Tuesday, October 5, 2021

Sunday October 5, 1941. Game Four of the 1941 World Series, Louis Brandeis passes away, the sitaution in the East grows grimmer.


I managed to miss the first three games here on the blog.

In game 1, the Yankees beat the Dodgers 3 to 2.  In game 2, the Dodgers beat the Yankees 3 to 2.  In game 3, the Yankees beat the Dodgers 2 to 1.

In this game, the Yankees beat the Dodgers 7 to 4 at Ebbets Field.

You could have listened on the radio, of course, but there were also other things to listen to.


Louis Brandeis, former Supreme Court Justice, died at age 84.  He'd retired from the court in 1939.


Brandeis remains a legend from the court, although probably few people could really define what he stood for now.  He was a progressive when that term had been defined by Theodore Roosevelt's politics. He was appointed to the court by Woodrow Wilson.  He was a wealthy man, but was opposed to consumerism and felt it influence corrupting.  He was also an opponent of big finance and big corporations.  He was personally very reserved.

He was the first Jewish Supreme Court Justice, although his parents were members of the heretical Frankism sect. The rest of his family was not, and it does not appear that Brandeis himself was.  He was married to a cousin of his and had two children.

On the same day, the New York Times ran an article that things were worsening for Jews in Eastern Europe, an understatement if ever there was one, but an understandable understatement given that Western news outlets hadn't had free access to Eastern Europe for twenty years at the time, and the Germans weren't about to give it to them.  Herman Hoth, a German general, was appointed commander of the German 17th Army where he would be a strong proponent of the war of annulation against the Jews and the Communists, whom he made no distinction between.  Hoth was tried after the war for war crimes and tried to excuse his actions as ones that that were sales puffery only, which was quite a stretch.  He served 15 years in prison for war crimes and died in 1971.

Weekly German propaganda poster released on this day in 1941.  The text reads, loosely; "Farmers and Soldiers stand hand in hand together, to give to the Volk their day bread, and to the Reich freedom through room.  The poster is a ghastly perversion of Christian ideals in regard to its reference to "daily bread" and bizarrely has the sword not beat into a plowshare, but anchored to a plot.

Of note, if you were in the West reading the news from this period, it'd have been hard not to conclude the Germans were going to win the war.  Now, of course, we realize that they were already in trouble in the Soviet Union, but that wouldn't have been obvious from reading the newspapers.

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