1944 deaths

Yva (26 January 1900 – disappeared June 1942?; officially declared dead on 31 December 1944) was the professional pseudonym of Else Ernestine Neuländer-Simon who was a German Jewish photographer renowned for her dreamlike, multiple exposed images. She became a leading photographer in Berlin during the Weimar Republic.
When the Nazi Party came to power, she was forced into working as a radiographer. She was deported by the Gestapo in 1942 and murdered, probably in the Majdanek concentration camp during World War II.

James Simon (29 September 1880 – 12/14 October 1944) was a German composer, pianist and musicologist.

Erich Marcks (6 June 1891 – 12 June 1944) was a German general in the Wehrmacht during World War II. He authored the first draft of the operational plan, Operation Draft East, for Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of the Soviet Union, advocating what was later known as A-A line as the goal for the Wehrmacht to achieve, within nine to seventeen weeks. Marcks studied philosophy in Freiburg in 1909.

General Fritz Lindemann (11 April 1894 – 22 September 1944) was a German officer in the Wehrmacht of Nazi Germany and member of the resistance to Adolf Hitler.
After serving in World War I, Lindemann participated in the suppression of the German Revolution of 1918–1919 as a member of the Freikorps. However, as a member of the Reichswehr and a loyalist to the Weimar Republic, he refused to participate in the Kapp Putsch.Lindemann served as commander of the 132nd Infantry Division from January 1942 to August 1943, before appointment as Chief of Staff of the Artillery Oberkommando des Heeres.Lindemann developed contacts with conspirators against Adolf Hitler including General Helmuth Stieff, and following the assassination of Hitler it was proposed that he would read the conspirators' proclamation to the German people over the radio, but he did not appear at the Bendlerblock on 20 July 1944 in order to do so. After the failure of the 20 July plot, he went into hiding. When the Gestapo came to arrest him, Lindemann tried to jump out of a window. However, he was shot in his leg and stomach, and later died in hospital from his injuries.
After standing trial for helping Lindemann at the People's Court, Erich and Elisabeth Gloeden, Hans Sierks and Carl Marks were all sentenced to death. They were executed by guillotine at Plötzensee Prison in September 1944.

Lothar Stark (5 September 1876 – 31 March 1944) was a German film producer. Stark was originally a journalist, but was brought into the film industry by the tycoon Paul Davidson. Stark worked as a distributor and worked then as an independent producer during the First World War and the Weimar Republic, founding his own company Lothar Stark-Film. Following the Nazi takeover in 1933, he faced increasing difficulties. In 1933 when evidence of his Jewish background was discovered, Stark went into exile in Copenhagen. Later he also went to London. He tried to produce new films there, but was unable to secure funding. Then he returned to Denmark, which was then invaded by Germany in 1940. In 1943 Stark, along with the majority of the Danish Jewish population, managed to escape to Sweden.

Franz Kaufmann (5 January 1886 – 17 February 1944) was a German jurist murdered in the Holocaust. His role helping underground Jews survive in hiding in Berlin and his execution are documented in The Forger, the memoirs of Cioma Schönhaus.Kaufmann was born to Jewish parents on 5 January 1886 and baptized a Protestant. He served in the first World War in the 10th Bavarian Field Artillery Regiment receiving, among other medals, the Iron Cross. After being wounded he was discharged from the army in 1918 as a reserve lieutenant. He obtained a doctorate in law and political science and in 1922 was appointed to a specialist post in government finances in the Prussian ministry of the interior. He later became chief secretary of the Reich Public Accounts Office, in the finance ministry.In 1936, because of his Jewish origins, he was dismissed from his post as chief secretary. When World War II broke out in 1939, he volunteered for the Red Cross but was refused, again due to his Jewish origins. He continued to enjoy privileged status due his then so-called racially mixed marriage to an Aryan-classified woman and because he brought up his daughter as a Christian.Kaufmann joined a bible study group with The Confessing Church at Berlin-Dahlem in 1940, and—with other members of the church—began to supply post-office identity cards to on-the-run Jews. Ultimately he headed an underground group that created and supplied all manner of fake documents to underground Jews, including certificates of Aryan descent, driving licenses, and food ration cards. These documents were essential to the survival of many Berlin Jews.He was arrested in August 1943. No charges were laid against him, since as a Jew in Nazi Germany he was subject not to German law but to police power. On 17 February 1944 he was taken to Sachsenhausen concentration camp and shot.

Siegmund Sredzki (30 November 1892 – 11 October 1944) was a German Resistance fighter against the Nazi regime.

Reinhold Strassmann (or Straßmann) (24 January 1893 in Berlin – late October 1944 in Auschwitz concentration camp) was a German mathematician who proved Strassmann's theorem. His Ph.D. advisor at University of Marburg was Kurt Hensel.
Born into a Jewish family, Strassmann refused to leave Nazi Germany, and he was eventually detained and deported to Theresienstadt concentration camp in 1943. On October 23, 1944, he was deported from Theresienstadt to Auschwitz concentration camp, where he was murdered soon after.He was the son of the forensic pathologist Fritz Strassmann.

Fritz Thiele (14 April 1894 – 4 September 1944) was a member of the German resistance who also served as the communications chief of the German Army during World War II.Thiele was born in Berlin and joined the Imperial Army in 1914. Working closely with Chief of Army communications General der Nachrichtentruppe Erich Fellgiebel, he was part of the assassination attempt against Adolf Hitler on 20 July 1944. He was responsible as part of the coup attempt in the effort to sever communications between officers loyal to Hitler and armed forces units in the field and from the communications centre at the Bendlerstrasse in Berlin; he relayed a crucial message from Fellgiebel to General Friedrich Olbricht and the other conspirators that the assassination attempt had failed but the coup attempt should still proceed. There are differing accounts of the time when he provided this report.
Thiele himself did not want to proceed with the coup attempt when he knew that the assassination attempt had failed and he left the Bendlerstrasse and visited Walter Schellenberg at the Reich Central Security Office in an attempt to extricate himself.Following Fellgiebel's arrest, Thiel was directed to assume his duties before he was himself arrested by the Gestapo on 11 August 1944. He was condemned to death on 21 August 1944 by the Volksgerichtshof and hanged on 4 September 1944 at Plötzensee prison in Berlin.

Antonio Irineo Villarreal González (July 16, 1877 in Lampazos, Mexico – December 16, 1944 in Mexico City) was a Mexican politician and soldier.
From 1903, Villarreal turned against the dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz. He published a number of liberal magazines and was subsequently imprisoned. After his release he fled to the United States where he joined, the anarchist Mexican Liberal Party (PLM) of Ricardo Flores Magón. At the outbreak of the Mexican Revolution in 1910, he joined the Progressive Constitutionalist Party (PCP) of Francisco Madero, and after Madero's victory in 1911 he was appointed consul in Barcelona.
After the coup attempt and assassination of Madero by Victoriano Huerta in 1913 he returned to Mexico. He joined the constitutionalist army of Pablo González Garza and Venustiano Carranza. He took part in the Convention of Aguascalientes, and remained as one of the few neutrals there when Villa and Carranza together walked out. On 31 October 1914, he was elected president of the convention, but soon handed over that function to Eulalio Gutiérrez. Villarreal was then made governor of Nuevo León, where he had a number of progressive reforms. A year later he was ousted by the forces of Carranza and he was forced to flee the country.
After the death of Carranza in 1920 he returned, and became minister of agriculture under Álvaro Obregón. In 1922 he stood for election as senator, but his victory was withheld. A year later he joined the De la Huertaopstand, but that organisation was suppressed, and he was forced to leave the country again. In 1929 he supported National Anti-Reelectionist Party and the presidential campaign of José Vasconcelos. In the disputed result of the election, he again fled the country again.
In 1934, he was presidential candidate for the Confederation of Independent Revolutionary Party, but got only 1.08% of the vote. After that, he retired from politics. He died in 1944.
His two sisters Teresa Villarreal and Andrea Villarreal both had careers as political agitators for the Mexican revolution from a base in exile in the United States.