Birthday Paper › What happened on …? › October 20

Events on October 20

• 1401 On the Grasbrook in Hamburg, dozens of former Vitalien brothers, including Klaus Störtebeker, are beheaded and their heads are impaled as a deterrent.
• 1842 Richard Wagner's tragic opera Rienzi, the Last of the Tribunes, is premiered at the Royal Court Theatre in Dresden. With his third completed opera, the composer achieves a breakthrough.
• 1891 With the Erfurt Program, an important SPD party congress comes to an end, creating a split between socialist theory in Marxist terms and the demands of realpolitik.
• 1935 Only 7,000 of the originally 90,000 soldiers of the Chinese Red Army under Mao Zedong's leadership reach Yan'an, the destination of the Long March in the Chinese Civil War.
• 1967 Eduard Zimmermann launches the television series Crime Scene XY … Unsolved on ZDF.
• 1968 At the Summer Olympics in Mexico City, the American Richard “Dick” Fosbury wins the gold medal in the high jump competition with a revolutionary jumping technique, the Fosbury Flop, later named after him, clearing 2.24 m.
• 1971 Willy Brandt receives the Nobel Peace Prize.
• 1973 Queen Elizabeth II opens the Sydney Opera House. The opening, during which Beethoven's Symphony No. 9 is performed, is broadcast live on television and celebrated with a grand fireworks display.
• 1974 ZDF broadcasts the first episode (Waldweg) of the crime series Derrick.
• 1983 The metre is redefined in Paris by the 17th General Conference on Weights and Measures as the distance that light travels in a vacuum in 1/299,792,458 of a second.
• 2004 The strongest earthquake in northern Germany since the beginning of seismic measurements reaches a magnitude of 4.5 on the Richter scale in the morning, shortly before nine o'clock. The hypocenter lies at a depth of 4,500 metres in the area around Neuenkirchen near Soltau.
• 2018 The space probe BepiColombo, a joint project between the ESA and JAXA for the exploration of the planet Mercury, is launched.

Born on October 20

• 1854 Arthur Rimbaud, French poet
• 1874 Charles Ives, American composer
• 1882 Bela Lugosi, Hungarian film actor
• 1891 James Chadwick, British physicist
• 1942 Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard, German biologist, Nobel laureate
• 1950 Tom Petty, American musician, singer and songwriter
• 1951 Claudio Ranieri, Italian footballer and coach
• 1971 Snoop Dogg, American rapper and actor
• 1971 Dannii Minogue, Australian singer
• 1990 Ben Münchow, German actor and voice actor

Is your birthday on October 20?

Then there is a newspaper that tells only the story of your day: what was going on in the world on October 20 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 October 20 · €14.90

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

Source of events and birthdays: German Wikipedia article „20. Oktober“, licence CC BY-SA 4.0, selected, shortened and translated by Birthday Paper.

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