Jan 7 In Germany, Marinus van der Lubbe, a Dutch communist charged with having set the Reichstage fire, is executed in Germany.
Jan 26 Hitler's government signs a ten-year non-aggession pact with Poland.
Jan 26 In New York City's Harlem district the Apollo Theater opens.
Feb 6 Rightists riot in Paris and other French cities in an attempt to overthrow a leftist coalition government. A political crisis follows.
Feb 9 In France, a new government is formed by a conservative: Gaston Doumergue.
Feb 12-16 The Austrian government issues a decree dissolving all political parties except for Chancellor Dollfuss' Fatherland Front. The government conducts a series of raids against the Social Democrats and the labor movement. They resist in four days of civil war and are crushed. The religiously pious chancellor, Engelbert Dollfuss, establishes a dictatorship.
Feb 16 Britain and the Soviet Union agree to promote trade between their countries.
Feb 23 In Nicaragua, Sandino returns for new talks. Upon leaving the presidential palace he is gunned down by the National Guard, led by Anastasio Somoza.
Feb 24 Nicaragua's National Guard attacks Sandinista cooperative farms and massacres their inhabitants.
Mar 1 In Japanese-ruled Manchukuo, Pu-Yi, the last of the Qing dynasty, is crowned monarch.
Mar 16 In Morocco, French forces crush three weeks of revolt by Berbers.
Apr 4 The Soviet Union fears a resurgent Germany. It extends its non-aggression pact with Poland and is beginning a massive armament program.
Apr 7 The Soviet Union and Finland renew their non-aggression pact for another ten years. This month the Finnish government outlaws civilians wearing uniforms and political emblems.
Apr 9-12 In the US there are more dust storms.
Apr 21-24 Dust is blown from the Dakotas to eastern Tennessee.
Apr 22 At the Little Bohemia Lodge, near Mercer Wisconsin, the FBI mistakenly shoot a local resident and two Civilian Conservation Corps workers. This alerts John Dillinger and his gang, and they escape, shooting as they go.
May 1 Austria negotiates a concordat with the Vatican which gives the Church in Austria wide powers over education.
May 1-31 The Dutch parliament grants the government emergency powers to regulate trade and industry and to control the activities of extremist political movements. The government prohibits National Socialists (Nazis), Revolutionary Socialists and Socialists from holding political office. Despite these measures, the National Socialists will continued to increase in number.
May 9 A strike by longshoremen begins in San Francisco. It will shut down US ports along the Pacific coast and frustrate businesses that want their goods moved. The Longshoremen want a six-hour day and a hiring hall to replace the company-operated waterfront hall.
May 11-12 More dust storms in the US West, the most severe to date. An estimated 350 million tons of topsoil is blown to the east coast.
May 23 In the Soviet Union, a fear of Germany and fascism is followed by an article in Pravda that signals switch to working with other parties, including Social Democrats, a new position for the Communist International that will be known as the United Front. The Soviet Union is posturing as a defender of European civilization, and fascism is characterised as a corruption of dying capitalism.
Jun 14-15 Adolf Hitler makes a state visit to Italy, intending to create closer relations between himself and Mussolini.
Jun 18 The French begin airline service between their colony Algeria and Brazzaville in the French Congo.
Jun 30 to Jul 1 Hitler sends Göring and Himmler's SS against Ernst Röhm and his lieutenants – leaders of the Nazi Party's 2.5 million paramilitary "Brown Shirts." They are executed, and the opportunity is taken to murder some old enemies of Hitler's movement. Total killed is 116.
Jul 2 Röhm had been Hitler's close friend and associate in the 1920s. Hitler wants respectabiity and to bury homosexuality. He pretends to be shocked at Röhm's homosexuality. President Hindenburg has been told of different motivations. He publicly thanks Hitler for his "determined action and gallant personal intervention which have nipped treason in the bud and rescued the German people from great danger."
July Regarding recent killings In Germany, DorothyThompson is to say: "I never met anyone in Germany, except a few intellectuals, who minded that these people did not have a trial. It was a though they had forgotten that there ever had been such a thing as law." (Hitlerland, by Andrew Nagorski, p.166)
Jul 5 The Longshoremen's strike on the Pacific coast has what is called "Bloody Thursday." A policeman fires a shotgun, killing a striking seaman and a strike sympathizer. The stike will go on for weeks. Teamsters are hurting and their leadership wants the Longshoremen to compromise, otherwise, they warn, the Teamsters will send their men as strikebreakers.
Jul 10 The French open a 300-mile rail line that connects Brazzaville to the Atlantic coast at Pointe Noire. Construction involved forced labor for ten years that killed nearly ten thousand.
Jul 22 In Chicago, the FBI kills John Dillinger after he leaves a movie theatre.
Jul 28 Speaking in Honolulu, President Roosevelt describes the build up of military forces there as "an instrument of continuing peace." In Japan, General Kunishiga Tanaka describes it as "insolent behavior" worthy of suspicion. (Human Smoke, p. 51.)
Aug 2 President Hindenburg dies. Adolf Hitler becomes head of state as well as chancellor. Not caring for democracy Hitler doesn't want the title "president." He accepts that title "Leader" (Führer).
Aug 8 Germany's armed forces swear a personal oath of loyalty not to the state but to Adolf Hitler.
Oct 16 Under pressure of Chiang Kai-shek's forces, Communists begin a "Long March" that will take them across 6,000 miles, 18 mountain ranges and 24 rivers before they reach a safe haven in the northwestern province of Shensi.
Oct 22 Charles Arthur "Pretty Boy" Floyd, 30, who escaped with Dillinger from the Little Bohemia Lodge and killed a lawman in the process, is killed by FBI agents near East Liverpool, Ohio.
Dec 1 In the Soviet Union, Politburo member Sergei Kirov is shot and killed at the Communist Party headquarters in Leningrad. Decades later, Stalin will be thought to have ordered the murder.
Dec 5 In Turkey, a constitutional amendment gives women the right to vote in parliamentary elections.
Dec 8 Mail service by air begins between England and Australia.
Dec 19 The Japanese government renounces naval limitations agreed to in the Washington Naval Treaty of 1922 and the London Naval Treaty of 1930.
IDec 31 By now in Italy, all elementary school teachers must wear the black shirt of the fascist party whenever they are in school.
Copyright © 1998-2018 by Frank E. Smitha. All rights reserved.