Eighty years ago this week the Red Army occupation of eastern European capitals brings Soviet methods in its wake.

 

 

In the final stages of the the German occuption of Budapest, Raoul Wallenberg, a member of the prominent family of Swedish industrialists, had been sent there to rescue Jews from deportation to Nazi death camps or persecution by the Hungarian fascist Arrow Cross party. He issued Swedish documentation to Jews and rented properties ostensibly as official Swedish premises, which were used to house Jews. It is unknown how many Jews were saved by his efforts, but it was certainly some thousands. He was detained by the Soviet security forces when the Red Army conquered Budapest and deported to Moscow under a false accusation of espionage but for reasons which remain obscure. He died, possibly murdered, in Soviet captivity.

The Red Army took Warsaw with minimal fighting. The Soviet puppet Polish National Committee  was immediately installed there to anchor its claim to be the legitimate government of the country.

F. D. Roosevelt was inaugurated for his fourth term as US President in a brief and simple ceremony at the White House rather than the Capitol. Publicly this was as a wartime economy measure (The US was still at peace for his third inauguration), but in reality was designed with a view to his desperately poor health.

The British government disclosed arrangements for the general election due later in the year. These were shaped to ward off any suggestion of a snap poll designed to favour the Conservative Party. It was intended to avoid any repetition of the "khaki election" immediately after the armistice in 1918 which returned the Lloyd George coalition to power. There would be at least seven weeks notice of the election. Servicemen would be able to vote in person and not only by proxy, and the timing of the count was to be organised so as to allow ballot papers to be shipped to the relevant constituences. Many men would still be serving in the Far East.  It is possible the the Conservatives imagined that people serving in the military would be more inclined to vote Conservative, whilst wives or other possible proxies living in Britain might be more susceptible  to the appeal of Labour.

 

 

Wallenberg disappears 

Poloish National Committee moves to Warsaw

For inaugurated indoors