What happened in 1938

World2

• Apr 24Konstantin Päts becomes the first President of Estonia.
• Oct 2Tiberias massacre: Arab raiders murder 19 Jewish immigrants.

Japan1

• May 21Tsuyama massacre: Matsuo Toi kills 30 people in a village in Okayama, Japan, in the world's worst spree killing by an individual until 1957.

North America3

• Feb 4Walt Disney's Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, the first cel-animated feature in motion picture history, is released in the United States, following a premiere on December 21 of the previous year.
• Apr 18Superman first appears in Action Comics #1 (cover date June). The date is established in court documents released during the legal battle over the rights to Superman (on April 18, 2018, DC Comics released Action Comics #1000).
• Jul 28Pan Am flying boat Hawaii Clipper disappears with 6 passengers and 9 crew members, en route from Guam to Manila.

Europe23

• Feb 4Adolf Hitler abolishes the War Ministry and creates the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht (High Command of the Armed Forces), giving him direct control of the German military. In addition, he dismisses political and military leaders considered unsympathetic to his philosophy or policies. General Werner von Fritsch is forced to resign as Commander of Chief of the German Army following accusations of homosexuality, and replaced by General Walther von Brauchitsch. Foreign Minister Baron Konstantin von Neurath is dismissed, and replaced by Joachim von Ribbentrop.
• Feb 22The Battle of Teruel ends in a Nationalist victory with recapture of the city, a turning point in the Spanish Civil War.
• Mar 12Anschluss: German troops occupy Austria; annexation is declared the following day.
• Apr 10In a result that astonishes even Hitler, the Austrian electorate in a national referendum approves Anschluss by an overwhelming 99.73%.
• Jul 6The Evian Conference on Refugees is convened in France. No country in Europe is prepared to accept Jews fleeing persecution, and the United States will take only 27,370.
• JulThe Mauthausen concentration camp is built in Austria.
• Sep 29Munich Agreement: German, Italian, British and French leaders agree to German demands regarding annexation of the Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia. The Czechoslovak government is largely excluded from the negotiations, and is not a signatory to the agreement.
• Oct 2Disgusted with Neville Chamberlain's conduct at Munich, Duff Cooper resigns his post as First Lord of the Admiralty. With his resignation, formal debate begins in the Parliament of the United Kingdom on the Munich Agreement, but with Chamberlain at the peak of his popularity, there can be little doubt His Majesty's Government will receive a vote of confidence.
• Oct 16Winston Churchill, in a broadcast address to the United States, condemns the Munich Agreement as a defeat, and calls upon America and western Europe to prepare for armed resistance against Hitler.
• Oct 21In direct contravention of the recently signed Munich Agreement, Adolf Hitler circulates among his high command a secret memorandum stating that they should prepare for the "liquidation of the rest of Czechoslovakia" and the occupation of Memel.
• Nov 2Arising from The Munich Agreement, Hungary is "awarded" the Felvidek region of South Slovakia and Ruthenia.
• Nov 9Holocaust – Kristallnacht: In Germany, the "night of broken glass" begins as Nazi activists and sympathizers loot and burn Jewish businesses (the all night affair sees 7,500 Jewish businesses destroyed, 267 synagogues burned, 91 Jews killed and at least 25,000 Jewish men arrested). One of several significant events on 9 November in German history.
• Nov 30Corneliu Zelea Codreanu, leader of the Romanian fascist Iron Guard, is murdered on the orders of King Carol II of Romania. Officially, Codreanu and the 13 other Iron Guard leaders are "shot while trying to escape".
• Dec 13The Neuengamme concentration camp opens near Hamburg.
• DecDiscovery of nuclear fissionHahn and Strassmann in Germany found that firing neutrons at uranium splits the nucleus. The next year Meitner and others showed that the split releases a great deal of energy.

8 more in the app

Asia5

• Feb 10Second Sino-Japanese War: Bombing of Chongqing begins.
• Mar 1Lee Byung-chul establishes a trucking business in Daegu, South Korea, which he names Samsung Trading Co, the forerunner to Samsung.
• JunJune 5 & 7 – The 1938 Yellow River flood is created by the Nationalist government in central China, breaching embankments during the early stage of the Second Sino-Japanese War, in an attempt to halt the rapid advance of Japanese forces. The flood kills at least 400,000, covers and destroys thousands of square kilometers of farmland, and shifts the mouth of the Yellow River hundreds of kilometers to the south.
• Sep 29The Republic of Hatay is declared in Syria; it lasts for less than a year.
• Majlis Khuddam-ul Ahmadiyya is established by Khalifat-ul Masih II, Mirza Basheer-ud-Din Mahmood Ahmad, the second Caliph of the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community.