April 21, 1943:
- April 20: "In the Warsaw Ghetto, Germans set fire to houses block by block and shoot all who emerge from buildings, bunkers, and sewers. Many Jews travel across rooftops and continue to fight. Patients at Warsaw's Czyste Hospital are murdered by German troops; See April 25, 1943.
- "Popular French film star Harry Baur dies in Berlin after being tortured by the Gestapo."
"Suitcases of Jews deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau, the camp's killing center, serve as a stark reminder that the victims had no notion of their impending doom.
Orders for deportation came suddenly and swiftly.
Jews hurriedly placed a few precious belongings in suitcases, wrote their names on the exteriors, and boarded trains to what they thought would be relocation centers somewhere in Eastern Europe.
Upon boarding, people were separated from their belongings and told the items would be returned when they disembarked.
Sorting through the belongings of Jews deported to Auschwitz and other death camps was a major and profitable undertaking."
"Gerard Kornmann hid Dutch Jews on two occasions.
In the end, however, an informer betrayed him, and he was arrested and shipped to the Sachsenhausen, Germany, concentration camp via the Vught, Netherlands, transit camp.
Following the Allied invasion of Western Europe, his captors shipped him to Lübeck, Germany.
He was on the Cap Arcona, which was among the four boats that the British bombed, assuming that the passengers were German, on May 3, 1945.
Kornmann died in the attack.
The irony of all this is painfully obvious, yet Kornmann's ultimate fate can be traced back to the informer--possibly a neighbor or even a "friend"--who betrayed him to the occupying authorities.
The possible reason can only be guessed at."
"In April 1943 the Germans uncovered the bodies of more than 4000 Polish POWs in the Katyn Forest, killed in 1940, apparently by the NKVD, the Soviet secret police.
The Soviets denied all responsibility, contending that the Germans were to blame."
"The Polish government-in-exile in London suspected the Soviets of the massacre, and its insistence that a thorough inquiry be pursued led to a cessation of relations between the Russians and the London Poles.
This provided a pretext for Joseph Stalin to establish a Communist government in Poland after the war."