Today in WWII History
World War II History for May 29
1942 - Adolf Hitler ordered all Jews in occupied Paris to wear an identifying yellow star on the left side of their coats.
On this day in 1942, on the advice of Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels, Adolf Hitler orders all Jews in occupied Paris to wear an identifying yellow star on the left side of their coats.
Joseph Goebbels had made the persecution, and ultimately the extermination, of Jews a personal priority from the earliest days of the war, often recording in his diary such statements as: “They are no longer people but beasts,” and “[T]he Jews … are now being evacuated eastward. The procedure is pretty barbaric and is not to be described here more definitely. Not much will remain of the Jews.”
But Goebbels was not the first to suggest this particular form of isolation. “The yellow star may make some Catholics shudder,” wrote a French newspaper at the time. “It renews the most strictly Catholic tradition.” Intermittently, throughout the history of the papal states, that territory in central Italy controlled by the pope, Jews were often confined to ghettoes and forced to wear either yellow hats or yellow stars.
2004 - The World War II Memorial, approved by the U.S. Congress in 1993, was dedicated on the National Mall in Washington, DC. The memorial features 56 granite pillar representing the states, territories of that time and the District of Columbia, and two arches that symbolize the two theaters of the war (Atlantic and Pacific). A wall is also featured with 4,000 sculpted gold stars to commemorate the more than 400,000 Americans killed in the war. The memorial covers seven landscaped acres.
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Author Bio: World War II researcher and historian working to preserve history and educate future generations. A student of Military History working to author and collect as much data as possible on the WWII time period. 
