This Day in History

Jan 13 1943
Hitler declares "Total War".


Jan 13 1959
Raul Castro, brother of Fidel, lines up 71 Batista supporters in front of a trench and machine guns them. They are then buried by a tractor without any verification that the prisoners were killed.

Jan 13 1962
Television comedy pioneer Ernie Kovacs drives his "unsafe at any speed" Corvair into a utility pole on Santa Monica Boulevard, killing him instantly and turning The Nairobi Trio into a Duo.

Jan 13 1979
The Young Men's Christian Association files a libel suit against the Village People for their popular Y.M.C.A hit.

Jan 13 1982
Air Florida Flight 90 crashed into the 14th Street Bridge over the Potomac River, killing all but four passengers and one flight attendant.

The aircraft was carrying 74 passengers and five crewmembers when it crashed during the failed takeoff attempt. The aircraft struck the 14th Street Bridge, which carries Interstate 395 between Washington, D.C. and Arlington County. It crushed seven occupied vehicles on the bridge and destroyed 97 feet of guard rail before it plunged through the ice into the Potomac River. The crash occurred less than two miles from the White House and within view of both the Jefferson Memorial and The Pentagon.

The accident killed 78 people, including four motorists on the 14th Street Bridge. The survivors were rescued from the icy river by civilians and professionals.

Jan 13 1987
New York mobsters Anthony "Fat Tony" Salerno and Carmine "Junior" Persico sentenced to 100 years of prison for racketeering, along with six others. All were members of the Mafia "board of directors"

Jan 13 1991
Forty-two people are killed in a soccer stampede and melee at Johannesburg, South Africa.

Jan 13 1998
A woman taking a tour of the White House applies spray paint to two early 19th century marble busts modeled by Giuseppi Ceracchi. No clear motive exists for the vandalism, and it it not clear how spray paint was brought through White House security. Spokesman Mike McCurry stated, "it looks like a bad rouge job on the busts".

This Day In History

Jun 10 1942
The town of Lidice (Loditz) is liquidated by the Nazis as penalty for the assassination of Adolf Hitler's favorite general, Reinhard Heydrich. Every adult male is killed, the women sent to the camps, and the town bulldozed.

Jun 10 1973
The 17-year-old grandson of J. Paul Getty is abducted in Rome. When the kidnappers demand a $17 million ransom, the billionaire refuses. "I have 14 other grandchildren, and if I pay one penny now, then I will have 14 kidnapped grandchildren." After the grandson's severed ear arrives in the mail, Getty finally coughs up the money.

Jun 10 1980
Percy Wood, president of United Airlines, receives a parcel at his home in Lake Forest, Illinois. Inside is a copy of the book Ice Brothers by Sloan Wilson. When he opens the book, it suddenly explodes, throwing shrapnel into Wood's hands, face, and thigh. The book turns out to be a present from the Unabomber.

This Day In History

Apr 30 1945
Newlyweds Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun kill themselves in the charming and romantic Fuhrerbunker, ending all hope for a ten-thousand-year Reich.

Apr 30 1961
Lee Harvey Oswald, during his stay in the Soviet Union, marries hospital employee Marina Prusakova. Oswald later becomes disenchanted with Soviet life, and the couple emigrates to the United States. Even so, he never permits his wife to learn English.

Hitler Reacts to the Hitler Parodies Being Removed from YouTube

Hitler's Paintings

LONDON, England (CNN) -- A painting by Adolf Hitler sold for almost $15,000 Thursday -- more than six times as much as expected.

The watercolor was one of 15 items of Hitler art being sold at auction. Together, the artworks by the Nazi leader fetched almost $120,000.

They had expected to raise just under $50,000, auction house Mullock's of Shropshire estimated.

Many of the pictures were on the market because one of the sellers wanted money to install a new central heating system in his house, a spokesman for the auction house said.
"The watercolors came from a collector who is a regular vendor of ours," said Richard Westwood-Brookes, a historical documents expert at Mullock's. "He'd forgotten about them for years. He found them in his garage."

He refused to disclose the identity of the seller, as a matter of policy.

Thirteen watercolors were expected to fetch $580 to $2,200 apiece, while the lone small oil painting was estimated at up to $30,000, the auctioneer estimates.

All of the watercolors shattered expectations -- 12 of them selling for between $4,400 and $9,000.

The remaining watercolor -- a 1910 painting showing a figure sitting on a stone bridge -- fetched almost $15,000. There has been speculation that the figure was a depiction of Hitler himself.

The oil painting sold at only almost $20,000. A pencil sketch signed "A Hitler 1914" went for almost $4,700, beating the auctioneer's estimate of up to $3,700.

An easel thought to have belonged to Hitler sold for nearly $15,000, having been expected to bring $2,900 to $5,800. An anonymous bidder purchased it by phone.

Hitler dreamed of being an artist as a young man, and although he failed to get into the Vienna Academy of Arts, he supported himself by painting watercolors for several years before World War I, according the Holocaust Encyclopedia of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

The auction also includes dozens of items related to Hitler's time as leader of Nazi Germany -- including documents from concentration camps where those deemed "undesirable" by the Nazis were imprisoned, sterilized and murdered. Approximately 6 million Jews were killed in Nazi death camps, alongside millions of political prisoners, homosexuals, Gypsies and others.

"Who would want to have in their house a painting by the most horrible murderer in the history of mankind?" asked Rabbi Marvin Hier, dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center which aims to fight anti-Semitism. "Any individual that would buy it to hang in their homes should be ashamed of themselves."

Hier said he did not object to Holocaust-related documents being auctioned "if their purpose is to wind up in research institutions," noting his own organization had obtained "important documents" that way.

Westwood-Brookes defended the sale of Nazi memorabilia.

"It's just as much as part of the Second World War as photographs of (Winston) Churchill," the British prime minister during the war. "It's something that happened and you can't ignore it."

He said he hoped buyers would preserve items such as a teenage girl's registration document for the notorious Auschwitz concentration camp, where approximately 1 million people were murdered.

"The intention is that people will acquire this material and make sure it is preserved for future generations to study," Westwood-Brookes said.

The buyers could be "anybody and everybody," he said.

"There are many, many collectors of Second World War memorabilia all around the world," he added.

"Some people wouldn't want it," he admitted, but some would, "mainly because they want something to do with a famous person in history. In this case it happens to be Hitler, but in another sale it might be Churchill or Gandhi."

"I don't take any moral position" on the sale of Hitler-related artifacts, he said. "You can't say this guy was a bad guy, so I won't sell his memorabilia, this guy was a good guy so I will sell his. If you do that, where do you stop?"

The Hitler paintings came from three sources, Westwood-Brookes said, describing them as "people who had collected them over the years."

"The rest of the stuff has come in from all sorts of sources -- dealers who acquire stuff and sell stuff from other auction houses or private sources, members of the public who find something in the attic, and collectors, who are constantly changing their collections and selling off that bit that they don't want in order to buy stuff that they do."

This Day In History

Apr 23 1969
Sirhan Sirhan sentenced to death for assassinating Robert Kennedy.

Apr 23 1975
Peter Ham of Badfinger suicides at age 27, by hanging himself. Another bandmate, Tom Evans, suicides later in 1983.


Apr 23 1983
The West German magazine Stern announces a major historical find: the discovery of 60 volumes of personal diaries purported to have been handwritten by Adolf Hitler.

Apr 23 1985
The Coca-Cola Bottling Company announces that it has irrevocably changed the formula for its flagship beverage, unveiling "New Coke." The company stands firm on its decision until public pressure finally forces them to reintroduce the original drink, exactly 79 days later.

This Day In History

Apr 20 1889
In Braunau, Austria, Klara Hitler gives birth to a bouncing baby boy named Adolf.

Apr 20 1979
President Jimmy Carter is attacked by a Killer Swamp Rabbit, while on vacation in Plains GA. The rabbit swam menacingly towards him, and he had to repel the ferocious creature with a paddle. There were no injuries. Press Secretary Jody Powell leaked the story to the press, and the White House had a lot of explaining to do.

Apr 20 1992
Alone in his apartment watching TV, British comedic legend Benny Hill suffers a fatal heart attack. His body goes undiscovered for four days.

Apr 20 1999
After their homemade timebombs fail to detonate in the school cafeteria, the heavily-armed duo of Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold decide to prowl through Columbine High School, indiscriminately gunning down classmates. A total of 15 are killed in their shooting spree. Contrary to news reports, their selection of victims is apparently random; they aren't hunting for jocks or blacks. Nor do they execute that Christian girl -- Valeen Schnurr in fact manages to crawl away and live to tell her story. They are not goths, they aren't gay, nor were they ever members of that dorky clique calling themselves the "Trenchcoat Mafia." They don't even listen to Marilyn Manson. Harris and Klebold are just a couple of extremely pissed-off kids with an arsenal.

This Day In History

Apr 29 1945
With Allied forces closing in on Berlin, Adolf Hitler marries Eva Braun in their fortified bunker. They kill themselves the following day.







Apr 29 1992
Rioting erupts in Los Angeles after Rodney King's assailants are acquitted by a jury. The looting and destruction begins in South Central L.A. and quickly radiates outward. By the time things are under control, 51 are dead and the city has sustained $1.5 billion in property damage. Civil disorder manages to spread to other North American cities, through the influence of live TV coverage.




Apr 29 1996
Search and rescue teams begin dragging Maryland's muddy Wicomico River after former CIA director William Colby is reported missing. They soon discover his partially-submerged canoe underneath a boat dock, but his body isn't located until it rises to the surface a week later.