The following events occurred in August 1937:
August 1, 1937 (Sunday) The Meuse-Argonne American Memorial was dedicated in Montfaucon-d'Argonne in France. The Moscow Military Music College was founded in the Soviet Union by Major General Semyon Chernetsky, conductor and music director of the Central Military Band of the Soviet defense ministry. SS-Obersturmbannführer Karl-Otto Koch arrived with his wife Ilse Koch at Nazi Germany's Buchenwald concentration camp to carry out the internment and execution of thousands of Jews and other political prisoners. American serial killer Anna Marie Hahn committed her fifth and final murder, after having poisoned five elderly men whom she had befriended and taken care of. Following the death of retired cobbler Georg Obendoerfer, Hahn was arrested. She would be executed in the electric chair at the Ohio Penitentiary on December 7, 1938. The popular radio program Good Will Hour, sponsored by Macfadden Communications Group and hosted by John J. Anthony, premiered nationwide in the U.S. on stations of the Mutual Broadcasting System, and would run for more than 15 years until the end of 1952. Born: Oleg Vinogradov, Soviet Russian choreographer and ballet director for the Kirov Ballet; in Leningrad Al D'Amato, U.S. Senator for New York from 1981 to 1999; in Brooklyn
August 2, 1937 (Monday) The Marihuana Tax Act was signed into law by U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt and took effect on October 1. Though not specifically outlawing or permitting the cultivation or sale of marijuana, the federal law required any person who did so to register with the U.S. government prior to paying a tax, providing the basis for identification (to allow states to enforce their own laws) and federal prosecution by the U.S. government for previous failure to pay the tax. The law would be struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court in the 1969 decision in Leary v. United States and replaced soon afterward in 1971 by the Controlled Substances Act. All six passengers and three crew of an Ala Littoria airliner were killed after the Savoia-Marchetti S.73 took off from Wadi Halfa on a flight to Asmara as part of its multi-stop flight from Rome to Addis Ababa.Safety Network Born: Ghulam Mustafa Khar, Pakistani politician who served as Governor of Punjab province 1971-1973 and as its Chief Minister 1973-1974; in Sanawan, Punjab Province, British India Garth Hudson, Canadian rock keyboardist for The Band; in Windsor, Ontario (d. 2025) Billy Cannon, American college and pro football halfback, inductee to the College Football Hall of Fame; in Philadelphia, Mississippi (d. 2018)
August 3, 1937 (Tuesday) All 14 people aboard a Pan American-Grace Airways seaplane were killed when the Sikorsky S-43 plunged into the ocean off of the coast of Panama. The explosion of a gasoline depot in Turkey, between Bairakli and Burnova, killed 24 oil workers. The 20th biennial World Zionist Congress opened in Zürich, Switzerland. Generalissimo Francisco Franco informed Italy that he had intelligence that the Soviets were shipping arms to the Republic. Franco urged Italian action to stop the transports. Born: Steven Berkoff (stage name for Leslie Steven Berks), English stage and film actor known for his roles as a villain in Beverly Hills Cop, Octopussy, Rambo: First Blood Part II and War and Remembrance; in Stepney, London
August 4, 1937 (Wednesday) In British India, a team of climbers led by Frank Smythe became the first people to reach the top of the high Himalayan mountain Deoban. The Bolivarian National Guard of Venezuela, named for South American hero Simon Bolivar was founded as a national police force by Venezuela's President Eleazar López Contreras. In Little Rock, Arkansas, the newly formed Society for the Booing of Commercial Advertisements in Motion Picture Theatres made its debut, booing loudly when corporate advertising appeared on the movie screen. Similar "booing clubs" soon began springing up elsewhere. In the 1930s and '40s movie houses experimented with running ads for commercial products alongside movie trailers, but many theatregoers resented the practice because, unlike the radio where ads were recognized as necessary, movies were not free. Born: Paul Abels, American Methodist minister and the first the openly gay cleric of a church in a major Christian denomination (as pastor of New York's Washington Square Methodist Episcopal Church from 1973 to 1984; in Yellow Springs, Ohio (d. 1992 from complications of AIDS) Angie Ferro, Filipino film, TV and stage actress; in Baleno, Masbate (d. 2023) David Bedford, English composer and musician; in Hendon, London (d. 2011) Died: K.P. Jayaswal, 55, Indian historian and lawyerK. P. Jayaswal Commemoration Volume, 1981; K. P. Jayaswal Research Institute, Patna, p. 61 Hans Reck, 51, German volcanologist and paleontologist, died of a heart attack while on an expedition to Portuguese East Africa (now Mozambique).
August 5, 1937 (Thursday) Japanese Emperor Hirohito ratified a directive removing the constraints of international law on the treatment of Chinese prisoners of war, a decision that would be followed by the execution or death by illness of all but 56 Chinese POWs taken during the war by Japan against China, as well as brutal treatment of Allied prisoners during World War II. The Soviet Union's secret police, the NKVD, began carrying out the repression of Ingrian Finns and other speakers of the Finnish language within its borders as part of its campaign against ethnic Finnish residents. During the first month of the operation ordered by NKVD Order No. 00447, 728 people were arrested, and in 1938, there would be 5,340 placed in prison. Before the NKVD operation was terminated on August 10, 1938, at least 8,000 Finns, and perhaps as many as 25,000 would die or simply disappear. Born: Herb Brooks, American Olympic ice hockey player and coach; in Saint Paul, Minnesota (d. 2003, automobile accident) Died: José Canals, 22, Spanish Olympic cross-country skier, was killed in action in the Spanish Civil War.
August 6, 1937 (Friday) The National Cancer Institute was established in the United States as a division of the United States Public Health Service agency by legislation signed into law by President Franklin Roosevelt. The first recorded smoking-related airline accident occurred when all six people aboard an Aeroflot flight from Moscow to Prague crashed near Herina. The accident was traced to one of the three passengers lighting a cigarette in the toilet, igniting accumulated fumes from aviation fuel. The Soviet Union and the United States agreed to extend their trade pact for one additional year. The Soviets agreed to spend $40,000,000 in purchases from the U.S., which in turn continued its most favored nation status for the Soviet Union. Born: Barbara Windsor, English actress; in Shoreditch, London (d. 2020)
August 7, 1937 (Saturday) The Japanese began to evacuate their concession at Hankou, citing "the steadily growing tension and a desire to prevent an incident likely to aggravate the general situation." World War I veteran Harold Wobber, 47, became the first person definitively known to have committed suicide by jumping from the Golden Gate Bridge. Marcian Germanovich, Soviet corps commander, was arrested two months after being dismissed from the Red Army, apparently because of his association with General Mikhail Tukhachevsky, who had been executed on June 12. Germanovich would be shot in prison on September 20.N. S. Cherushev and Yu. N. Cherushev, Elite of the Red Army (commanders of the 1st and 2nd ranks, comkors, divisional commanders and their equal): 1937–1941, a Biographical Dictionary] (Moscow: Metropolis Press, 2013) pp. 69–70. Born: Rosemary Smith, Irish rally car driver; in Dublin (d. 2023) Magic Slim (stage name for Morris Holt), blues singer and guitarist and inductee to the Blues Hall of Fame; in Torrance, Mississippi (d. 2013) Died: Eddie Gerard, 47, Canadian ice hockey player and manager, died of throat cancer. He would be one of the original inductees to the Hockey Hall of Fame on its founding in 1945. Henri Lebasque, 71, French post-Impressionist painterEmmanuel Bénézit, Dictionary of painters, sculptors, designers and engravers, Gründ, 1999. Howard E. Dorsey, 33, American hydraulic engineer who had been sworn into office five weeks earlier, was killed when he lost control of his automobile and ran over a cliff along with his passenger, secretary Marion Lonabaugh."Councilman and Woman Die in Crash", Los Angeles Times, August 8, 1937, p.1 Takeo Wakabayashi, 29, Japanese footballer who played for the Japan national team, died from lung disease.
August 8, 1937 (Sunday) A contingent of 3,000 Japanese soldiers conspicuously entered Beijing (at the time referred to in the Western press as "Peiping"), capital of the Republic of China without resistance. Japanese warplanes dropped propaganda leaflets on the populace proclaiming that the "Japanese army has driven out your wicked rulers and their wicked armies and will keep them out." The Butovo firing range began operations as an execution site for political prisoners who had been arrested by the NKVD, the Soviet secret police, as the first 91 prisoners were transported there from Moscow and shot. According to records kept by the NKVD, there were 20,761 executions until the Butovo range closed on October 19, 1938. Born: Dustin Hoffman, American actor and director; in Los Angeles Jorge Cafrune, popular Argentine folk singer; in El Carmen, Jujuy Province (killed in pedestrian accident, 1978) Died: Jimmie Guthrie, 40, Scottish motorcycle racer, was killed competing in the German motorcycle Grand Prix. Edmund Pearson, 57, author of "true crime" nonfiction books, died from bronchial pneumonia.
August 9, 1937 (Monday) The government of Germany ordered a correspondent for The Times, Norman Ebbutt, to leave Germany. The move was made in retaliation for Britain expelling three German journalists on suspicion of espionage. Swiss-born American astronomer Fritz Zwicky became the first person on earth to observe a new supernova (SN 1937D) that had occurred in the galaxy designated NGC 1003 (visible within the western edge of the Perseus constellation) as much as 31 million years earlier(based on estimates that NGC 1003 is an average of 30.94 million light years distant from Earth) The American alligator "Muja, estimated to be 12 years old, arrived at the Belgrade Zoo in Yugoslavia (now in Serbia) and would still be alive in 2025 as the oldest living known alligator in captivity. The adventure film Souls at Sea starring Gary Cooper, George Raft and Frances Dee premiered at the Globe Theatre in New York City. Born: Nelson Villagra, Chilean film actor; in Chillán, Diguillín provincebazuca.com Biografía y filmografía de Nelson Villagra. Forouzan (stage name for Parvin Kheyrbakhsh), Iranian film actress who was a star from 1963 until being banned from acting during the 1979 Iranian Revolution; in Bandar-e Anzali (d.2016)
August 10, 1937 (Tuesday)
American mathematician Claude Shannon, described later as "the father of information theory" submitted his masters' thesis A Symbolic Analysis of Relay and Switching Circuits to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The paper, later described by Howard Gardner as "possibly the most important, and also the most famous, master's thesis of the century", demonstrated the electrical applications of Boolean algebra to establish the theoretical basis for digital circuits and digital computing. U.S. Patent No. 2,089,171 was awarded to musician George Beauchamp and Adolph Rickenbacker for the first electric guitar, three years after he had applied for the patent on June 2, 1934. The Republican tanker Campeador was sunk off Tunis by Italian destroyers. While 28 members of the crew were saved, 12 died.