) and he won the support of the army. Hitler ordered that as long as Germany controlled the sky, Operation Sea Lion would go start on September 15th 1940. Therefore, the invasion depended entirely on whether Goering's Luftwaffe could defeat the RAF ...

1940 WW2: The German heavy cruiser Gneisenau is damaged by a torpedo from the British submarine Clyde. Note: Gneisenau was a famous World War II 31,100 ton Gneisenau class battlecruiser of the German Kriegsmarine. She was the second to carry the name of the Prussian general August von Gneisenau; the first was the World War I armored cruiser SMS Gneisenau, destroyed at the battle of the Falkland Islands in 1914. She usually sailed into battle accompanied by her sister ship, the equally famous Scharnhorst.

I am under the necessity of bringing to the attention of the Congress the ruthless sinking by a German submarine on May 21 of an American ship, the Robin Moor, in the South Atlantic Ocean (25 deg 40' West, 6 deg 10' North) while the vessel was on the high seas en route to South Africa. According to the formal depositions of survivors the vessel was sunk within thirty minutes from the time of the first warning given by the Commander of the submarine to an officer of the Robin Moor. The submarine did not display its flag, and the Commander did not announce its nationality. The Robin Moor was sunk without provision for the safety of the passengers and crew ...

1942 Holocaust: All Jewish schools in Greater Germany are closed. (THP)

1942 WW2: Tobruk is captured as the Germans breakthrough into Egypt.

1943 Race riots erupt in Detroit. Federal troops will be sent in two days later to quell the violence, which will result in more than 30 deaths.

... blacks and whites clashed in minor skirmishes on Belle Isle. Two young blacks, angered that they had been ejected from Eastwood Park some five days previously, had gone to Belle Isle to try to even the score. Police began to search cars of blacks crossing to Belle Isle but they did not search cars driven by whites. Fighting on the island began around 10 p.m. and police declared it under control by midnight. More than 200 blacks and whites had participated in the free-for-all ...

1943 WW2: 60 RAF bombers launch the first British shuttle raid: after bombing the radar works at Friedrichshafen, they fly on to Algiers to refuel and then return to England.

1944 WW2: The battle of the Philippine Sea ends.

The four Japanese attacks used 373 carrier aircraft, of which 130 returned to the carriers, and several more were destroyed onboard the two carriers destroyed on the first day. After the second day the totals were three carriers and 395 aircraft. Losses on the US side on the first day were only 23, and on the second 100, most due to night landings. The losses to the Japanese were irreplaceable. In the battle of Leyte Gulf a few months later, their carriers were used solely as a decoy due to the lack of aircraft, and aircrews to fly them ...

1944 WW2: In the East, the Red Army captures Viipuri on the Soviet-Finnish border.

1946 Nuremberg War Crimes Trials: The wily Albert Speer, Hitler's minister of armaments, testifies.

Dr Flachsner (Speer's counsel): Herr Speer, the Prosecution charges you with co-responsibility for the entire number of foreign workers who were transported to Germany. Your Co-defendant Sauckel has testified in this connection that first of all he worked for you in this matter, so that his activity was primarily determined by your needs. Will you please comment on this? Speer: Of course, I expected Sauckel to meet above all the demands of war production, but it cannot be maintained that he primarily took care of my demands, for beginning with the spring of 1943 I received only part of the workers I needed. If my maximum had been met, I should have received all of them. For this I need cite but one example. During that same period some 200,000 Ukrainian women were made available for housework, and it is quite certain that I was of the opinion that they could be put to better use in armaments production. It is also clear that the German labor reserve had not been fully utilized. In January 1943 these German reserves were still ample. I was interested in having German workers-including, of course, women-and this nonutilization of German reserves also proves that I cannot be held solely responsible for covering the essential needs, that is, for demanding foreign labor ...Dr Flachsner: Herr Speer, I should like to go back to your testimony of 18 October 1945. In it you stated several times that you knew that the workers from occupied countries were being brought to Germany against their will. The Prosecution alleges that you approved of the use of force and of terror. Will you comment on that? Speer: I had no influence on the method by which workers were recruited. If the workers were being brought to Germany against their will that means, as I see it, that they were obliged by law to work for Germany. Whether such laws were justified or not, that was a matter I did not check at the time. Besides, this was no concern of mine ...

1991 The German parliament narrowly votes in favor of moving its capital from Bonn to Berlin.

1998 Death: Conrad Schumann, East German border guard; the first, and one of the most famous, escapees from East Germany. On 15 August 1961 he found himself, aged 19, guarding the Berlin Wall, then in its third day of construction, at the corner of Ruppinerstrasse and Bernauerstrasse. At that stage, the Wall was no more than a low barbed-wire fence. Seizing his opportunity, Schumann jumped over the barbed wire, and was then driven away at high speed in a West Berlin police car.