December 13

On the morning of December 13, 1957, a strong earthquake struck the Farsinaj area in Harsin County, Kermanshah Province, western Iran. The shock and its aftershocks heavily damaged adobe and unreinforced-masonry villages in the western Zagros foothills, killing and injuring many residents, destroying homes and stores of food and livestock, and leaving a scattered, largely provincial relief effort to handle rescue, sheltering, and slow rebuilding through the winter months.

On December 13, 1943, occupying German forces rounded up and executed hundreds of male residents of Kalavryta in the northern Peloponnese and set much of the town ablaze. The killings—commonly remembered as the Kalavryta massacre—were carried out as a collective reprisal against local partisan activity. The commonly cited death toll is 438 male civilians; the town’s population and memory were forever altered by that single winter day.

On December 13, 1939, three Royal Navy cruisers—HMS Exeter, HMS Ajax, and HMS Achilles—engaged the German pocket battleship SMS Graf Spee off the estuary of the Río de la Plata. After a running daylight duel, Graf Spee withdrew to neutral Montevideo, where diplomatic pressure and British deception led Captain Hans Langsdorff to scuttle his ship on December 17. The episode combined naval gunnery, intelligence, and law into one consequential early-war drama.

Established on December 13, 1938, near the village of Neuengamme southeast of Hamburg, the Neuengamme concentration camp began as a brickworks labor site and grew into a large central camp with dozens of subcamps. Between 1938 and the final evacuations in May 1945, roughly 106,000 people passed through Neuengamme and its satellites; at least about 42,900 are known to have died there or in related evacuations, including thousands lost at sea in the Bay of Lübeck in early May 1945. The camp’s liberation by British forces on May 4, 1945, led to investigations, trials, and decades of memorial work and scholarship.

After Japanese forces captured Nanjing on December 13, 1937, the city descended into weeks of mass shootings, rape, looting, and arson. Foreign diplomats and missionaries established a Safety Zone that sheltered tens of thousands, recorded atrocities, and offered the clearest contemporaneous testimony. Estimates of victims remain contested—Chinese memorials cite about 300,000 dead; many historians place the likely range between roughly 100,000 and several hundred thousand—while tens of thousands of women were reportedly raped. The events shaped postwar trials, memory politics in East Asia, and continuing historical debate.