A Dark Date & Poll Result

Hi Subscribers!

The week started with me sending the final corrections in the proofs of my book to the publisher on Monday, so it is now out of my hands and I can think about other things.

On Thursday, I uploaded a new post on the DT blog – about 18 February, which was a very dark day in 1943 in Germany, for two very different reasons.

One is that it was on that day that siblings Sophie and Hans Scholl, of the White Rose resistance movement, were arrested by the Gestapo for distributing flyers that harshly criticized the Nazis and their continued war effort even after the disaster that was Stalingrad. They were put on a show trial and a few days later sentenced to death and immediately executed. The photo above of a bust of Sophie Scholl was taken at the place of their arrest at Munich’s Ludwig Maximilian University. I had only just uploaded an updated chapter about the White Rose Memorial at that Uni on my website. So you can find more about that story there too.

The other dark event on that same day, 18 February 1943, was that infamous “total war” speech that Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels gave at the Berlin Sportpalast venue. It was that speech that culminated in the rhetorical question “Wollt ihr den totalen Krieg?” (‘Do you want total war?’) to which the invited, select audience of devout Nazis predictably responded with a resounding “Ja!” (‘yes!’). And thus the prolonged war and the resultant destruction of Germany in WWII that the White Rose movement had been warning against was seemingly “approved”.

I’m currently also working on a book review – more about that probably in the next newsletter. It’s worth waiting for …

But now for the result of the themed blog-post poll posted last Sunday. There was a clear winner this time: Dark Tourism & Broken Glass; so I will write that one up and post it on the blog this week. Dark Tourism & Bullet Holes came second, so I may field that again in a later poll.

So much for this time.

Have a good week – and stay safe!

Best wishes

Peter