1944: Anne Frank, Holocaust, Smokey Bear, Women Teachers can Marry!

1944

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Year 1944 (MCMXLIV) was a leap year starting on Saturday (link will display the full calendar) of the Gregorian calendar.

 January

• January 5 – The Daily Mail becomes the first transoceanic newspaper.
• January 11 – US President Franklin Delano Roosevelt proposes a Second Bill of Rights for social and economic security in his State of the Union address
• January 17 – WWII:
• The Soviet Union ceases production of the Mosin-Nagant 1891/30 sniper rifle.

March

• March 2
• WWII: A train stalls inside a railway tunnel outside Salerno, Italy; 521 choke to death.
• March 10 – WWII: In Britain the Education Act lifts the ban on women teachers marrying.
• March 18 – The eruption of Mount Vesuvius in Italy kills 26 and causes thousands to flee their homes.

 May

• May 5 – WWII: Mohandas Gandhi is released in India.

 June

June – German V-2 rockets on test from Peenemünde become the first man-made objects to enter space.

• June 6 – WWII – Battle of Normandy: Operation Overlord, commonly known as D-Day, commences with the landing of 155,000 Allied troops on the beaches of Normandy in France. The Allied soldiers quickly break through the Atlantic Wall and push inland, in the largest amphibious military operation in history. This operation helps liberate France from Germany, and also weakens the Nazi hold on Europe.
• June 13 – WWII: Germany launches a V1 Flying Bomb attack on England.
• June 29 – The Holocaust – The deportation of Hungarian Jews to Auschwitz and other Nazi concentration camps begins.

July

• July 6
• Hartford circus fire: More than 100 children die in one of the worst fire disasters in the history of the United States.
• WWII: At Camp Hood, Texas, future baseball star and 1st Lt. Jackie Robinson is arrested and later court-martialed for refusing to move to the back of a segregated U.S. Army bus. He is eventually acquitted.

August

• August 7 – IBM dedicates the first program-controlled calculator, the Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator (known best as the Harvard Mark I).
• August 9 – The United States Forest Service and the Wartime Advertising Council release posters featuring Smokey Bear for the first time.
• August 20 – WWII:
• American forces successfully defeat Nazi forces at Chambois, closing the Falaise Gap.

 September

• September 2
• The Holocaust: Diarist Anne Frank and her family are placed on the last transport train from Westerbork to Auschwitz, arriving 3 days later.

 October

• October 30
• The Holocaust: Anne Frank and sister Margot Frank are deported from Auschwitz to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.

 November

• November 7 – U.S. presidential election, 1944: Franklin D. Roosevelt wins reelection over Republican challenger Thomas E. Dewey, becoming the only U.S. president elected to a fourth term.

 December

• December 24
• The first complete U.S. production of Tchaikovsky's ballet The Nutcracker is presented in San Francisco, choreographed by William Christensen. It will become an annual tradition there, and for the next ten years, the San Francisco Ballet will be the only ballet company in the United States performing the complete work, until George Balanchine premieres his version in New York in 1954.

Date unknown

• Olympic Games are suspended due to WWII.
• Swedish children's author Astrid Lindgren publishes her first book, Pippi Longstocking.
• In Sweden, Erik Wallenberg and Ruben Rausing invent a way to package milk in paper and start the company Tetra Pak.
• Hans Asperger publishes his paper on Asperger syndrome.