On Feb. 22, 1943, brother and sister Hans and Sophie Scholl, and their colleague in the White Rose resistance organization, Christoph Probst, stood trial before the Volksgericht — the People’s Court that tried political offenses against the Nazi German state. Found guilty of treason by Roland Freisler, head judge of the court, the three were executed that same day. The method of capital punishment was guillotine.
On Feb. 21, 1848, The Communist Manifesto, written by Karl Marx with help from Friedrich Engels, was published in London by a group of German-born revolutionary socialists known as the Communist League.
On Feb. 21, 1916, the Battle of Verdun began with German bombardment of the city of Verdun, France. For ten months, the longest single engagement of World War II, German forces attacked the French along a 20-kilometer front crossing the Meuse River. When the battle ended, with no change in the strategic position of either army, the combined death toll was over 300,000 (out of over 700,000 casualties).
On Feb. 21, 1965, Malcolm X was gunned down by rival Black Muslims while addressing his Organization of Afro-American Unity in New York City.
For something a tad more upbeat, on this date in 1952 the British government, under Winston Churchill, abolished identity cards in the UK to “set the people free.”
Beginning on Feb. 20, 1944, and lasting through Feb. 25, 1944, the United States Strategic Air Forces (USSTAF) launched a series of missions against the Third Reich that became known as “Big Week.” In six days, the Eighth Air Force bombers based in England flew more than 3,000 sorties and the Fifteenth Air Force based in Italy more than 500. Together they dropped roughly 10,000 tons of bombs. The daylight bombing campaign was also supported by RAF Bomber Command operating against the same targets at night. The campaign helped the Allies achieve air superiority, so the invasion of Europe could proceed. While U.S. industrial might could entirely replace losses during the “Big Week,” Germany was unable to do so.
On Feb. 19, 1942, was a sad day for constitutional rights, with President Franklin D. Roosevelt signing Executive Order 9066, authorizing the Secretary of War to prescribe certain areas of the country as military zones. These zones were used to incarcerate Japanese Americans in internment camps.
On Feb. 18, 1943, Hans and Sophie Scholl, a brother and sister, were arrested at the University of Munich for secretly (or not so secretly) putting out leaflets calling on Germans to revolt against Adolf Hitler and the Nazi regime. In the previous year Hans had founded a group of students, who called themselves “The White Rose.” The group wrote and distributed six leaflets aimed at educated Germans. The leaflets made their way across Germany and to several other occupied countries. The Allies later dropped them all over the Third Reich.
On Feb. 16, 1878, the Bland-Allison Act, which provided for a return to the minting of silver coins, became U.S. law. Today, the value of American money is secured only by public faith in the stability of the government, but during the 19th Century, money was backed by actual deposits of silver and gold.
Five years earlier, when Congress had stopped buying silver and minting silver coins — following the lead of European nations — a financial panic ensued. Reasons for the suspension, and at the heart of the panic, lay in the fact that the exchange value of silver and gold was fixed at a rate that favored silver producers. Had the United States Treasury let the two standards free float, making a distinction between silver dollars and gold dollars, none of the political strife over bimetallism would have occurred.
In 1893, in the midst of another financial panic, this time as a result of depletion of gold reserves in the U.S. Treasury, President Grover Cleveland called a special session of Congress to repeal the bimetallic standard. He was successful, though agrarian inflationists took over the Democratic Party and offered up, for the next election, William Jennings “Cross of Gold” Bryan as a counter to Cleveland’s old-fashioned fiscal conservative/social liberalism.
On Feb. 15, 1898, the USS Maine, a battleship, exploded in the Cuba’s Havana harbor, killing 260 American sailors. An official U.S. Naval Court of Inquiry ruled in March 1898 that the ship was blown up by a mine, without directly blaming Spain. Nonetheless, Congress declared war and, within three months, the U.S. had decisively defeated Spanish forces. On December 12, 1898, the Treaty of Paris was signed between the U.S. and Spain, granting the United States its first overseas empire with the ceding of such former Spanish possessions as Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines. In 1976, a team of American naval investigators concluded that the Maine explosion was likely caused by a fire that ignited its ammunition stocks, not by a Spanish mine or act of sabotage.
On Feb. 14, 278 A.D., Valentine, a priest in Rome during the reign of Emperor Claudius II, was executed. In order to facilitate the raising of an army for his unpopular military campaigns, the emperor outlawed all marriages and engagements. Valentine defied Claudius’s order and continued to perform marriages for young lovers in secret. Once discovered, Valentine was arrested and condemned by the Prefect of Rome to be beaten to death with clubs and to have his head cut off. The sentence was carried out on February 14. Valentine was named a saint by the Roman Catholic Church after his death.
Feb 14, 1989, at a meeting of the presidents of Nicaragua, Honduras, Guatemala, Costa Rica, and El Salvador, the Sandinista government of Nicaragua agreed to free a number of political prisoners and hold free elections within a year. In return, Honduras promised to close bases used by anti-Sandinista rebels. Within a year, the Sandinistas were defeated in Nicaragua elections.
On Feb. 13, 1633, Italian philosopher, astronomer and mathematician Galileo Galilei arrived in Rome to face charges of heresy for advocating Polish astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus’s theory that the Earth revolves around the Sun. In April, Galileo pled guilty before the Roman Inquisition in exchange for a lighter sentence. Put under house arrest indefinitely by Pope Urban VIII, Galileo spent the rest of his life at his villa in Arcetri, near Florence, before dying in 1642.
On Feb. 13, 1945, the bombing of Dresden by the Royal Air Force and the United States Army Air Force began, lasting for three days. The inner city of Dresden was largely destroyed and early reports estimated 150,000 to 250,000 deaths. The German Dresden Historians’ Commission, in an official 2010 report published after five years of research, but years after the war, concluded there were up to 25,000 civilian casualties.
On Feb. 12, 1986, Soviet human rights activist Anatoly Scharansky was released after spending eight years in Soviet prisons and labor camps. The amnesty deal was arranged at a summit meeting between Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev and President Ronald Reagan. Scharansky had been imprisoned for his campaign to win the right for Russian Jews, forbidden to practice Judaism in the USSR, to emigrate.
On Feb. 12, 1909, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) was founded.
On Feb. 12, 1593, approximately 3,000 Korean defenders led by General Kwon Yul successfully repelled more than 30,000 invading Japanese forces in the Siege of Haengju.