1920 Palm Sunday tornado outbreak

For the last few years we have heard a lot about climate change, and only a fool would deny climate change.

However climate change is nothing new. We only started collecting global climate data since 1880, but our planet has been around for about 4.5 billion years. There have been a great number of climate changes during that time.

28 March 1920 was a Palm Sunday, as it is today. The Palm Sunday tornado outbreak of 1920 was an outbreak of at least 37 tornadoes, 31 of which were significant, across the Midwest and Deep South states on March 28, 1920. The tornadoes resulted in fatalities of at least 153 but some reports put that figure at at least 380. There were also at least 1,215 injured.

The majority of the fatalities occurred in Georgia (201+), Indiana (56), and Ohio (55), while the other states had lesser totals.

Severe thunderstorms developed in Missouri during the early morning hours. The storms moved rapidly to the northeast towards Chicago, Illinois. The first tornado injured five people southeast of Springfield, Missouri in the pre-dawn hours in Douglas County. This first twister was a precursor of things to come, as the morning went on and the atmosphere began to destabilize, due to the abundance of sunshine that preceded the cold front in the dry slot area, which covered the lower Great Lakes region, extending southward well past the Ohio River Valley.

Newspaper accounts and weather records documented over 38 storms of major significance; therefor , the number of actual tornadoes is probably much higher, especially when the U.S. Weather Bureau (National Weather Service) prior to 1916 did not conduct any aerial/damage surveys, nor was there any education or awareness campaign for the public to properly report them.

Throughout the years we have heard many predictions on how many years we have left before the damage becomes irreversible, These prediction actually go back for decades.

Here is what I fear though , there are many good willing crusaders who are active in trying to safe the planet. Greta Thunberg , for example, but they don’t always back their activism up with science, It is often driven by emotions and not actual facts. There is a danger when we give people like a teenage girl a platform to pursue an agenda, which is sometimes dictated by others.

It is also dangerous when when we have billionaires, like Gunhild Stordalen, flying scientists all over the world in order to proof a point, not realizing that by doing so they actual lose the point and give more fuel to conspiracy theorists.

Science should be backed up by scientific facts and not by emotional driven opinions, although it may be well meant it can and will cause more harm then good.

We have to look for better alternatives then fossil fuel, but this also needs to be backed up by solid scientific data. However why we still use oil to heat our homes and move our transport is beyond me. There should have been an alternative for this a long time ago and not even for the benefit for the climate. Oil is an economic commodity and has often been used as a political weapon.

sources

380 Americans killed in Palm Sunday tornado outbreak 100 years ago this hour #OnThisDay #OTD (Mar 28 1920)

https://www.wfft.com/content/news/100th-Anniversary-of-the-Destructive-Palm-Sunday-Tornado-Outbreak-569181181.html

https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-xpm-2007-03-26-0703260190-story.html

https://www.weather.gov/iwx/19200328_tornado_outbreak

The Dutch SS volunteers

History of Sorts

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Not everyone in the Netherlands were against the Nazi occupation of the country. Although most of the Dutch hated the German occupiers, there were some who saw it as an opportunity to pursue their own agenda.

In a meeting on June 9, 1940 between A.A. Mussert( the leader of the National Socialist Movement in the Netherlands ,NSB). and Gottlob Berger of the German SS-Amt, Mussert was ordered by Hitler to recruit Dutch men for the Wiking division of the Waffen-SS. The Dutch volunteers would get their own regiment, the Standarte ‘Westland’.

The Dutch volunteers who fought with the Germans were initially two apart groups: those who served with the Waffen-SS and those who registered for the Dutch Vrijwilligerslegion (Volunteer Legion).

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It became possible at the end of May 1940 for somebody Dutch to join the Waffen-SS. About 1,400 men, primarily those who had enlisted with the SS, followed a rigorous…

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Edith Stein- AKA Teresa Benedict of the Cross.

History of Sorts

Edith-Stein

Today is the 30th anniversary of the beatification of Edith Stein by Pope John Paul II.Her story intrigued me, not because I am a Catholic and I pray to saints, but because Edith Stein’s life has remarkable similarities to another converted Jewish woman called Luise Löwenfels, who was deported from my birth place.

Forgotten History-Luise Löwenfels

Both women had fled Germany and moved to the Netherlands,in fact they had met while in the Netherlands because the convents they belonged to were only a few miles from each other. And both fates were intertwined.

Edith Stein, also known as St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross, (12 October 1891 – 9 August 1942), was a German Jewish philosopher who converted to Roman Catholicism and became a Discalced Carmelite nun. She is canonized as a martyr and saint of the Catholic Church.

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In the midst of all her studies, Edith Stein…

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April/May strike- Death Penalty

History of Sorts

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On 29 April 1943, Wehrmachtbefehlshaber (Wehrmacht Commander) General Friedrich Christiansen announced that Dutch soldiers who had fought against the invading Germans in May 1940 would again be taken as prisoners of war and sent to Germany to work in factories and on the land.

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A wave of anger engulfed the country. A spontaneous protest strike broke out in the Stork Machinery Factory in Hengelo. This was followed by the so-called April-May Strikes that swept the rest of the country, except for some cities in the west of the Netherlands. SS and Police leader Hans Rauter tried to stop the action using violence: he instituted martial law.

Hanns Rauter

Twenty-year-old Jochum van Zwol from the village of Leens, who hadn’t even gone on strike himself, was the first to be summarily executed.

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He was shot in front of a firing squad on 1 May 1943 in Groningen and buried somewhere in an unmarked…

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The forgotten victims of Dachau-The Christian Clergy.

History of Sorts

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(picture above:The Blessed Antoni Zawistowski was tortured and died at Dachau in 1942,courtesy Falco van Delft)

Dachau became the camp where 2,720 clergymen were sent, including 2,579 Catholic Priests. The priests at Dachau were separated from the other prisoners and housed together in several barrack buildings in the rear of the camp. There were 1,780 Polish priests and 447 German priests at Dachau. Of the 1,034 priests who died in the camp, 868 were Polish and 94 were German.(Source: “What was it like in the Concentration Camp at Dachau?” by Dr. Johannes Neuhäusler)

Other clergymen at Dachau included 109 Protestant ministers, 22 Greek Orthodox, 2 Muslims and 8 men who were classified as “Old Catholic and Mariaists.”

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Many clergy were imprisoned at Dachau. The first Churchman arrived at Dachau in 1935, but from 1940, Dachau became the concentration point for clerical prisoners of the Nazi regime.

According to Ronald Rychlak( an…

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The last days of “Il Duce” Benito Mussolini

History of Sorts

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In September 1943, Nazi paratroopers staged a daring commando raid that rescued Mussolini from the Apennine Mountain ski resort where he was being detained. Hitler installed Mussolini as the figurehead of the Social Republic of Italy (known informally as the Republic of Salo), a Nazi puppet state in German-occupied northern Italy.

By April 25, 1945, however, the Third Reich was quickly losing its grip on northern Italy. With his stronghold of Milan teetering on the precipice, Mussolini agreed to meet with a delegation of partisans at the palace of Milan’s Cardinal Alfredo Schuster. There, a furious Mussolini learned that, unbeknownst to him, the Nazis had begun negotiations for an unconditional surrender.

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Mussolini stormed out of the palace and fled Milan with his 33-year-old mistress, Clara Petacci, in the 1939 Alfa Romeo sport car he had bought as a gift for his girlfriend.

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The following day, the pair joined a convoy…

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Persecution of homosexuals in Nazi Germany.

History of Sorts

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Upon the rise of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party in Germany, gay men and, to a lesser extent, lesbians, were two of the numerous groups targeted by the Nazis and were ultimately among Holocaust victims. Beginning in 1933, gay organizations were banned, scholarly books about homosexuality, and sexuality in general, (such as those from the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft, run by Jewish gay rights campaigner Magnus Hirschfeld) were burned, and homosexuals within the Nazi Party itself were murdered. The Gestapo compiled lists of homosexuals, who were compelled to sexually conform to the “German norm.”

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While male homosexuality remained illegal in Weimar Germany under Paragraph 175 of the criminal code, German homosexual-rights activists became worldwide leaders in efforts to reform societal attitudes that condemned homosexuality. Many in Germany regarded the Weimar Republic’s toleration of homosexuals as a sign of Germany’s decadence. The Nazis posed as moral crusaders who wanted to stamp…

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The Circus that saved a Jewish family

History of Sorts

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I stumbled upon this story by accident. I was actually doing research on a Jerry Lewis movie called “The Day the Clown Cried “The film was met with controversy regarding its premise and content, which features a circus clown who is imprisoned in a Nazi concentration camp. Lewis has repeatedly insisted that The Day the Clown Cried would never be released because it is an embarrassingly “bad work” that he was ashamed of..

the day the clown cried

In Europe, circuses used to travel across national borders, spending weeks moving through forests and little-used trails, and then set up shop in small villages. During the direst parts of World War II, villagers would flock to see the circus–especially in Germany. “Even during the Third Reich, a traveling circus meant a diversion from the daily drudgery of work.

Adolf Althoff, the young heir of the famous Althoff circus, with a family tradition reaching back to the 17th century…

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Happy Birthday Diana Ross

Diana Ross (born March 26, 1944) is an American singer and actress. Born and raised in Detroit, Michigan, she rose to fame as the lead singer of the vocal group The Supremes, who became Motown’s most successful act during the 1960s and one of the world’s best-selling girl groups of all time. They remain the best-charting female group in US history.

Following departure from the Supremes in 1970, Ross embarked on a highly successful, globally ground-breaking solo career in music, television, film and stage.

Jehovah’s Witnesses and the Holocaust

First of all let me start by saying I am not a member of the Jehovah’s Witnesses. I don’t agree with some aspects of their religion. However that doesn’t mean I don’t respect their faith, because I do. I respect anyone’s faith once it doesn’t include hatred and violence. Among my friends are Jews, Christians, , Buddhists, Baháʼí and Atheists. In fact I remember a few years ago I was doing a course in web development and I gave some of my fellow students a lift home, that time I had a microcosm of several faiths in my car, a Christian, a Jew, a Muslim and an atheists, all connected via one thing, education.

However the title of the blog is Jehovah’s Witnesses and the Holocaust and that is what I will be focusing on.

I have done blogs on the subject before but I found it important to do another one, because the more I read about it the more I realize how little is known about this.

Unlike the Jews and Roma victims who were persecuted and murdered by virtue of their birth, the Jehovah’s witnesses could save themselves by denouncing their faith. The courage the vast majority showed in refusing to do so, in the face of torture, maltreatment in concentration camps, and sometimes execution, won them the respect of many contemporaries.

Rather then going into too deep of details I will focus on just a few stories.

The picture at the start of the blog is of the Kusserow family. They were active in distributing religious literature and teaching Bible study classes in their home. Their house had been under intense scrutiny.

The oldest son,Wilhelm Kusserow,had been arrested for refusing to join the army. In 1940 he had made it clear to the judge that he only obeyed God’s law and not Hitler’s laws. He interpreted God’s command “thou shalt not kill” literally and refused to serve in the German army

For this he was executed by a firing squad in Muenster prison on April 27.

His younger brother, , also refused to join the army for the same reason . He was executed on March 28,1942 in Brandenburg prison by guillotine , aged 20.

Helene Gotthold was executed by guillotine in Berlin’s Ploetzensee Prison, on December 8. 1944.

Helene’s husband was arrested in 1936.basically for practicing his faith After searching her house, where they found Jehovah’s witnesses literature the Gestapo arrested her in 1937; she was beaten with rods and lost her unborn baby. The court gave her an 18-month sentence.

Helene and her husband were arrested again in February 1944. They were imprisoned in Essen, however after the prison had been destroyed in an Allied bombing raid, they were transferred to a prison in Potsdam. On August 4, the People’s Court sentenced Helene and five other Witnesses to death for illegally holding Bible meetings and undermining the nation’s morale. Before her execution, Helene was allowed to write a letter to her husband and children.

Helene was executed by guillotine in Berlin’s Ploetzensee Prison on December 8, 1944. Her family survived and resumed their Jehovah’s Witness missionary work in Germany.

I think many people underestimate the bravery of the Jehovah’s witnesses, still to this day. After reading and researching for this blog and the other blogs I did, I have found a new respect for this group of Christians. Does that mean I agree with all of their believes, of course it doesn’t but I don’t expect anyone to agree with all of my believes either. One thing I do know though, if I could have saved my live by denouncing my faith, there is a great chance I would have done that.

Sources

https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/id-card/helene-gotthold

https://www.fold3.com/page/286019312/jehovahs-witnesses-and-the-holocaust/stories

https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/photo/the-kusserow-family

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