Leon Sedov, Trotsky's son, is assassinated in…
1938 CE
Leon Sedov, Trotsky's son, is assassinated in 1938, also the year of the first assassination attempt against Trotsky.
Wall Street investment banking firm Brown Brothers Harriman, according to a Village Voice article that will be published 54 years later, “arranged for a loan of tetraethyl lead to the Nazi Luftwaffe” in 1938.
Prescott Bush, father of future US president George Bush, is a senior managing partner of the firm.
Tetraethyl lead is added to gasoline to make leaded gasoline, an essential component of mechanized warfare.
Standard Oil Co. aids Germany in procuring $20 million worth of aviation fuel and lubricants to be stockpiled for the coming war.
Standard Oil, according to an I.G.
Farben internal memo, has established “plants for us ready for production right away on the basis of all the experience that the Americans have had for years.” General Motors, controlled by the Du Pont family, owns 80 percent of the stock of Opel AG, maker of Germany’s passenger cars.
Opel has reportedly earned GM US$36 million over the past decade, but because Hitler has prohibited the export of capital from Germany, GM has reinvested a reported $20 million of its profits in German companies owned or controlled by Nazi officials.
International telephone and Telegraph (IT&T) holds substantial amounts of stock in a number of German arms companies, including fighter aircraft manufacturer Focke-Wulf.
IT&T, though reportedly permitted (unlike GM) to export its profits, reinvests its German profits in the German armaments industry.
The first main petroleum deposits are discovered in Saudi Arabia in 1938.
A 1938 German expedition to Antarctica stakes out 600,000 square kilometers in lands near the South Pole.
In March 1938, Germany annexes Austria.
Alleged abuses of ethnic Germans by Czechs in western Czechoslovakia’s Sudeten area causes an international crisis.
The European powers, meet at Munich to discuss Hitler’s claims on the Czechoslovakian-held Sudetenland, but fail to dissuade him.
In the person of Neville Chamberlain, Britain's "Round Tablers" and "Cliveden Set" orchestrate, with French compliance, Hitler’s initial appeasement.
Britain and France join Italy in allowing Hitler to formally carve away Czechoslovakia’s Sudetenland, which serves only to whet his appetite for lebensraum in the East.
The Nazis, deciding in 1938 to remove all Jews from German soil, begin mass arrests in May 1938 and establish slave labor camps.
Ernst vom Rath, a German legation secretary in Paris, is assassinated in early November 1938.
The Nazis use the event as an excuse for Kristallnacht (“the night of broken glass”) to invoke terror among Germany’s Jews.
On November 9—10, Nazi storm troopers arrest 20,000 people, torch 267 synagogues and destroy Jewish-owned shops and businesses.
The Nazis later assess Germany’s Jews with an atonement fee of $400 million for damage to their own properties.