December 13, 1938

1938Gus Johnson, American basketball player (died 1987)^[†]

Gus (Honeycomb) Johnson Jr. was an American professional basketball player in the National Basketball Association (NBA) and American Basketball Association (ABA). A 6 ft 6 in (1.98 m), 235-pound (107 kg) forward who occasionally played center, Johnson spent nine seasons with the Baltimore Bullets before he split his final campaign between the Phoenix Suns and Indiana Pacers, where he won the ABA championship in his final game. Johnson did not come into the NBA until he was almost 25-years old. He was a five-time NBA All-Star by age 33, before chronic knee issues and dubious off-court habits took their tolls late in his career.

1938The Holocaust: The Neuengamme concentration camp opens in the Bergedorf district of Hamburg, Germany.^[†]

The Holocaust, known in Hebrew as the Shoah, was the genocide of European Jews during World War II. From 1941 to 1945, Nazi Germany and its collaborators systematically murdered some six million Jews across German-occupied Europe, around two-thirds of Europe's Jewish population. The murders were committed primarily through mass shootings across Eastern Europe and poison gas chambers in extermination camps, chiefly Auschwitz-Birkenau, Treblinka, Belzec, Sobibor, and Chełmno in occupied Poland. Separate Nazi persecutions killed millions of other non-Jewish civilians and prisoners of war (POWs); the term Holocaust is sometimes used to include the murder and persecution of non-Jewish groups.