16 MARCH
SETTLERS, POLICE AND SOLDIERS SHOOT DEAD HUNDREDS IN NAIROBI
[ 16 March 1922 ]
On 16 March 1922, according to various official sources, Kenyan colonial soldiers and police shot dead 20 protesters in Nairobi, though the real figure for those who died on the streets or later in hospital is now estimated to have been in the hundreds.
MI5 – GERMANY WANTS TO ‘INUNDATE THIS COUNTRY WITH JEWS’
[ 16 March 1938 ]
Today in 1938, the Home Secretary, Sir Samuel Hoare, explained to his colleagues in the Cabinet that although he felt a ‘great reluctance’ in refusing persecuted Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany, MI5 had warned him that Germany was planning to ‘inundate this country with Jews, with a view to creating a Jewish problem in the United Kingdom.’ He therefore felt unable to recommend allowing them entry, on the apparent assumption that any large number of Jews would threaten a dangerous contamination of British society. The same antisemitic propaganda that one can find repeatedly expressed in the Nazi archives.1
THE RAF OBLITERATES THE MEDIEVAL TOWN OF WURZBURG
[ 16 March 1945 ]
On this day in 1945, in the closing days of the Second World War, as Allied forces advanced ever deeper into Germany, 225 RAF Lancaster heavy bombers dropped a mixture of high explosives and 300,000 incendiary bombs on the medieval city of Wurzburg.
FOOTNOTE
- Cabinet conclusions 14(38), 16 March 1938, CAB 23/93 quoted in A.J. Sherman, Island Refuge: Britain and Refugees from the Third Reich: 1933-39, Paul Elek, London p. 88.
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