On 4 August 1914, Belgium and Britain declared war on Germany after Germany’s invasion of Belgium. The front page of next day’s Washington Times recorded “President offers to act as mediator”. Wilson was dealing with international catastrophe upon the shadow of his wife’s battle with Bright’s disease, to which she succumbed on 6 August.
On 4 August 1918, Corporal Adolf Hitler received the Iron Cross First Class upon the recommendation of his immediate superior, Lieutenant Hugo Gutmann. Gutmann, also a holder, would be persecuted with the rest of his race by Hitler, but managed to get out. First, to Belgium, then to the US, where he worked as a typewriter salesman in St Louis. His resting place is a Jewish cemetery in San Diego, the Home of Peace.
On 4 August 1944, tipped-off German police stormed the Achterhuis and seized Anne Frank and her family.
On 4 August 1964, the bodies were found of Andrew Goodman (New York Jew, friend and classmate of Paul Simon), James Earl Chaney (suspended from his segregated high school for wearing an NAACP badge), and Michael Schwerner (New York Jew, friend and schoolmate of Robert Reich). They had been murdered by white supremacists in June. Schwerner’s widow remarked during the search:
It is tragic, as far as I am concerned, that white northerners have to be caught up in the machinery of injustice and indifference in the South. Before the American people register concern, I personally suspect that if Mr Chaney, who is a native Mississippian negro, had been alone at the time of the disappearance that this case like so many other that have come before would have been completely unnoticed.
4 August is the birthday of Raoul Wallenberg, the Swedish diplomat whose issue of protective passports in Budapest allowed many Jews to avoid murder, and of Barack Obama, first black US president.
