Birthday Paper › What happened on …? › December 21

Events on December 21

• 1140 King Conrad III captures Weinsberg Castle after a long siege. The women carry their husbands out of the castle and thus save their lives. The women are known as the Faithful Women of Weinsberg, and the castle as Weibertreu.
• 1898 Marie and Pierre Curie discover the chemical element radium.
• 1913 The world's first crossword puzzle appears in the weekend supplement of the New York World newspaper, invented by Arthur Wynne.
• 1925 The propagandistic silent film Battleship Potemkin by Sergei Eisenstein, with music by Edmund Meisel, is given its world premiere at the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow on the occasion of the 20th anniversary of the 1905 Revolution.
• 1952 In the GDR, television begins as a “public test program” from Berlin-Adlershof with two hours of daily broadcasting time.
• 1955 At the Apollo cinema in Vienna, the film Sissi by Ernst Marischka, starring Romy Schneider and Karlheinz Böhm, has its world premiere.
• 1968 With Apollo 8, carrying astronauts Frank Borman, James Arthur Lovell and William Anders on board, a manned spacecraft of the Apollo program sets off from Kennedy Space Center for the first time on its way toward the Moon.
• 1972 The Basic Treaty between the Federal Republic of Germany and the GDR is signed in East Berlin by Egon Bahr and Michael Kohl, with the aim of establishing good-neighborly relations between the two states.
• 1975 At the OPEC headquarters building in Vienna, terrorists led by Carlos carry out a spectacular hostage-taking. Approximately 70 hostages are taken, including 11 oil ministers from OPEC countries. 3 people die in the operation.
• 1998 The Austrian men's team celebrated a ninefold victory in the Super-G in Innsbruck, a feat unique in the history of the Alpine Ski World Cup.
• 2007 Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Czechia, Slovakia, Hungary, Slovenia and Malta become members of the Schengen Area.
• 2018 The Prosper-Haniel mine in Bottrop closes as Germany's last coal mine.

Born on December 21

• 1874 Tadeusz Boy-Żeleński, Polish poet and literary translator
• 1890 Hermann Joseph Muller, American biologist and geneticist, Nobel laureate
• 1911 Paul Burkhard, Swiss composer
• 1920 Alicia Alonso, Cuban prima ballerina, ballet director and choreographer
• 1931 Julia Gschnitzer, Austrian actress
• 1940 Frank Zappa, American musician and composer
• 1950 Jeffrey Katzenberg, American film producer
• 1950 Thomas Hürlimann, Swiss writer
• 1970 Stefan Lövgren, Swedish handball player
• 1983 Steven Yeun, South Korean-American actor

Is your birthday on December 21?

Then there is a newspaper that tells only the story of your day: what was going on in the world on December 21 of your birth year, which song was at the top, what the weather was like at your birthplace, plus birthday twins and a personal greeting.

• For every birth year from 1946
• 4 to 10 pages, always €14.90, as a PDF to print
• With a greeting page for voice and video messages

Create the paper for December 21 · €14.90

Day and month are already filled in, you only choose the birth year.

Source of events and birthdays: German Wikipedia article „21. Dezember“, licence CC BY-SA 4.0, selected, shortened and translated by Birthday Paper.

More days in December