Unaddressed is the claim that ‘Lenin’ smashed unions. Correct me if I’m wrong, but didn’t the Bolsheviks only destroy the anticommunist trade unions, while assimilating the socialist ones?
Events that happened today (August 21):
1934: Benito Mussolini met with Austrian Chancellor Kurt Schuschnigg in Florence. Meanwhile, an international Jewish conference in Geneva declared that the boycotting of the Third Reich would be redoubled until the rights of German Jews were fully restored.
1936: Fascist Italy accepted a French proposal to pursue a policy of nonintervention in the Spanish Civil War. Britain announced a similar policy to the Third Reich’s, warning that any attempt to interfere with British shipping in Spanish waters would be met with stern measures.
1937: The Spanish fascists captured Villacarriedo.
1940: Johann Schalk received the Ehrenpokal der Luftwaffe, while the ‘tree of liberty’, planted in Saverne after Alsace was restored to France at the end of World War I, was chopped down by members of the Hitler Youth.
1941: As the Axis captured the Ukrainian port city of Kherson and the Bila Tserkva massacre took place in Ukraine, Berlin ordered Army Group North to encircle Leningrad, believing that the loss of the symbolic capital of the Russian Revolution would deal a crushing blow to Soviet morale. Coincidentally, the Axis officially opened the Drancy internment camp in France and also commissioned the submarines U‐376 and U‐584. But less happily for the Fascist bourgeoisie, the communist activist Pierre Georges murdered Axis naval cadet Alfons Moser at the Barbès–Rochechouart metro station in Paris by shooting him in the back.
1942: The Guadalcanal Campaign: American forces defeat an attack by Imperial Japanese Army soldiers in the Battle of the Tenaru.
1943: The Axis lost both Kiska and Wewak.
1944: Canadian and Polish units captured the strategically important town of Falaise, Calvados, France, from the Axis. (Coincidentally, Dumbarton Oaks Conference, prelude to the United Nations, began.)
1945: The first major Imperial Japanese surrender ceremony in China took place at the Zhijiang Airport in Hunan Province.