Rome
Rome is the capital city and a special comune of Italy. Rome serves as the capital of the Lazio region. With 2,872,800 residents in 1,285 km2, it is the country's most populated comune, it is the fourth most populous city in the European Union by population within city limits. It is the centre of the Metropolitan City of Rome, which has a population of 4,355,725 residents, thus making it the most populous metropolitan city in Italy. Rome is located in the central-western portion of the Italian Peninsula, within Lazio, along the shores of the Tiber; the Vatican City is an independent country inside the city boundaries of Rome, the only existing example of a country within a city: for this reason Rome has been defined as capital of two states. Rome's history spans 28 centuries. While Roman mythology dates the founding of Rome at around 753 BC, the site has been inhabited for much longer, making it one of the oldest continuously occupied sites in Europe; the city's early population originated from a mix of Latins and Sabines.
The city successively became the capital of the Roman Kingdom, the Roman Republic and the Roman Empire, is regarded by some as the first metropolis. It was first called The Eternal City by the Roman poet Tibullus in the 1st century BC, the expression was taken up by Ovid and Livy. Rome is called the "Caput Mundi". After the fall of the Western Empire, which marked the beginning of the Middle Ages, Rome fell under the political control of the Papacy, in the 8th century it became the capital of the Papal States, which lasted until 1870. Beginning with the Renaissance all the popes since Nicholas V pursued over four hundred years a coherent architectural and urban programme aimed at making the city the artistic and cultural centre of the world. In this way, Rome became first one of the major centres of the Italian Renaissance, the birthplace of both the Baroque style and Neoclassicism. Famous artists, painters and architects made Rome the centre of their activity, creating masterpieces throughout the city.
In 1871, Rome became the capital of the Kingdom of Italy, which, in 1946, became the Italian Republic. Rome has the status of a global city. In 2016, Rome ranked as the 14th-most-visited city in the world, 3rd most visited in the European Union, the most popular tourist attraction in Italy, its historic centre is listed by UNESCO as a World Heritage Site. The famous Vatican Museums are among the world's most visited museums while the Colosseum was the most popular tourist attraction in world with 7.4 million visitors in 2018. Host city for the 1960 Summer Olympics, Rome is the seat of several specialized agencies of the United Nations, such as the Food and Agriculture Organization, the World Food Programme and the International Fund for Agricultural Development; the city hosts the Secretariat of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Union for the Mediterranean as well as the headquarters of many international business companies such as Eni, Enel, TIM, Leonardo S.p. A. and national and international banks such as Unicredit and BNL.
Its business district, called EUR, is the base of many companies involved in the oil industry, the pharmaceutical industry, financial services. Rome is an important fashion and design centre thanks to renowned international brands centered in the city. Rome's Cinecittà Studios have been the set of many Academy Award–winning movies. According to the founding myth of the city by the Ancient Romans themselves, the long-held tradition of the origin of the name Roma is believed to have come from the city's founder and first king, Romulus. However, it is a possibility that the name Romulus was derived from Rome itself; as early as the 4th century, there have been alternative theories proposed on the origin of the name Roma. Several hypotheses have been advanced focusing on its linguistic roots which however remain uncertain: from Rumon or Rumen, archaic name of the Tiber, which in turn has the same root as the Greek verb ῥέω and the Latin verb ruo, which both mean "flow". There is archaeological evidence of human occupation of the Rome area from 14,000 years ago, but the dense layer of much younger debris obscures Palaeolithic and Neolithic sites.
Evidence of stone tools and stone weapons attest to about 10,000 years of human presence. Several excavations support the view that Rome grew from pastoral settlements on the Palatine Hill built above the area of the future Roman Forum. Between the end of the bronze age and the beginning of the Iron age, each hill between the sea and the Capitol was topped by a village. However, none of them had yet an urban quality. Nowadays, there is a wide consensus that the city developed through the aggregation of several villages around the largest one, placed above the Palatine; this aggregation was facilitated by the increase of agricultural productivity above the subsistence level, which allowed the establishment of secondary and tertiary activities. These in turn boosted the development of trade with the Greek colonies of southern Italy; these developments, which according to archaeological ev
Francoist Spain
Francoist Spain, known in Spain as the Francoist dictatorship known as the Spanish State from 1936 to 1947 and the Kingdom of Spain from 1947 to 1975, is the period of Spanish history between 1936 and 1975, when Francisco Franco ruled Spain as dictator with the title Caudillo. The nature of the regime changed during its existence. Months after the start of the Spanish Civil War in July 1936, Franco emerged as the single rebel military leader and was proclaimed Head of State on 1 October 1936, ruling a dictatorship over the territory controlled by the Nationalist faction; the 1937 Unification Decree merging all parties supporting the rebel side led to Nationalist Spain becoming a single-party regime. The end of the war in 1939 brought the extension of the Franco rule to the whole country and the exile of Republican institutions; the Francoist dictatorship took a form described as "fascistized dictatorship", or "semi-fascist regime", bringing a clear influence from German and Italian totalitarianisms in fields such as labor relations, the autarkic economic policy, the particular use of symbols, or the single-party, the FET y de las JONS.
In its years the regime opened up and became closer to developmental dictatorships, although it always preserved residual fascist trappings. During the Second World War, Spain's entry in to the Axis alongside its supporters from the civil war and Italy, never came to be after Franco's demands for the war-torn country to join proved too much for the other members to accept. Spain helped Germany and Italy in various ways while maintaining its neutrality. However, Spain was isolated by many other countries for nearly a decade after World War II and its autocratic economy, still trying to recover from the civil war, suffered from chronic depression. Reforms were implemented in the 1950s and Spain abandoned autarky, delegating authority to liberal ministers; this led to massive economic growth that lasted until the mid-1970s, second only to Japan, known as the "Spanish miracle". During the 1950s the regime changed from being totalitarian and using severe repression to an authoritarian system with limited pluralism.
Spain joined the United Nations in 1955 and during the Cold War, Franco was one of the world's foremost anti-Communist figures: his regime was assisted by the West, it was asked to join NATO. Franco died in 1975 at the age of 82, he restored the monarchy before his death, which made his successor King Juan Carlos I, who led the Spanish transition to democracy. On 1 October 1936, Franco was formally recognised as Caudillo of Spain—the Spanish equivalent of the Italian Duce and the German Führer—by the Junta de Defensa Nacional, which governed the territories occupied by the Nationalists. In April 1937, Franco assumed control of the Falange Española de las JONS led by Manuel Hedilla, who had succeeded José Antonio Primo de Rivera, executed in November 1936 by the Republican government, he merged it with the Carlist Comunión Tradicionalista to form the Falange Española Tradicionalista y de las JONS, the sole legal party of Francoist Spain, it was the main component of the Movimiento Nacional. The Falangists were concentrated at local government and grassroot level, entrusted with harnessing the Civil War's momentum of mass mobilisation through their auxiliaries and trade unions by collecting denunciations of enemy residents and recruiting workers into the trade unions.
While there were prominent Falangists at a senior government level before the late 1940s, there were higher concentrations of monarchists, military officials and other traditional conservative factions at those levels. However, the Falange remained the sole party; the Francoists took control of Spain through a comprehensive and methodical war of attrition which involved the imprisonment and executions of Spaniards found guilty of supporting the values promoted by the Republic: regional autonomy, liberal or social democracy, free elections and women's rights, including the vote. The right-wing considered these "enemy elements" to comprise an "anti-Spain", the product of Bolsheviks and a "Judeo-Masonic conspiracy", which had evolved after the Reconquista of the Iberian Peninsula from the Islamic Moors, a Reconquista, declared formally over with the Alhambra Decree of 1492 expelling the Jews from Spain. At the end of the Spanish Civil War, according to the regime's own figures there were more than 270,000 men and women held in prisons and some 500,000 had fled into exile.
Large numbers of those captured were returned to Spain or interned in Nazi concentration camps as stateless enemies. Between six and seven thousand exiles from Spain died in Mauthausen, it has been estimated that more than 200,000 Spaniards died in the first years of the dictatorship from 1940–1942 as a result of political persecution and disease related to the conflict. Spain's strong ties with the Axis resulted in its international ostracism in the early years following World War II as Spain was not a founding member of the United Nations and did not become a member until 1955; this changed with the Cold War that soon followed the end of hostilities in 1945, in the face of which Franco's strong anti-communism tilted its regime to ally with the United States. Independent political parties and trade unions were banned throughout the duration of the dictatorship. Once decrees for economic stabilisation were put forth by the late 1950s, the way was opened for massive foreign investment – "a watershed in post-war economic and ideological normalisation leading to extraordinarily rapid e
The Holocaust
The Holocaust known as the Shoah, was a genocide during World War II in which Nazi Germany, aided by local collaborators, systematically murdered some six million European Jews—around two-thirds of the Jewish population of Europe—between 1941 and 1945. Jews were targeted for extermination as part of a larger event during the Holocaust era, in which Germany and its collaborators persecuted and murdered other groups, including Slavs, the Roma, the "incurably sick", political and religious dissenters such as communists and Jehovah's Witnesses, gay men. Taking into account all the victims of Nazi persecution, the death toll rises to over 17 million. Germany implemented the persecution of the Jews in stages. Following Adolf Hitler's appointment as German Chancellor in January 1933, the regime built a network of concentration camps in Germany for political opponents and those deemed "undesirable", starting with Dachau on 22 March 1933. After the passing of the Enabling Act on 24 March, which gave Hitler plenary powers, the government began isolating Jews from civil society, which included a boycott of Jewish businesses in April 1933 and enacting the Nuremberg Laws in September 1935.
On 9–10 November 1938, during Kristallnacht, Jewish businesses and other buildings were ransacked, smashed or set on fire throughout Germany and Austria, which Germany had annexed in March that year. After Germany invaded Poland in September 1939, triggering World War II, the regime set up ghettos to segregate Jews. Thousands of camps and other detention sites were established across German-occupied Europe; the deportation of Jews to the ghettos culminated in the policy of extermination the Nazis called the "Final Solution to the Jewish Question", discussed by senior Nazi officials at the Wannsee Conference in Berlin in January 1942. As German forces captured territories in the East, all anti-Jewish measures were radicalized. Under the coordination of the SS, with directions from the highest leadership of the Nazi Party, killings were committed within Germany itself, throughout occupied Europe, across all territories controlled by the Axis powers. Paramilitary death squads called Einsatzgruppen, in cooperation with Wehrmacht police battalions and local collaborators, murdered around 1.3 million Jews in mass shootings between 1941 and 1945.
By mid-1942, victims were being deported from the ghettos in sealed freight trains to extermination camps where, if they survived the journey, they were killed in gas chambers. The killing continued until the end of World War II in Europe in May 1945; the term holocaust, first used in 1895 to describe the massacre of Armenians, comes from the Greek: ὁλόκαυστος, translit. Holókaustos; the Century Dictionary defined it in 1904 as "a sacrifice or offering consumed by fire, in use among the Jews and some pagan nations". The biblical term shoah, meaning "destruction", became the standard Hebrew term for the murder of the European Jews, first used in a pamphlet in 1940, Sho'at Yehudei Polin, published by the United Aid Committee for the Jews in Poland. On 3 October 1941 the cover of the magazine The American Hebrew used the phrase "before the Holocaust" to refer to the situation in France, in May 1943 The New York Times, discussing the Bermuda Conference, referred to the "hundreds of thousands of European Jews still surviving the Nazi Holocaust".
In 1968 the Library of Congress created a new category, "Holocaust, Jewish". The term was popularized in the United States by the NBC mini-series Holocaust, about a fictional family of German Jews, in November 1978 the President's Commission on the Holocaust was established; as non-Jewish groups began to include themselves as Holocaust victims too, many Jews chose to use the terms Shoah or Churban instead. The Nazis used the phrase "Final Solution to the Jewish Question". Most Holocaust historians define the Holocaust as the enactment, between 1941 and 1945, of the German state policy to exterminate the European Jews. In Teaching the Holocaust, Michael Gray, a specialist in Holocaust education, offers three definitions: "the persecution and murder of Jews by the Nazis and their collaborators between 1933 and 1945", which views the events of Kristallnacht in Germany in 1938 as an early phase of the Holocaust; the third definition fails, Gray writes, to acknowledge that only the Jewish people were singled out for annihilation.
The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum defines the Holocaust as the "systematic, state-sponsored persecution and murder of six million Jews by the Nazi regime and its collaborators", distinguishing between the Holocaust and the targeting of other groups during "the era of the Holocaust". According to Yad Vashem, Israel's Holocaust memorial, most historians regard the start of the "Holocaust era" as January 1933, when Hitler was named Chancellor of Germany. Other victims of the Holocaust era include. Hitler came to see the Jews as "uniquely dangerous to Germany", according to Peter Hayes, "and therefore uniquely destined t
Jane Haining
Jane Mathison Haining was a Scottish missionary for the Church of Scotland in Budapest, recognized in 1997 by Yad Vashem in Israel as Righteous Among the Nations for having risked her life to help Jews during the Holocaust. Haining worked in Budapest, from June 1932, as matron of a boarding house for Jewish and Christian girls in a school run by the Scottish Mission to the Jews. In or around 1940, after World War II had broken out in 1939, the Church of Scotland advised Haining to return to the UK, but she decided to stay in Hungary; when Germany invaded Hungary in March 1944, the SS began arranging the deportation of the country's Jews to Auschwitz II-Birkenau, the German extermination camp in occupied Poland. Arrested by the Gestapo in April 1944 on a variety of charges after a dispute with the mission's cook, Haining was herself deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau in May, where she died three months probably as a result of starvation and the camp's catastrophic living conditions. Little is known about death in Auschwitz.
In 1949 a Scottish minister, the Reverend David McDougall, editor of the Jewish Mission Quarterly, published a 21-page booklet about her, Jane Haining of Budapest. According to Jennifer Robertson, writing in 2014 for PRISM: An Interdisciplinary Journal for Holocaust Educators all subsequent publications about Haining depend on McDougall's booklet. Born at Lochenhead Farm in Dunscore, Scotland, Haining was the fifth child of Jane Mathison and her husband, Thomas John Haining, a farmer, who had married in 1890. Mathison, herself from a farming family, died in 1902 while giving birth to the couple's sixth child, when Haining was about five. Haining's father died that June. Toward the end of the year, his second wife, Robertina Maxwell, gave birth to a daughter, Agnes. Haining grew up as a member of the evangelical Craig Church in Dunscore, part of the United Free Church of Scotland. Educated at Dunscore village school, she won a scholarship to Dumfries Academy in 1909, as her older sisters Alison and Margaret had done, where she lived as a boarder in the Moat Hostel for Girls.
She graduated as the school dux, one of 41 school prizes she was awarded, left with Highers in English, German and Mathematics. After graduating, Haining trained at the Athenaeum Commercial College in Glasgow, from 1917 until 1927 worked in Paisley for J. and P Coats Ltd, a thread manufacturer, first as a clerk as secretary to the private secretary. During this period, she lived at 50 Forth Street, Pollokshields and attended the nearby Queen's Park West United Free Church, where she taught Sunday School. According to Nan Potter, who attended the classes, Haining would buy the children cream buns for tuppence ha'penny, it was around this time. In 1927 she attended a meeting in Glasgow of the Jewish Mission Committee and heard Rev. Dr. George Mackenzie, chair of the committee, discuss his missionary work, she told a friend "I have found my lifework!"Her manager at work was ill at the time, so Haining stayed with Coats for another five months another year while he trained her replacement. There followed a one-year diploma course at the Glasgow College of Domestic Science, which gave her a qualification in domestic science and housekeeping.
She took a temporary post in Glasgow in Manchester as a matron. In or around 1932 she responded to an ad in the Church of Scotland magazine Life and Work, looking for a matron for the girls' hostel attached to its Jewish mission school in Budapest; the Jewish mission ran a school for both Jewish and Christian girls in its mission building at 51 Vörösmarty Street. The Church of Scotland had established the mission known as St. Columba's Church, in 1841 to evangelize to Hungarian Jews; the founding ministers, Drs. Alexander Black and Alexander Keith, along with Andrew Bonar and Robert Murray M'Cheyne, had been making their way to Jerusalem to spread Christianity, when Black is reported to have injured himself falling from his camel, as a result of which he and Keith decided to return to Scotland, they did so via Budapest. The Archduchess Dorothea of Austria befriended them there, the upshot was that the men were persuaded to establish a Scottish mission in that city; the Jewish mission committee sent Haining for further training at St Colm's Women's Missionary College in Edinburgh.
Her dedication service took place at St Stephen's Church, Edinburgh, on 19 June 1932, during a service presided over by the chair of the Jewish mission committee, Dr. Stewart Thompson. Haining left for Budapest the next day, seven months before Adolf Hitler became Chancellor of Germany on 30 January 1933; the girls' home was on the third floor of the Vörösmarty Street mission building, consisted of two bedrooms with about 16 girls in each room, as of 1932. Most of the students were Jews. McDougall wrote in 1949: "Not all the girls were Jewesses however, for it was considered wise to have a proportion of Christian girls among them."Haining wrote that the school had 400 pupils ranging from six to 16. These were the girls for. Although Hungarian law did not allow religious conversion before the age of 18, she wrote, the school aimed to prepare its Jewish students for conversion to Christianity; the daily Bible lesson for all pupils included study of the New Testament. Haining made efforts to have part of the building converted to club rooms, so that the evangelical work could continue for girls who had left the school, as most did when they were 14 or 15.
When World War II br
Johan Hendrik Weidner
Johan Hendrik Weidner was a decorated Dutch hero of World War II. Johan Hendrik Weidner Jr. was born in Brussels to Dutch parents. Although his birth name was Johan Hendrik, he used to call himself "Jean" and in the U. S. "John". He was the eldest of four children, grew up in Switzerland, near the French border at Collonges-sous-Salève - a village in the French department of Haute-Savoie, where his father taught Latin and Greek at the Seventh-day Adventist Church seminary. Following his education at French public schools, he attended basic courses at the Seventh-day Adventist Seminary in Collonges-sous-Salève, his father Johan Hendrik Weidner Sr. who studied at the University of Geneva, had been a minister for the Seventh-day Adventists in Brussels and Switzerland, hoped Jean would follow in his footsteps. To his father's regret, he decided to go into business, in 1935 he established a textile import/export business in Paris, France. Around this time he went to Geneva to attend sessions of the League of Nations, saw firsthand how ineffective that body was in preventing the outbreak of war in 1939.
At the outbreak of World War II Jean was living in Paris. With the subsequent German occupation of France he fled with several others from Paris to Lyon in the unoccupied part of France; because he had to abandon his Parisian business, he began a new business in Lyon. In 1941, Jean founded "Dutch-Paris", an underground network of which the location of his Lyonnaise textile business soon became its headquarters. In order to get passes to go in and out of the Swiss frontier zone, he set up a second textile shop in Annecy at the end of 1942. Dutch-Paris became one of the largest and most successful underground networks for people persecuted for faith or race, Allied pilots, persons of great Dutch importance to help them escape via Switzerland and Spain; this escape route was used for smuggling documents. In the Netherlands this message line was known as "The Swiss Way". In its heyday, 300 people were part of this underground network, of which about 150 people were arrested. 40 people were slain or died from the effects of captivity, including his sister who helped to coordinate escapes from Paris.
The escape route has contributed to the French Resistance, is responsible for the rescue of more than 1,080 people, including 800 Dutch Jews and more than 112 downed Allied pilots. Jean was one of the most sought after underground leaders of France, for whom the Gestapo at one time offered a reward of five million francs for his arrest. In February 1944, a young female courier was arrested by the French police and extradited to the Gestapo. Against all rules, she had a notebook with her containing names and addresses of Dutch-Paris members, she was brutally interrogated by a guard that held her head under cold water until she nearly drowned. Under torture she revealed many names of key members of the underground network; as a result, a large number of Dutch-Paris members were arrested. The name of Jean's sister Gabrielle Weidner was among the names listed in the notepad, she was arrested by the Gestapo and imprisoned at the Fresnes prison in Paris, because it was hoped for that her comrades would try to free her.
In Fresnes she was treated well, but when this ploy did not work, she was shipped to Ravensbrück concentration camp in Germany. She died of the effects of malnutrition, only a few days after liberation by the Russians. During the occupation, Jean was arrested by both French gendarmerie and French Milice, including the Swiss border police; the French gendarmerie beat him up brutally, but they had to release him due to lack of evidence. In another arrest by the Milice in Toulouse he was tortured, but he managed to escape before they could transfer him to the Gestapo; the Gestapo were never able to get a hold of him. In November 1944, after the Liberation of France Weidner was invited to London by Queen Wilhelmina, to come to tell her about the "Dutch-Paris" escape route, the situation of Dutch civilians in France and Belgium. In the same year he was made a Captain in the Dutch Armed Forces, after which he could be in charge of the Dutch Security Service based in Paris, his service was in charge of vetting all the Dutch citizens in France and Belgium to look for any that collaborated with the Germans.
The Bureau of National Security, the Department of Justice, the Dutch Embassy in Paris all claimed authority for Netherlands Security Service. Therefore, it has never become clear under whose direction he fell. In mid 1946, Jean was dismissed by the Dutch government, arguing that they needed a professional policeman on the post. After his work with the security he picked up the threads of normal life again, returned to his import/export textile business. In 1955 he emigrated to the United States settling in California where from 1958 he and his wife Naomi operated a chain of health food stores. For his War efforts, Weidner was awarded the United States Medal of Freedom with Gold Palm, made an Honorary Officer of the Order of the British Empire, an Officer in the Dutch Order of Orange-Nassau; the French Government honored him with the Croix de Guerre and Médaille de la Résistance and the Légion d'honneur. The Belgian Government made him an Officer of the Order of Leopold. At the 1993 opening of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.
C. he was one of seven persons chosen to light candles recognizing the rescuers. The Israeli government honored Weidner as one of the gentiles designated as Righteous Among the Nations at Israel's national Holocaust Memorial, Yad Vashem where a grove of trees was planted in his name on the Hill of Rem
Spanish Civil War
The Spanish Civil War took place from 1936 to 1939. Republicans loyal to the left-leaning Second Spanish Republic, in alliance with the Anarchists and Communists, fought against the Nationalists, an alliance of Falangists and Catholics, led by General Francisco Franco. Due to the international political climate at the time, the war had many facets, different views saw it as class struggle, a war of religion, a struggle between dictatorship and republican democracy, between revolution and counterrevolution, between fascism and communism; the Nationalists won the war in early 1939 and ruled Spain until Franco's death in November 1975. The war began after a pronunciamiento against the Republican government by a group of generals of the Spanish Republican Armed Forces under the leadership of José Sanjurjo; the government at the time was a moderate, liberal coalition of Republicans, supported in the Cortes by communist and socialist parties, under the leadership of centre-left President Manuel Azaña.
The Nationalist group was supported by a number of conservative groups, including the Spanish Confederation of Autonomous Right-wing Groups, including both the opposing sides of Alfonsists and the religious conservative Carlists, the Falange Española de las Juntas de Ofensiva Nacional Sindicalista, a fascist political party. Sanjurjo was killed in an aircraft accident while attempting to return from exile in Portugal, whereupon Franco emerged as the leader of the Nationalists; the coup was supported by military units in the Spanish protectorate in Morocco, Burgos, Valladolid, Cádiz, Córdoba, Seville. However, rebelling units in some important cities—such as Madrid, Valencia, Málaga—did not gain control, those cities remained under the control of the government. Spain was thus left militarily and politically divided; the Nationalists and the Republican government fought for control of the country. The Nationalist forces received munitions and air support from Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, while the Republican side received support from the Soviet Union and Mexico.
Other countries, such as the United Kingdom and the United States, continued to recognise the Republican government, but followed an official policy of non-intervention. Notwithstanding this policy, tens of thousands of citizens from non-interventionist countries directly participated in the conflict, they fought in the pro-Republican International Brigades, which included several thousand exiles from pro-Nationalist regimes. The Nationalists advanced from their strongholds in the south and west, capturing most of Spain's northern coastline in 1937, they besieged Madrid and the area to its south and west for much of the war. After much of Catalonia was captured in 1938 and 1939, Madrid cut off from Barcelona, the Republican military position became hopeless. Madrid and Barcelona were occupied without resistance, Franco declared victory and his regime received diplomatic recognition from all non-interventionist governments. Thousands of leftist Spaniards fled to refugee camps in southern France.
Those associated with the losing Republicans were persecuted by the victorious Nationalists. With the establishment of a dictatorship led by General Franco in the aftermath of the war, all right-wing parties were fused into the structure of the Franco regime; the war became notable for the passion and political division it inspired and for the many atrocities that occurred, on both sides. Organised purges occurred in territory captured by Franco's forces so they could consolidate their future regime. A significant number of killings took place in areas controlled by the Republicans; the extent to which Republican authorities took part in killings in Republican territory varied. The 19th century was a turbulent time for Spain; those in favour of reforming Spain's government vied for political power with conservatives, who tried to prevent reforms from taking place. Some liberals, in a tradition that had started with the Spanish Constitution of 1812, sought to limit the power of the monarchy of Spain and to establish a liberal state.
The reforms of 1812 did not last after King Ferdinand VII dissolved the Constitution and ended the Trienio Liberal government. Twelve successful coups were carried out between 1814 and 1874; until the 1850s, the economy of Spain was based on agriculture. There was little development of a bourgeois commercial class; the land-based oligarchy remained powerful. In 1868 popular uprisings led to the overthrow of Queen Isabella II of the House of Bourbon. Two distinct factors led to the uprisings: a series of urban riots and a liberal movement within the middle classes and the military concerned with the ultra-conservatism of the monarchy. In 1873 Isabella's replacement, King Amadeo I of the House of Savoy, abdicated owing to increasing political pressure, the short-lived First Spanish Republic was proclaimed. After the restoration of the Bourbons in December 1874, Carlists and Anarchists emerged in opposition to the monarchy. Alejandro Lerroux, Spanish politician and leader of the Radical Republican Party, helped bring republicanism to the fore in Catalonia, where poverty was acute.
Growing resentment of conscription and of the military culminated in the Tragic Week in Barcelona in 1909. Spain was neutral in World War I. Following the war, the working class, industrial class, military united in hopes of removing the corrupt central government, but were unsuc
Jan Karski
Jan Karski was a Polish World War II resistance-movement soldier, a professor at Georgetown University. In 1942–43 Karski reported to the Polish Government-in-Exile and to Poland's Western Allies about the situation in German-occupied Poland about Germany's destruction of the Warsaw Ghetto and about Germany's extermination camps on Polish soil that were murdering Jews, ethnic Poles, other nationalities. Jan Karski was born Jan Kozielewski on 24 June 1914 in Poland, he was born on St John's Day, named Jan according to the old Polish custom of naming newborns after the saints. An error was made in the baptismal records listing 8 August, as Karski explained in interviews on several occasions as well as published interviews with his family. Karski remained so throughout his life, he grew up in a multi-cultural neighborhood where the majority of the population was Jewish. Jan Karski remarked that, he had failed to fulfill his wartime mission, he said: "And thus I myself became a Jew. And just as my wife's entire family was wiped out in the ghettos of Poland – in Nazi concentration camps and crematoria – so have all the Jews who were slaughtered become my family.
But I am a Christian Jew... I am a practicing Catholic... My faith tells me the second original sin; this sin will haunt humanity to the end of time. And I want it to be so."After intensive military training in the prestigious school for mounted artillery officers in Włodzimierz Wołyński, he graduated with a First in the Class of 1936 and ordered to the 5th Regiment of Mounted Artillery, the same military unit where Colonel Józef Beck, Poland's Foreign Affairs Minister, served. He completed his diplomatic education between 1935 and 1938 in various posts in Romania, Germany and the United Kingdom, went on to join the Diplomatic Service. After completing and gaining a First in Grand Diplomatic Practice, on 1 January 1939 he started work in the Polish Ministry of Foreign Affairs. During the Polish September Campaign, Kozielewski's 5th Regiment was a unit of the Kraków Cavalry Brigade, under General Zygmunt Piasecki and a part of Armia Kraków defending the area between Zabkowice and Częstochowa. After the last Battle of Tomaszów Lubelski on 10 September 1939, some units including 1st Battery of 5th Regiment with Kozielewski tried to reach Hungary but were captured by the Red Army between 17 and 20 September.
Kozielewski was held prisoner in Kozielszczyna camp. He concealed his true rank of 2nd Lieutenant and after a uniform exchange, was identified by the NKVD commander as a Private, he was handed over to the Germans as a person born in Łódź, incorporated into the Third Reich, thus escaping the Katyn massacre. In November 1939 on a train to a POW camp in General Government, Karski managed to escape, found his way to Warsaw. There he joined the SZP – the first resistance movement in occupied Europe organized by General Michał Karaszewicz-Tokarzewski and a predecessor of ZWZ the Home Army. About that time he adopted a nom de guerre of Jan Karski, which became his legal name. Other noms de guerre used by him during World War II included Piasecki, Kwaśniewski, Kruszewski and Witold. In January 1940 Karski began to organize courier missions with dispatches from the Polish underground to the Polish Government in Exile based in Paris; as a courier, Karski made several secret trips between France and Poland.
During one such mission in July 1940 he was arrested by the Gestapo in the Tatra Mountains in Slovakia. Tortured, he was transported to a hospital in Nowy Sącz, from which he was smuggled out with vital help of Józef Cyrankiewicz. After a short period of rehabilitation, he returned to active service in the Information and Propaganda Bureau of the Headquarters of the Polish Home Army. In 1942 Karski was selected by Cyryl Ratajski, the Polish Government Delegate's Office at Home, to perform a secret mission to prime minister Władysław Sikorski in London. Karski was to contact Sikorski as well as various other Polish politicians and inform them about Nazi atrocities in occupied Poland. In order to gather evidence, Karski met Bund activist Leon Feiner and was twice smuggled by Jewish underground leaders into the Warsaw Ghetto for the purpose of directly observing what was happening to Polish Jews. My job was just to walk, and observe. And remember; the odour. The children. Dirty. Lying. I saw a man standing with blank eyes.
I asked the guide: what is he doing? The guide whispered: “He’s just dying”. I remember degradation and dead bodies lying on the street. We were walking the streets and my guide kept repeating: “Look at it, remember” And I did remember; the dirty streets. The stench. Everywhere. Suffocating. Nervousness. Disguised as an Estonian camp guard he visited what he thought was Bełżec death camp. In actuality, it seems that Karski only managed to get close enough to witness a Durchgangslager for Bełżec in the town of Izbica Lubelska, located midway between Lublin and Bełżec. Many historians have accepted this theory. Starting in 1942, Karski reported to the Polish, British and U. S. governments on the situation in Poland on the destruction of the Warsaw Ghetto and the Holocaust of Polish Jews. He had carried out of Poland a microfilm with further information from the underground movement on the extermination of European Jews in German-oc
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Media related to Ángel Sanz-Briz at Wikimedia Commons
