1198: After the death of Celestine III. Count Lotario di Segni, 38, was elected pope and took the name of Innocent III. on. Under his pontificate, the spiritual and secular leadership of the medieval papacy reached its zenith. (He died in Perugia in 1216.)
1788: The tragicomic opera “Axur, re d’Ormus” by Antonio Salieri with a libretto by Lorenzo Da Ponte was premiered at the Burgtheater in Vienna and soon became one of Salieri’s most popular works.
1908: The Brooklyn-Manhattan subway line comes into operation in New York.
1918: US President Woodrow Wilson addresses a message to the US Congress in which he proposes “14 points” for a future peace agreement in Europe. (Point 10 defines the “freest possibility” for independent development for the peoples in Austria-Hungary.)
1933: The organ of the Social Democratic party “Arbeiter-Zeitung” discloses the so-called Hirtenberger arms affair (secret delivery of war material from Italy to Hungary and illicit financing of the Austrian National Guard). A key role in arms smuggling was played by the industrial magnate and head of the Hirtenberger ammunition factory, the “cartridge king” Fritz Mandl, with close ties to Mussolini and Heimwehr leader Ernst Rüdiger Starhemberg.
1938: Spanish Civil War: Legal Republican government troops capture the city of Teruel, Aragon, after a three-week siege.
1943: German 6th Army at Stalingrad is ordered to surrender by Soviet Army, Colonel General Friedrich Paulus refuses as ordered. (Hitler had refused Paul’s request for freedom of action for an escape from surrounded German troops.)
1948: The United States has issued an ultimatum to Yugoslavia and Bulgaria to refrain from recognizing the Greek communist counter-government of former partisan leader General Markos Vafiadis.
1948: World-famous operatic tenor, composer and actor Richard Tauber dies in London. A member of the Vienna State Opera since 1925, he had to emigrate after the Anschluss in 1938.
1953: After the fall of Conservative Prime Minister Antoine Pinay, whose government collapsed over the dispute over the European Defense Community, radical socialist René Mayer has formed a new centre-left coalition in France.
1963: In a joint letter to UN Secretary General U Thant, the United States and the USSR drew a line under the Cuban missile crisis.
1963: In Vienna, the ÖVP under Chancellor Alfons Gorbach and the SPÖ under Vice Chancellor Bruno Pittermann start the longest negotiations for the formation of a coalition government, which only materialize at the end of March.
1973: Chinese Foreign Minister Ji Pengfei calls on Western European states to unite politically and militarily to counter the threat posed by the Soviet Union.
1993: Deputy Prime Minister of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Hakija Turajlić, is assassinated by Serb militiamen in front of UN soldiers.
2003: 75 people die in a plane crash near Diyarbakir in Turkey. Five occupants survive the crash.
2003: After a summer drought, several bushfires have broken out in Kosciuszko National Park near the Australian capital Canberra, turning into one of Australia’s worst natural disasters.
2008: The Germanist and literary man Wendelin Schmidt-Dengler is named Austria’s “Scientist of the Year 2007”. On September 7, the Austrian “literary pope” died suddenly at the age of 66.
birthdays: Jean-Baptiste Drouet, French revolutionary (1763-1824); Matthias Macher, Austrian physicians (1793-1876); Alfred Russel Wallace, British naturalist (1823-1913); Josef (Bubi) Bradl, Austrian ski jumper (1918-1982); Otto Hubertus Henkell, German entrepreneur (1923-1988); Evelyn Lear, American soprano (1926-2012); Jean-Marie Straub, French director (1933-2022); Michael Sturminger, Austrian director and screenwriter (1963); Manuel Locatelli, Italian footballer (1998).
days of death: Christian Rohlfs, German painter (1849-1938); Kurt Schwitters, German painter (1887-1948); André Francois-Poncet, French diplomat (1887-1978); Riccardo Tauber, Austrian tenor (1891-1948); Walter E. Diemer, US inventor of chewing gum (chewing gum) (1904-1998); Sir Michael Tippett, British composer (1905-1998); Hans Bertram, German writer (1906-1993); Ron Goodwin, British film composer (1925-2003).
name days: Severin, Erhard, Gudula, Luzian, Paula, Gudrun, Garibaldi, Heinrich,
Lawrence, Dominican.
