Public Figures & Cultural Luminaries

Statesmanship & Statesmen

35

🕯️ 550

Franklin D. Roosevelt

Franklin Delano Roosevelt

United States

1882-01-30 – 1945-04-12 (63 years old)

Redefined American liberalism, built the modern social safety net, organized the Arsenal of Democracy to defeat fascism, and laid the foundations for the United Nations.

Warm Springs, Georgia, United States

35 Full Record →

Religious Figures & Theologians

53

🕯️ 1,100

Dietrich Bonhoeffer (The Cost of Discipleship)

Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Poland

4 February 1906 – 9 April 1945 (39 years old)

Heroic German Lutheran pastor and theologian who resisted the Nazi regime, led the underground seminary of the Confessing Church, authored The Cost of Discipleship, and was executed by hanging weeks before WWII ended.

Flossenbürg Concentration Camp, Germany

53 Full Record →

Politics

1

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Idola Saint-Jean

Idola Saint-Jean

Canada

1880 – 1945 (64 years old)

Passionate Montreal suffragist, actress, and educator who founded the Alliance canadienne pour le vote des femmes and became the first French Canadian woman to run for the federal parliament in 1930.

Montreal, Canada

1 Full Record →

Humanitarian & Peace

36

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Bienheureux Marcel Callo

Marcel Callo

France

1921 – 1945 (23 years old)

Typographe et militant jociste breton, déporté au STO puis au camp de Mauthausen pour avoir soutenu spirituellement et soigné ses camarades ouvriers déportés.

Mauthausen, Austria

36 Full Record →

Arts & Music

5

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Emily Carr

Emily Carr

Canada

1871 – 1945 (73 years old)

Monumental West Coast painter and author who overcame decades of isolation to paint the towering totem poles and cedar rainforests of British Columbia, winning the Governor General's Award for Klee Wyck.

Victoria (British Columbia), Canada

5 Full Record →

Sports & Athletics

41

🕯️ 3,180

Eric Liddell

Eric Henry Liddell

China

16 January 1902 – 21 February 1945 (43 years old)

Eric Liddell, 'The Flying Scotsman', was an Olympic 400m champion and Scottish rugby international renowned for his unyielding Christian conviction, famously withdrawing from his signature 100m event at the 1924 Paris Olympics because the heats were held on a Sunday. Switching to the 400 meters, he won gold in a world record time before dedicating his life to missionary work in China, where he died in a Japanese civilian internment camp in 1945.

Weihsien Internment Camp, Shandong, China

41 Full Record →

Literature & Poetry

13

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Mebarek El Mili

مبارك الميلي

Algeria

1898 – 1945 (46 years old)

Pioneering Algerian historian who authored the first comprehensive modern history of Algeria written in Arabic, reclaiming indigenous North African history from colonial narratives.

Mila, Algeria

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Literature & Poetry

5

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August Vermeylen

August Vermeylen

Belgium

1872 – 1945 (72 years old)

Visionary Flemish author, art historian, and senator who co-founded the avant-garde journal Van Nu en Straks and became the first rector of the newly Dutchified Ghent University in 1930.

Uccle (Brussels), Belgium

5 Full Record →

Sciences & Discovery

31

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Vladimir Vernadsky

Владимир Иванович Вернадский

Russia

1863 – 1945 (81 years old)

Russian and Ukrainian mineralogist and geochemist who founded biogeochemistry and popularized the concept of the Biosphere, theorizing its evolution into the human-guided Noosphere.

Moscow, Russia

31 Full Record →

Politics

0

🕯️ 0

Ricardo Jiménez Oreamuno

Ricardo Jiménez Oreamuno

Costa Rica

1859-02-06 – 1945-01-04 (85 years old)

Three-time democratically elected President of Costa Rica and Chief Justice, celebrated for unshakeable civic austerity, civil liberties protection, and reconstructing Cartago after the 1910 earthquake.

San José, Costa Rica

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Arts & Music

8

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Lhaj Belaid

الحاج بلعيد

Morocco

c. 1875 – c. 1945 (~70 years old)

The founding patriarch and undisputed master of modern Amazigh (Soussi) poetry and music, whose virtuosity on the single-stringed ribab and philosophical Tamazight verses transformed Moroccan folk culture.

Tiznit, Morocco

8 Full Record →

Religious Figures & Theologians

19

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Cheikh Tourad

الشيخ تراد ولد العباس

Mauritania

1843 – 1945 (102 years old)

Venerated 19th-century Sufi master of the Fadiliyya-Qadiriyya order who spent a century arbitrating Saharan tribal conflicts and establishing nomadic schools across the Hodh and Sahel.

Aioun, Mauritania

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Arts & Music

37

🕯️ 970

Wassily Wassilyevich Kandinsky

Василий Васильевич Кандинский

Russia

16 December 1866 – 13 December 1944 (77 years old)

Visionary Russian painter and Bauhaus master universally recognized as the pioneer of pure non-objective abstract art, who linked visual color and geometry to musical synesthesia in his landmark treatise Concerning the Spiritual in Art.

Neuilly-sur-Seine (Paris), France

37 Full Record →

Technology

1

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Paul Otlet

Paul Marie Ghislain Otlet

Belgium

1868 – 1944 (76 years old)

Belgian bibliographer and visionary thinker revered as a founding father of information science who created the Universal Decimal Classification (UDC) and conceived the Mundaneum—a physical precursor to the World Wide Web.

Ixelles (Brussels), Belgium

1 Full Record →

Sciences & Discovery

4,627

🕯️ 100

Arthur Eddington

Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington

Great Britain

1882 – 1944 (61 years old)

British astrophysicist who led the historic 1919 solar eclipse expedition confirming Einstein's General Relativity.

Cambridge, United Kingdom

4,627 Full Record →

Humanitarian & Peace

33

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Tsunesaburo Makiguchi

牧口 常三郎

Japan

1871 – 1944 (73 years old)

Pédagogue et philosophe humaniste japonais, fondateur de la Soka Kyoiku Gakkai, mort martyr en prison pour son refus du militarisme shinto d'État.

Fujinomiya, Shizuoka, Japan

33 Full Record →

Resistance & Human Rights

34

🕯️ 930

Hannah Szenes

Szenes Anikó / חנה סנש

Hungary

17 July 1921 – 7 November 1944 (23 years old)

Hungarian-Jewish poet and British Special Operations Executive paratrooper who parachuted into Yugoslavia to rescue Allied airmen and Hungarian Jews, executed by firing squad after refusing to reveal military codes under torture.

Budapest, Hungary

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Art

3

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Hilma af Klint

Hilma af Klint

Sweden

1862-10-26 – 1944-10-21 (81 years old)

Revolutionary Swedish artist now recognized as the true pioneer of abstract art in Western history, who created purely non-objective geometric spiritual paintings years before Kandinsky or Mondrian.

Stockholm, Sweden

3 Full Record →