Sketch of Cthulhu drawn by H.P. Lovecraft in 1934:

To R.H. Barlow, Esq., whose Sculpture hath given immortality to this trivial Design of his oblig’d of all servants. 

Cthulhu

H.P. Lovecraft

11th May, 1934

April 10, 1930: Dolores Huerta is born.

Dolores Huerta was born in Dawson, New Mexico, and was raised by her mother (along with her two brothers) in Stockton, California, a major city in the state’s agriculturally productive San Joaquin Valley. Although her mother eventually became a hotel owner and a successful businesswoman, Huerta’s community was supported by low-wage migrant farm workers (like the family of Cesar Chavez), and so Huerta herself, inspired by her upbringing and her experience working as a teacher among impoverished students, became a community organizer and set out to “correct economic injustice”. In the 1950s Huerta worked with the Stockton chapter of the Community Service Organization, a group that focused on promoting political participation and empowerment among American immigrant groups, especially Mexican-Americans, and which came to be known as “a training ground for the first generation of Latino leaders”. Among these leaders was Huerta herself, and Cesar Chavez, whom she met while working with the CSO. 

In 1960, she founded the Agricultural Workers Association (AWA), and in 1962 Huerta and Chavez founded a union called the National Farm Workers Association that would later merge with the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee to become the United Farm Workers of America, . Its principal aim was (and is) to organize farmworkers and, through non-violent methods, to “provide farm workers and other working people with the inspiration and tools to share in society’s bounty”. In 1965, the AWOC and NFWA organized the Delano grape strike in protest of the poor pay (90 cents an hour, on average) and poor working conditions of table grape growers; this strike was not resolved until 1970, but the activists successfully brought national attention to the plight of oft-overlooked farmworkers. Huerta was a co-founder of the UFW and one of its major spokespeople and organizers, but she also provided within the union a feminist voice; previously she had referred to feminism as a “middle-class phenomenon”, but later referred to herself as a “born-again feminist” - in addition to organizing farmworkers in pursuit of better pay and working conditions, Huerta also worked to get more women involved in the movement. 

During her work as an activist, Huerta was arrested over twenty times. In 1988, she was beaten by the police in San Francisco during a peaceful protest against the policies of George H.W. Bush, and after this incident she began to focus on women’s rights advocacy. Since the 1990s, Huerta has received numerous honors and awards for her work, including the Eleanor Roosevelt Human Rights Award in 1998, honorary degrees from several institutions, and most recently the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the United States’ highest civilian award.  

April 1, 1939: The Spanish Civil War ends.

On March 28, 1939, Spanish Republican forces surrendered Madrid to Francisco Franco and his Nationalist army, which had besieged the capital for, by then, nearly three years. Madrid was one of the last Republican strongholds left standing in Spain after the Catalonia Offensive and the subsequent capture of Barcelona, and shortly after the fall of the capital city, the Francoists completed their total conquest of all of Spain. 

Franco declared over the radio on April 1 the Nationalist victory and an end to a conflict that had cost half a million lives - and yet was still only the beginning, as the Spanish Civil War was in some ways a precursor to World War II, mostly with regard to early usage of tactics and equipment (like terror bombing and the Luftwaffe’s Stukas)that would be used throughout the later conflict. Shortly after the end of the war, the new Francoist government set out to purge and punish the new regime’s enemies, a continuation of the ongoing “White Terror”. Tens of thousands of Franco’s wartime enemies were executed or sent to labor camps or deported to Nazi concentration camps, and even those who had fled to France were soon targeted by the Vichy government, rounded up, and interned. Trade unions and all political parties except the Falange were suppressed. The end of the Spanish Civil War marked the beginning of Francisco Franco’s dictatorship (which was  nominally neutral throughout World War II, though it remained friendly toward the Axis powers), a not-quite fascist regime that lasted until Franco’s death in 1975. 

March 30, 1940: Japan establishes a Chinese puppet government in Nanjing.

In 1931, the Empire of Japan invaded Manchuria (the northeast portion of China) following the Mukden Incident and, following its successful conquest of the region, established a puppet state known as Manchukuo, or Manshū-koku, which came to be “ruled” in 1934 by Puyi, China’s last emperor, who had been permanently deposed in 1917. In 1937, a clash known as the Marco Polo Incident marked the beginning of total war between China and Japan and the beginning of the full-scale Japanese invasion of China. Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek and his forces (which had temporarily made peace with the Chinese Communist Party in the midst of their civil war) managed to hold off the Japanese reasonably well, though his armies incurred massive casualties and the war cost countless civilian lives as well. In 1937, the Japanese captured the Nationalist capital at Nanjing and carried out a massacre against its inhabitants that came to be known as the “Rape of Nanking”. 

The Kuomingtang fled to Chongqing, and in 1940 the Japanese established a collaborationist government to rival the relocated KMT government; this new “Reorganized National Government of China” was led by Wang Jingwei (pictured above), a former member of the KMT, known in postwar China as a Benedict Arnold-type collaborationist traitor. The new government used the same flag (with an extra pennant reading “peace, anti-Communism, national construction”) and emblem as the KMT government and claimed to be the rightful government of China, although it was not recognized by any of the Allied powers, nor did it exert any actual governing power over the regions it was supposedly given control over (i.e. ostensibly all of China except Manchukuo). It operated under three main principles: pan-Asianism, anti-communism, and anti-KMT. Wang Jingwei, whose government was subject to constant sabotage and resistance throughout the war, died before its end, in 1944, and the regime was dissolved in 1945 after Japan’s defeat in World War II. 

March 22, 1933: Dachau concentration camp opens.

Dachau concentration camp, located in the southern German state of Bavaria, was completed and opened less than two months after Adolf Hitler was named Chancellor or Germany, making it the earliest built of the Nazi concentration camps. The construction of Dachau took place amidst the Nazis’  consolidation of power in the German government (and very soon over all aspects of German life), and its initial purpose was to suppress any potential opponents of the new regime - political prisoners, often communists and social democrats. Later, the camp’s prisoner population came to include common criminals and religious dissidents; in 1935, Jehovah’s Witnesses and homosexuals arrived as prisoners to Dachau; in 1938, after the annexations of Austria and the Sudetenland, 11,000 Jews were deported to the camp; and throughout the war, more prisoners from all across Europe came to Dachau. In 1939 its prisoners were relocated to Buchenwald, but by 1944 thousands of people had been packed together into this overcrowded, disease-ridden camp.  

As the first camp to be established by the Nazis, Dachau served as the model for later concentration camps and a testing ground for techniques that would be used at those other sites. Theodor Eicke was made commandant of the camp in June of 1933, and it was he more than anyone who devised the system and regulations of Dachau and most later Nazi camps. His Lagerordnung served as the camps’ disciplinary code, laying out the various punishments, ranging from hard time to flogging to death, to be doled out to prisoners who violated dress codes or attempted to agitate revolt. Although distinct from the extermination camps of Poland, whose main purpose was to kill as many people as possible as efficiently as possible, Dachau claimed thousands of lives due to poor sanitation, starvation, overworking, outbreaks of typhus, and other factors. 

Dachau, its subsidiary camps, and the approximately 60,000 people imprisoned within them were liberated in April of 1945 by American soldiers, who, after seeing the horrific conditions of the camps and the railroad cars piled high with bodies, killed a number of German guards. In May, the 7,000 prisoners (mostly Jews) who had been forced by their guards on a death march to Tegernsee were also liberated. 

March 13, 1938: The Anschluss is declared.

The Anschluss (Anschluß) was the annexation of Austria into Nazi Germany, in which Austria ceased to be an independent state and was incorporated into the Greater German Reich as Ostmark - Eastern march, a name meant to enforce pan-Germanism by suggesting that Austria was merely the eastern portion of a new German empire. This action was explicitly forbidden by the terms of the Treaty of Versailles, and the Austrian government in power between 1934 and 1938 was opposed to union with Germany; however, in February of 1938, Adolf Hitler met with Austrian Chancellor Kurt Schuschnigg at Berchtesgaden, where the two settled a mostly one-sided agreement to ease the tensions between the two nations. Schuschnigg agreed to end his government’s opposition to National Socialists in Austria. Shortly afterward, Schuschnigg made Arthur Seyss-Inquart, an Austrian National Socialist, Austria’s new Minister of the Interior (he also served as chancellor during the brief period between Schuschnigg’s resignation and the beginning of the Anschluss). Schuschnigg’s efforts to preserve Austria’s independence continued, however, and he called for a plebiscite on the issue of unification with Germany to be conducted on March 13; Hitler, fearing that a plebiscite might affirm Austrian independence by popular vote, ordered German troops into Austria on March 12 on the grounds that the people had requested German military aid. 

No fighting took place, and German forces were greeted with flowers and cheering - which is why the annexation of Austria is sometimes called the “war of flowers” (Blumenkrieg). One day later, a law regarding the union of the two nations was promulgated, although the new plebiscite. which could now be safely conducted under the supervision of the Nazis, was not held until April 10 - it declared that 99.7% of Austrian voters desired union with Germany. Meanwhile, former chancellor Schuschnigg was placed under house arrest, and Adolf Hitler entered his native country as, in his own words, a “liberator”. Although many Austrians still opposed the Anschluss, many of these dissidents were also thankful that the takeover had occurred so quickly and bloodlessly. Austrian Jews were, of course, not welcomed with open arms and integrated smoothly into the Greater German Reich - shortly after the Anschluss, even before the April 10 plebiscite, the Nazis began to institute anti-Jewish policies in Austria, subjecting Austrian Jews to the same treatment they would have been made to endure in Germany.