Henri Deterding

Henri Wilhelm August Deterding was one of the first executives of the Royal Dutch Petroleum Company and was its general manager for 36 years, from 1900 to 1936, and was also chairman of the combined Royal Dutch/Shell oil company. 

He succeeded the founder of Royal Dutch, Jean Baptiste August Kessler, when he died, and made Royal Dutch Shell a competitor to John D. Rockefeller's Standard Oil and one of the world's largest petroleum companies.

In 1920, Deterding was made an honorary Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire, for services to Anglo-Dutch relations and for his work in supplying the Allies with petroleum during the First World War. Deterding was a bitter enemy of the Soviet Union and helped thousands of White Russian exiles.

Born in Amsterdam in 1866, the fourth child in a family of five, Deterding was the son of Philip Jacob Deterding, a merchant navy master mariner, and Catherina Adolphina Geertruida (née Kayser). Philip Deterding died in 1870, leaving the family in straitened circumstances. However, Henri was educated up to the age of sixteen at the Higher Citizens' School in Amsterdam.

After leaving school, Deterding took a clerical position in the Twentsche Bank, where he developed a remarkable aptitude for handling figures. To avoid the slow promotion of a banking career, he entered an examination for positions in the Netherlands Trading Society of the Dutch East Indies, gained first place, and was appointed to the company's Eastern staff. After some years with the firm, he began to work in the oil industry, which was then in its infancy.

In May 1896, at the age of thirty, Deterding took a job with the Royal Dutch Oil Company, working with the managing director, J. B. A. Kessler. At the time, Royal Dutch was not a major company, still struggling to make good, and Deterding was instrumental in piloting it through many difficulties. Kessler died in March, 1900, leaving instructions, put in writing shortly before his death, that he wished Deterding to take over from him as general manager.

Soon gaining the nickname of "the Napoleon of Oil", Deterding was responsible for developing the tanker fleet that enabled Royal Dutch to compete with the Shell company of Marcus Samuel. He led Royal Dutch to several major mergers and acquisitions, including the merger with Samuel's "Shell" Transport and Trading Company in 1907 and the purchase of Azerbaijan oil fields from the Rothschild family in 1911. In the last years of his life, Deterding was controversial when he became an admirer of the German Nazi Party. In 1936, he discussed with them the sale of a year's oil reserves on credit; the next year, he was forced to resign from the position of general manager, but remained a member of the company's board.

In 1894, Deterding married firstly Catharina Neubronner, a Dutch woman, with whom he had two sons and a daughter. In 1924 he married secondly Lydia Pavlovna Koudoyaroff (1904–1980), a daughter of the White Russian General Paul Koudoyaroff, who had been the mistress of his rival Calouste Gulbenkian, and they had two daughters, including the socialite Olga Deterding. After that marriage ended in divorce, at the age of seventy Deterding married, lastly, to Charlotte Mina Knack, a German who had been a secretary in the company and from a prestigious coffee trading family from Hamburg. They had two children together, Louisa and Henriette. Henriette married renowned pianist and industrialist Kurt Leimer. During his second marriage, his English country house was Buckhurst Park, Winkfield, Berkshire, where Mrs Deterding continued to live with her two daughters after the divorce.

The British newspaper the Daily Mail mistakenly published Deterding's obituary on 27 June 1924, and the news was copied by The New York Times under the heading "Henry Deterding dies at film show; Director General of the Royal Dutch Company Succumbs Suddenly in The Hague". However, on that day the Dutch envoy in London, René de Marees van Swinderen, said in a letter to the Dutch foreign minister, Herman Adriaan van Karnebeek:

"P.S. I could not resist sending also herewith the obituary in the Daily Mail dedicated to Deterding, who happily is very much alive."

Deterding was a steadfast enemy of the Soviet Union, caused largely by the nationalization of his properties in Azerbaijan. He was accused of conspiring against Soviet oil interests and even of printing counterfeit Soviet money. He became a target for Soviet press attacks and, particularly, of propaganda poems by the leading Soviet poet Vladimir Mayakovsky.

In 1936, Deterding bought the manor of Dobbin, near Krakow am See, in Mecklenburg, Germany, and moved there neighboring then-director of Deutsche Bank, Emil Georg von Strauss with whom he was friends. He also had a property in Suvretta, St. Moritz, Switzerland, and was there when he died on 4 February 1939.

René-Louis Lafforgue

René-Louis Lafforgue was a French songwriter and singer of Spanish origin and libertarian inspiration.  He was also an actor in cinema, theater and television .

René-Louis Lafforgue was born on March 13, 1928 into a family of libertarian activists from the Spanish Basque Country. He suffered the war in Spain , then exile in France, where his parents took refuge in Cachan . He took part in the Resistance with his brother Sylvain, who died there.

After having practiced several trades (apprentice butcher, carpenter, machinist), he became an actor, then a singer-songwriter. After the first parts of the shows of Georges Brassens , he moved to the Olympia .

In 1948 , Charles Dullin hired him as an actor. In 1949 , he toured Europe with the mime Marcel Marceau .

He interprets the play Drame à Toulon - Henri Martin by Claude Martin and Henri Delmas which recounts the life and trial of Henri Martin , a sailor opposed to the war in Indochina and sentenced to five years' imprisonment for participation in a "demoralization enterprise of the army and the nation. Charles Denner, Paul Préboist, José Valverde and Antoine Vitez are some of the actors in troupe. Representations are prohibited by several prefects and mayors. But the censorship is often thwarted and the play is played more than three hundred times.

In 1955 , he won the Grand Prix de la Chanson française de Deauville (André Claveau category), which marked the beginning of his notoriety.

René-Louis Lafforgue is the author of the songs Julie la Rousse (1956) and Le Poseur de rails (1957). He won the Record Prize in 1959

In 1962 , he created the cabaret L'École buissonnière at No. 10  rue de l'Arbalète in Paris , where Guy Bedos, Paul Préboist, Pierre Louki, Boby Lapointe, Maurice Fanon, Christine Sèvres, Léo Campion and even Beatrice Arnac. The cabaret was then a meeting place for libertarians and pacifists for whom it hosted many parties. After his death, the cabaret was run by his wife, Claudie. He was also the founder of Éditions du Tournesol.

René-Louis Lafforgue was killed in a car on national road 118, between Albi and Castres, on June 3, 1967  while traveling for the filming of a soap opera, L'Éventail de Sevilla . He rests in Cachan cemetery.

Anders Lange

Anders Sigurd Lange was a Norwegian political organiser, speaker and editor who led his eponymously named political party Anders Lange's Party into parliament in 1973.

Anders Sigurd Lange was born on September 5, 1904 in Nordstrand, Aker (now a part of Oslo) to doctor Alf Lange (1869–1929) and Anna Elisabeth Svensson (1873–1955). He had two older siblings, Alexander and Karen. Although he was born in Aker, the family moved to Foss in Bjelland when he was only six weeks old, owing to his father being appointed district physician for a region consisting of Bjelland, Grindheim and Åseral. The Lange family was originally from Holstein and Denmark, and included several prominent public officials, priests, doctors and businessmen. Lange lived in Foss for his first seven years. Lange's parents were divorced in 1911, and Anna Elisabeth moved to Bergen with her three children. They lived in humble conditions in a guest house in Fjøsanger for the first two to three years. The family thereafter moved to Kristiania (now named Oslo), settling in Skillebekk.

Lange started his secondary education at Vestheim School in 1921, but failed to graduate examen artium. He subsequently moved to Kristiansand in 1923, and finished his education at Kristiansand Cathedral School in 1924. He was not interested in politics in his youth, spending his free time in outdoor recreation and sports. In Kristiania (Oslo), Lange had played football and ice hockey for the club Mercantile SFK, and he continued to play football for FK Donn in Kristiansand. He broke his nose several times during play, giving him his characteristic crooked nose. Lange held his first public speech (albeit a short one), the Kristiansand russ speech, on 17 May 1924 in honour of Henrik Wergeland. He thereafter served in the Royal Guards for his conscription service.

During his time in the military, Lange became interested in forestry after reading the 1923 book Skogen og folket by Christian Gierløff. He graduated as a forestry technician at the Oddernes forestry school in 1926. He had part of his practice in Andebu, and after graduating he continued working there for a local farmer. A cousin of his father later tipped him that he could get work at a forestry school in Argentina, and Lange set out for the country in 1927. He went to port in Buenos Aires, got in connection with Kristiansand-based Norwegians, and travelled north to Tartagal near the border to Paraguay. He became engaged with the Saco company, and headed a work team of 15 men. Lange had also brought with him football equipment to the country, and he became known by the locals as "Don André". Lange lived in Argentina from November 1927 to June 1929, when he went home with his father's casket, his father having died of a heart attack when visiting Lange at his office in Argentina.

Educated as a forestry technician, Lange got involved in politics following his stay in Argentina in the late 1920s. He joined the right-wing Fatherland League organisation upon his return to Norway in 1929, and he became a popular speaker at public rallies. His provocative style however often led to controversies. Although his agitation was chiefly directed against the political left, he also rejected the efforts of the far-right. He left the organisation in 1938 to join Landsforeningen Norges Sjøforsvar, where he agitated for strengthening the Norwegian armed forces and warned against the future world war. He was initially blocked from entering the organised Norwegian resistance during the Second World War, but nonetheless did work to assist resistance members, and he was arrested by the Germans and imprisoned twice.

After the war, Lange initially focused on his work as a kennel-owner, as well as to write and publish his own dog-owner's paper. Although he had pledged to not enter politics again, he became increasingly politically active. He started touring the country to speak at his public rallies, and the paper he published became increasingly political. He was a charismatic right-wing public speaker who first and foremost objected to high taxes, state-regulations and public bureaucracy. He gained a considerable following among youth in the 1960s, and their activities included to counter-demonstrate against left-wing demonstrations. Increasingly called upon by his supporters to establish a new political party, it was not until 1973 that he finally agreed to do so. The new party, named Anders Lange's Party (ALP) was founded by popular acclamation during a public meeting at Saga kino. He successfully entered the Norwegian Parliament after the election later the same year, but his new-found political career came to an abrupt end when he died the following year. Lange's political party was reformed and renamed to the Progress Party after his death.

Lange died on October 18, 1974.

Władysław Szpilman

Władysław Szpilman was a Polish pianist and classical composer of Jewish descent. 

Szpilman is widely known as the central figure in the 2002 Roman Polanski film The Pianist, which was based on Szpilman's autobiographical account of how he survived the German occupation of Warsaw and the Holocaust.

Szpilman studied piano at music academies in Berlin and Warsaw. He became a popular performer on Polish radio and in concert. Confined within the Warsaw ghetto after the German invasion of Poland, Szpilman spent two years in hiding. Towards the end of his concealment, he was helped by Wilm Hosenfeld, a German officer who detested Nazi policies. After World War II, Szpilman resumed his career on Polish radio. Szpilman was also a prolific composer; his output included hundreds of songs and many orchestral pieces.

Väinö Tanner

Väinö Alfred Tanner was a leading figure in the Social Democratic Party of Finland, and a pioneer and leader of the cooperative movement in Finland. He was Prime Minister of Finland in 1926–1927.

Tanner was born on March 12, 1881 in Helsinki as the son of a railway brakesman of modest means. After matriculating in 1900, he studied at the business college Suomen Liikemiesten Kauppaopisto (one of two predecessors of the present-day Business College Helsinki). He also studied law, graduating as a jurist in 1911.

Tanner started work as a trainee at the Großeinkaufs-Gesellschaft Deutscher Consumvereine (GEG) in Hamburg, Germany, while still a student, and in 1903, after returning to Finland, became manager of Turun Vähäväkisten Osuusliike, then the largest cooperative retail society in Finland. He was later appointed to the supervisory board of the Helsinki-based cooperative Elanto in 1907, and also became chairman of Suomen Osuuskauppojen Keskuskunta (SOK) in 1909 and CEO of Elanto in 1915. He also served as president of the International Co-operative Alliance (ICA) from 1927 until 1945.

He did not participate in the Finnish Civil War, maintaining a neutral attitude. When the war ended he became Finland's leading Social Democratic Party (SDP) politician, and a strong proponent of the parliamentary system. His main achievement was the rehabilitation of the SDP after the Civil War. Väinö Tanner served as Prime Minister (1926–1927), Minister of Finance (1937–1939), Minister of Foreign Affairs (1939–1940), and after the Winter War Minister of Trade and Industry (1941–1942) and Minister of Finance (1942–1944).

Väinö Tanner's legacy is in his directing the Finnish working class from their extremist ideology towards pragmatic progress through the democratic process. Under his leadership the Social Democrats were trusted to form a minority government already less than 10 years after the bloody civil war. Tanner's minority socialist government passed a series of important social reforms during its time in office, which included a liberal amnesty law, reduced duties on imported foods, and pension and health insurance laws.

During President Relander's brief illness Tanner, who held the post of prime minister, was even the acting president and Commander-In-Chief. In this role he even received the parade of the White guards on the 10th anniversary of the White victory. This was perceived as a remarkable development at the time. During the 1930s and 1940s, the Social Democrats formed several coalition governments with the Agrarian party. In the Winter War Väinö Tanner was the foreign minister. Väinö Tanner's leadership was very important in forming the grounds and creating the Spirit of the Winter War which united the nation.

After the end of the Continuation War, Tanner was tried for responsibility for the war in February 1946, and sentenced to five years and six months in prison.

After the Continuation War, and while still in prison, Tanner became the virtual leader of a faction of the SDP which had strong support from the USA. This faction eventually came out on top after a great deal of internal party strife lasting for much of the 1940s. Tanner criticised Finland's post-war doctrine known as Paasikivi-Kekkonen doctrine, in which Finnish foreign affairs were kept strictly neutral and friendly with the USSR. Tanner managed to return to the Finnish parliament as a representative in the 1951 parliamentary elections. The acting foreign minister at the time, Åke Gartz insisted that the head of the Finnish Social Democratic Party Emil Skog should try to keep Tanner away from the party. Tanner would go on to win the 1957 SDP chairman election. Tanner won the race by 1 vote. 

Tanner died on April 19, 1966.

Isaak Kikoin

Isaak Konstantinovich (Kushelevich) Kikoin, D.N., was a Soviet physicist of Lithuanian origin and an author of physics textbooks in Russian language who played an important role in the former Soviet program of nuclear weapons.

Kikoin was born on March 28, 1908 in the town of Novye Zhagory (now Žagarė in Lithuania), Russian Empire. Kikoin was a Lithuanian Jew (orthodoxy) whose patronymic was also written as Kushelevich (Кушелевич; "son of Kushel"); and his parents were school teachers. During the World War I, his family was relocated from Latvia to Russia where he entered in gymnazium in Pskov, and upon graduation, he went to study physics at the Leningrad Polytechnic Institute in 1925.

In 1930-31, he earned his specialist degree in physics and successfully defended his thesis on Photomagnetism for his Doktor Nauk in 1936. He taught physics at the Leningrad Polytechnic Institute, and his early work investigated the electrical conductivity and magnetic attractions in metals until 1938. From 1938 till 1944, he taught physics at the Ural Polytechnic Institute and found a landmine project with the Red Army that would demagnetize, and detonate the German army's tanks. It was Kurchatov who brought Kikoin in Soviet program of nuclear weapons and assigned him the Uranium enrichment project at this Laboratory No. 2 using the gaseous diffusion method took place under Kikoin while Lev Artsimovich worked on electromagnetic isotope separation. During the Russian Alsos, he went to Germany to locate German knowledge that would proved useful in Soviet programs.

He remained associate with Soviet program of nuclear weapons, and was an academician of the Academy of Sciences of the Soviet Union and was awarded the Stalin Prize a total of four times (1942, 1949, 1951, 1953), the Lenin Prize in 1959, and the USSR State Prize in 1967 and 1980. Kikoin was named a Hero of Socialist Labour (1951); he also won the Kurchatov Medal (1971). Kikoin was with Igor Kurchatov as one of the founders of the Kurchatov Atomic Energy Institute, which developed the first Soviet nuclear reactor in 1946. This was the lead-in to the Soviet atomic bomb project with the first atomic bomb test taking place in 1949.

In 1970, Kikoin (jointly with Andrey Kolmogorov) started issuing Kvant magazine, a popular science magazine in physics and mathematics for school students and teachers. He authored texts on molecular physics in 1978, and it was has been translated in Persian language.

Kikoin died on December 28, 1984.

Archibald Reiss

Rodolphe Archibald Reiss was a German–Swiss criminology-pioneer, forensic scientist, professor and writer.

The Reiss family was in agriculture and winemaking. Archibald was born on July 8, 1875 the eighth of ten children, son of Ferdinand Reiss, landowner and Pauline Sabine Anna Gabriele Seutter von Loetzen. After finishing high school in Germany, he went to Switzerland for his studies. He had received a Ph.D. in chemistry at the age of 22 and was an expert in photography and forensic science. In 1906 he was appointed a professor of forensic science at the University of Lausanne. In 1909, he was the founder of the first academic forensic science programme and of the "Institut de police scientifique" (Institute of forensic science) at the University of Lausanne. He published two major books on forensic science "Photographie judiciaire" (Forensic photography), Mendel, Paris, in 1903 and the first part of his major contribution "Manuel de police scientifique. I Vols et homicides" (Handbook of forensic science I: Thefts and homicides), Payot, Lausanne and Acan, Paris, in 1911. The Institute he created celebrated its 100th anniversary in 2009 and has grown to become a major school, "Ecole des sciences criminelles", that includes forensic science, criminology and criminal law within the Faculty of Law and Criminal Justice of the University of Lausanne.

With the advent of World War I, Reiss was commissioned by the Serbian government to investigate atrocities committed by the invading Central Powers against Serbs. Dr. Reiss would end up extensively documenting his findings in two reports. The first, "Report upon the atrocities committed by the Austro-Hungarian Army during the first invasion of Serbia" was completed in 1915 and published in 1916, focusing on the crimes committed by the Austro-Hungarians against the Serbs during their invasion and occupation of Serbia in the first few months of World War I in 1914. The second Reiss report focused on the second round of the invasion and occupation of Serbia and crimes committed against the Serbs which began in 1915, this time by the combined forces of Austria-Hungary, Bulgaria, and Germany, but in Bulgaria the results of Rice's investigations are rejected on the arguments that he did not take any photographs of victims of "Bulgarian atrocities", while making them for the Austro-Hungarian and German ones - moreover that he was one of the pioneers of forensic photography and the fact that he fought in the ranks of the Serbian army during the war compromised his impartiality as an expert. This second report, "Infringement of the Rules and Laws of War committed by the Austro-Bulgaro-Germans: Letters of a Criminologist on the Serbian Macedonian Front", was published in 1919.

When Serbia was overrun in 1915 he joined the Serbian Army in its retreat across Albania to return with the victorious Serbian Army when it liberated Belgrade in the final days of the war. He was known as a great friend of Serbia and the Serbian people and after the war decided to stay and live in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. Upon the invitation of the Serbian Government, he carried out an inquiry on Hungarian, German and Bulgarian atrocities in Serbia during World War I and published the reports in European papers. He was part of the Serbian Government's envoy at the Paris Peace Conference, 1919. He found propaganda postcards of the Austrian-Hungarian Army showing atrocities against Serbian people.

After the war, Reiss helped establish the first police academy in Serbia and teach forensic sciences. He was one of the founders of the Red Cross of Serbia. He became an honorary citizen of Krupanj in 1926.

Reiss died on August 7, 1929. 

Christen Daae Magelssen

Christen Daae Magelssen was a Norwegian sculptor .

Magelssen was born on May 6, 1841 the son of parish priest in Åfjord, Hans Gynter Magelssen (d. 1886) and Drude Cathrine Haar Daae (1815–88), a sister of Ludvig Kristensen Daa . As a young man, he was first a sailor, before he started making figureheads in an English workshop. When he returned to Norway he decided to become a sculptor, and in 1866 went to Copenhagen with a state scholarship. He was taught by the Danish sculptor Herman Wilhelm Bissen for three years. In this period, he produced his first major work, "Sailor, who sweaters his Fatherland's Coast".

In the following years, Magelssen lived in Kristiania , before he went to Rome in 1871 . He lived in Rome for ten years, initially with a state grant, and became acquainted with other Norwegians who were in Italy at the same time: Ole Bull , Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson , Jonas Lie and Henrik Ibsen . During the Rome period, he made, among other things, the colossal statue "Meleager", which was exhibited at the World Exhibition in Paris in 1878 . In the 1880s he returned to Norway, and lived first in Bergen , then in Kristiania.

He was married to the Italian printer's daughter Adele Elvira Salandri (b. 1857).

Magelssen died on March 20, 1940.