World War II Diary: 85 Years Ago, Today Tuesday, October 3, 1933

World War II Diary: 85 Years Ago, Today

Tuesday, October 3, 1933

A failed assassination attempt against Engelbert Dollfuss seriously injured him.

Yugoslavian King Alexander arrives in Sofia, Bulgaria, to help establish a Balkan Pact against the Nazis.

Noted traveler and writer William Joseph Harding King, who explored the Libyan Desert as well as the Sahara, dies in Devon, England, at the age of 64.

President Franklin Roosevelt signs 17 codes and confers with Hugh S. Johnson, NRA Administrator.

About 80,000 dressmakers, members of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union, hold a victory celebration because of improvements in hours, wages, and working conditions due to the NRA.

A fire in Griffith Park in Los Angeles trapped more than 50 people employed by a Los Angeles County relief project.

James and Amy Mollison encounter difficulties as they attempt to take off for Baghdad from Ontario. The plane gets off the ground, but winds force it down on the beach, necessitating taking it to Toronto for repairs.

Cuban President Ramón Grau narrowly escaped assassination. Rumors that the U.S. Embassy in Havana would be bombed necessitate a special guard around the building. The public also learns that 30 shots were fired at an armored car carrying President Ramon Grau San Martin.

Japan’s government will reduce acreage planted with rice in 1934, since a bumper crop, plus surplus left from last year, is causing a problem for farmers.

Photograph: Albert Einstein presents his final speech given in Europe, at the Royal Albert Hall, South Kensington, London, England, 3 October 1933.

In his speech at the Royal Albert Hall he declared:

‘If we want to resist the powers which threaten to supress intellectual and individual freedom we must keep clearly before us what is at stake, and what we owe to that freedom which our ancestors have won for us after hard struggles.’

‘Without such freedom there would have been no Shakespeare, no Goethe, no Newton, no Faraday, no Pasteur and no Lister. There would be no comfortable houses for the mass of people, no railway, no wireless, no protection against epidemics, no cheap books, no culture and no enjoyment of art at all. There would be no machines to relieve the people from the arduous labour needed for the production of the essential necessities of life. Most people would lead a dull life of slavery just as under the ancient despotisms of Asia. It is only men who are free, who create the inventions and intellectual works which to us moderns make life worth while.’

The Times reported that Einstein was wildly cheered on rising and during his speech, which was delivered in English. Other speakers at the meeting were physicist and Nobel Prize winner Lord Ernest Rutherford; leading anti-Nazi politician and Nobel Prize winner Sir Joseph Austen Chamberlain; preacher and suffragist Dr Maude Royden and leading economist and social reformer Sir William Beveridge.
Aftermath

Lord Rothermere’s Daily Mail newspaper urged its readers to stay away from the meeting as they regarded Albert Einstein as a communist threat to the country. At this time, Lord Rothermere was a supporter of both Adolf Hitler and the British Union of Fascists.

Four days later, Albert Einstein sailed to New York from Southampton to start a new job at Princeton University, originally planning to be away for only six months. He was never to return to Europe again.