These Were The Last Survivors Of Major Historical Events

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.

#History #Events #Survivors

Millvina Dean | 0:00
Ivan Martynushkin | 1:06
Gordon Moore | 2:12
Bill Herz | 3:31
Theodore Van Kirk | 4:28
Ernest Hendon | 5:39
Werner G. Doehner | 6:49
Rose Freedman | 7:51
Clarence Norris | 8:50
Alfred Anderson | 9:46
Edgar Nollner | 10:54
Bobby Welch | 12:11
Robert Kenneth Kaufman | 13:15
Audrey Lawson-Johnston | 14:09
Johnny Moore | 15:14
Matashichi Oishi | 16:10
Luciano Graziano | 17:30
Clint Hill | 18:27

Voiceover by: Tim Bensch

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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  emigrating 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, tortured, 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 indiscriminate 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 quickly 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 reported 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 miles 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 Syphilis　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 linked 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] huge 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 overhaul 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 Scottsboro 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, saying,

“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 opposing 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 served 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 stakes: 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 from 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 the 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 horrors, 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  the 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 saw 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 Hiroshima 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 parlor 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 Kennedy, whom he continued to  protect after the death of her husband.