Under Monday, March 27, the book of history records, among other things:
1188: Emperor Friedrich I. Barbarossa takes the cross at the court in Mainz and decides on the 3rd crusade.
1513: Spanish conquistador Ponce de León discovers Florida from Haiti and claims the land for Spain.
1703: Tsar Peter the Great founds St. Petersburg, today’s Leningrad.
1813: Prussia declares war on France. Beginning of the wars of liberation.
1933: Japan withdraws from the League of Nations over its intervention in Manchuria.
1938: Lufthansa opens passenger services on the Berlin – Baghdad line.
1938: In a pastoral letter, the Catholic bishops in Austria are calling for people to vote “yes” in the referendum on April 10 on Austria’s “annexation” to the German Reich. The accompanying letter to Gauleiter Josef Bürckel is handwritten by Theodor Cardinal Innitzer with “…Heil Hitler!” signed.
1958: After Bulganin’s resignation, Soviet party leader Nikita Khrushchev also took over the post of prime minister.
1968: The Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, who became the first person to orbit the earth in a spaceship on April 12, 1961, dies in a plane crash near Moscow.
2003: Iraq War: US parachutists land in northern Iraqi Kurdish region to secure oil fields near Kirkuk and Mosul.
2003: The body of top politician Ivan Stambolić, a former supporter and later critic of Slobodan Milošević, who has been missing for years, is found in Serbia.
2006: Fritz Verzetnitsch resigns after 19 years as ÖGB President. A few days earlier, it had become known that he had used the strike fund to save BAWAG without informing the Executive Committee. As his interim successor, Verzetnitsch appoints the chairman of the municipal employees’ union, ÖGB Vice President Rudolf Hundstorfer.
2008: The trial of Michel Fourniret, accused of kidnapping, raping and murdering seven girls and young women between 1987 and 2001, begins in the French Ardennes town of Charleville-Mézières. His third wife, Monique Olivier, is in the dock with him. Both are sentenced to life imprisonment.
birthdays: Johann Andreas Eisenbarth, German surgeon (1663-1727); Joseph Schreyvogel, East. writer (1768-1832); Richard Pfeiffer, German bacteriologist (discovered the influenza bacillus) (1858-1945); Frederick Henry Royce, British car engineer (1863-1933); Karl Mannheim, Austro-Brit. sociologist (1893-1947); Annemarie Moser-Proell, former Austrian female ski racer (1953); Quentin Tarantino, US director (1963); Holliday Grainger, British actress (1988).
days of death: Jakob Gauermann, Austria painter and graphic artist (1773-1843); William Stern, German-US psychologist/philosopher (1871-1938); Harry Piel, German film actor (1892-1963); Ferdinand “Ferry” Porsche jr., Austro-German automobile designer (1909-1998); Fay Kanin, US screenwriter (1917-2013); Ernst Eisenmayer, Austria. painter/sculptor (1920-2018); Jean-Marie Balestre, French FISA and FIA President (1921-2008); Stéphane Audran, French actress (1932-2018); Yuri Gagarin, Soviet cosmonaut, first man in space (1934-1968).
name days: Frowin, Rupert, Heimo, Ruperta, Hubert, Augusta, Leda, Ernst, Benedikt, Nikodemus.