1959 deaths

Phillip Gregory Nesser (December 10, 1880 – May 9, 1959) was a German-American professional American football player in the Ohio League and the early National Football League (NFL) for the Columbus Panhandles. He was also a member of the Nesser Brothers, a group consisting of seven brothers who made up the most famous football family in the United States from 1907 until the mid-1920s. He is distinguished as being the first German to play in the NFL.
Phil was primarily a tackle, although he often carried the ball on several plays.
Outside of football, Phil was considered a math genius although he never attended school past the fourth grade. According to his daughter, Phil later taught at Central High School in Columbus until the school's administrators found out he did not have a degree and forced him to resign. In addition to football, he was a champion hammer thrower.

José María Jarabo (28 April 1923 – 4 July 1959) was a Spanish spree killer, who between 19 and 21 July 1958, murdered four adults and an unborn baby. Jarabo was sentenced to death by garrote and executed in 1959.

Ernst Jäckh (February 22, 1875 – August 17, 1959) was a German journalist, diplomat, author, and academic who later lived in Great Britain and the United States. He is most known for having advocated for first Germany, and then the United States, having better relations with Turkey. He was the founder and leader of the Deutsche Hochschule für Politik in Berlin from 1920 to 1933.

Hilde Neumann (born Hilde Martha Betty Rosenfeld: 13 April 1905, in Berlin-Karlshorst – 11 September 1959, in Berlin) was a German lawyer.She was politically leftwing and of Jewish provenance: she spent the Nazi years in exile. In 1947 she returned to Berlin and resumed her political focus, becoming a senior legal official in the Socialist Unity Party (Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands / SED), which by 1949 had become the ruling party of the German Democratic Republic (East Germany) which was formally established in October of that year. She also served as editor in chief of "Neue Justiz", an East German monthly specialist journal concerned with legal matters.

Pierre Paulus (1881–1959), later Baron Pierre Paulus de Châtelet, was a Belgian expressionist painter. He is best known as the designer of the "bold rooster" (French: coq hardi) adopted on 3 July 1913 as the symbol of the Walloon Movement and today the flag of Wallonia.Paulus gained notability during the Walloon Art Exposition of Charleroi in 1911 and, in the interwar period, he held several exhibitions in Europe and in the United States.

Air Marshal George Mitchell Croil CBE, AFC (June 5, 1893 – April 8, 1959) was an American-born Canadian Royal Flying Corps pilot during World War I who went on to become the first Chief of the Air Staff of the Royal Canadian Air Force. Croil resigned as CAS in 1940 and then served as Inspector-General of the RCAF until his retirement in 1944, when the post of Inspector General was abolished.

Benny Fields, occasionally billed as "Bennie Fields" (born Benjamin Geisenfeld; June 14, 1894 – August 16, 1959), was a popular singer of the early 20th century, best known as one-half of the Blossom Seeley-Benny Fields vaudeville team.

Paul Hermann August Oestreich (30 March 1878 – 28 February 1959) was a German educator and pedagogue.

Paul Douglas Fleischer (April 11, 1907 − September 11, 1959), known professionally as Paul Douglas, was an American actor.

Emmett I. Brown Jr. (1918 – September 9, 1959) was a professional photographer who is most noted for documenting Indianapolis, Indiana's jazz music scene along Indiana Avenue, a hub of activity for the city's African-American community in the 1940s and 1950s. Brown opened his own photography studio, the Brown Show Case, on Indiana Avenue in the late 1940s. During a brief residence in Chattanooga, Tennessee, in the mid-1950s, Brown opened a photography studio and became an editor at Sepia magazine. Brown returned to Indianapolis in 1956 and established a new studio on the city's eastside, where he concentrated on portraits and did freelance photography, including work for the Indianapolis Recorder. During his twenty-year career, cut short due to a heart ailment, Brown photographed Dizzy Gillespie, jazz trombonist Jimmy Cleveland, the Hampton Sisters, the Milt Buckner Trio, and The Mills Brothers, among others. He also photographed local churches, businesses, and street scenes, as well as notable individuals in Indianapolis's African-American community and nationally known boxers Joe Louis and Sugar Ray Robinson.
Brown, who grew up in Indianapolis and attended Crispus Attucks High School, also studied at Tennessee A and I (now known as Tennessee State University) in Nashville, Tennessee, and a photography school in Chicago, Illinois, before returning to his hometown to begin his career as a photographer. Brown was a member of Kappa Alpha Psi fraternity, a thirty-second degree Prince Hall Mason, and also served as an assistant pastor at Indianapolis’s Martindale Avenue Church of Christ. Many of his photographs from the 1940s and 1950s are included the collection of the Indiana Historical Society.