Photograph: New York Daily News front page, November 12, 1938. Headline: “NAZI JAIL JEWS IN PRISON CAMPS.”
Hermann Göring meets privately with Nazi leaders to plan the elimination of Jews from the German economy. The Decree on the Exclusion of Jews from German Economic Life closed all Jewish-owned businesses in Germany. Göring announces he wants Madagascar as a Jewish homeland.
All of Germany’s Jews were ordered to pay a collective fine of 1 billion Reichsmarks for the murder of Ernst vom Rath. Each Jew in possession of property over 50,000 RM was required to pay 20 percent of its value. A fine of 1 billion marks is levied against Jews collectively, and they must pay to repair their wrecked homes and businesses. New restrictions bar them from any business work after January 1. The Judenvermögensabgabe (“Jewish Capital Levy”) was an arbitrary special tax imposed on German Jews under the Nazi dictatorship. The tax was only a part of a larger series of actions taken by the Nazis to systematically plunder Jewish assets.
After the assassination attempt on the German Legation Secretary Ernst Eduard vom Rath and the November pogroms in 1938, Hermann Göring demanded a contribution payment of one billion Reichsmark (RM) as “atonement” for “the hostile attitude of Judaism towards the German people”. The decree of 12 November 1938 on the expiation of Jews of German nationality was signed by Hermann Göring, who had been granted a general power of attorney in 1936 to issue ordinances.
On the same day, the “Ordinance on the Elimination of Jews from German Economic Life” and the “Ordinance on the Restoration of the Street Image in Jewish Commercial Operations” were issued, followed three weeks later by the “Ordinance on the Use of Jewish wealth”.
In a “Discussion on the Jewish Question” lasting several hours on 12 November 1938, Göring outlined the goal in front of more than a hundred participants, “to come to a very clear action profitable for the Reich” pertaining to the Jewish question. The damage caused by the pogrom was to be repaired by the Jews themselves; insurance benefits were confiscated. Jewish business enterprises were to be expropriated at an estimated value and transferred to German buyers at market value. Shares and securities had to be exchanged for Reich Treasury notes. Göring said during this meeting:
"I will choose the wording that the German Jews in their entirety will be imposed a contribution of 1 billion as punishment for the nefarious crimes, etc., etc. That'll work. The bastards won't do a second murder that fast. By the way, I have to say once again: I don't want to be a Jew in Germany."
Spanish insurgents said today their forces were moving down from the Chercun Mountains in an attempt to cut the last road connecting government advance positions with bases on the opposite, or left, shore of the Ebro River.
Descending from positions in the last mountain ranges lying between Venta de Los Camposinos and Asco, about 10 miles north of Gandesa, the insurgents were reported to have passed the highway between the two towns and moved toward the Asco-Flix Road. These sources added that all operations were hampered by bad weather, including heavy fog.
Government dispatches, on the other hand, said the insurgents had suffered tremendous losses in the campaign of encirclement of the government’s Ebro forces. They asserted the insurgents had lost more than 100,000 men on the Ebro front since the government forces crossed the river in a westward push last July.
Insurgent airplanes raided Valencia and Barcelona today. Five planes dropped 50 bombs on the port of Valencia, but most of them fell into the sea. At Barcelona four persons were killed and 30 wounded in air raids during the morning. The British ship Candleston Castle was slightly damaged and one member of the crew suffered a broken leg. Thirty-three bombing planes dropped explosives on the port and business districts.
The Hungarian Parliament officially incorporated the newly acquired territory from Czechoslovakia into its borders.
Rumanian King Carol will see Field Marshal Hermann Wilhelm Göring on his forthcoming trip to Germany and also possibly Adolf Hitler, it was said reliably today. Well-informed sources believed a meeting with Göring, who is head of the German Luftwaffe (air force), would entail discussion of a Rumanian army plan to buy German airplanes.
France’s government revalues gold and takes other steps to revive its economy. French Premier Daladier’s government, backed by the demand of 7,000,000 world war veterans for a strong government, tonight issued thirty-two decree laws to rebuild France within her Democratic framework. Daladier declared they were the strongest measures that could be drawn without violating traditional principles of the French government. Some members of the Chamber of Deputies described them as the last chance to avert collapse of the democracy. Among the laws decreed two days before the expiration of semi-dictatorial decree powers granted by parliament was a measure revaluing the gold reserve of the Bank of France at the rate of 170 francs to the pound sterling, or 37.69 to the dollar.
France turns away Jewish refugees at the border, unless they have visas.
Five Arabs were killed today when a clandestine bomb factory in a house in Makdal, a village in the southern part of the Mandate of Palestine, exploded.
Representative Martin Dies (D-Texas), chairman of the special house committee investigating un-American activities, tonight disclosed plans to ask the next congress for a million dollars to investigate charges of corruption and graft in the WPA and the PWA and to continue the committee’s inquiry into subversive foreign activities. With the announcement Dies got the jump on colleagues who have been considering a bi-partisan congressional inquiry into the administration of relief funds through the two agencies. The committee also would investigate reported communist activity in the ranks of federal easy money workers.
Telegraph companies — including Western Union — are denied their requested exemption from the new minimum wage, and must pay their messengers 25 cents per hour.
“My Reverie” by Larry Clinton topped the American popular music charts.
College Football Scores:
Notre Dame, 19; Minnesota, 0.
Michigan, 0; Northwestern, 0.
Ohio State, 32; Illinois, 14.
College of Pacific, 32; Chicago, 0.
Indiana, 7; Iowa, 3.
Duke, 21; Syracuse, 0.
Fordham, 0; North Carolina, 0.
Penn State, 7; Pennsylvania, 7.
Navy, 14; Columbia, 9.
Cornell, 14; Dartmouth, 7.
Harvard, 40; Virginia, 13.
Army, 34; Chattanooga, 13.
Princeton, 20; Yale, 7.
Pittsburgh, 19; Nebraska, 0.
Wisconsin, 14; UCLA, 7.
Washington, 7; Southern California, 6.
California, 20; Oregon, 0.
Washington State, 12; Idaho, 0.
Oregon State, 6; Stanford, 0.
Alabama, 14; Georgia Tech, 14.
Tulane, 28; Georgia, 6.
Texas Christian, 28; Texas, 6.
Southern Methodist, 19; Arkansas, 6.
The United States and Mexico agree to a plan on payment for agricultural land expropriated since 1927, to begin with a $1 million payment in May 1939. Annual indemnity payments will follow.
More expropriation, both of oil fields and mines owned by American companies, is threatened in Mexico to resolve labor problems.
Fires still burn in Hankow, and cholera breaks out.
Japanese troops early today occupied Yochow, gateway to Hunan province, registering a major gain in their drive on Changsha, the Hunan capital. Battering down Chinese resistance the invaders fought their way across the walls of Yochow by moonlight. The victory gave them possession of an important rail and river center and placed them within eighty miles of Changsha. Warships which accompanied the advance from Hankow, 122 miles downstream, landed troops at Linsiang, a Yangtze River port. These troops were designated to mop up the area around the mouth of Lake Tungting, which connects with the Yangtze just above Yochow.
At daybreak the Japanese continued their advance with two columns. One moved down the railway paralleling the shores of Lake Tungting. This force did not expect major opposition before reaching Sinshin, forty-five miles south of Yochow. With the fall of Yochow the Japanese reported the Chinese were withdrawing from their Feng River line protecting Nanchang, Chinese air base in Kiangsi province. The Chinese asserted that 600 Japanese were killed in a Chinese counterattack against Maping. The attack, they said, blocked the invaders’ advance against Suihsien.
Heavy fighting was said to be continuing tonight in the northeastern corner of Hunan province where Chinese denied Japanese reports of the capture of the “gateway” city of Yochow. They said they were making a successful defense against the Japanese attacks. Capture of Yochow, which the Japanese said they took early today, would open Tungting Lake for a naval offensive southward along its tributary, the Siang River, toward Changsha, Hunan provincial capital about eighty miles from Yochow. The Japanese naval offensive along the Yangtze River, into which Tungting Lake flows, was said to have been halted near Linsiang, less than twenty miles from Yochow. The Chinese had laid a boom of sunken junks and mines there. Thousands of Chinese civilians were reported in flight before the Japanese campaign, fanning out from Hankow, 122 miles down the Yangtze from Yochow.
Zhang Zhizhong, upon receiving inaccurate intelligence about approaching Japanese troops, gave the order to set fire to several key buildings in Changsha, Hunan Province, China to deprive the Japanese of use should they be captured. The fire, set the following day, grew out of control, causing extensive property damage and killing a number of civilians. This event would lead to his firing.
Civilians begin to evacuate Changsha. Foreign residents take shelter at Yale-in-China University or in an oil company-owned compound on the Siang River. Chinese army troops head west or south.
Dow Jones Industrial Average: 158.41 (+0.94).
Born:
Benjamin Mkapa, 3rd president of Tanzania (1995-2005), in Ndanda, Tanganyika (d. 2020).
Mort Shuman, American singer, and songwriter, with Doc Pomus (“Viva Las Vegas”; “Save The Last Dance For Me”), in New York, New York (d. 1991).
Denis DeJordy, Canadian NHL goalie (Chicago Black Hawks, Los Angeles Kings, Montreal Canadiens, Detroit Red Wings), in St-Hyacinthe, Quebec, Canada.
Larry Onesti, AFL middle linebacker (Houston Oilers), in Chicago, Illinois (d. 2018).
Karl Kaimer, AFL defensive end (New York Titans), in Elizabeth, New Jersey.
Alberto Diaz Lobo, Founder of ETERNA S.A. in San Pedro Sula, Honduras.
Larry Clinton — “My Reverie” (vocals by Bea Wain)
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