1944 deaths

Turney White Leonard (June 18, 1921 – November 6, 1944) was a United States Army officer who received the U.S. military's highest award, the Medal of Honor, for his actions in World War II.

Hégésippe Jean Légitimus was born in Pointe-à-Pitre, Guadeloupe on 8 April 1868 and died before the end of World War II in Angles-sur-l'Anglin, France, on 29 November 1944. He was a socialist politician from Guadeloupe who served in the French National Assembly from 1898–1902 and 1906-1914.In 1793, Jean-Baptiste Belley was the first black man elected to the French Parliament. It would be 105 years later before another black man, Hégésippe Légitimus, was elected. Up until 1898 the colonies and territoires d'Outre-Mer had only been represented by white, mixed-race or "béké" deputies.Légitimus was followed shortly afterwards by other black deputies: Gratien Candace, Blaise Diagne, Ngalandou Diouf, Achille René-Boisneuf and Maurice Satineau. He sat in the parliamentary assembly alongside Guesde, Jean Jaurès and Léon Blum, becoming good friends with them.
Légitimus was one of the founders of the Parti Ouvrier, the socialist party of Guadaloupe. It was politically aligned with that of mainland France.Légitimus, councillor and mayor of Pointe-à-Pitre, founder of the socialist movement in Guadeloupe, Member of Parliament in Paris, made an indelible mark on French political life at the beginning of the nineteenth century.
The price of sugar went through the roof during the US Civil War (1861-1865). But it began to fall again in 1870, creating a crisis that had the effect of rationalising capital, wealth and production on one hand against the abolition of slave labour, unreliable production and social upheaval and war on the other hand. The crisis, and consequent world-wide disruption, continued until 1914, whereupon many families had migrated from Guadeloupe to live in mainland France.
Socialism rose up in the thoughts and actions of workers, including the black slaves and workers on the sugar plantations, and amongst the intelligentsia. In 1914, the war to end all world wars began. Socialist parties quickly grew in number, strength and influence throughout recognised world diaspora. Hégésippe Légitimus was the founder and driving force of the Socialist Party in Guadeloupe.
Légitimus also founded the Republican Youth Committee and the Workers Party of Guadeloupe. He established a newspaper called "The People" in 1891. The Workers Party was politically aligned to the socialist-left and quickly became popular amongst the Guadeloupeans. It became very popular because it was the first Party to defend workers' rights and give a united voice to the black population. Légitimus entered the House of Deputies as the member for Guadeloupe in 1898. He became President of the Council in 1899 and was elected Mayor of Pointe-à-Pitre in 1904.
The new order of politics, aligned with that of mainland France, exemplified by Legitimus's socialist credo, attacked the virtual monopoly held by mulattoes in Guadeloupean business and politics. Mulattoes were accused by many people of acting against the interests of the black population. But, Légitimus also earned his share of critics because he was accused of collaborating with "the big end of town" over bank start-up finances needed by small businesses and support capital needed by on-going, large projects. Economic necessities in the circumstances, as always, might have required a cautious, rather than radical, approach.
For a quarter of a century Légitimus was considered the voice of the black movement. Some called him the black Jaurès. Jean Jaurès was the famous French socialist, pacifist and intellectual assassinated by a young fascist war-monger in Montmartre at the beginning of WW1. Légitimus helped open the doors of tertiary education to everyone. He supported the political careers of Gaston Monnerville, the grandson of a slave who had a brilliant legal and political career in France, and Felix Eboue, who was appointed governor of Guadeloupe in 1936.
Hégésippe Jean Légitimus was made Chevalier of the Legion of Honour in 1937. He was obliged to stay in France because of the declaration of war and died in Angles-sur-l'Anglin on 29 November 1944. Following a proposal by General de Gaulle, his remains were returned to Guadeloupe where he was given a state funeral. Several boulevards in Guadeloupe are named after Hégésippe and the main one has his bust displayed, perpetuating the memory of this great black leader and politician. During the commemoration of the sesquicentennial of the abolition of slavery in May 1988 several plaques were unveiled in his memory in front of more than fifty of his descendants. The commemoration was chaired by Gésip Légitimus, a grandson of this exceptional man.
Hégésippe's son, Victor-Étienne Légitimus, journalist and husband of the actress Darling Légitimus, created La Solidarité Antillaise (The Caribbean Solidarity) to defend the interests of his compatriots. He actively participated in the creation of The Movement Against Racism and For Friendship Amongst Peoples (MRAP) and The International League Against Racism and Anti-Semitism (LICRA).
Légitimus wrote in an article in The People, 4 February 1894:—
"The free man is made for speaking, as is the bird for singing.
Woe be he if, intelligent, able to be useful to his people, to humanity thanks to his moral and intellectual faculties, he satisfies himself with vegetating miserably between fear and lazy pleasures!
We are made for the struggle
And whichever way we choose to direct our faculties,
It as an imperious law that impels us to implement them.(...)
I want mankind happy and smiling, I want a proclaimed and recognized equality between all and by all.
I want the light to be diffused in torrents, profusely; no more ignorant people and no more proletarians!

All men reunited as one huge family sharing the air, the sun, the water and the bread, with a kiss."

Fabiana Sebastiana María Carmen Romero Rubio y Castelló (20 January 1864 – 25 June 1944), was the second wife of Porfirio Díaz, President of Mexico.

Horace Seaver "Stump" Carswell Jr. (July 18, 1916 – October 26, 1944) was a United States Army major who was killed in action while serving as a member of the Army Air Forces during World War II. He was posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor.He is the namesake of Carswell Air Force Base near Fort Worth, Texas, since 1948.

Alexandre-Achille Cyprien Souques (6 February 1860 – 24 December 1944) was a French neurologist born in Comprégnac in the département Aveyron.
Souques studied medicine in Paris, where in 1886 he became an interne and in 1891 earned his medical doctorate. Afterwards he worked as médecin des hôpitaux (Hospice de la Salpêtrière), and in 1918 became a member of the Académie de Médecine. With Joseph Babinski (1857-1932) and others, he was a founding member of the Societé de Neurologie de Paris.
He is remembered for his extensive research of Parkinsonism, and in a 1921 treatise titled Rapport sur les syndromes parkinsoniens, he documented the importance of encephalitis lethargica as a cause of Parkinsonism. With his mentor Jean-Martin Charcot (1825-1893), he described the eponymous "Souques-Charcot geroderma", a condition that is a variant of Hutchinson–Gilford disease. Souques is also credited with introducing the term "camptocormia" to describe an abnormal forward-flexed posture.

Siegfried Oberndorfer (24 June 1876 in Munich – 1944 in Istanbul) was a Jewish-German physician, pathologist, and cancer researcher.

Karl Harko von Noorden (13 September 1858 – 26 October 1944) was a German internist, born in Bonn and educated in medicine at Tübingen, Freiberg, and Leipzig (M.D., 1882).
In 1885 he was admitted as privatdocent to the medical facility of the University of Giessen, where he had been assistant in the medical clinic since 1883. In 1889 he became first assistant of the medical clinic at Berlin University, in 1894 was called to Frankfurt am Main as physician in charge of the municipal hospital, and in 1906 was appointed professor of medicine at the University of Vienna, as a successor to Carl Nothnagel.
Von Noorden made special researches involving albuminuria in health, metabolism disorders and its treatment, diabetes, diseases of the kidney, dietetics, etc., and wrote on these subjects, some of his books appearing in English. Among his assistants was the Austrian-American psychologist Rudolf von Urban.
Noorden advocated an "oat-cure" to treat diabetes. The diet "consisted of 250 gm. oatmeal a day - 80 gm. with about 0.4 liter water each meal and maybe some vegetables or fruits for the taste"He died in Vienna. His father, also named Carl von Noorden (1833–1883) was a noted historian.

Marin Molliard (8 June 1866, in Châtillon-Coligny – 24 July 1944, in Paris) was a French botanist.
From 1888 he studied at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, where he successively earned degrees in mathematics (1889), physics (1890) and natural sciences (1891). In 1892 he obtained his agrégation, and two years later became chef de travaux to the faculty of sciences at Paris. In 1922 he became a lecturer at the École Normale supérieure de Saint-Cloud, and from 1923 to 1936 served as director of the laboratory of plant biology in Avon. In 1937 he received the title of honorary professor.In 1923 he was named president of the Société botanique de France. During the same year he was elected as a member of the Académie des sciences (section of botany).In 1904 he was the first to describe conidia in the fungal genus Sarcoscypha. In 1984 John W. Paden introduced the generic name Molliardiomyces for the anamorphic states of Sarcoscypha and the related genus Phillipsia.

Ernst Julius Cohen ForMemRS (7 March 1869 – 6 March 1944) was a Dutch Jewish chemist known for his work on the allotropy of metals. Cohen studied chemistry under Svante Arrhenius in Stockholm, Henri Moissan at Paris, and Jacobus van't Hoff at Amsterdam. In 1893 he became Van't Hoff's assistant and in 1902 he became professor of Physical Chemistry at the University of Utrecht, a position which he held until his retirement in 1939. Throughout his life, Cohen studied the allotropy of tin.
Cohen's areas of research included polymorphism of both elements and compounds, photographic chemistry, electrochemistry, pizeochemistry, and the history of science. He published more than 400 papers and numerous books.In 1913 he became member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences. He was elected a Foreign Member of the Royal Society in 1926. Following the 29 April 1942 decree that Dutch Jews wear the yellow badge, he was arrested by Nazi police for non-compliance and forced to resign.According to Margit Szöllösi-Janze, in her book, Science in the Third Reich, Cohen "put great efforts into restoring the relationships of Western European scientists with their German colleagues after the First World War."
He was killed on 6 March 1944 in a gas chamber at Auschwitz concentration camp.

Eugène Louis Bouvier (9 April 1856 in Saint-Laurent-en-Grandvaux – 14 January 1944 in Paris) was a French entomologist and carcinologist. Bouvier was a professor at the Muséum national d'histoire naturelle.