France released the last German Prisoner of War that it had been holding from the Great War.
I wish I had more details on this, such as who he was, and what became of him.
France also founded the Colony of Niger on this day. France controlled the territory used to form the colony long before this, but had not organized it into a political entity until this date.
Niger would remain loyal to Vichy until its collapse during the Second World War.
There is, I'd note, no proof that Donald J. Trump is a Russian agent.
Nonetheless, two days after the Russians (we suspect) blew a hole in their own gas pipeline to Germany for no rational reason, our former President, who is now in trouble for all the classified information he packed home to his golf resort dwellings, come out with this steaming pile of pooh.
What the crap?
And what hubris.
"I will head up group???"
You have to be joking.
What idiot would want the same man who betrayed Afghanistan into Taliban hands and made twenty years of American, and Allied, effort there meaningless to head up a delegation to try to sort out the war between Ukraine and Russia, a war we might note which Trump buddy Putin is losing badly.1
What would his solution be? Russia takes half of Ukraine, 3/4s of Poland, and a slice of Lithuania to go?
Only a diehard Trump loyalist seriously would believe that Russia would not have raped Ukraine if Trump were President, although you can surely believe that the United States would have done nothing whatsoever to stop it. Nothing. The war would be over, alright, with Ukraine in Russian hands and a followup guerilla war in Ukraine going on right now. Biden's leadership on this topic at least has been monumental.
And why does this come out now?
That's the odd thing.
As noted, there's no evidence that Trump is a Russian agent.
There's reason to suspect he's a Russian asset, probably unknowingly.
But it's sure easy to have suspicions, if, for no other reasons, his own actions, which is in fact probably the only reason, which is why it probably also isn't true.
Anyway you look at it, this offer is beyond absurd.
Footnotes:
1. After posting this, I actually saw a recycled Twitter, or maybe Truth (sic) Social tweet in which somebody cheered "this is how a real President acts".
Not a really good President.
Also, according to the Washington Post, Tucker Carson suggested, which is different from actually stated, that the US may have sabotaged the pipeline. I'm not going to link into the original Carson broadcast as I can't stand him, but if Carson suggested that, I find it difficult in the extreme to believe that he believes that's possible. At this point, anyone still listening to him, really ought to stop.
St. Paul's letter to the Corinthians is a tough read for a lot of people. So much so that a lot of people who regard themselves as Christians skip it, and quite a few more will excuse themselves from its provisions. Maybe almost all Christians do. Not all to the same extent of course, but to varying degrees, a lot sure do.
It's also a letter that's somewhat truncated in the translation from the original Greek in part because at least one of the terms used for an item of conduct is translatable, but it's unique to Paul. Translations tend to condense the list of sexual sins he lists and group them into smaller categories, which is also probably because, at least in the case of English, that's how things tend to work. Greek might have several words that are very specific, where we have one which isn't.
Which takes me to Luke.
The Gospel reading for last Sunday was as follows, from Luke.
Great crowds were traveling with Jesus,
and he turned and addressed them,
“If anyone comes to me without hating his father and mother,
wife and children, brothers and sisters,
and even his own life,
he cannot be my disciple.
Whoever does not carry his own cross and come after me
cannot be my disciple.
Which of you wishing to construct a tower
does not first sit down and calculate the cost
to see if there is enough for its completion?
Otherwise, after laying the foundation
and finding himself unable to finish the work
the onlookers should laugh at him and say,
‘This one began to build but did not have the resources to finish.’
Or what king marching into battle would not first sit down
and decide whether with ten thousand troops
he can successfully oppose another king
advancing upon him with twenty thousand troops?
But if not, while he is still far away,
he will send a delegation to ask for peace terms.
In the same way,
anyone of you who does not renounce all his possessions
cannot be my disciple.”
Luke, Chapter 14.
Well, that's a little distressing, too. It certainly doesn't fit into the American "health and wealth" Gospel. Luke talks of following Christ right up to, and over, the point of death.
And note this, Luke states that at this point Christ was already indicating his own fate that was coming up: "Whoever does not carry his own cross and come after me cannot be my disciple."
A lot of people are pretty comfortable with other people carrying crosses, but not so much their own. Indeed, we tend to excuse our crosses away. Which takes us back to Paul, who was definitely in the no excuses category.
Which takes us to the German "Synodal Way".
A lot of Apostolic Christians, Catholic in particular of course, have been watching in absolute horror as the German Catholic Church went on its Synodal Way which seemed, particularly in regard to long held Apostolic Christian beliefs, set to toss out 2,000 years of defined teaching as, basically, too hard, or maybe just too hard for modern people. Essentially it seemed as if the German Bishops were going to opine that maybe some things that have always been regarded as crosses ought not to, making it a lot easier to be a Christian, which is interestingly something that Christ certainly didn't promise to be easy.
I quit worrying about what the German Bishops were doing a while back, although I'm not sure why. The Church in Germany is in bad shape but very wealthy, which is a really bad combination. Its wealth gives it the chance to be destructive and well as beneficial, and the fact that it's in bad shape means that it can either engage in retrospection and seek to address it, or it can try to take the same path a lot of Protestant churches have and just define away things that are pretty clearly set.
Because Pope Francis is regarding as a "progressive" or "liberal" in some quarters, although I think he's misunderstood in that regard, many have been wringing their hands that he was secretly hoping for the Synodal Way to overturn Christian morality, and then he'd follow and adopt their path. There's no reason whatsoever to believe he'd do that, but that's been a common assumption.
What may have been missed is that really savvy observers of the German Church have noticed that it tends to march right up to the brink of something, and then something will officially prevent it from taking the position it was going to, giving it an excuse that, well, it can't do anything about it. I didn't know that, but I wasn't worrying about what they were doing any longer. I think the reason why was that at some point, as a Catholic, it seemed to me that they wouldn't leap, no matter how much they might wish to.
And they didn't.
It required 75% of the Bishops to vote in favor of a text that wished to alter certain items of sexual morality in the Church. 61% voted for it. Not enough. It won't be adopted.
There are piles of yelling going on about this now, but the vote was taken and over. Things will continue to occur, but now the German Church needs to return to the fold, and it will do so. It has a lot of work to do.
Part of what should be done, I'd note, is that it ought to ask the German government to end the Church tax which funds it. It's not fair in the first place. No religion, anywhere, should be funded by the government. The supplying of money in that fashion always creates an unrealistic concept within any institution. American institutions of higher learning provide a good example. Cut off from German federal funds, they'll have to find their own way to be funded, and that will have to be directly tied to the spiritual needs of their flocks. The same is true, I'd note, for the German Lutheran Church.
That won't be easy, but it's already been shows that the path they were taking wasn't working, and but for 39% of the German Bishops, they were set to go even further down that path. It seems, at the end of the day, people really know that they need to carry their cross and don't want to be told they don't need to do it.
Kleo is a new, just released, German Netflix series. I literally stumbled on it, as I haven't watched Netflix for a while, but I was temporarily idled due to medical fun and games and there was literally nothing worth watching on regular television. I started watching it as it the summation of it on Netflix suggested it'd be the sort of movie I might like. I like spy films and mysteries, and I'm not wholly adverse to shoot 'em ups, even when, or perhaps particularly when, they're superficial.
Well, it exceeded my expectation.
Set in the 1980s, the eight part series is frankly very difficult to describe. It follows the story of East German female Stasi (East German state police) assassin Kleo Straub as she goes from being an "unofficial agent" of the Stasi whose job is killing targets they designate, to being set up and imprisoned, to being released in 1989 as East Germany begins to collapse, at which time she's dedicated to finding those who wrongly accused her and killing them.
And that's all just in the first episode.
Added to that, we have a failed West German policeman who was present in The Big Eden, a nightclub, the night that Kleo performs her last killing for the DDR, who can never get quite over it and who, upon Kleo's release, realizes that she's the woman he identified as the killer the night of the murder.
All of that doesn't do it justice, however.
The film features far more twists and turns than most spy movies, and makes the tricky loyalties in the John Wick films look like child's play. Kleo, the assassin herself, played by Jella Haase, is impossible not to like, even though she's clearly partially unhinged and trying to get through life with a badly damaged soul. Sven Petzold, the detective, is dogged in his pursuit, but he's also hapless and somewhat incompetent in his job. Indeed, as an example, it's obvious about halfway through the film that Sven at first deeply likes Kleo and then is falling in love with her even though she's so messed up that he has to at one point make her promise to quit killing people, which she does simply because he requests it, not because she has any real concept of right and wrong beyond being a dedicated Communist.
None of this, however, comes close to actually describing the plot.
In terms of its history, which is why we review certain films here, this film does a good job of capturing the atmosphere of the times in Germany and Europe. The East Germans, whom in this film are mostly those associated with the Communist government, can hardly gasp what is happening to them as their government collapses. As many of them are its agents, they're dedicated to an institution that's collapsing for the most part, while some of them are rapidly moving on into capitalism. The West Germans are pretty willing to take advantage of the situation. More than that, however, West Germany is shown to have become a multicultural post Volk society, whereas East Germany has not, something even demonstrated by the actors chosen in the film. All of the East German characters are figures that we'd recognize from classic films involving the Germans of World War Two, even though that is not what they are portraying. They're all very German (although some of the actors actually are not). The West Germans, however, appear not only more modern and 1980s "cool", but many of them are clearly not ethnically German, that most obviously being the case for West German intelligence agent Min Sun, who is played by Chinese-born, but German raised, Yun Huang.
Backgrounds are correct for the period, including the funky German techno music that plays a role in the series. Clothing is as well, with that also providing a difference between the East and the West. Firearm wise the maker was careful to equip the East Germans with Soviet type handguns, whereas the West Germans carry the iconic German PPK.
The film includes reference to actual characters from the period, and not just in the greater sense of being background for the times. The head of the East German police is a character in the film and not fictionalized as to name, for instance. Margot Honecker, Erich Honecker's third wife, shows up as a character. These insertions are done so well, that offhand references to fictional events become difficult to distinguish from ones that didn't happen, as in references to the "woman who attempted to kill Reagan" and the details of that event, which never occurred.
This being a German movie, it should be noted that there is seemingly an obligation that Haase be seen topless at some point. In this case, the nudity is basically limited to a single scene, but it's quite graphic. There must be a clause in the contracts for German actresses that they have to appear nude at some point in a film.
Anyhow, It's very well done and with watching.
As a note, this is a German language movie, but it has well done English subtitles. An option to listen to it with British English dubbing is available, but I don't care for that much personally. The subtitles are very close translations of the German, with departures due to German idioms that don't granslate perfectly.
Country Gentleman, for its Saturday issue, ran the second part of a story that it started the week prior.
It's interesting to note, FWIW, that in depictions of rural children from this era, such as this one, they're commonly depicted sans shoes. A lot of these illustrations, while romanticized, are fairly accurate, which would suggest that farm children, at least in some parts of the country, did typically omit footwear in the summer. That certainly doesn't ever seem to have been the case here, however.
The Saturday Evening Post came out with a portrait by Charles A. MacClellan of an attractive, but very serious looking, woman which is apparently entitled "Back To School"
Judge went to press with certainty that at least beer was going to be exempted from Prohibition.
Judge was correct, of course. Not only beer, but alcohol in general, would come back starting a decade later, although not all at once with a sudden repeal of Prohibition at the national level, as so often imagined.
Interestingly, this has a modern parallel in that what had been constitutionalized, a ban on alcohol, was reversed even though not everyone was in favor of that reversal, leaving the states to sort it out, which they did, but not instantly. The Dobbs decision effectively does that with another issue.
Whether allowed or not, today, even eventually, it's not now for me, as this is colonoscopy day.
I've been dreading it and really pondering changing course. It's not so much the procedure itself, it's the medications they require the day and early morning of which cause . . well. . . diarrhea. I hate being sick, and I'm not sure if it's worth it.
Having said that, according to something I read, 1 in 23 men get colorectal cancer, which sounds like a lot. But that's 4.35%, which doesn't. In an abstract fashion, I feel that everyone ought to get this simple diagnostic tool, but I'm hypocritical enough to be reconsidering it.
Again, it's the diarrhea medication that I'm dreading at the time I type this out. I'd rather skip eating several days prior, which seems like it ought to do the same thing.
The United Mine Workers and the Policy Committee of the Anthracite Coal Operators came to an agreement for a year, which brought to an end the dangerous strike that had been going on for some time.
Friedrich Ebert, President of the German republic, declared the Deutschlandlied to be the national anthem, but only the third stanza of the song. It remains the German national anthem today, having regained that position in the Budesrepublik in 1952, again starting with the third stanza. The militant first stanza was used during the Third Reich.
It was on this day in 1942 that Auschwitz first commenced the industrial scale murder of its inmates, principally, although completely exclusively, consisting of Jews from all over Europe.
Everything about this is mind-boggling, and repeated efforts to explain how this occurred continue to be inadequate. I had originally intended to post a lengthy post on this, but the day got away from me and I didn't have the chance.
While the intended post would have been much lengthier, I will note that up into the initial decade and a half of the 20th Century, nobody would have imagined a horror on this scale, which is not to say that antisemitism did not exist in Europe. Indeed, it very much did, although not equally in every country by any means. Perhaps ironically, Germany compared favorably in this regard compared to, for example, France, where antisemitism had been much more open. Indeed, German Jews were highly assimilated and acculturated in many instances in Germany prior to the First World War.
Nonetheless, antisemitism remained and had deep roots. Even before the loss of the Great War, warning signs existed of an underlying virulent strain of antisemitism developing. This took root in odd places, including in the popular eugenics movement that existed in the early 20th Century, which melded with the PanGermanism movement which should to unite "Germans" in a single nation. These combined in no small part as frankly defining what a German was, was not easy, and in fact the Nazis were never able to come up with a cogent definition in spite of dedicating significant efforts to do so. To some degree, indeed, the definition of "German" didn't really come about until the Germans had lost the war. At any rate, defining the "other", i.e., who was excluded, combined with odd wacky genetic theories of the time, and mixed in antisemitism with it. The stress of the economic collapse of Germany during the Great Depression, cultural misconceptions about Jews in certain industries, the presence of Jewish refugees escaping the collapse of the Russian Empire and the Russian Civil war, and the confusion and propogandization of Communism with the Jews all added fuel to the fire and combined with age-old fears and prejudices.
Nonetheless, in spite of this and the rise of the Nazis, none of this could have occurred if a lot of Germans didn't choose to simply go alone or sit on their hands.
Added to this, the complicity of Eastern European, and indeed Western European, populations can't be ignored. In spite of the intense suffering that they suffered at the hands of the Germans, Poles and residents of the Baltic States were complicit in the murder of the Jews. Romanians were as well. Ultimately, authorities in occupied France assisted in the deportation of Jewish residents of France, not all of whom who had French citizenship but many of whom did.
In remarkable contrast, however, Scandinavian countries were hostile to German efforts, with Denmark being notably so in spite of being occupied, but with Norway also being. Norwegians were particularly uncooperative with their occupiers in everything. Finland, with some slight exception, likewise did not cooperate, and even Italy, in spite of having passed antisemitic laws under the fascists, did not cooperate with efforts to murder Italian Jews until September 1943.
As noted, the murder of so many people on an industrial scale, by a modern nation, is hard to grasp and remains inexplicable. It couldn't have happened but for the fact that so many people turned a blind eye and chose to think of themselves, first.
Across the globe, on this day in 1942 Douglas MacArthur stated:
The President of the United States ordered me to break through the Japanese lines and proceed from Corregidor to Australia for the purpose, as I understand it, of organizing the American offensive against Japan, a primary object of which is the relief of the Philippines. I came through and I shall return,
The USS Langley was recommissioned as the first U.S. Navy aircraft carrier on this day in 1922.
_underway_in_June_1927_(cropped).jpg)
She had originally been a collier.
The small carrier was converted, for a second time, to a seaplane tender in 1937. Heavily damaged in action off of Java, she was scuttled on February 27, 1942.
President Harding ordered with the withdrawal of the remaining 4,000 troops from Germany by July.
The great cartoon Out Our Way by Canadian-born J. R. Williams began its run of 55 years. The cartoon focused on snippets of small town, Army and rural life, featuring average rural characters, cowboys and cavalrymen. It had many reoccurring characters. Williams knew these characters well, having worked as a cowboy himself, and having done a six-year hitch as a cavalryman in the U.S. Army.
Out Our Way is, in my view, not only a really funny cartoon, it's frankly one of the few cartoons from this period that actually remains funny to contemporary readers.
I really like the Jimmy Akin's Mysterious World podcast. I want to note that upfront, as I think these next two episodes, while really entertaining and interesting. . . well, they sort of lay an egg.
At least sort of.
Not completely.
Countdown to Pearl Harbor? (FDR, Advance Knowledge)
Pearl Harbor Conspiracy? (FDR, Advance Knowledge, Soviet Spy)
Now, before a person assumes too much based on the title, Akin isn't suggesting, as some have, even occasionally some serious historians, that Roosevelt knew about Japanese designs on Pearl Harbor and let the attack happen. Indeed, the conclusion to the second one pretty much definitively smashes that concept in a very general way.
Rather, what this two part episode suggests, but never flatly states, is that Treasury employee Harry Dexter White used his position to bring about an American diplomatic stance that made the war with Japan inevitable, as that's what the Soviets wanted.
The evidence, however, just doesn't support that.
Well, at least not completely.
This isn't a new theory, by the way. It's been around since at least the 1990s.
White was a Soviet agent. That's perfectly clear. There are those who will dispute that even now, but we can set that aside. He might not have been a Communist, but he was a Soviet mole without a doubt.
Harry Dexter White was a brilliant economist who came to that profession somewhat late, entering university at age 30, by which time he had already served as an Army officer in World War One. He ultimately obtained a PhD in economics at age 38, and then taught at Harvard. Later, he came into the Treasury Department at a time at which, for PhD's in economics, you either taught or worked for the government. He was a very valued employee there.
The administration of Franklin Roosevelt was the most left leaning administration that the United States has ever seen, and the administration was full, at the office level, of many hard left thinkers. While the Wilson Administration had suppressed the then growing radical Socialists movements after World War One, FDR's administration was not interested in this and his coming into power in 1932 proved to be a respite for those with really radical views. By and large, the government didn't care that much whether lower functionaries were hard line leftists.
And the country had quite a few of them. Socialism, and other radical left wing philosophies, had been growing in the US since the mid 19th Century and by the 1910s it was coming into its own. It was very much in vogue in some circles in the 1920s, in spite of efforts of the government to suppress it, and it drew encouragement from the example of Soviet Russia, which was in actuality very poorly understood. Its base was in the working class, of course, but it was also heavily represented by Eastern European and Southern European immigrants, and oddly enough young academics.
White wasn't young, but he'd come to academia late. And, additionally, he was a first generation American of Jewish Lithuanian extraction, so he had a foot in both the academic community and the immigrant one. His Eastern European parents had only been in the US for twelve years at the time of his birth, and they were a working class family. As noted, he was undoubtedly a brilliant man.
While even to this day he has his defenders, its clear that he was recruited as a Soviet mole by Jacob Golos, who was successful in recruiting numerous other Americans to the same role. White became associated in that role with Whitaker Chambers, whom he reported to. And whatever it was he personally believed, it is clear that he was highly sympathetic to the USSR, so sympathetic that on rare occasions he was willing to voice that sympathy, as when he once engaged in a restaurant argument with a colleague to whom he maintained that Soviets had successfully worked out a system that would replace capitalism and Christianity. And he was willing to carrying his admiration of the USSR as far as espionage and theft. If he wasn't a Communist, he obviously had deep sympathies for the Communists.
When Chambers came out of the cold, he reported White among those who were Soviet agents, which he did as early as 1938. Chambers didn't think that White was a Communist and further thought that while he was a Soviet agent, he thought White thought he was manipulating the Soviets to his ends, rather than the other way around, a rather naive thing to believe, if he believed it, but one which may be very well correct.
Chambers' 1938 accusations were wholly dismissed by the Government. He'd repeat them in March 1945 at which time the State Department was reaching out to Chambers. Chambers at that point indicated that White had brought Communists into the government, but that White himself was timid.
In November 1945 the news on White was corroborated by defecting American Communist courier Elizabeth Benchley. The Truman Administration basically ignored this, however, and even at this late date White's career in the government continued on, although he was less influential than before, and his boss Morgenthau was replaced by Truman. Real problems for White didn't develop until 1948, however, when he was called before the House Committee on Un-American Affairs. Following his testimony, he had a heart attack. Shortly after going to a farm he had bought to recuperate, he had a second one and died due to an overdose of a drug he administered to treat it. His death came a mere two days after he testified and it might have been suicide. He was one of two figures caught up by the HCUA at the time who died from mysterious deaths during the investigations.His untimely death, and the fact that the Army closely guarded the Venona secretes, not really trusting anyone, meant that here was room for years to portray him as an innocent victim of a false accusation, rather than what he was, an exposed spy for the Soviet Union.
Okay, why does all of this matter?
Well, White's role as a Communist agent. . . again he might not have been a Communist himself, certainly are critical in regard to his wartime role in the Treasury Department. More than that, however, he was the principal architect of the Bretton Woods Agreement which governed the world's post-war economy up until the early 1970s. He was also the principal architect of the Morgenthau Plan, which saw the future of Germany as split into regions, deindustrialized, and made agrarian.
It can't be said that White's recommendations on the Morgenthau Plan and the Bretton Woods agreement were Communistic, so if he was himself heavily sympathetic to the Communists, it didn't fully show in that work, at least not in an openly obvious way. It's known that he was passing information to the Soviets, but based on his actual work, he didn't seem to be really openly aiding them much in his work product during the war.
Well, what about accusations that he did before the war?
I'm not really seeing it there in an effective way either, although he may have tried a bit.
This is based on the claim that the Soviets developed an Operation Snow which was to attempt to get the United States and Japan into a war against each other. The thought is that this would alleviate the Soviet fear of fighting a two front war, should Japan come in against the USSR. And, in spite of those who nay say that, the Japanese Army in fact wanted to do that, even though the wisdom of taking on the USSR at the same time that the Japanese were unable to defeat China was obviously pretty questionable.
Anyhow, Stalin did worry about this, to be sure. And the NKVD could have hatched a plot to try to get figures in the American government to aid them in some fashion here, but the evidence is pretty sketchy, even if such journals as Time and The Wall Street Journal have published articles acknowledging the effort and, in the case of Time, even crediting the Japanese attack on Pearl Habor to White.
Claims about Operation Snow come from one source, a figure formerly in the KGB, who claimed to be part of it. It's possible that he had the knowledge on it, but based on what we otherwise have come to learn about White's role as a mole, this claim is on a narrow strand. What that source claimed is that in 1941, prior to the commencement of Operation Barbarossa, the Soviets were working to reestablish their spy contacts with American agents. Those contacts had been disrupted by Stalin murdering everyone. Anyhow, the claim is that a new contact reached out to White and vaguely suggested that it would be in the best interest of the US and the USSR if Japan was aggressively isolated. White, this claim asserts, stated that his own thinking aligned with this. You have to do a lot of reading between the lines here from there.
White did issue a memo on his views on what to do regarding Japan prior to Operation Barbarossa. It came, however, in the context of the Roosevelt Administration becoming increasingly aggressive with Japan in any event. That memo was, moreover, oddly anti-British, a peculiar position to take in regard to a country that was, at the time the supposed meeting occurred, the only major power fighting the Germans. A person could rationalize that a Japanese attack on the US would mean that the Soviets would only have to fight the Germans, but what would the point of alienating the British be? While a person might claim that this would refocus American eyes from the Atlantic to the Pacific, there was never going to be a war in which the Soviets weren't going to be glad to have the British fighting the same enemy.
Indeed, it would be frankly more likely that, if the Soviets had a plot, the point was to distract the Japanese, rather than to actually provoke them into a war.
At any rate, White's first note was rejected and therefore not influential. A second one some months later, however, is more problematic.
Some weeks prior to Pearl Harbor the Japanese signaled that they'd be willing to evacuate China and northern Indochina under an agreement with the United States, if they were allowed to retain control of Manchuria. Roosevelt in fact leaned away from this, and that did result in a White memo to Morgenthau which in turn issued to Roosevelt under Morgenthau's signature. That resulted in an ultimatum to Japan to withdraw from China.
Having said that, there's also evidence that the Japanese offer wasn't understood in the context of what was being offered in regard to northern Indochina. Moreover, by that time the US had already taken a really hard line on Japan in China. A compromise regarding Manchuria in fact would have been problematic, even if Roosevelt was considering it.
And of course White was one man, with apparently mixed motives. His suggestion may have been influential, but he wasn't the one conveying it. Did he have such influence over Morgenthau by that point that Morgenthau would do what he wanted? Moreover, did they both have influence over Cordell Hull? That's pretty problematic.
And that one man aspect of it, at the end of the day, is the significant thing. White was a lieutenant of Morgenthau's, and Morgenthau wasn't a Communist and didn't know that White was. And neither of them set foreign policy, Cordell Hull had a bigger role in that, and the President the ultimate role.
The U.S. military plans for war with Germany, Rainbow 5, were leaked and appeared in two major newspapers. The spectacular leak, the source of which has never been determined, showed an intent to build a 10,000,000 man Army and deploy 5,000,000 men to Europe to defeat the Germans by 1943. The resulting furor was enormous.
The Germans ridiculed the plans as impossible, but the German General Staff took it seriously and argued for a hiatus of offensive operations in the East in order to attempt to take the United Kingdom out of the war before Britain could be used as a staging area for American troops. Hitler rejected the idea. Rainbow 5 did in fact become the basic plan adopted by the United States during the war.
On this day in 1921, Daimler-Motoren-Gesellschaft (DMG) applies for a trademark for its "star in a ring" logo. In Bavaria, the funeral of King Ludwig III was held without incident, in spite of fears that it might result in a pro monarchy demonstration. It didn't occur in part as Prince Rupprecht, who did hold aspirations of regaining the thrown would nonetheless not allow his father's funeral to be used for that purpose.
Hideki Tojo became the Japanese Prime Minister on this day in 1941.
The appointment signaled Japan's slide towards war, and was understood in that fashion at the time.
Tojo was a career army officer of samurai ancestry. He harbored strong resentment against the United States for the terms of the treaty negotiated in the US by President Theodore Roosevelt that ended the Russo Japanese War. While TR acted as an honest broker in those negotiations, and one the Nobel Prize for his efforts, many in Japan felt that the treaty had unfairly been favorable to Imperial Russia.
German Richard Sorge, a super sleuth for the Soviet Union, was arrested in Tokyo on this day.
Sorge had provided an incredible amount of detailed information regarding Japan to the Soviet Union, although there is some question of whether or not the Soviets made use of all of the information that he supplied. Stationed in Japan starting in 1933, he had penetrated the German embassy in Japan and provided highly detailed information to the Soviets, including the near starting date for Operation Barbarossa, information that Stalin definitely ignored. He later informed the Soviets that Japan would not attack the Soviet Union, which the USSR does seem to have accepted as accurate, allowing it to free up forces that would have had to remain in the East.
Sorge was a German national, but had been born in Azerbaijan where his father was a mining engineer. He became a communist while convalescing from wounds received as a soldier in World War One and after a time was recruited as a Soviet secret agent. His cover was that he was a reporter. In that capacity he'd supplied information from various locations all over the globe where he'd been posted, with his reports from Japan starting in 1940.
Sorge sent his messages to Moscow by short wave radio, using one time pads. While the messages couldn't be decrypted, their broadcasting couldn't be hidden, which is what lead to Sorge's arrest. As he was German and a member of the Nazi Party, the Japanese at first believed that he was a member of the Abwehr, but under torture he confessed to working for the Soviets. The Soviets of course denied this.
Sorge's second wife, who was in the Soviet Union, was arrested and died in the Gulags in 1943. Sorge's mistress Hanako Ishii survived the war in spite of her connection with him.
It should be noted that Sorge didn't work alone, and that he obtained information by various means, including through Japanese Communist spy Hotsumi Ozaki. He's an odd historical figure as he was a remarkably long-serving Soviet spy at a time when the Soviets recalled and executed many such figures. Like a lot of Soviet spies, he was loyal to the Soviet Union but not to his spouse. He was detested in West Germany following the war, but his reputation has been rehabilitated, perhaps undeservedly, as his service to the USSR can't really be regarded as an anti Nazi act so much as a dedicated Communist one.
Spies, it should be noted, were undoubtedly their own odd class. The Abwehr, which the Japanese had suspected Sorge of working for, did in fact have a spy on Japanese held territory, that being Ivar Lissner, who was, oddly enough, an ethnic German Jew. In fact, his ethnicity had been a factor in his working with the Abwehr as he had bargained with it to secure the release of his father from a concentration camp and his family members from Nazi harm. His spy network extended into Siberia, but he too was arrested by the Japanese, who then held him for the remainder of the war as, mistakenly, a Soviet spy. He survived the war, unlike Sorge who was executed in 1944.
On this date in 1921, the US Senate ratified the treaty ending the state of war between the United States and Germany.
On the same day, the German cabinet resigned due to developing economic conditions in Germany.
On this day in 1941 the Germans achieved a first that we'd no doubt normally suspect some other nation had.
The Luftwaffe sank the Soviet battleship Murat with dive bombers. Ju87s, i.e., Stukas, to be more precise.
The Murat was a dreadnought that had entered Imperial Russian service in 1915 as the Petropavlovsk. After sinking, she was partially raised and used as gun battery in the siege of Leningrad.
For what it is worth, the Murat tends to be credited as a victory to Hans-Ulrich Rudel, Germany's most decorated World War Two serviceman. Rudel, interesting, was a ground attack pilot during the war, not a fighter pilot or something that would be generally regarded as being more glamorous. His career was spectacular, but he was only one of two German pilots to hit the Murat, which went down after being hit by just two bombs.
Rudel survived the war, ending up an American POW, but in 1946 fled to Argentina. He was a Nazi and may have feared what remaining in post-war Germany meant at the time. He returned to Germany in 1953 where he was involved in neo Nazi politics, so he never reformed or excused his views.
On the same day, the US Navy launched the USS Massachusetts.
