On June 30, 1934, Adolf Hitler launched his “blood purge” of political and military rivals in Germany in what came to be known as the “Night of the Long Knives.”
Thank god that’s all over.
Purging the more socialist elements (among others) makes me think of this
Beefsteak Nazi (German: Rindersteak-Nazi),[1][2] or “Roast-beef Nazi”, was a term used in Nazi Germany to describe communists and socialists who joined the Nazi Party. Munich-born American historian Konrad Heiden was one of the first to document this phenomenon in his 1936 book Hitler: A Biography, remarking that in the Sturmabteilung (Brownshirts, SA) ranks there were “large numbers of Communists and Social Democrats” and that “many of the storm troops were called ‘beefsteaks’ – brown outside and red within”.[3] The switching of political parties was at times so common that SA men would jest that “[i]n our storm troop there are three Nazis, but we shall soon have spewed them out”.
Also on this date: In 1918, labor activist and socialist Eugene V. Debs was arrested in Cleveland, charged under the Espionage Act of 1917 for a speech he’d made two weeks earlier denouncing U.S. involvement in World War I. (Debs was sentenced to prison and disenfranchised for life.)
In 1971, the Supreme Court ruled, 6-3, that the government could not prevent The New York Times or The Washington Post from publishing the Pentagon Papers.
MGGA!
