August 5, 1931

1931Tom Hafey, Australian footballer and coach (died 2014)^[†]

Thomas Stanley Raymond Hafey was an Australian rules footballer who played for the Richmond Football Club in the Victorian Football League (VFL). He then became one of the VFL's longest-serving and most successful coaches, guiding Richmond to four VFL premierships before also having stints at Collingwood, Geelong and finally Sydney.Hafey was an inaugural inductee into the Australian Football Hall of Fame in 1996, named coach of Richmond's team of the century in 1998, and given the AFL Coaches Association "Coaching Legend Award" in 2011. He was renowned for his fitness and toughness even in his elderly years when he would still run rings around his juniors. He would do over 700 push-ups and crunches a day every day since he started playing in the VFL.

1931Judge and Nazi Party member Werner Best drews the Boxheim Documents, which described a violent takeover of the government by the NSDAP.^[†]

The Nazi Party, officially the National Socialist German Workers' Party, was a far-right political party in Germany active between 1920 and 1945 that created and supported the ideology of Nazism. Its precursor, the German Workers' Party, existed from 1919 to 1920. The Nazi Party emerged from the extremist German nationalist, racist, and populist Freikorps paramilitary culture, which fought against communist uprisings in post–World War I Germany. The party was created to draw workers away from communism and into völkisch nationalism. Initially, Nazi political strategy focused on anti-big business, anti-bourgeoisie, and anti-capitalism, disingenuously using socialist rhetoric to gain the support of the lower middle class; that was later downplayed to gain the support of business leaders. By the 1930s, the party's main focus shifted to antisemitic and anti-Marxist themes. The party had little popular support until the Great Depression, when worsening living standards and widespread unemployment drove Germans into political extremism.