On this day: August 7
POSTED: 02:38 PM PDT Aug 06, 2012
UPDATED: 11:00 PM PDT Aug 06, 2012
The Purple Heart is born, a comic legend dies, a man on a wire goes for a stroll a quarter of a mile above the sidewalks of Manhattan, and U.S. embassies in Africa are targeted in a terrorist attack, all on this day.
German Federal Archive/Wikimedia Commons
1938: The building of Mauthausen concentration camp begins in Germany. Initially a single camp at Mauthausen, it expanded over time and by the summer of 1940, the camp had become one of the largest labor camp complexes in German-controlled Europe. The largest prisoner of war contingent was Soviet, the second largest was Spanish.
