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– April 16, 1947 – NBC World News Roundup – Gordon Skene Sound Collection –
April 16, 1947 – Another fractured day in a Post-War world. News from The Holy Land over the situation in Palestine and violence erupting between Arabs and Jews and British troops as the common target.
On this day in 1947, the hanging execution was carried out for Dov Gruner. Gruner was born on December 6, 1912 to a religious Jewish family in Kisvárda, Hungary. In 1938, after studying engineering in Brno, he joined the Zionist youth movement Betar, which arranged his passage to Palestine in 1940 aboard the illegal immigrant ship S.S. Skaria. After spending six months in the Atlit detainee camp, he settled in Rosh Pina. In 1941, he joined the British Army to fight the Nazis, and together with his comrades in the Jewish Brigade came to the aid of Holocaust survivors in Europe. After Grüner’s demobilization from the army, in March 1946, he took part in an Irgun arms raid against a British army depot near Netanya. Ten days later he participated in his second and final operation on behalf of the Irgun—an arms raid against a Ramat Gan police station. Gruner headed a team of “porters”, who took weapons from the armory to a waiting truck. When a gunfight in which two Irgun men and an Arab constable were killed broke out, Gruner and his team continued working under fire. Gruner was hit and wounded during the firefight. The remaining Irgun members boarded the truck and escaped together with the weapons.
Gruner, who had been severely wounded by a gunshot to the face, was taken to hospital and operated on. His health slowly began to improve, and he was transferred to prison. On January 1, 1947, his trial before a Jerusalem military court began.
On this day, Gruner was hanged at Acre prison on April 16, 1947, at the age of 35. Executed together with him were his Irgun colleagues Yehiel Dresner, Mordechai Alkahi and Eliezer Kashani. And trouble in the Holy Land continued.
In other news – Secretary of State George Marshall was meeting with Soviet Premier Stalin to discuss the matter of Germany and it’s reunification. Russia was hard pressed to allow anything resembling the old Germany to resurface again.
And the nationwide Telephone strike was cranking along. Talks were resuming, but there was no end in sight.
And that’s just a bit of what went on, this April 16, 1947 as reported by the NBC News Of The World.
