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Soltan Petru (b. 1931-06-29 / d. 2016-07-15)
He was a Moldovan mathematician. He was a member of the Academy of Sciences of Moldova and an honorary member of the Romanian Academy. Petru Soltan was a member of the Mathematical Society of Moldova. Petru Soltan served as member of the Parliament of Moldova (1990–1994) and is a leader of the Democratic Forum of Romanians in Moldova.
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68
Born 1878-03-31. Domain:Sport. Cause of death:Accident
"Jack" Johnson was an American boxer who, at the height of the Jim Crow era, became the first African American world heavyweight boxing champion (1908–1915). Among the period's most dominant champions, Johnson remains a boxing legend, with his 1910 fight against James J. Jeffries dubbed the "fight of the century". According to filmmaker Ken Burns, "for more than thirteen years, Jack Johnson was the most famous and the most notorious African-American on Earth". Transcending boxing, he became part of the culture and the history of racism in America. Johnson died in a car crash on U.S. Highway 1 near Franklinton, North Carolina after racing angrily from a diner that refused to serve him. He was taken to the closest black hospital, Saint Agnes Hospital in Raleigh.
40
Born 1905-06-03. Domain:Society. Cause of death:Murder
SS-Hauptsturmführer (Captain) Martin Gottfried Weiss, alternatively spelled Weiß was the Commandant of Dachau concentration camp in 1945. He also served as the commandant of Neuengamme concentration camp from April 1940 until September 1942. Weiss was born in Weiden in der Oberpfalz. He was tried during the Dachau Trials of 15 November — 13 December 1945, found guilty, and was executed on 29 May 1946.
49
Born 1897-01-17. Domain:Society. Cause of death:Murder
He was a French doctor who was convicted of multiple murders after the discovery of the remains of 26 people in his home in Paris after World War II. He is suspected of killing more than sixty victims during his life.
During World War I, Petiot was drafted into the French infantry in January 1916. In Aisne he was wounded and gassed and exhibited more symptoms of mental breakdown. He was sent to various rest homes, where he was arrested for stealing army blankets and jailed in Orleans. In a psychiatric hospital at Fleury-les-Aubrais he was again diagnosed with various mental ailments but was returned to the front in June of 1918. He was transferred three weeks later after he shot himself in the foot, but was attached to a new regiment in September. A new diagnosis was enough to get him discharged with a disability pension.
Petiot went on trial on March 19, 1946, facing 135 criminal charges. René Floriot acted for the defense, against a team consisting of state prosecutors and twelve civil lawyers hired by relatives of Petiot's victims. Petiot taunted the prosecuting lawyers, and claimed that various victims had been collaborators or double agents, or that vanished people were alive and well in South America under new names. He admitted to killing just nineteen of the twenty-seven victims found in his house, and claimed that they were Germans and collaborators - part of a total of 63 "enemies" killed. Floriot attempted to portray Petiot as a resistance hero, but the judges and jurors were unimpressed. Petiot was convicted of 26 counts of murder, and sentenced to death.
On May 25, Petiot was beheaded, after a stay of a few days due to a problem in the release mechanism of the guillotine.
63
Born 1883-06-05. Domain:science (economics). Cause of death:Heart attack
Keynes was ultimately a successful investor, building up a substantial private fortune. He was nearly wiped out following the Stock Market Crash of 1929, but he soon recouped his fortune.
54
Born 1892-11-01. Domain:Sport. Cause of death:Unknown
Fourth World Chess Champion.
During World War II, Alekhine played in several tournaments held in Germany or German-occupied territory. In 1941, a number of anti-semitic articles entitled Aryan and Jewish Chess appeared under his name in the Pariser Zeitung. Extensive investigations have not yielded conclusive evidence of the authenticity of the articles.
While planning for a World championship match against Botvinnik, he died in his hotel room in Estoril, Portugal. His death, the circumstances of which are still a matter of debate, is thought to have been caused either by his choking on a piece of meat, or by a heart attack.
57
Born 1889-03-05. Domain:Politics. Cause of death:Unknown
In 1918, he was elected general secretary of the Section française de l'Internationale ouvrière (SFIO) socialist party. Frossard took a trip to Bolshevist Russia in 1920 and became a supporter of Leninism, campaigning for his party to join the Comintern. The Leninists inside the PSU led to the party's split at the December 25 Congress of Tours. Frossard became general secretary of the new French Communist Party (PCF), while Léon Blum led the SFIO. Nonetheless, Frossard soon became disenchanted with the PCF's rejection of pluralism - he resigned on January 1, 1923, and joined the SFIO himself.
Frossard was made Minister of Public Works and Transmissions in the First Government of Philippe Pétain, created after the Battle of France and the beginning of the Nazi German occupation of France. After the signing of the armistice, he refused to be part of any Vichy France executive, but worked as a journalist. Suspicion of collaboration with the enemy led to an enquiry into his activities at the end of World War II, but his name was soon cleared.
59
Born 1886-04-17. Domain:Society. Cause of death:Cancer (stomach)
James Gralton was born in the townland of Effrinagh, Parish of Kiltoghert, about six miles from Carrick-on-Shannon in County Leitrim. His parents were Micheal Gralton and Alice Campbell. There were four girls and three boys in the family: Winnie, Mary Ann, Alice and Maggie Kate were the girls, and the boys were Jimmy, Charles and a little boy who died young. Gralton was reared on a small farm of about twenty-five acres of bad land, which was surrounded by some good land. The people were too poor to buy fertiliser for the crops so they had to burn some of the topsoil, and this left the land poor and shallow. Gralton emigrated to the United States in 1909, but returned to Ireland to fight in the Irish War of Independence, and later in 1932 to look after his mother, where he led the Revolutionary Workers' Group in Leitrim, a predecessor of the Communist Party of Ireland. He ran a dance hall in Effrinagh where he arranged free events where he expounded his political views. There were violent protests against these dances, led by Catholic priests, which culminated in a shooting incident. Following this, on 9 February 1933, he was arrested, and later deported to the United States of America, on the basis that he was an alien. This led to public protests organised by the Irish Republican Army. Shortly before his death from stomach cancer, in New York, he married Bessie Cronogue (d. 1975), a woman from Drumsna, County Leitrim, only a few miles from where he had been brought up.
60
Born 1885-11-11. Domain:Society. Cause of death:Accident
It was in World War II that he truly made his mark. Patton commanded both corps and armies as a general in North Africa, Sicily, and the European Theater of Operations. Near the end of the Sicilian campaign, Patton jeopardized his career by slapping a soldier recuperating at a hospital. The well-publicized incident caused General Eisenhower to relieve him of command. Thus, instead of playing a major part in the invasion of Normandy, he was relegated to being a decoy. However, he was later given command of the U.S. Third Army and ably led it in breaking out of the hedgerows of Normandy and across France. When a surprise major German offensive resulted in American units being surrounded in Bastogne, Patton rapidly disengaged his army from fighting in another sector in order to relieve the key town.
Patton often got into trouble with his outspokenness and strong opinions. In addition to the slapping incident, towards the end of the war, he voiced his detestation and mistrust of the Soviets and his desire to fight them. He has also been criticized for sending an ill-fated rescue mission for his son-in-law, held in a prison camp deep behind enemy lines.
On December 9, 1945, a day before he was due to return to the United States, Patton was severely injured in a road accident. He and his chief of staff, Major General Hobart R. "Hap" Gay, were on a day trip to hunt pheasants in the country outside Mannheim. Their 1938 Cadillac Model 75 was driven by PFC Horace Woodring (1926 - 2003), with Patton sitting in the back seat on the right side, with General Gay on his left, as per custom. At 11:45 near Neckarstadt (Käfertal), a 2½ ton GMC truck driven by Technical Sergeant Robert L. Thompson hit the car containing the general head-on. According to the book Unexplained Mysteries of World War II, as the crash was at a railway crossing and the vehicles were just starting up, this means the crash was at no more than 20 miles per hour.
At first the crash seemed minor, the vehicles were hardly damaged, no one in the truck was hurt, and Gay and Woodring were uninjured. However, Patton was leaning back with trouble breathing. The general had been thrown forward and his head struck a metal part of the partition between the front and back seats. Paralyzed from the neck down, George Patton died of an
embolism several days later.
79
Born 1866-08-13. Domain:Business. Cause of death:Age
Was an Italian entepreneur, who founded Fiat car manufacturing in 1899.
Got compromised with Mussolini.
For his grandson, see Gianni Agnelli.
80
Born 1865-09-01. Domain:Science (Physics style). Cause of death:Age
He invented the test called "Mouton-Charpy" (Charpy Impact test).
62
Born 1883-06-28. Domain:Politics. Cause of death:Murder
Charged with treason and violating state security, Laval was tried and after being found guilty, despite vigorously defending himself in the first part of his trial, was sentenced to death. After a failed attempt at suicide (the cyanide had lost its full potency), he was executed by firing squad at Fresnes prison, near Paris, half-unconscious and vomiting.
48
Born 1897-03-19. Domain:Society. Cause of death:Murder
After the Normandy Invasion and Allied advance, Darnand fled to Germany in September 1944 and joined Pétain's puppet government in Sigmaringen. In April 1945, he had to flee from Sigmaringen to Merano in Northern Italy. He was eventually captured after the war and taken back to France, where he was executed by firing squad in October 1945.
76
Born 1869-09-06. Domain:Writing. Cause of death:Age
Felix Salten was an Austro-Hungarian author and literary critic in Vienna. Salten was born Siegmund Salzmann in Pest, Austria-Hungary. His father was Fülöp Salzmann, the telegraph office's clerk in Pest; his mother was Maria Singer. He was the grandson of an Orthodox rabbi. When he was four weeks old, his family relocated to Vienna, as many Jews did after the Imperial government had granted full citizenship rights to Jews in 1867. His best remembered work is Bambi (1923). A translation in English was published by Simon & Schuster in 1928, and became a Book-of-the-Month Club success. In 1933, he sold the film rights to the American director Sidney Franklin for only $1,000, and Franklin later transferred the rights to the Walt Disney Studios, which formed the basis of the animated film Bambi (1942). Life in Austria became perilous for Jews during the 1930s. In Germany, Adolf Hitler had Salten's books banned in 1936. Two years later, after Germany's annexation of Austria, Salten moved to Zurich, Switzerland, with his wife, and spent his final years there.
63
Born 1882-09-30. Domain:Science (Physics style). Cause of death:Age
He was a German physicist. He is perhaps best known as the co-inventor of the Geiger counter and for the Geiger-Marsden experiment which discovered the Atomic nucleus. He did not hesitate to give to the nazis some of his jewish colleagues, who had helped him in his discoveries. He was a member of the Uranium Club, which was working on an atomic bomb for Nazi Germany. Geiger died in Potsdam, Germany a few months after World War II ended.
62
Born 1883-12-03. Domain:Music. Cause of death:Murder
Webern's music was denounced as "cultural Bolshevism" and "degenerate art" by the Nazi Party in Germany, even before they seized power in Austria in 1938. Although Webern had sharply attacked Nazi cultural policies in private lectures given in 1933, their intended publication did not take place at that time, which proved fortunate since this later "would have exposed Webern to serious consequences." During the war, however, his patriotic fervor led him to endorse the regime in a series of letters to Joseph Hueber, where he described Hitler on 2 May 1940 as "this unique man" who created "the new state" of Germany. As a result of official disapproval, he found it harder (though at no stage impossible) to earn a living, and had to take on work as an editor and proofreader for his publishers, Universal Edition. He left Vienna near the end of the war, and moved to Mittersill in Salzburg, believing he would be safer there. On 15 September 1945, during the Allied occupation of Austria, he was accidentally shot dead by an American Army soldier following the arrest of his son-in-law for black market activities, when, despite the curfew in effect, he stepped outside the house to enjoy a cigar without disturbing his sleeping grandchildren.
24
Born 1921-05-04. Domain:Science (Physics style). Cause of death:Accident
He was an Armenian-American physicist with the Manhattan Project who accidentally irradiated himself on August 21, 1945, during a critical mass experiment at the remote Omega Site facility at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, resulting in his death 25 days later.
53
Born 1892-03-30. Domain:Science (Math style). Cause of death:Cancer (lung)
His funeral at Lwów's Łyczaków Cemetery turned into a patriotic demonstration by the Poles who still remained in the city.
35
Born 1909-11-24. Domain:Science (Math style). Cause of death:Other
Gerhard Karl Erich Gentzen was a German mathematician and logician. He made major contributions to the foundations of mathematics, proof theory, especially on natural deduction and sequent calculus. He died of starvation in a Soviet prison camp in Prague in 1945, having been interned as a German national after the Second World War. Gentzen was arrested during the citizens uprising against the occupying German forces on May 5, 1945. He, along with the rest of the staff of the German University in Prague was subsequently handed over to Soviet forces. Because of his past association with the SA, NSDAP and NSD Dozentenbund, Gentzen was detained in a prison camp, where he died of starvation.
39
Born 1905-08-11. Domain:Society. Cause of death:Unknown
He was a German SS officer and member of the Institute for Hygiene of the Waffen-SS. He witnessed mass murders in the Nazi extermination camps Belzec and Treblinka. He reportedly contacted the Swedish diplomat Göran von Otter as well as members of the Roman Catholic Church with contacts to Pope Pius XII in order to inform the international public about the Holocaust. In 1945 he wrote the Gerstein Report about this. Afterward he allegedly committed suicide.
On 22 April 1945, Gerstein surrendered to the French commandant of the occupied town of Reutlingen. He received a sympathetic reception and was transferred to a residence in a hotel in Rottweil. It was there that he was able to write out his reports. However, he was later transferred to the notorious Cherche-Midi military prison where he was apparently treated as a war criminal. On 25 July, 1945 he was found dead in his cell, an alleged suicide.
57
Born 1888-09-25. Domain:Science (Math style). Cause of death:Age
Stefan Mazurkiewicz was a Polish mathematician who worked in mathematical analysis, topology, and probability. He was a student of Wacław Sierpiński and a member of the Polish Academy of Learning (PAU). His students included Karol Borsuk, Bronisław Knaster, Kazimierz Kuratowski, Stanisław Saks, and Antoni Zygmund. For a time Mazurkiewicz was a professor at the University of Paris; however, he spent most of his career as a professor at the University of Warsaw. The Hahn–Mazurkiewicz theorem, a basic result on curves prompted by the phenomenon of space-filling curves, is named for Mazurkiewicz and Hans Hahn. His 1935 paper Sur l'existence des continus indécomposables is generally considered the most elegant piece of work in point-set topology. During the Polish–Soviet War (1919–21), Mazurkiewicz as early as 1919 broke the most common Russian cipher for the Polish General Staff's cryptological agency. Thanks to this, orders issued by Soviet commander Mikhail Tukhachevsky's staff were known to Polish Army leaders. This contributed substantially, perhaps decisively, to Polish victory at the critical Battle of Warsaw and possibly to Poland's survival as an independent country.
45
Born 1900-07-04. Domain:Writing. Cause of death:Other
During World War II, Desnos was an active member of the French Résistance, often publishing under pseudonyms, and was arrested by the Gestapo on February 22, 1944. He was first deported to Auschwitz, then Buchenwald, Flossenburg and finally to Térézin (Theresienstadt) in Czechoslovakia in 1945, where he died from typhoid, only weeks after the camp’s liberation. He wrote poems during his imprisonment which were destroyed accidentally following his death.
41
Born 1904-04-21. Domain:Society. Cause of death:Suicide
Odilo Lothar Ludwig Globocnik was an Austrian Nazi and a Holocaust perpetrator. He was an official of the Nazi Party and later a high-ranking leader of the SS. He had a leading role in Operation Reinhard, which organized the murder of around one and a half million mostly Polish Jews during the Holocaust in the Majdanek, Treblinka, Sobibor and Belzec extermination camps. Historian Michael Allen described him as "the vilest individual in the vilest organization ever known". Globocnik died by suicide shortly after being captured and detained by British soldiers. Globocnik committed suicide by biting on a cyanide capsule.
45
Born 1900-10-07. Domain:Politics. Cause of death:Suicide
Himmler was arrested on 22 May by Sergeant Arthur Britton, and in captivity, was soon recognized. Himmler was scheduled to stand trial with other German leaders as a major war criminal at Nuremberg, but committed suicide in Lüneburg by swallowing a potassium cyanide capsule before interrogation could begin. These cyanide tablets were fitted in caps in SS officers’ teeth (which they snapped open and swallowed the tablet) before the Holocaust began so that they would always have the choice of suicide if anything went wrong. His last words were Ich bin Heinrich Himmler! (“I am Heinrich Himmler!”). Shortly afterwards, Himmler’s body was secretly buried in an unmarked grave on the Lüneburg Heath. The precise location of Himmler’s grave remains unknown.
48
Born 1897-10-29. Domain:Politics. Cause of death:Suicide
At 8 p.m. on the evening of 1 May, Goebbels arranged for an SS doctor, Helmut Kunz, to kill his six children by injecting them with morphine and then, when they were unconscious, crushing an ampoule of cyanide in each of their mouths. According to Kunz's testimony, he gave the children morphine injections but it was Magda Goebbels and Stumpfegger, Hitler's personal doctor, who then administered the cyanide. Shortly afterwards, Goebbels and his wife went up to the garden of the Chancellery, where they killed themselves. After the war, Rear-Admiral Michael Musmanno, a U.S. naval officer and judge, published an account apparently based on eye-witness testimony: "At about 8.15 p.m., Goebbels arose from the table, put on his hat, coat and gloves and, taking his wife's arm, went upstairs to the garden." They were followed by Goebbels's adjutant, SS-Hauptsturmführer Günther Schwägermann. "While Schwägermann was preparing the petrol, he heard a shot. Goebbels had shot himself and his wife took poison. Schwägermann ordered one of the soldiers to shoot Goebbels again because he was unable to do it himself." The bodies of Goebbels and his wife were then burned in a shell crater, but owing to the lack of petrol the burning was only partly effective, and their bodies were easily identifiable. A few days later, Voss was brought back to the bunker by the Soviets to identify the partly burned bodies of Joseph and Magda Goebbels and the bodies of their children. "Vice-Admiral Voss, being asked how he identified the people as Goebbels, his wife and children, explained that he recognised the burnt body of the man as former Reichsminister Goebbels by the following signs: the shape of the head, the line of the mouth, the metal brace that Goebbels had on his right leg, his gold NSDAP badge and the burnt remains of his party uniform." The remains of the Goebbels family were secretly buried, along with those of Hitler, near Rathenow in Brandenburg. In 1970, they were disinterred and cremated, and the ashes thrown in the Elbe.
56
Born 1889-04-20. Domain:Politics. Cause of death:Suicide
On 30 April 1945, after intense street-to-street combat, when Soviet troops were spotted within a block or two of the Reich Chancellory in the city centre, Hitler committed suicide in the Führerbunker. He did so by means of a self-delivered shot to the head while simultaneously biting into a cyanide capsule. Hitler's body and that of Eva Braun (his long-term mistress whom he had married the day before) were put in a bomb crater, doused in gasoline by Otto Günsche and other Führerbunker aides, and set alight as the Red Army advanced and shelling continued. Hitler also had his dog Blondi poisoned before his suicide to test the poison he and Eva Braun were going to take.
Trivia
Hitler war zu Lebzeiten Ehrenbürger etlicher deutscher Städte. Trotz der Argumentation, dass die Ehrenbürgerschaft mit dem Tod ende, haben viele Städte Hitler diese nach seinem Tod explizit wieder entzogen, einige andere nicht, darunter z. B. Bad Doberan oder Völklingen.
Mit dem Anophthalmus hitleri benannte der Käfersammler Oscar Seibel 1933 einen kleinen, blinden, braunen Höhlenkäfer, der mittlerweile vom Aussterben bedroht ist, nach Hitler.
Im April 1934 wurde in der Umgebung von Bad Tölz der Heigelkopf in Hitlerberg umbenannt und ein zehn Meter hohes, 1200 kg schweres Hakenkreuz aufgestellt.
Das TIME Magazine wählte Hitler 1938 zum „Mann des Jahres“. Die Intention dieses Titels war jedoch nicht, die entsprechende Person zu ehren, sondern herauszustellen, wer aus Sicht der Redaktion in einem bestimmtem Jahr den größten Einfluss auf die Weltpolitik hatte. So ging der Titel 1939 und 1942 an Josef Stalin.
Hitler wurde von verschiedenen Forschungsinstituten mehrmals als der bekannteste Deutsche identifiziert und ist eine der weltweit bekanntesten Persönlichkeiten überhaupt.
33
Born 1912-02-06. Domain:Society. Cause of death:Suicide
In early April 1945 Braun traveled by car from Munich to Berlin to be with Hitler at the Führerbunker. Eva refused to leave as the Red Army closed in, insisting she was one of the few people loyal to him left in the world. Hitler and Braun were married on April 29, 1945 during a brief civil ceremony which was witnessed by Joseph Goebbels and Martin Bormann. The bride wore a black silk dress.
With Braun's marriage her legal name changed to Eva Hitler. When Eva signed her marriage certificate she wrote the letter B for her family name, then lined this out and replaced it with Hitler. Although bunker personnel were instructed to call her Frau Hitler, her new husband continued to call his wife Fräulein Braun.
There was gossip among the Führerbunker staff that Eva was carrying Hitler's child, but there is no evidence she was ever pregnant.
62
Born 1883-07-29. Domain:Politics. Cause of death:Murder
Mussolini entered World War II in June 1940 on the side of Nazi Germany. Three years later, the Allies invaded Italy and occupied most of southern Italy. In April 1945, Mussolini attempted to escape to Austria, only to be captured and killed near Lake Como by partisans. His body was brought to Milan where it was hung upside down and mocked by crowds of people.
33
Born 1912-02-28. Domain:Society. Cause of death:Murder
Petacci was with Mussolini in the end. On 27 April 1945, when a convoy of escaping Italian Social Republic members, including Mussolini, was captured by Communist partisans, it is said that Petacci was offered the opportunity to go unmolested. But she firmly refused and, instead, tried to protect Mussolini with her body. On 28 April, she and Mussolini were taken to Mezzagra where she and the Duce were shot. On the following day, 29 April, Mussolini and Petacci's bodies were taken to the Piazzale Loreto in Milan and hung upside down in front of an Esso gas station. The bodies were photographed as a crowd vented their rage upon them.
She was twenty-nine years younger than Mussolini.