#OnThisDay, 23 May 1430, Jeanne d'Arc, fighting in the rearguard, is pulled from her horse and captured by the Burgundians at the siege of Compiègne. She is then sold as a prisoner to the British, who put her on trial for heresy.
#OnThisDay, 8 May 1946, Estonian teens Aili Jürgenson and Ageeda Paavel blew up a Soviet war memorial in response to Soviet destruction of Estonian war memorials. They served eight years in the gulag as punishment. In 1988 they were awarded the Estonian Order of the Cross of the Eagle to recognise their fight.
#OnThisDay, 18 Apr 1905, Baroness Bertha von Suttner becomes the first woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize for her activism.
As well as writing an influential novel, Lay Down Your Arms (1889), she founded the German Peace Society in 1892. In 1907 she was the only woman to attend the Second Hague Peace Convention, and warned that Europe was heading for war once again.
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.
Why is a bridge in Sarajevo named after two women?
#OnThisDay, 5 Apr 1992, Suada Dilberović, a Muslim, and Olga Sučić, a Catholic, are killed whilst protesting for peace in Sarajevo during the outbreak of the Bosnian war. They are the first civilian casualties in what became the Siege of Sarajevo. The siege lasted 1,425 days, and over 5,000 civilians were killed during it.
The bridge they died on has been renamed in their memory.
Am Internationalen Tag des #Gedenkens an die Opfer der #Sklaverei und des transatlantischen #Sklavenhandels empfehlen wir die Lektüre unseres Doppelhefts #WerkstattGeschichte 66/67 (2015) "europas sklaven", der Thementeil, hg. v. Doris Bulach & Juliane Schiel, mit Beiträgen u.a. von Karwan Fatah-Black (@kfb) & Matthias van Rossum sowie von @magnusressel:
#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.”
Tinder may be a relatively new societal trend, but the idea behind it — matchmaking — is not. Hans Holbein the Younger was a 16th-century artist tasked with painting the portraits of potential wives across Europe, including profile pictures of eligible women for King Henry VIII. Here’s more from BBC Culture: https://flip.it/kLCrZq #Culture#Dating#EuropeanHistory#Art
I think these might be a good read for German anarchists too:
Bad Memory
"German Jewish poet and public intellectual Max Czollek’s polemic against German memory culture, De-Integrate!, came out in English this year and is reviewed in this issue by Sanders Isaac Bernstein. The book draws on German Jewish sociologist Y. Michal Bodemann’s concept of the “Theater of Memory,” a coinage meant to describe the role of German Jews in a narrative that is less about making amends to victims of genocide than about redeeming perpetrators and their descendants."
Very early #OnThisDay, 18 Sept 1943, Yolande Beekman arrives in Nazi-occupied France to work as a radio operator for the Special Operations Executive. The British SOE supported the French Resistance, and radio operator was one of the more dangerous roles.
She was captured in January 1944, and was shot at Dachau concentration camp in September 1944.
#OnThisDay, 22 Aug 1943, Yvonne Cormeau parachutes into France to be a radio operator for the British Special Operations Executive. The SOE supported the French Resistance to Nazi occupation.