Historic events pass from living memory
into the history books with the death of the last survivor. Here are
the stories of a few of those final witnesses to some of history's
most important, often tragic, events. Calling a ship unsinkable is just
daring the universe to prove otherwise, and that's exactly what happened
when the Titanic sank on April 14, 1912. On board was 2-month-old Millvina Dean,
who would become the last surviving passenger. Dean, her parents, and her brother were
emig
rating to the U.S. from England. Their final destination was Kansas City,
but they never got there. Although she, her brother, and her mother were among the
first passengers who made it into the lifeboats, her father stayed behind and was one of
the many who died in the freezing waters. She became something of a
celebrity in her later years, but Dean refused to see any film version of
the sinking — especially James Cameron's. "I wouldn't see the film, because of my
father going down. And I
wondered if he was going down with the ship. I couldn't
see that. It would be too emotional." Still, in 2009, when she was struggling
to pay for her nursing home, Cameron, Leonardo DiCaprio, and Kate Winslet sent
along a hefty donation to ensure her future. Dean was 97 years old when she
passed away later that year. It was David Dushman who drove his tank
straight through the Auschwitz electric fence. He and his fellow soldiers had no idea
what the camp was, and what horrors were about to
unfold before them. When he passed away
in 2021, that left only a single surviving soldier from the first group to liberate the
Nazis' most notorious concentration camp. Ivan Martynushkin was just 21 years
old when he accompanied the Red Army's 322nd Rifle Division into what they first
thought was an empty camp until they saw some of the 7,000-odd prisoners who
had been left behind after the Nazi evacuation. He spoke openly about
what they found there, recalling, "We saw emaciated, tortur
ed, impoverished
people. Those were the people I first encountered. [...] We could tell from their eyes
that they were happy to be saved from this hell. Happy that now they weren't threatened by
death in a crematorium. Happy to be freed." He has also said that he was well aware at the
time that he was looking at the fate he could have shared. Around 15,000 of his fellow
Soviet soldiers had died at Auschwitz, with hundreds dying in the days just
before the liberators arrived. And that indis
criminate killing is at the heart
of the message that he continued to spread, even after he became the last living
liberator of the Auschwitz concentration camp: "The life of entire peoples were put at stake." It probably didn't seem like much
of a historic event at the time, but when Gordon Moore and seven of his
coworkers at the Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory quit to form their own company, it was
the moment that kick-started Silicon Valley and, in turn, laid the groundwork
for today'
s computer age. "In the absence of an official contract, eight newly-minted dollar bills were
passed around the table for signatures." Moore became the last survivor of the
so-called "traitorous eight" after the 2021 death of Dr. Jay Last. After Last, Moore,
and their colleagues parted ways with the notoriously difficult-to-work-with
– and notoriously racist – Nobel Prize-winning Dr. William Shockley,
they founded Fairchild Semiconductor, developed a method for building silicon
chips quick
ly and efficiently, and the world never looked back. Silicon Valley
sprang up around Fairchild Semiconductor, and it's nice to imagine that Shockley was
left shaking his fist at them with pure rage. Moore went on to co-found Intel and establish
the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, which gives away $300 million in charitable
donations every year. According to Forbes, the charity is worth somewhere around
$6 billion, while Moore himself is worth around $8.9 billion. Meanwhile, Moore's
Law
— the prediction that the processing power of computers was going to double
every year — has proved pretty accurate, and it might not have happened if Moore and his
colleagues hadn't made the historic decision to quit their jobs and set out on their own.
He died in March 2023 at the age of 94. The days of gathering the family around the
radio to listen to a story unfold have been replaced by Netflix and podcasts, but
in 1938, one radio drama went down in history. War of the Worlds went out
across
national airwaves in October that year. There's quite a bit of debate about whether
or not it actually caused any kind of panic, with many experts saying that it didn't
and those stories were a bit of folklore added later. That's impressive in and of
itself, and surprisingly, the last member of that broadcast lived to see the reports
of hysteria and various remakes of the story. When Bill Herz died in 2016, The New York
Times described him as, quote, "something of a curmudgeon." In
addition to working for Orson
Welles ask casting director, Herz voiced several roles in the radio drama, as well. His two ham
radio operators talking about the alien invasion they were witnessing made it into the final
broadcast. And during rehearsals, he also stood in for Welles. He wasn't shy about saying just what
he thought of the now-famous broadcast, either: "I thought to myself, 'Nobody's going to believe
this in a million years.' Boy, was I wrong." In 2014, The New York Times report
ed on the death
of the last man to have a bird's-eye view of the event that would change not just the course of
World War II but modern warfare. Theodore Van Kirk was the navigator on the Enola Gay. At 93
years old, he was the last survivor of the crew that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima.
According to the atomic physicists on site, there were just 43 seconds between the
release of the bomb and its impact. "He looked at us and said, 'We
think the airplane'll be okay if you're nine mil
es away when the bomb explodes.'" As Van Kirk recalled: "The plane jumped and made a sound like sheet
metal snapping. Shortly after the second wave, we turned to where we could look out
and see the cloud, where the city of Hiroshima had been. [...] I describe it
looking like a pot of black, boiling tar." He also spoke of the moments immediately
following the blast, when he had the sense that something world-changing had just happened.
He also realized that their small crew were — for a few
short moments — the only ones on
earth who knew what had just been done. Van Kirk left the military in 1946. After
earning a master's in chemical engineering and spending 35 years working for DuPont, he
later gave lectures on his role in World War II. He always said that he did it to
educate the following generations on what had happened that day, and he always
stood by the decision to drop the bombs. There are plenty of historic
events that are downright awful, including the Tuskegee Syph
ilis Experiment.
The study involved 623 Black men who were monitored over the course of four decades. Some
were diagnosed with syphilis, some were not, and they were all under the impression that
they were being treated for other ailments that included things like fatigue and anemia.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says the men were not honestly informed of what
the study was, nor was consent given. Worse, even when treatments for syphilis became
available, the test subjects
weren't treated. The last surviving participant was Ernest Hendon, who passed away in 2004 at the age of
96. According to the Los Angeles Times, Hendon and his brother were both a part of
the control group that didn't have syphilis, and he spoke about how they had no idea what
they were actually signing up for, recalling, "They said it was a study that would do you good." Hendon outlived scores of other participants.
When the story went public in 1972, 100 men were dead of complications lin
ked to their
participation, 28 were dead from syphilis, and — since they hadn't been told what they
had — at least 59 wives and children were also diagnosed with the disease. Hendon lived to
hear President Bill Clinton's apology, stating, "Everybody knows now that we were mistreated. I'm glad they're seeing now that
it will never happen again." It was probably unbelievably
exciting for an 8-year-old boy: Werner Doehner was going to be one of
the passengers on an airship touted as: "[A] hug
e flying billboard for
German aeronautical supremacy." It came complete with swastikas, had already
made 62 perfectly safe and uneventful journeys, and when Doehner and his family boarded in 1937, it was traveling from Frankfurt, Germany
all the way to Lakehurst, New Jersey. That airship was, of course, the Hindenburg, and it was about 175 feet in the air when
fire engulfed the airship in about 34 seconds. "This is the worst of the worst of
disasters in the world. Oh, the humanity." Doehner
's quick-thinking mother pushed both him
and his brother out a window before she jumped, and although they spent weeks in the hospital
with severe burns, it saved their lives. Doehner's father and sister weren't as fortunate,
and both perished. His mother had tried to save his sister, too, but had been unable to lift her
out of the zeppelin window. And the last time he saw his father, he'd just recorded some
video and was heading back to their cabin. Doehner died in 2019 at the age
of 90.
But his son, Bernie, said: "My dad was secretive about
the disaster and didn't like to talk about it. He was a really private person." It's no secret that working conditions throughout
history have often been pretty terrible. That was brought into sharp relief in 1911 when New York
City's Triangle Shirtwaist Factory was consumed in a fiery blaze that killed 146 of the 600
factory employees there that day. The fire brought national attention to the dangers of sweatshops,
particularly because
it was determined that most of the deaths would have been preventable if
only basic safety measures had been observed. The deaths were gruesome. Many were burned
alive or died jumping out of the factory's windows. Rose Freedman was one of the lucky
ones. The 17-year-old went up instead of down, following company execs who were
heading to the roof to be rescued. She was rescued, too, and went on to become an
outspoken campaigner in the fight for employee rights, labor unions, and an overhau
l to
the national worker safety legislation. She loudly condemned the execs she'd followed
to the roof, revealing that they'd locked the doors because they had been afraid of theft
and had tried to bribe her to say otherwise. At the time of her death in 2001, Freedman was the last living survivor
of the fire. She was 107 years old. Clarence Norris was the last surviving defendant
in a case that became a landmark example of racial injustice in America. He was a member
of the so-called Scott
sboro Boys, a group of nine Black men between the ages of 13 and 19 who
were accused of raping two white women in Alabama. The boys had been on a train heading north for
work when they were arrested near Scottsboro. The arrests came in 1931, but the case dragged on
until 1937, and even though one of the accusers recanted, Norris was given the death penalty three
times. He wasn't fully or formally exonerated until 1976. He was paroled in 1946, but the
stigma remained. Norris fought it, sayin
g, "A man should never give up hope. [...]
They had said that I was a nobody, a dog, but I stood up and I said the truth.
Somebody's got to do these things in life." Norris was 76 years old when he died in 1989. It took until 2013 for three of the men
— Haywood Patterson, Charles Weems, and Andy Wright — to receive their formal
exonerations, long after their deaths. The Christmas Truce is one of the most famous
stories of World War I. It happened on December 25, 1914, when soldiers on oppos
ing sides
silenced their weapons and emerged from the trenches. Face-to-face with enemy soldiers who
were just like they were — young men sent into a terrifying war — they traded gifts, sang Christmas
carols, and even played impromptu games of soccer. "It's a victory the likes of
which will not be seen again." The last surviving witness to the Christmas
truce was Alfred Anderson. He'd been 18 years old at the time, and when he died in
2005, he'd reached the ripe old age of 109. Anderson se
rved with the Black Watch
regiment, and spoke of the experience, saying, "All I'd heard for two months in the
trenches was the hissing, cracking, and whining of bullets in flight, machine-gun
fire, and distant German voices. But there was a dead silence that morning. [...] We
shouted 'Merry Christmas!' even though nobody felt merry. The silence ended early in
the afternoon, and the killing started again." Anderson was also the final survivor
of a group of soldiers who took their name from
a comment made by Kaiser Wilhelm
II. They were the "Old Contemptibles," and Anderson served on the front lines until
he was severely wounded in the spring of 1916. He was sent back to England to become an
instructor, and he never left the U.K. again. The famous Iditarod Sled Dog Race covers
a 1,100-mile route from Anchorage to Nome, and although it only started in 1973, it was
inspired by an event from decades earlier. Back then, however, the relay teams were working
against much higher st
akes: life and death. It was 1925, and the highly contagious
disease diphtheria had broken out in Nome, Alaska. Life-saving serum
was sourced from Anchorage, but it was the middle of the winter, and
after getting it part of the way by train, the planes intended for the final leg
of the journey were deemed unflyable. "These are aircraft that are built out of
wood and fabric and, basically, piano wire." The answer? Man and man's best friend. It took a relay of 20 men and 150 dogs to get
the
serum to Nome, but they did it, and the last surviving member of that
group of fearless men passed away in 1999. Edgar Nollner was the second in the
relay team. At the time he set out, it was already 56 degrees below zero. Still,
he and his team covered 24 miles up the Yukon River in just around three hours. Other
teams suffered catastrophic consequences. Dogs died and froze in their harnesses,
and mushers suffered severe frostbite and temporary blindness. The extreme conditions
meant that
there were a series of close calls, but as retold in the movie Balto,
the serum made it in time to save hundreds of lives. Nollner passed away after
suffering heart failure at the age of 94. Train robberies might seem like something
that's been left behind in the Old West, but nobody told the fifteen men who, in 1963, hijacked a train, pulling off the
largest cash heist in world history. The caper is widely known as the Great Train
Robbery. The thieves not only made off with £2.6 million f
rom a British postal train,
but they became international celebrities for basically giving the establishment
the middle finger at a time when the majority of the world was struggling.
Adjust that £2.6 million for inflation, and by 2022 that's about £58 million. That's
about $70.7 million in U.S. dollars today. The entire thing was orchestrated with help from
a still unidentified inside man known only as The Ulsterman. After the robbery, the 15 thieves
went their separate ways. Some fled th
e country, some were arrested, and one was killed by
a hitman. The last survivor is Bobby Welch, who is now in his mid-nineties. Welch was
sentenced to 30 years in prison. He was released on June 14, 1976, and apparently
managed to find the person who'd been in charge of his share of the cash while he
was "away." The deaths of all the other robbers meant it's unlikely that the mysteries
surrounding the robbery will ever be solved. It's no secret that World War II was full of
unspeakable ho
rrors, and that was definitely true of combat in the Pacific. Even after
the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan was in doubt as to whether or not they
wanted to bring the war to an end all the way up until the documents were signed. But
in a September 2, 1945 ceremony on board the USS Missouri, U.S. General Douglas
MacArthur accepted Japan's surrender. The deck of the ship was lined with witnesses,
and the very last surviving American who was there to see it passed away in 2019. At
t
he time of the surrender, he was still Lieutenant Commander Robert Kenneth Kaufman,
and he served at the ceremony as an Aide and Flag Lieutenant. Kaufman would go on to earn
the rank of captain, and by the time he was front and center for the surrender, he'd already
served in the North Atlantic and North Africa. After his retirement, Kaufman continued
to participate in remembrance events. When he laid the wreath at the
2017 Pearl Harbor Remembrance Day, he was already the sole survivor of
the witnesses to Japan's surrender. If there were any Americans who were still on
the fence about getting involved in World War I, they almost certainly had
a change of heart on May 7, 1915. That's the day a German U-boat targeted
and sank the passenger liner Lusitania, killing 1,198 of the 2,000 people on
board — including more than 100 Americans. "At 2:28, just 18 minutes after she
was struck, the Lusitania disappears." The last known survivor was Audrey
Lawson-Johnston, who passed away
in 2011 at the age of 95. She was just 3
months old when she sailed aboard the doomed passenger liner and owed her life
to a nursemaid who was traveling with the family. It was 18-year-old Alice Lines who
made sure she and her brother made it to a lifeboat. It wasn't easy. Lines would later
testify that she had initially been pushed away from the lifeboats, but jumped into
the water to follow her young charges. Lines and the two children were soon reunited
with parents Warren and Amy Pearl
, but tragically, their two other daughters and their nurse
were lost in the disaster. Their bodies were never recovered. Lawson-Johnston made
her thoughts on the sinking clear, stating, "I never blamed the sea, because it wasn't the sea's fault. It was
the Germans' fault and that was that." Johnny Moore was just 16 when he became an
accidental witness to one of the biggest events in transportation history. Moore just
happened to be walking on a beach in Nags Head, North Carolina, when he s
aw something interesting
going on nearby. He walked over and found a small group of men tinkering with a massive machine.
Two of the men were Orville and Wilbur Wright, and the machine was their plane that was just
about to take off for that first historic flight. "They flew 120 feet in twelve
seconds. Twelve seconds that changed the history of mankind forever." It was Moore who first announced the flight to
the world — or the part of the world who heard him shouting as he ran down the rest
of the beach on
that December day in 1903. It was also Moore who helped pinpoint the location for a later monument.
Although Wright Stories says he lived long enough to be the last surviving witness to that
historic first flight, his story is a sad one. The 66-year-old Moore committed suicide in
February of 1952. His body was found in his home, which was just a short distance
from the Wright Brothers' monument. While scores of people visit the memorials to the
World War II bombings of Hir
oshima and Nagasaki, there aren't nearly as many who visit the
94-foot fishing boat that is the Daigo Fukuryu Maru or Lucky Dragon. Perhaps that's
because they don't realize that what happened to the boat and the 23-member crew was so
terrible that it — not the aforementioned Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings — kicked off
a worldwide movement to ban atomic weapons. "Deadly ashes were found all over the ship, and strong radioactivity. What
would the experts say now?" It was March 1, 1954, when
the little
fishing boat was caught in the fallout from the United States' Castle Bravo tests of
a new thermonuclear device. The boat was 86 miles away from the test site but was still
caught in the ash rains that fell afterward and lasted for five hours. All the men on the
ship were hospitalized, suffering from bloody sores and blisters, hair loss, and damage that
would haunt them for the rest of their lives. The last survivor of the ill-fated
Lucky Dragon was Matashichi Oishi, who passed
away in 2021 — 67 years after he
was caught in Castle Bravo's fallout. Oishi, who wrote a book about his experience, struggled
with health problems his entire life. He was diagnosed with liver cancer, sleeping sickness,
and hepatitis C. Although he always knew what the cause was, he fought for five decades
to be given status as a victim of a nuclear bomb. He also blamed his lasting health
problems for the stillbirth of his child. Technically, World War II came to an end several
times, and
Germany alone actually surrendered twice. The first surrender happened on May 7,
1945, and the second occurred on May 9. The first was signed in Reims, France, and the second — done
at the behest of Stalin and the Soviets — happened in Berlin. The first was attended by
then-22-year-old Luciano Graziano, who became the last surviving witness. With time, he realized
just how significant it was, later writing, "I was honored to be in that room that day." Drafted out of his sister's
beauty par
lor in East Aurora, New York — where he did everything from haircuts
to perms — he was assigned to a unit tasked with keeping Allied buildings up and running. After
hitting Omaha Beach in the third wave on D-Day, he participated in the Battle of the Bulge
and was serving as utilities foreman when he was asked to oversee the outfitting of
the Little Red School House for surrender. After the war, he opened a salon in Georgia.
His daughters now oversee the business, and he has since written a
book titled A Patriot's
Memoirs of World War II - Through My Eyes, Heart, and Soul, about his experiences in the war. There were a lot of people lining the streets of
Dallas on the day that President John F. Kennedy was assassinated, but of those who
were in the president's limo that day, Secret Service agent Clint
Hill is the last survivor. Hill is clearly featured in all of the footage.
He was the one on the back of the limo, who jumped in the back seat to shield the president and
first
lady from any more bullets. Hill avoided interviews about the assassination for decades
before sharing his recollections of what he saw first-hand, particularly when he was in the back
of the limo with the president and first lady. "She said, 'Oh, Jack, what have they done? They've
shot his head off. I have his brains in my hand.'" His recollections were filled
with regret. As he told CNN, "I felt there was something I should have been
able to do. Moved faster, reacted quicker, gotten there
just moments quicker, could
have made all the difference in the world." Hill went on to say that the years
following Kennedy's death were, for him, filled with nightmares,
alcohol, and isolation, explaining, "You just have to accept it and
live with it, the best you can." Hill served alongside five presidents
— Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, and Ford — and after his retirement in 1975, he went on to write several books about
his experiences. One specifically focuses on Jackie Kenned
y, whom he continued to
protect after the death of her husband.
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