November 6

1730 Death: Hermann von Katte: King Frederick William I of Prussia forces young Frederick (the future Frederick the Great) to watch the decapitation of Hans Hermann von Katte for treason. The teenage crown prince faints. He will suffer severe hallucinations for the next two days. [For further details, Click here.]

[Editor's Note: Frederick himself was also court-martialed, but the court declared that it was not competent to try the case. It is not clear whether, as claimed by Voltaire, Frederick William intended to have his son executed. However, fortunately for Frederick, the Emperor Charles 6th claimed that a prince had to be tried by the Imperial Diet. Frederick was then imprisoned in a fortress during 1731 and banned from court until early 1732.]

1868: The capital of Japan is renamed Tokyo (Eastern Capital) and relocated from Kyoto to Edo. (Satow)

1907: The painful iodoform treatments Klara Hitler has been receiving become nearly daily, with a strong "hospital smell" permeating the rooms of the small apartment. Adolf assists Dr. Bloch [above] in administering the treatments, which cause Klara much pain and intense discomfort.

Paula Hitler:

During this time my mother was severely ill we were most unhappy. Assisting me, my brother Adolf spoiled my mother during this time of her life with overflowing tenderness. He was indefatigable in his care for her, wanted to comply with any desire she could possible have and did all to demonstrate his great love for her. [For further details, Click here.]

1914 Various:

List Regiment (Nov 1-8): Gefreiter Adolf Hitler's 1st Company, 16th Bavarian Reserve Infantry, after seeing their first action on the Yser (Oct 29-31), spend a few days behind the lines at Werwick. [For further details, Click here.]

Siege of Tsingtao: The German "air force" in Tsingtao consists of two planes, one of which, piloted by a Lt. M�llerskowsky, had crashed previously. On this day the remaining plane, piloted by Lieutenant Gunther Pl�schow (above), flees Tsingtao carrying the governor's last dispatches.



1917 Various:

List Regiment: (November 3, 1917-March 25 1918) Dispatch Runner Gefreiter Adolf endures trench warfare north of Ailette with 3 Company, 16 Bavarian Reserve Infantry Regiment. [For further details, Click here.]

World War I: Canadians take Passchendaele:

After three months of horrific fighting, the Third Battle of Ypres finally ends when Canadian forces take the village of Passchendaele in Belgium.

In one of the bloodiest battles of World War I, a combination of over-ambitious aims, terrible weather conditions, and misguided persistence by British Field Marshal Douglas Haig led to nearly 250,000 total casualties suffered by both sides. At the time Allied forces were scheduled to begin the long-planned offensive, Allied artillery and unusually heavy rains had turned the battlefield into a sea of mud. Soldiers fought in the mud, slept in the mud, and some men drowned in the mud when they slipped into water-filled shell craters. When the offensive was finally called off, after the Canadian victory at Passchendaele, the total Allied advance amounted to only five miles. (

World War I: Middle East: Allenby strikes north, launching the Desert Mounted Corps across the country toward the sea. The Turks evacuate Gaza in time to avoid the trap, but are closely pursued by Allenby.

Russian Revolution: Lenin reappears to direct the revolution in Petrograd.

1918 Various:

World War I: American spearheads reach the Meuse River before Sedan and sever the Mezieres-Montmedy rail line, a vital supply artery for the entire German front.

World War I (Oct 15 - Nov 10): Gefreiter Adolf Hitler, blinded in a gas attack near Werwick on Oct 14, recovers in the Prussian Reserve Hospital at Pasewalk near Berlin. The doctors at this army hospital, on the cutting edge of medical treatments for gassed soldiers, provide Hitler with very good care, and his sight slowly and painfully begins to return to him over these few weeks. Hitler falls into a deep depression. After over four years on the front lines, his fighting days are over. In four years of war, the List Regiment has lost 3,754 dead, 8,795 wounded, with 678 taken prisoner. This is somewhat above the average for the German Armed Forces as a whole.

Throughout the length of the war, fifty-nine Jews served in the List Regiment, sixteen of these as officers. Thirty percent of the Jews in the List Regiment were honored for bravery, and seventeen percent were killed in action.[For further details, Click here.]

1923 Weimar: As European inflation soars, one loaf of bread in Berlin is reported to be worth about 140 billion German marks.

The very rich suffered least because they had sufficient contacts to get food etc. Most of the very rich were land owners and could produce food on their own estates. The group that suffered a great deal--proportional to their income--was the middle class. Their hard earned savings disappeared overnight. They did not have the wealth or land to fall back on as the rich had. Many middle class families had to sell family heirlooms to survive. It is not surprising that many of those middle class who suffered in 1923, were to turn to Hitler and the Nazi Party.

1924 Britain: Stanley Baldwin, Conservative leader, is elected Prime Minister. He soon appoints Winston Churchill, formerly a Liberal, as his Chancellor of the Exchequer.

1930 Disarmament: Nov 6-Dec 9 The Preparatory Commission on disarmament holds its final meetings.

1932 Weimar: New elections in Germany fail to break a parliamentary deadlock. The National Socialists lose 34 seats, down 229 seats to 195 (and two million votes), while the Communists increase theirs from 88 to 100.

1933 Boycott: The Conference of Anglo-Jewish organizations in London approves the anti-Nazi boycott.

1935 Aviation: The Hawker Hurricane, the aircraft responsible for 60% of the Royal Air Force's air victories in the Battle of Britain, made its first flight. [For further information, click here.]

1937 Countdown to Infamy: Italy joins the German-Japanese Anti-Comintern Pact. This grouping prefigures their later alliance structure in World War II.

From the Diary of Count Ciano, Italian Foreign Minister:

We have signed the pact this morning. The atmosphere was distinctly different from usual diplomatic ceremonies. Three nations pledged to join on a common path that might perhaps lead to war. This is a necessary war, if one wishes to rupture this vessel that suffocates the energies and aspirations of young people. After the signatures we went to the Duce. I have rarely seen him that happy. We are not any longer in the situation of 1935. Italy has broken through the isolation. It is at the center of the most powerful political-military combination had ever existed.

1938 Hitler delivers a speech in Weimar.

[What] seems to us almost a miracle as we look back upon it is nothing else than the reward for infinite and unceasing labor? And now for that labor we have received from Providence our reward, just as the Germany of 1918 received its reward. At that time Germany shared in those blessings which we think of under the collective idea Democracy. But Germany has learned that democracy in practice is a different thing from democracy in theory.

1939 Various:

Volkishness: Himmler departs for Munich to prepare for the annual Blutzeuge celebration to commemorate the 1923 putsch. (THP)


USA: In Luck County, Ukrainian peasants murder 200 Polish refugees from Nazism, who are offered accommodation and then killed. (THP)

1940 Church and Reich: Cardinal Faulhaber submits a letter of protest to Minister of Justice Guertner. Faulhaber writes that despite all attempts at secrecy, everyone now knows that large numbers of patients are being killed in the course of a compulsory euthanasia program. The killing of these innocent people, Faulhaber concludes his letter, raises a moral issue which cannot be ignored. (THP)

1941 World War II: Various:

FDR to Stalin:

I am happy to inform you that medical supplies…will be provided as rapidly as these supplies can be purchased and shipped, less such portion thereof as the British may supply….The American Red Cross is prepared to provide approximately one-third of the total list at an approximate cost of $5,000,000 as a gift of the American people…The Red Cross is also transmitting a message…pointing out the importance of reasonable observation by the American Red Cross representative of the distribution made of its supplies subject, of course, to all appropriate military considerations. I would deeply appreciate it if your Government can assure me that the desired arrangements are acceptable.

Stalin celebrates the Revolution's anniversary:

On this day in 1941, the 24th anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution, Joseph Stalin, premier and dictator of the USSR, delivers a speech to a rally of Moscow Party workers.

The rally was held underground, in the marbled halls of the Mayakovsky train station. There, Stalin encouraged the assembled Communist Party workers with the promise that if the Germans "want a war of extermination, they shall have one." The very next day, standing atop Lenin's Mausoleum in Red Square, Stalin took the salute of his troops and encouraged them to defend "holy Russia"—even as German tanks, previously mired in mud, began to roll over now—frozen ground in their advance toward the Soviet capital.

1942 World War II: Various:

Second Front: In a speech to the Congress of Soviet Deputies, Stalin warns the United States and Britain that "the absence of a second front against Fascist Germany may end badly for all freedom-loving countries, including the Allies themselves." He declares that the aim of the coalition is to "save mankind from reversion to savagery and mediaeval brutality."

Holocaust: Approximately 10,000 Jews from Chelm are sent to Sobibor. (THP)

Holocaust: Himmler gives his support to a plan to establish a collection of Jewish skulls and skeletons at the Reich Anatomical Institute in Strasbourg, not far from Natzweiler concentration camp. (see June 21, 1943) (THP)

1943 World War II: After more than two years of German rule, Kiev is retaken by the Russians.

1944 USA: Nuclear weapons: The Hanford Atomic Facility in the US state of Washington produces its first plutonium, and will go on to create more for almost the entire American nuclear arsenal. [For further information, click here.]

1951 (Nov 6-9): Werner von Braun is invited to attend his first Space Travel Symposium, although he is not slated to speak. It is a space medical conference jointly sponsored by the Lovelace Foundation for Medical Education and Research, and the US Air Force School of Aviation Medicine; and is held in San Antonio, Texas. He meets an editor for Collier's Weekly Magazine, Cornelius Ryan, who had been to the previous symposium, and will later write an account of the Normandy Invasion; The Longest Day. Realizing that Collier's Weekly Magazine could be a great place to propagate the exploration of space to a wide audience, von Braun, along with Fred Whipple of Harvard, and Joseph Kaplan of UCLA, eventually convince a still-skeptical Ryan to publish a series of von Braun authored articles. (Piszkiewicz)

[See: Wunderwaffen: Hitler's Deception and the History of Rocketry.]

1975 Death: Ernst 'Putzi' Hanfstaengl:

Putzi was an American citizen at the heart of the Hitler entourage from the early 1920s to the late 1930s. In 1943, after falling out of favor with the Nazis and interned by the Allies, Putzi was bailed out of the miseries of a Canadian prisoner of war camp by his friend and protector President Franklin D. Roosevelt. When FDR's actions threatened to become an internal political problem in the United States, Putzi was re-interned in England. As if it is not surprising enough to find both Heinrich Himmler and Franklin D. Roosevelt prominent in Putzi's life, we also discover that the Nazi Stormtrooper marching songs were composed by Hanfstaengl, "including the one that was played by the Brownshirt columns as they marched through the Brandenburger Tor on the day Hitler took over power. To top this eye-opener, Putzi averred that the genesis of the Nazi chant "Sieg Heil, Sieg Heil," used in the Nazi mass rallies, was none other than "Harvard, Harvard, Harvard, rah, rah, rah." Putzi certainly helped finance the first Nazi daily press, the Voelkische Beobachter. Whether he saved Hitler's life from the Communists is less verifiable.

2001 For the first time since the Second World War, in a cause beyond peacekeeping, Germany commits 3,900 soldiers to the 'war on terror.'

Edited by Levi Bookin (Copy editor)

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