May 19, 1945

1945Pete Townshend, English singer-songwriter and guitarist^[†]

Peter Dennis Blandford Townshend is an English musician. He is the co-founder, guitarist, keyboardist, second lead vocalist, principal songwriter and de facto leader of the Who, one of the most influential rock bands of the 1960s and 1970s. His aggressive playing style, poetic songwriting techniques and authorship of two rock operas with the Who, as well as other projects, have earned him critical acclaim.

1945Philipp Bouhler, German soldier and politician (born 1889)^[†]

Philipp Bouhler was a German senior Nazi Party functionary who was both a Reichsleiter and Chief of the Chancellery of the Führer of the NSDAP. He was also the SS official responsible for the Aktion T4 euthanasia program that killed more than 250,000 disabled adults and children in Nazi Germany, as well as co-initiator of Aktion 14f13, also called Sonderbehandlung, that killed 15,000–20,000 concentration camp prisoners.

1945Syrian demonstrators in Damascus are fired upon by French troops injuring twelve, leading to the Levant Crisis.^[†]

Syrians are the majority inhabitants of Syria, indigenous to the Levant, most of whom have Arabic, especially its Levantine and Mesopotamian dialects, as a mother tongue. The cultural and linguistic heritage of the Syrian people is a blend of both indigenous elements and the foreign cultures that have come to rule the land and its people over the course of thousands of years. By the seventh century, most of the inhabitants of the Levant spoke Aramaic. In the centuries after the Muslim conquest of the Levant in 634, Arabic gradually became the dominant language, but a minority of Syrians (particularly the Assyrians and Syriac-Arameans retained Aramaic, which is still spoken in its Eastern and Western dialects.