1959 in West Germany

← 1958 1957 1956 1959 in West Germany → 1960 1961 1962
Decades:	1940s 1950s 1960s 1970s
See also:	Other events of 1959 Timeline of German history

The following lists events that happened during 1959 in West Germany.

Events

May

• May 5 - The United States signed an agreement with West Germany, to share classified information about American nuclear weapons and to train German personnel in the operation of those weapons.^[1]

June

• June 10 - A month after withdrawing a six-month ultimatum for the Western powers to withdraw from Berlin, Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev issued a new deadline when talks broke down in Geneva. Khrushchev demanded that the U.S., Britain, and France withdraw their armies from West Berlin by June 10, 1960. The ultimatum was withdrawn on September 27 when Khrushchev met with President Eisenhower at Camp David.^[2]

October

• October 15 - Ukrainian nationalist Stepan Bandera was murdered by a KGB agent Bogdan Stashinsky in Munich. The weapon was a gun that fired hydrogen cyanide gas into Bandera's face. Stashinsky, who had killed newspaperman Lev Rebet in the same manner in 1957, swallowed an antidote, and escaped.^[3]

November

• November 11 - Werner Heyde, a psychiatrist who had guided the euthanizing of more than 100,000 handicapped persons in Nazi Germany, surrendered to police in Frankfurt after 13 years as a fugitive. As director of the Reich Association of Hospitals, Dr. Heyde had carried out "Action T4". Men, women and children who were mentally or physically handicapped were the victims of Heyde's "mercy killing" from 1939 to 1942, usually by lethal injection. Sentenced in absentia to death, Heyde had been practicing in Flensburg as "Dr. Fritz Sawade". On February 13, 1964, five days before his trial was to start, Dr. Heyde hanged himself at the prison in Butzbach.^[4]
• November 25 - The first Bilateral Investment Treaty in history was signed between West Germany and Pakistan. BITs govern the terms of private investment between companies in the two nations, including provisions for arbitration of disputes.^[5]

December

• December 13 - Two apartment houses in a suburb of Dortmund were levelled by an explosion at 3:12 a.m.. Of 34 people in the Aplerbeck buildings, 26 were killed.^[6]

See also

• 1959 in Germany
• 1959 in East Germany

References

1. Nuclear Shadowboxing: Cold War Redux (DeVolpi, Inc., 2004), pI-13
2. Eric Herring, Danger and Opportunity: Explaining International Crisis Outcomes (Manchester University Press ND, 1995), p. 135
3. Joseph J. Trento, The Secret History of the CIA (Carroll & Graf, 2005), p180
4. "Heyde, Werner", in Who's Who in Nazi Germany (Routledge, 2001), p 107
5. "International Investment", in Research Handbook in International Economic Law (E. Elgar, 2007), p215
6. The Post-Standard (Syracuse), December 14, 1959, p1