Explore 1392 historical events from 1940–1949.
Louis Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Bachelier was a French mathematician at the turn of the 20th century. He is credited with being the first person to model the stochastic process now ca…
Louis Bachelier, French mathematician and academic (born 1870)
William Joseph Denny was an Australian journalist, lawyer, politician and decorated soldier who held the South Australian House of Assembly seats of West Adelaide from 1900 to 1902…
Bill Denny, Australian journalist, lawyer, politician, and decorated soldier (born 1872)
Olayinka Herbert Samuel Heelas Badmus Macaulay was a Nigerian nationalist, politician, surveyor, engineer, architect, journalist, and musician. Macaulay is considered by many as fo…
Herbert Macaulay, Nigerian journalist and politician (born 1864)
Seán McCaughey was an Irish militant and Republican activist. He was an Irish Republican Army (IRA) leader in the 1930s and 1940s and hunger striker.
Seán McCaughey, Irish Republican, died on hunger strike (born 1915)
Zara "Zadie" DuPont (1869–1946) was an American suffragist, serving as the first Vice President of the Ohio Woman Suffrage Association.
Zara DuPont, American suffragist (born 1869)
Bruno Emil Tesch was a German chemist and entrepreneur. Together with Gerhard Peters and Walter Heerdt, he invented the insecticide Zyklon B. He was the owner of Tesch & Stabenow, …
Bruno Tesch, German chemist and businessman (born 1890)
Newton Booth Tarkington was an American novelist and dramatist best known for his novels The Magnificent Ambersons (1918) and Alice Adams (1921). He is one of only four novelists t…
Booth Tarkington, American novelist and dramatist (born 1869)
Jacob Christian Hansen-Ellehammer was a Danish inventor and aviation pioneer. He obtained a total of 59 Danish patents and worked with many different things, including amusement ma…
Jacob Ellehammer, Danish pilot and engineer (born 1871)
Carter Glass was an American newspaper publisher and Democratic politician from Lynchburg, Virginia. He represented Virginia in both houses of Congress and served as the United Sta…
Carter Glass, American publisher and politician, 47th United States Secretary of the Treasury (born 1858)
Martin Gottfried Weiss, alternatively spelled Weiß, but best known as The Demon of Dachau was the commandant of the Dachau concentration camp in 1945 at the time of his arrest. He …
Martin Gottfried Weiss, German SS officer (born 1905)
Louis Alexander Slotin was a Canadian physicist and chemist who took part in the Manhattan Project. Born and raised in the North End of Winnipeg, Manitoba, Slotin earned both his B…
Louis Slotin, Canadian physicist and chemist (born 1910)
Ion Antonescu was a Romanian military officer and marshal who presided over two successive wartime dictatorships as Prime Minister and Conducător during most of World War II. Havin…
Ion Antonescu, Romanian marshal and politician, 43rd Prime Minister of Romania (born 1882)
Mikhail Ivanovich Kalinin was a Soviet politician and Russian Old Bolshevik revolutionary who served as the nominal head of state of the Soviet Union from 1919 until his resignatio…
Mikhail Kalinin, Russian civil servant and politician (born 1875)
Masaru Ibuka was a Japanese electronics industrialist and co-founder of Sony, along with Akio Morita.
Masaru Ibuka and Akio Morita founded the telecommunications corporation Tokyo Tsushin Kogyo, later renamed Sony
The League of Nations was the first worldwide intergovernmental organisation whose principal mission was to maintain world peace. It was founded on 10 January 1920 by the Paris Pea…
The final session of the League of Nations concluded in Geneva, with delegates agreeing to transfer much of its assets t
The Naperville train disaster occurred on April 25, 1946, on the Chicago, Burlington and Quincy Railroad at Loomis Street in Naperville, Illinois, when the railroad's Exposition Fl…
Two passenger trains collided in Naperville, Illinois, leaving 45 people dead and some 125 injured
Plutonium is a chemical element; it has symbol Pu and atomic number 94. It is a silvery-gray actinide metal that tarnishes when exposed to air, and forms a dull coating when oxidiz…
While working with a mass of plutonium known as the demon core, Manhattan Project physicist Louis Slotin accidentally ex
Montese is a town in the province of Modena, Emilia-Romagna, Italy.
World War II: Montese, Italy, is liberated from Nazi forces
A bomber is a military combat aircraft that utilizes air-to-ground weaponry to drop bombs, launch torpedoes, or deploy air-launched cruise missiles.
World War II: Over 1,000 bombers attack the small island of Heligoland, Germany
The Surrender at Caserta of 29 April 1945 was the written agreement that formalized the surrender of German and Italian Fascist forces in Italy, ending the Italian Campaign of Worl…
World War II: The Surrender of Caserta is signed by the commander of German forces in Italy
Stalag Luft I was a German World War II prisoner-of-war (POW) camp near Barth, Western Pomerania, Germany, for captured Allied airmen. The presence of the prison camp is said to ha…
World War II: Stalag Luft I prisoner-of-war camp near Barth, Germany is liberated by Soviet soldiers, freeing nearly 9,0
The Surrender at Caserta of 29 April 1945 was the written agreement that formalized the surrender of German and Italian Fascist forces in Italy, ending the Italian Campaign of Worl…
World War II: The surrender of Caserta comes into effect, by which German troops in Italy cease fighting
Wöbbelin was a subcamp of the Neuengamme concentration camp near the city of Ludwigslust. The SS had established Wöbbelin to house concentration camp prisoners whom the SS had evac…
World War II: The US 82nd Airborne Division liberates Wöbbelin concentration camp finding 1,000 dead prisoners, most of
The Workers' and Peasants' Red Army, often referred by its shortened name as the Red Army, was the army and air force of the Russian Soviet Republic and, from 1922, the Soviet Unio…
World War II: The Red Army begins the final assault on German forces around Berlin, with nearly one million troops fight