Roma push France to recognise the Holocaust-era genocide.
Young Roma in France have launched a campaign calling on the state to officially recognise the genocide of Roma and Sinti people during World War II.
At the centre of their message are wartime letters written by their ancestors from internment camps – unanswered pleas for help sent to the French authorities.
Very early #OnThisDay, 12 Apr 1944, Odette Wilen parachutes into France to work as a wireless operator for the British Special Operations Executive. The SOE supports the French resistance.
Wireless operators were at the greatest risk of discovery, as their position could be triangulated whenever they were transmitting messages back to London.
Wilen evades capture by minutes and escapes over the Pyrenees. She lives until 2015.
#OnThisDay, 9 Apr 1944, Lise de Baissac returns to France to resume work as a Special Operations Executive courier. The British SOE supported the French resistance.
She gathered and passed on information, and took part in armed attacks. At one point she rented a room in a house occupied by the local commander of the German Forces.
Muriel Byck also arrives to be a SOE wireless operator. She dies of meningitis whilst still in France.
Very early #OnThisDay, 6 Apr 1944, Lillian Rolfe and Violette Szabo separately arrive in occupied France to work for the British Special Operations Executive (SEO). Rolfe is a wireless operator, Szabo a courier.
Szabo returns to the UK at the end of April but goes back to France in June 1944 and is captured. Rolfe is captured in July 1944.
They are executed together, by shooting, in Ravensbrück concentration camp in Feb 1945.
#OnThisDay, 25 Mar 1941, the first WRNS arrive at Bletchley Park in the UK. They operate the Bombe machines used for decoding German Enigma machine messages. Their work helps shorten World War 2.
#OnThisDay, 24 Mar 1944, Éliane Plewman is arrested by the Gestapo in Nazi-occupied France after six months operating as a courier for the Special Operations Executive. The British SOE supported the French resistance. A courier carried messages and equipment around their network.
#WomenInHistory #OTD #History #WomensHistory #WorldWar2 #EuropeanHistory #SOE
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@SocraticEthics The #BrainDrain from #Hungary to the #UnitedStates during #WorldWar2 and the following #ColdWar catapulted #American #Mathematics and #ComputerScience (John Von Neumann…), #Chemistry (George Olah…), #Nuclear #Physics (Leo Szilard…) to become the undisputed world leader in #science and #technology.
That brain drain resulted in the Russia-aligned country full of morons that you see today.
#DonaldTheDeplorable is also a #Putin puppet and starting a brain drain FROM here.
#OnThisDay, 19 March 1944, Yvonne Baseden parachutes into Nazi-occupied France as a Special Operations Executive radio operator. The British SOE supported the French resistance. Radio operators ran the greatest risk of discovery as their position could be triangulated when they were transmitting.
Baseden was captured and sent to Ravensbrück.
She was the subject of the first regular UK edition of This Is Your Life in 1955.
“Once, with hand-grenades in my shopping bag, I travelled in a train so full that I had to stand against a German NCO.”
#OnThisDay, 18 Mar 1943, Francine Agazarian arrives in Nazi-occupied France to be a courier in the Special Operations Executive. The British SOE supported the French Resistance.
#OnThisDay, 11 Mar 1942, the current Waterloo Bridge in London partially opens. The construction force included many women, giving it the nickname “the Ladies Bridge”.
#WomenInHistory #OTD #History #WomensHistory #BritishHistory #LondonHistory #WorldWar2 #Histodons
https://historicengland.org.uk/whats-new/news/england-built-by-women/
Incidentally, the same approach was used by German U-Boats during #WorldWar2, which prompted the US military to undertake what is likely the largest #LightPollution study ever conducted: https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/citations/ADA954894
Very early #OnThisDay, 3 Mar 1944, Denise Bloch and Eileen Nearne arrived, separately, into occupied France as wireless operators for the British Special Operations Executive. The SOE supported the French resistance in sabotaging Nazi operations.
Both women were arrested by the summer. Denise was killed in Ravensbrück. Eileen escaped but never recovered her health.
Very late #OnThisDay, 28 Feb 1944, Madeleine Damerment parachuted into occupied France to be an agent for the Special Operations Executive. The British SOE worked with the French Resistance.
She was French, and had previously run escape lines for downed airmen. She escaped France in 1942, and then chose to return.
She was immediately arrested as the network had been betrayed. She was executed at Dachau in Sept 1944.
#OnThisDay, 22 Feb 1943, Sophie Scholl is sentenced to death and immediately executed, alongside her brother and a friend, for distributing anti-Nazi literature at her university in Munich, Germany.
Her cellmate said her last words to her were “how can we expect righteousness to prevail when there is hardly anyone willing to give himself up individually to a righteous cause... It is such a splendid sunny day, and I have to go.”
On this day in 1942, Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066.
The executive order put hundreds of thousands of people into concentration camps.
The vast majority of the people imprisoned were Japanese-American, though some were German-Americans and Italian-Americans were also imprisoned.
Japanese-Americans who were not imprisoned in the camps faced violence and discrimination.
@jeffjarvis the #usa thinks they can interfere in #eu elections and demand #fascist to power(again) in #germany. Did all those american soldiers died for nothing in #worldwar2 !?
I remember back in my youth there were a number of "jokes" about #Italy being an unreliable / incompetent ally to #Germany in #WorldWar2 .
These don't sound so funny now, and not just because I've learned a bit about the numerous atrocities the Germans committed in Italy during the later stage of the war.
No, I think the main reason we Germans should refrain from making any jokes about this is because Italians, unlike Germans, actually managed to get effective armed resistance movements going against their #fascist regime. During the Third Reich, German resistance was mostly ineffective - there were lots of conscientious objectors to the Nazis, but there was no armed resistance to speak of.
What might have been if German resistance forces had shot Hitler? That would have sent a powerful signal - but Germans who took up arms almost always followed the Nazis, to the bitter end.
#OnThisDay, 22 Jan 1944, Sonia Olschanezky is arrested by the Gestapo. She had run an Special Operations Executive guerrilla network near Paris after the leader was arrested. The British-based SOE supported the French Resistance to Nazi occupation.
She was killed at the Natzweiler-Struthof concentration camp six months after her arrest.
The Engineer Behind Mine Detection - According to [Joanna Goodrich] in IEEE Spectrum, prior to World War II, soldiers ... - https://hackaday.com/2025/01/10/the-engineer-behind-mine-detection/ #metaldetector #minedetector #mischacks #worldwar2 #inventor
