Sunday, September 7, 1941. A National Day of Prayer, Excusing Murder, and a Roosevelt Personal Tragedy

Whiel it doesn't show up as an official National Day of Prayer in the UK during World War Two, some sort of National Prayer Day was observed in the United Kingdom on this Sunday in 1941.  As part of it, a parade was  held in London.

There were several National Days of Prayer proclaimed by the government during the war, with this not being the first one.  The tradition is an ancient one and there have been appeals for National Days of Prayer to be proclaimed in recent years.  For that matter, Prime Minister Boris Johnson has made appeals to Christianity which have been much more direct than any made by U.S. Presidents in recent years.

Canadian wartime poster.

While there seems some doubt on the exact date (it may have been a few days earlier), Hitler issued his Directive No. 35 which ordered an advance on Moscow and that its capture be accomplished prior to the onset of winter.

The problem, of course, is that Hitler had already stopped the advance on Moscow several weeks earlier and it was really too late to restart it.

On the same day, the German government chose as its poster of the week a prediction from Hitler that if "International Financial Judaism" started another war, it would result in Judaisms destruction.  The thought was, of course, deluded as Jews weren't responsible for any of Europe's wars in its entire history and did not control its finances.  Indeed, most of the Jews murdered by the Germans during World War Two were of modest means, to say the least.

This issuance of the poster at this point was interesting in part as the Germans had already murdered enormous numbers of Easter European Jews by this point and the numbers were increasing every day.  The massacres were so large that they could hardly be kept a secret.  There has to be some element at work here that would suggest the Nazi government was working on providing an excuse to the German public for the horrific bloodbath that people must have been whispering about, or soon would be.

Sara Roosevelt, the mother of Franklin Roosevelt, passed away.  She was nearly 87.  Franklin was her only child, although he did have a much older half brother, James, who had died in 1927 at age 72.  She was the second wife of her husband, James, who was 26 years her senior and who had passed away in 1900.  His first wife had passed away four years prior to their marriage. As seems to have been common with the Roosevelt's, both of his wives were related to him, with Sara being a sixth cousin of his.  This means, by extension, that Franklin was the son of distant cousins and married a cousin himself.

Franklin Roosevelt wearing mourning arm band a few days after his mother's death.