This Day in WWII History: Jan 13, 1942: Allies promise prosecution of war criminals

On this day, representatives of nine German-occupied countries meet in London to declare that all those found guilty of war crimes would be punished after the war ended. Among the signatories to the declaration were Polish Gen. Wladyslaw Sikorski and French Gen. Charles de Gaulle. The core of the declaration was the promise of "the punishment, through the channels of organized justice, of those guilty of, or responsible for, these crimes, whether they have ordered them, perpetrated them, or participated in them."

Knowledge of German atrocities occurring in Poland and Russia were reaching both the Allied governments and the exiles from the countries in which the butchering of innocents was taking place. News of Jews, political dissidents, and clergy being systematically murdered, tortured, or transported to labor camps as the Nazi ideology advanced along with Hitler's armed forces increased the resolve and solidarity among the Allies to defeat the Axis.

Also on this day: President Franklin D. Roosevelt establishes the U.S. War Production Board, with business executive Donald M. Nelson as its chairman.

This was not the first time Roosevelt called on Nelson. In 1940, the president asked Nelson, then executive vice president of Sears, Roebuck and Co., to head up the National Defense Advisory Commission. As Roosevelt established agency after agency to coordinate the transition of industry from peacetime to wartime production, Nelson skipped among jobs, becoming director of purchases for the Office of Production Management and, in August 1941, director of the Supply Priorities and Allocations Board. The War Production Board, created to establish order out of the chaos of meeting extraordinary wartime demands and needs, replaced the Supply Priorities and Allocations Board.

As chairman, Nelson oversaw the largest war production in history, often clashing with civilian factories over the most efficient means of converting to wartime use and butting heads with the armed forces over priorities. Despite early success, Nelson made a major judgement error in June 1944, on the eve of the Normandy invasion, when he allowed certain plants that had reached the end of their government/military production contracts to reconvert to civilian use. The military knew the war was far from over and feared a sudden shortage of vital supplies. A political battle ensued, and Nelson was eased out of his office and reassigned by the president to be his personal representative to Chiang Kai-shek in China.

Taken from: http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/allies-promise-prosecution-of-war-criminals [13.01.2015]

This Day in WWII History: Jan 11, 2010: Miep Gies, who hid Anne Frank, dies at 100

On this day in 2010, Miep Gies, the last survivor of a small group of people who helped hide a Jewish girl, Anne Frank, and her family from the Nazis during World War II, dies at age 100 in the Netherlands. After the Franks were discovered in 1944 and sent to concentration camps, Gies rescued the notebooks that Anne Frank left behind describing her two years in hiding. These writings were later published as “Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl,” which became one of the most widely read accounts of the Holocaust.

Miep Gies was born into a working-class, Catholic family in Vienna, Austria, on February 15, 1909. At age 11, with food shortages in her native land following World War I, she was sent to the Netherlands to live with a foster family who nicknamed her Miep (her birth name was Hermine Santrouschitz). In 1933, she went to work as a secretary for Otto Frank, who ran a small Amsterdam company that produced a substance used to make jam. By the following year, Frank’s wife and two daughters, Margot and Anne, had left their native Germany to join him in the Dutch capital. 

In May 1940, the Germans, who had entered World War II in September of the previous year, invaded the Netherlands and quickly made life increasingly restrictive and dangerous for the country’s Jewish population. In early July 1942, the Frank family went into hiding in an attic apartment behind Otto Frank's business. They were eventually joined by Otto Frank's business associate and his wife and son, as well as Miep Gies’ dentist, all of whom were Jewish. Gies, along with her husband Jan, a Dutch social worker, and several of Otto Frank's other employees risked their own lives to smuggle food, supplies and news of the outside world into the secret apartment (which came to be known as the Secret Annex). Gies and her husband even spent a night in hiding with the group to learn firsthand what it was like.

On August 4, 1944, after 25 months in hiding, the eight people in the Secret Annex were discovered by the Gestapo, the German secret state police, who had learned about the hiding place from an anonymous tipster who has never been definitively identified. Gies was working in the building at the time of the raid and avoided arrest because the officer was from her native Vienna and felt sympathy for her. She later went to police headquarters and tried, unsuccessfully, to pay a bribe to free the group. 

The occupants of the Secret Annex were sent to concentration camps; only Otto Frank survived. After he was liberated from Auschwitz by Soviet troops in January 1945, he returned to Amsterdam, where Miep Gies gave him a collection of notebooks and several hundred loose papers containing observations the teenage Anne Frank had penned during her time in hiding. Gies recovered the materials from the Secret Annex shortly after the Franks' arrest and hid them in her office desk. She avoided reading the papers during the war out of respect for Anne’s privacy. 

Otto Frank, who lived with the Gies family after the war, compiled his daughter’s writings into a manuscript that was first published in the Netherlands in 1947 under the title "Het Acheterhuis" ("Rear Annex"). Later published in English as "Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl," the book went on to sell tens of millions of copies worldwide. 

In 1987, Gies published a memoir, "Anne Frank Remembered," in which she wrote: "I am not a hero. I stand at the end of the long, long line of good Dutch people who did what I did and more--much more--during those dark and terrible times years ago, but always like yesterday in the heart of those of us who bear witness. Never a day goes by that I do not think of what happened then."

taken from: http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/miep-gies-who-hid-anne-frank-dies-at-100 [10.01.2014]

This Day in WWII History: Jan 10, 1941: Lend-Lease introduced into Congress

On this day, President Franklin D. Roosevelt's Lend-Lease program is brought before the U.S. Congress for consideration.

Roosevelt devised the Lend-Lease program as a means of aiding Great Britain in its war effort against the Germans. The program gave the chief executive the power to "sell, transfer title to, exchange, lease, lend, or otherwise dispose of" any military resources he deemed in the ultimate interest of the defense of the United States. The idea was that if Britain were better able to defend itself, the security of the U.S. would be enhanced. The program also served to bolster British morale, as they would no longer feel alone in their struggle against Hitler.

Congress authorized the program on March 11. By November, after much heated debate, Congress extended the terms of Lend-Lease to the Soviet Union, even though Stalin's USSR had already been the recipient of American military weapons and had been promised $1 billion in financial aid.

By the end of the war, more than $50 billion in funds, weapons, aircraft, and ships were distributed to 44 countries through the program. After the war, the Lend-Lease program morphed into the Marshall Plan, which allocated funds for the revitalization of "friendly" democratic nations.

Taken from: http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/lend-lease-introduced-into-congress [10.01.2015]