Friday, January 31, 2014

Friday, 31 January 1930

Hamburg:  

Rioting again breaks out, despite a heavy and armed police presence, when the unemployed and many communists ignore police orders not to demonstrate.  Police, sometimes failing to distinguish demonstrators from other citizens, wade into numerous gatherings, often roughing up peaceful bystanders.  Eventually they open fire on some of the rioters.  The worst fighting takes place in front of a new building where the demonstrators try to force the workers there to lay down their tools in a sympathy strike.  Twenty more people are arrested (in addition to yesterday’s total), and the entire police force is ordered to a state of emergency.  By nightfall, police issue a statement saying they have the situation under control.

Berlin:  

Meanwhile the entire police force here is also ordered to emergency duty in anticipation of communist agitation.  Communists have announced plans, in defiance of an order from the Prussian Ministry of the Interior against such gatherings, for several groups to gather in various parts of the city, then converge on a central meeting place.  Police warn that they will fire on demonstrators if necessary.

And all of this is intensified by the news that 76 people, including several Reichstag members, have been arrested at a secret communist meeting said to be plotting a coup attempt in Germany for Feb. 1.  The riots were supposedly a prelude to the larger plot. 

Paris:  

The uproar is growing over what is thought to be a brazen daylight kidnapping of Alexander Koutiepoff, former general of the White Russian forces.  A second witness emerges claiming to have seen Koutiepoff abducted, and conservative French newspapers are calling for France to break diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union over the episode.  Koutiepoff’s wife is quoted as saying, “It is the Bolsheviks!  I know it!  I know those people!”

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