August 8 – Some important events on this day.
1220 👉🏼 Sweden is defeated by Estonian tribes in the Battle of Lihula
1303 👉🏼 Crete earthquake strikes with estimated magnitude of 8, triggering a major tsunami with major damage including ships sweep 2 miles inland in Egypt
1508 👉🏼 Spaniard Juan Ponce de León founds Caparra the first European settlement in Puerto Rico
1509 👉🏼 Emperor Krishnadeva Raya is crowned, marking the beginning of the regeneration of the Vijayanagara Empire in Southern India
1609 👉🏼 Venetian senate examines Galileo Galilei’s telescope
1786 👉🏼 US Congress unanimously chooses the dollar as the monetary unit for the United States of America
1898 👉🏼 Will Kellogg invents Corn Flakes
1918 👉🏼 Battle of Amiens.
On this day, the Allies launch a series of offensive operations against German positions on the Western Front during World War I with a punishing attack at Amiens, on the Somme River in northwestern France.
After heavy casualties incurred during their ambitious spring 1918 offensive, the bulk of the German army was exhausted, and its morale was rapidly disintegrating amid a lack of supplies and the spreading influenza epidemic. Some of its commanders believed that the tide was turning irrevocably in favor of Germany’s enemies; as one of them, Crown Prince Rupprecht, wrote on July 20, “We stand at the turning point of the war: what I expected first for the autumn, the necessity to go over to the defensive, is already on us, and in addition all the gains which we made in the spring—such as they were—have been lost again.” Still, Erich Ludendorff, the German commander in chief, refused to accept this reality and rejected the advice of his senior commanders to pull back or begin negotiations.
1925 👉🏼 1st national march of Ku Klux Klan (between 25,000 and 40,000 marchers) in Washington, D.C.
1929 👉🏼 German airship Graf Zeppelin begins a round-the-world flight.
1945 👉🏼 USSR establishes a communist government in North Korea
1945 👉🏼 US, USSR, Britain and France sign Treaty of London which sets down procedures for the Nuremberg war trials of Nazi leaders.
At the end of World War II in Europe, the victorious Allied powers created the first international court to try war criminals from Nazi Germany. Headquartered in the German city of Nuremberg, the the first and most famous trials of the major war criminals were held between November 20, 1945 and October 1, 1946, with verdicts announced on September 30 and October 1.
In the end, a large number of senior Nazi leaders were sentenced to death, including Hermann Goering (who killed himself with cyanide the night before his sentence was to be carried out), Karl Dönitz, Martin Bormann (who was missing but sentenced to death in abstentia), Alfred Jodl, Joachim von Ribbentrop and various others. Some leaders, like Rudolf Hess and Albert Speer, were given prison terms in Spandau Prison. The death sentences were carried out on October 16, 1946.
Described as “the greatest trial in history” by one of the presiding judges, Nuremberg was a leap in international law, and would set a precedent for trying war crimes in an international court. The effect of Nuremberg can be seen in the modern-day International Criminal Court and with the prosecution of criminals for actions during wars in Yugoslavia and beyond.
1974 👉🏼 US President Richard Nixon announces he will resign at 12pm the next day
1988 👉🏼 Ceasefire between Iran & Iraq takes effect after 8 years of war
1988 👉🏼 Discovery of most distant galaxy (15 * 10 ^ 12 light yrs) announced
1992 👉🏼 Metallica band member James Hetfield suffers second and third-degree burns during a pyrotechnics explosion on stage at Olympic Stadium, Montreal
2008 👉🏼 IXXX Summer Olympic Games open in Beijing, China