Date in year · 1939 · The 1930s

June 4, 1939

On June 4, 1939, the Holocaust: The MS St. Louis, a ship carrying 973 German Jewish refugees, is denied permission to land in Florida, in the United States, after already being turned away from Cuba. Forced to return to Europe, more than 200 of its passengers later die in Nazi concentration camps. Clay Shaw, Ali Khamenei, Karel Gott would arrive in the same year.

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1939

1930s

Around 1939

The year in brief

1939 (MCMXXXIX) was a common year starting on Sunday of the Gregorian calendar, the 1939th year of the Common Era (CE) and Anno Domini (AD) designations, the 939th year of the 2nd millennium, the 39th year of the 20th century, and the 10th and last year of the 1930s decade.

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What happened

On June 4, 1939

  1. 1939 The Holocaust: The MS St. Louis, a ship carrying 973 German Jewish refugees, is denied permission to land in Florida, in the United States, after already being turned away from Cuba. Forced to return to Europe, more than 200 of its passengers later die in Nazi concentration camps.

    Genocide of European Jews by Nazi Germany

    The Holocaust, known in Hebrew as the Shoah, was the genocide of European Jews during World War II. From 1941 to 1945, Nazi Germany and its collaborators systematically murdered around six million Jews across German-occupied Europe, approximately two-thirds of Europe's Jewish population. The murders were committed primarily through mass shootings across Eastern Europe and poison gas chambers in extermination camps, chiefly Auschwitz-Birkenau, Treblinka, Belzec, Sobibor, Chełmno and Majdanek death camps in occupied Poland.

Elsewhere that year

Other moments from 1939

The class of 1939

Others born in 1939

Clay Shaw 1939– American accountant, judge, and politician (died 2013)
Ali Khamenei 1939– Supreme Leader of Iran (died 2026)
Karel Gott 1939– Czech singer-songwriter and actor (died 2019)
George Edgar Slusser 1939– American scholar and author (died 2014)
Louis Andriessen 1939– Dutch pianist and composer (died 2021)
Yuli Turovsky 1939– Russian-Canadian cellist, conductor and educator (died 2013)

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