List of Famous people who died in 1934
Marie Curie
Marie Skłodowska Curie, born Maria Salomea Skłodowska, was a Polish and naturalized-French physicist and chemist who conducted pioneering research on radioactivity. As the first of the Curie family legacy of five Nobel Prizes, she was the first woman to win a Nobel Prize, the first person and the only woman to win the Nobel Prize twice, and the only person to win the Nobel Prize in two scientific fields. She was the first woman to become a professor at the University of Paris in 1906.
John Dillinger
John Herbert Dillinger was an American gangster of the Great Depression. He led a group known as the "Dillinger Gang", which was accused of robbing 24 banks and four police stations. Dillinger was imprisoned several times but escaped twice. He was charged, but not convicted of the murder of an East Chicago, Indiana, police officer who shot Dillinger in his bullet-proof vest during a shootout; it was the only time Dillinger was charged with homicide.
Cecil Chubb
Sir Cecil Herbert Edward Chubb, 1st Baronet, was the last private owner of Stonehenge prehistoric monument, Wiltshire, which he donated to the British government in 1918.
Pretty Boy Floyd
Charles Arthur Floyd, nicknamed Pretty Boy Floyd, was an American bank robber. He operated in the West and Central states, and his criminal exploits gained widespread press coverage in the 1930s. He was seen positively by the public because during robberies he burned mortgage documents, freeing many people from their debts. He was pursued and killed by a group of Bureau of Investigation (BOI) agents led by Melvin Purvis. Historians have speculated as to which officers were at the event, but accounts document that local officers Robert "Pete" Pyle and George Curran were present at his fatal shooting and also at his embalming. Floyd has continued to be a familiar figure in American popular culture, sometimes seen as notorious, other times portrayed as a tragic figure, even a victim of the hard times of the Great Depression in the United States.
Albert I of Belgium
Albert I reigned as King of the Belgians from 1909 to 1934. He ruled during an eventful period in the history of Belgium, which included the period of World War I (1914–1918), when 90 percent of Belgium was overrun, occupied, and ruled by the German Empire. Other crucial issues included the adoption of the Treaty of Versailles, the ruling of the Belgian Congo as an overseas possession of the Kingdom of Belgium along with the League of Nations mandate of Ruanda-Urundi, the reconstruction of Belgium following the war, and the first five years of the Great Depression (1929–1934). King Albert died in a mountaineering accident in eastern Belgium in 1934, at the age of 58, and he was succeeded by his son Leopold III. He is popularly referred to as the "Knight King" or "Soldier King" in Belgium in reference to his role during World War I.
Ernst Röhm
Ernst Julius Günther Röhm was a German military officer and an early member of the Nazi Party. As one of the members of its predecessor, the German Workers' Party, he was a close friend and early ally of Adolf Hitler and a co-founder of the Sturmabteilung, the Nazi Party's militia, and later was its commander. By 1934, the German Army feared the SA's influence and Hitler had come to see Röhm as a potential rival, so he was executed during the Night of the Long Knives.
Enid Yandell
Enid Yandell was an American sculptor from Louisville, Kentucky who studied with Auguste Rodin in Paris, Philip Martiny in New York City, and Frederick William MacMonnies.
Kume Keiichiro
Kume Keiichiro was a Japanese painter in the yōga style. His father was the historian, Kume Kunitake.
Baby Face Nelson
Lester Joseph Gillis, known by the alias George Nelson and Baby Face Nelson, was an American bank robber. He became partners with John Dillinger, helping him escape from prison in Crown Point, Indiana. Nelson and the remaining gang members were labelled as public enemy number one. He was given the nickname Baby Face Nelson due to his small stature and somewhat youthful appearance, although few dared call him that to his face. Criminal associates instead called him "Jimmy".
Fritz Haber
Fritz Haber was a German chemist who received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1918 for his invention of the Haber–Bosch process, a method used in industry to synthesize ammonia from nitrogen gas and hydrogen gas. This invention is of importance for the large-scale synthesis of fertilizers and explosives. It is estimated that two thirds of annual global food production uses nitrogen from the Haber-Bosch process, and that this supports nearly half the world population. Haber, along with Max Born, proposed the Born–Haber cycle as a method for evaluating the lattice energy of an ionic solid.