‘Bloody Sunday’ refers to a riot on July 17, 1932, where Fascists, under police escort, marched through the working‐class neighborhoods of Altona until unknown shooters from the rooftops and windows opened fire on them.

Nineteen or ‘eighteen SA, KPD, policemen, and even female bystanders were killed’, with ‘16 of them by police bullets’. Two hundred and eighty‐five people took injury on that day, and afterwards we lost four comrades. This riot would become the pretext for the German bourgeoisie’s suspension of the pseudodemocracy.

Quoting Richard J. Evans’s The Third Reich in Power, 1933–1939, page 71:

The first batch of Communists to be beheaded consisted of four young men arrested for their supposed part in the events of the Altona ‘Bloody Sunday’ in Ju[ly] 1932, when a number of brownshirts had been shot dead — supposedly by Communists, in reality by panicking units of the Prussian police — during a march through a heavily Communist district of the Prussian town. Condemned by a Special Court in Altona on trumped‐up charges of planning an armed uprising, the four men appealed for clemency to Hermann Göring.

The local state prosecutor advised him to turn the appeal down: ‘Carrying out the sentences will bring the whole seriousness of their situation graphically before the eyes of people of Communist inclinations; it will be a lasting warning for them and have a deterrent effect.’ The sentences were duly carried out and the executions were widely publicized in the press.

A spirit of pure revenge was what informed the decision to force forty Communists sentenced in another mass trial to witness the beheading by hand‐held axe of four of their fellow ‘red marines’ in the yard of a Hamburg prison in 1934 at a ceremony also attended by brownshirts, SS men and the male relatives of [Fascist] activists who had died in street fighting in 1932.

The defiant reaction of the Communists, who shouted political slogans and physically resisted the executioners, ensured that this would not happen again.

Quoting Samuel W. Mitcham, Jr.’s Why Hitler? The Genesis of the Nazi Reich:

[Chancellor Franz von] Papen used the Altona riot as an excuse to end the political deadlock in Prussia and to extend his own power base. On July 20 he used his emergency presidential powers and ordered General Gerd von Rundstedt to remove the Social Democratic/Center coalition (which had remained in office without a majority in the Landtag) on the grounds that it had failed to maintain law and order and had failed to deal firmly with the Reds. Otto Braun, the Prussian premier since 1920, was ousted.

By this act, Papen hoped to portray himself as the protector of the Republic against the Red menace, and thus steal some of Hitler’s thunder. He named himself commissioner of Prussia and Franz Bracht, the mayor of Essen, as his deputy and minister of the interior, the man in charge of the Prussian police and two‐thirds of the police in the Reich. In ousting the democratic government of Prussia, Papen removed another pillar from the crumbling edifice that was the Weimar Republic.

(Emphasis added in all cases.)

F. von Papen was instrumental in the Third Reich’s establishment, agreeing to give Adolf Schicklgruber a cabinet position in January a year later.

Other events that happened today (July 17):

1928: Prefascist member of the now Fascist Chamber of Deputies, Giovanni Giolitti, died.
1936: General Francisco Franco and other Spanish fascists rebelled from Morocco against the recently elected left‐leaning Popular Front government of Spain and started the civil war.
1944: An Allied aeroplane severely injured Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, among other Axis personnel, while they were going through Sainte‐Foy‐de‐Montgommery and on their way back to headquarters.
1945: Axis Field Marshal, Ernst Bernhard Wilhelm Busch, kicked the bucket (as Joseph Stalin, W. Churchill and H. Truman met together in Potsdam to discuss what to do with his country, no less).

In addition to the daily topics, I am planning on appending ‘on this day’ sections to them, which shall feature ideas for future topics and frequently contain interesting coincidences. Any feedback on this idea is appreciated.

ETA: retitled the topic.