October 1946


The following events occurred in October 1946:

October 1, 1946 (Tuesday)

  • The day after the verdicts were rendered in the Nuremberg Trials, sentences were pronounced. Twelve of Nazi Germany's most murderous leaders were given two weeks more to live, with hangings scheduled for October 15.
  • Mensa, the high IQ society, was founded in Oxford, the United Kingdom, by Roland Berrill and Lancelot Ware. According to the website for the American organization, "the date is now the recognized founding date for the organization", based on Berrill when the first piece of Mensa literature was printed.
  • Kim Il Sung University was founded near Pyongyang.
  • Communist China's first motion picture company, the Northeast Film Studio was established at Xingshan.
  • The Alaskan Air Command, formerly the Eleventh U.S. Air Force was permanently headquartered at Elmendorf Air Force Base.

October 2, 1946 (Wednesday)

October 3, 1946 (Thursday)

October 4, 1946 (Friday)

  • On the eve of the Jewish Yom Kippur holiday, and a month before midterm elections, U.S. President Harry S. Truman announced that he had cabled British Prime Minister Clement Attlee to say that he endorsed immediate immigration of over 100,000 Jewish refugees into Palestine. Truman's rationale was that the British-mediated conference between Arabs and Jews had been adjourned until December, and that "In view of the fact that winter will come before the conference can be resumed, I believe and urge that substantial immigration into Palestine cannot await a solution." Attlee was furious at Truman's sudden public statement, and forecast that it would only increase violence in the region, while leaders of Arab nations felt that they had been betrayed, and Truman's opponents criticized the decision as a clumsy bid for Jewish voters. "It may well have been Truman's desperate political straits that led him to such a blatantly political gambit," observed one later historian.
  • The Nag Hammadi library was saved for posterity, as the Coptic Museum in Cairo accepted the ancient scrolls into its permanent collection. Twelve complete manuscripts and eight pages of a 13th had been buried in a sealed jar in the 4th century AD and not unearthed again until December 1945. The text "begins at the approximate time that the Dead Sea Scrolls leave off", notes one author.
  • Born:
  • *Susan Sarandon, American film actress; as Susan Tomalin in New York City
  • *Chuck Hagel, U.S. Senator for Nebraska 1997-2009, U.S. Secretary of Defense 2013 to 2015; in North Platte, Nebraska
  • Died:
  • *Barney Oldfield, 68, American race car driver
  • *Gifford Pinchot, 81, American conservationist and the first Chief of the U.S. Forest Service

October 5, 1946 (Saturday)

October 6, 1946 (Sunday)

October 7, 1946 (Monday)

  • A Fairey Firefly airplane struck a school in Apeldoorn, in the Netherlands, killing 23 people, most of whome were teenage schoolboys. The 21-year-old pilot, on his first solo flight, was flying low over his parents' house in a misguided stunt, and the left wing clipped the roof of the school gymnasium, dropping burning fuel inside. The dead included the pilot and his mother, who suffered a fatal heart attack.
  • By a vote of 342 to 5, the Constitution of Japan, as revised by the House of Councillors, was approved by the House of Representatives of Japan. The instrument, which provided equal rights and renounced war, went into effect on May 3, 1947, six months after it was promulgated.
  • Born: Catharine MacKinnon, American feminist activist; in Minneapolis

October 8, 1946 (Tuesday)

  • Voters in the U.S. territory of Alaska participated in the first referendum on the question of statehood. At the time, the total population was less than 85,000 people, and it took two months to tally all of the ballots. The final result of the advisory resolution was 9,630 to 6,822 in favor of Alaska someday becoming the 49th state of the United States, a goal which would finally be attained on January 3, 1959.
  • Born:
  • *Dennis Kucinich, American politician who became the "Boy Mayor of Cleveland" at age 31, later U.S. Representative for Ohio 1997 to 2013; in Cleveland
  • *Hanan Ashrawi, Palestinian activist; in Nablus, Mandatory Palestine

October 9, 1946 (Wednesday)

October 10, 1946 (Thursday)

October 11, 1946 (Friday)

October 12, 1946 (Saturday)

  • Article 3 of the Allied Control Council Directive 38 was put into effect in the Soviet Zone of Germany, and remained in effect when the zone became the German Democratic Republic. With vague language making it a criminal offense for anyone to have, after May 8, 1945, "endangered or possibly endangered the peace of the German people or the peace of the world through propaganda for National Socialism or militarism or by the invention or diffusion of tendentious rumors", the law was applied to fire 520,000 former Nazi party members from jobs, and to convict more than 11,000 people between 1948 and 1964.
  • Born: Jack Fuller, American journalist and publisher; in Chicago
  • Died: General Joseph Stilwell, 63, American military leader who commanded U.S. Army operations in China and Burma during World War II

October 13, 1946 (Sunday)

October 14, 1946 (Monday)

October 15, 1946 (Tuesday)

  • Hours before he was scheduled to be the first Nazi war criminal to hang following his conviction in the Nuremberg Trials, Gestapo founder Hermann Göring avoided the hangman's noose by poisoning himself. During his imprisonment, Goering had concealed, on his person, a glass vial of cyanide inside a.25 caliber brass cartridge. Suspicion originally fell upon Goering's lawyer, his wife and his barber as people who might have provided him with his means of suicide, but an investigation by the Allied powers concluded that Göring had kept the cartridge hidden even before his arrest.
  • The St. Louis Cardinals beat the Boston Red Sox 4–3 in the seventh game of the best-of-seven World Series to win the championship of major league baseball.
  • Born: Richard Carpenter, American pop singer for the brother-sister duo The Carpenters; in New Haven, Connecticut

October 16, 1946 (Wednesday)

October 17, 1946 (Thursday)

  • A Russian language translation of Strategic Position of the British Empire, a top secret document stolen from the War Office, was delivered to Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin. The extent of betrayal of Britain's security was not revealed until 1999, after the end of the Cold War.
  • The OPA removed all price controls on coffee, effective immediately.
  • Born: Bob Seagren, American pole vaulter; in Pomona, California. Seagren broke the world record four times between 1966 and 1972.

October 18, 1946 (Friday)

October 19, 1946 (Saturday)

October 20, 1946 (Sunday)

October 21, 1946 (Monday)

October 22, 1946 (Tuesday)

  • The Soviet Army carried out the simultaneous roundup of all persons in Soviet occupied Germany who were deemed essential to the Soviet missile program, then shipped them and their families by train to the USSR. Rocket scientists at Mittelwerk had been attending a late night party held in their honor by General Gaidukov, and then were told that they would be moving.
  • In what came to be known as part of the Corfu Channel Incident, a convoy of Royal Navy ships was sailing through the Straits of Corfu as part of a British test of Albania's defenses, which had fired on two cruisers in May. The destroyer struck a mine at 2:53 pm, and collided with a second mine at 4:31 pm while towing Saumarez. In all, 44 men were killed and 42 seriously injured in the explosions.

October 23, 1946 (Wednesday)

October 24, 1946 (Thursday)

October 25, 1946 (Friday)

  • With the war crimes trials of top Nazi leaders having completed, indictments were handed down against 20 Nazi physicians, two administrators and an attorney for war crimes including euthanasia murder, human experimentation and medical torture. The Doctors' Trial, a series of trials, conducted at Nuremberg, would begin on December 9, 1946, and last until July 20, 1947.
  • Vice-Admiral Ross T. McIntire, who had served as the physician to the President for Franklin D. Roosevelt, revealed the details of FDR's medical history, final illness, and a minute-by-minute account of the President's death on April 12, 1945. The news was occasioned by the publication, by G.P. Putnam's Sons, of McIntyre's book White House Physician.

October 26, 1946 (Saturday)

October 27, 1946 (Sunday)

October 28, 1946 (Monday)

October 29, 1946 (Tuesday)

  • Soviet Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov surprised the U.N. General Assembly by calling for universal disarmament and the banning of all nuclear weapons, while hinting that the United States' monopoly on the atomic bomb might have ended.
  • In a secret briefing Major General Lauris Norstad told President Truman that the only means of preventing the Soviet Union from invading Western Europe would be an air assault against 17 Soviet cities with atomic weapons. At the time, the U.S. had the means to assemble no more than nine bombs.
  • European jazz guitarist Django Reinhardt arrived in the United States for the first time at the expense of Duke Ellington. Reinhardt, who flew from Paris to New York, came to the U.S. without his guitar nor anything more than the clothes that he had been wearing.
  • Born: Peter Green, guitarist for Fleetwood Mac; in Bethnal Green, London

October 30, 1946 (Wednesday)

October 31, 1946 (Thursday)

  • The Indonesian rupiah was introduced with a radio broadcast by Vice-President Mohammad Hatta, who urged his fellow Indonesians to use the money as a symbol of independence and economic development. The first attempt to create the new currency had been thwarted in January, when Dutch colonial authorities had seized control of the printing office and confiscated the original run of notes.
  • Born:
  • *Stephen Rea, Northern Irish film actor known for The Crying Game; in Belfast
  • *Helen Vela, Filipino actress, television host and radio personality known for Lovingly Yours, Helen; in Manila