Curated playlist
1945 deaths
- Seitarō KitayamaSeitarō Kitayama's 1917 anime, made for paying audiences, retold Japanese folktales.
- Franklin D. RooseveltFranklin D. Roosevelt was paralyzed from the waist down, and he was careful never to be seen in his wheelchair.
- David Lloyd GeorgeDavid Lloyd George had to be smuggled out of Birmingham disguised as a policeman.
- Heinrich HimmlerHeinrich Himmler died by biting a hidden cyanide pill during a British exam. He was dead within 15 minutes.
- Adolf HitlerAdolf Hitler was rejected twice by Vienna's art academy. He later became dictator of Germany.
- Martin BormannOn the 16th of August 1999, the ashes of Martin Bormann were scattered over the Baltic Sea. German authorities chose open water partly so that neo-Nazis would have no tomb to turn into a monument. More than half a century after the war,…
- Benito MussoliniBenito Mussolini was named after a Mexican president. His socialist father chose the name to honor Benito Juárez.
- Joseph GoebbelsJoseph Goebbels was Chancellor of Germany for a single day.
- Béla BartókOnly ten people attended composer Béla Bartók's funeral in New York in 1945. He had fled fascism five years earlier.
- Death of Adolf HitlerA skull fragment long thought to be Hitler's turned out to belong to a woman. DNA testing settled it in 2009.
- Death of Benito MussoliniThe partisan who shot Mussolini in 1945 borrowed a submachine gun because his own weapon had jammed.
- George S. PattonA reporter once heard George S. Patton say that winning in combat took "blood and brains." The reporter began calling him "blood and guts," and the nickname followed Patton for the rest of his life. Soldiers under his command sometimes…
- Johan HuizingaJohan Huizinga began as a scholar of Sanskrit, not medieval history. His thesis was about a jester in Indian drama.
- Subhas Chandra BoseSubhas Chandra Bose is remembered in India as Netaji, a Hindustani title that means Respected Leader. The name did not begin on Indian soil. It was first used in early 1942, in Berlin. The speakers were soldiers of the Indische Legion,…
- Fumimaro KonoeFumimaro Konoe swallowed potassium cyanide rather than face arrest for war crimes.
- Vladimir VernadskyVladimir Vernadsky argued that living things are a geological force. His 1926 book The Biosphere made the case.
- Hermann KallenbachArchitect Hermann Kallenbach gave Gandhi a 1,100-acre farm near Johannesburg. He named it Tolstoy Farm.