On Wednesday, September 29, the book of history records, among other things:
1066: The Norman Duke William I, the Conqueror, lands with his troops in Pevensey near Hastings in southern England and lays claim to the throne.
1911: Italy declares war on Turkey (until 1912) and conquers Tripolitania and Cyrenaica, the core areas of Libya.
1911: The Lower Austrian state parliament decides to lift female teachers’ celibacy.
1941: On September 29 and 30, 35,000 Jews, many of them women and children, were shot dead by German “Einsatzgruppen” in the Babyn Yar gorge near Kiev. In total, more than 100,000 civilians are murdered in this place of horror.
1946: In Hamburg, the Thalia Theater will reopen with Shakespeare’s “Was ihr wollt”.
1956: The new Südbahnhof in Vienna is officially opened.
1956: France’s Prime Minister Guy Mollet and West German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer reach an agreement in Bonn on the Saar resettlement agreement.
1961: Austria ratifies the OECD Convention and is one of the 18 European founding members of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.
1981: President Ronald Reagan instructs the US Coast Guard to intercept and send back refugee boats from Haiti.
1986: One month after his arrest on suspicion of espionage, US journalist Nicholas Daniloff returns to the United States.
2001: The UN Security Council unanimously passes an anti-terrorism resolution in New York.
2001: The caricature museum designed by Gustav Peichl with numerous works by Manfred Deix opens in Krems.
2016: After eight days of trial at the regional court, Alen R., who killed three people in a rampage through Graz in 2015 and committed 108 murder attempts, is sentenced to life imprisonment. The jury ruled the 27-year-old was sane, despite two out of three psychiatrists disagreeing. In addition, a briefing is ordered. The judgment is not final.
Birthdays: Michael Servetus, Spanish physician, scholar, humanist and theologian; Antitrinitarians (1511-1553); Guadalupe Victoria, Mexican politician; 1824-1829 first President of Mexico (1786-1843); Carl Duisberg, German chemist / industrialist (1861-1935); Ludwig von Mises, US / east. Political economist (1881-1973); Enrico Fermi, Italian physicist (1901-1954); Eva Frodl-Kraft, east. Art historian (1916-2011); Antonio Buero Vallejo, Spanish playwright (1916-2000); Josef Traxel, German tenor (1916-1975); Trevor Howard, engl. Actor (1916-1988); Anita Ekberg, Swedish actress (1931-2015); James Watson Cronin, US physicist, Nobel Prize 1980 (1931-2016); Silvio Berlusconi, Italian media entrepreneur / politician (1936); Werner Pochath, east. Actor (1941-1993); Georg-Dieter von Holtzbrinck, German publisher (1941); Lech Wałęsa, Polish trade unionist / politician, Nobel Peace Prize 1983 (1943); Jutta Ditfurth, German sociologist, journalist and politician; 1980 co-founder of the party “The Greens” (1951); Michelle Bachelet, Chile. Politician; President 2006-10 and 2014-18 (1951).
Days of Death: Gellu Naum, Romanian. Writer / poet (1915-2001); Nguyên Văn Thiêu, South Vietnamese politician (1923-2001); Helmut Qualtinger, east. Writer, actor, cabaret artist (1928-1986).
Name days: Gabriel, Michael, Raphael, Lothar, Michaela, Raphaela, Gabriela, Johannes, Karl, Konrad.