Snowball Atrocities #1: Snowball Bomb May 24, 2016
Author: Beach Combing | in : Contemporary , trackback
Sometimes the blogger finds a newstory that he cannot let go. After a week of wrestling with his conscience Beach has decided that he simply has to give this particular incidence of love between the peoples of Europe wider coverage. We are in 1931.
Prague. Thursday. Two schoolboys were killed in the course of a snowball fight between Czecho-Slovak boys and a part of German schoolboy visitors at Klein Wuerben, near Maehrisch, Alstaldt. The cause of the death was a home-made bomb in the pocket of one of the boys, which exploded when hit by a hard snowball. Reuter.
By 1931 there were severe tensions between Czechoslovakia and Germany over the German minority living within Czechoslovak territory. Hitler would be Chancellor in a little more than a year; the Sudetenland would be invaded in 1938; then the world would go to war in 1939, in large part because of Hitler’s perfidy over the Czech Republic.
It is very possible that this visit to Klein Wuerben in the Sudetenland was a ‘peace’ visit; or alternatively the ‘Czecho-Slovak boys’ were actually Sudeten Germans and so this was a friendship visit. The snowball fight we can pass over relatively quickly: boys will be boys. However, it is extraordinary that the German children arrived with a homemade bomb powerful enough to kill two when accidentally detonated! What kind of games had they in mind?
Source: ‘Fatal Snowballing’, Hull Daily Mail (31 Dec 1931), 3
Beach has decided to open a ‘snowball’ tag: any good snowball stories from history will be gratefully received, drbeachcombing AT yahoo DOT com
