New Zealand’s Labour party introduces free health…

In 1938, New Zealand’s Labour party introduces universal social security.

Siam’s Regency Council, in 1938, appoints Colonel Luang Pibul Songgram, an energetic reformer, to the post of Prime Minister.

Under the Pibul Songgram government, Siam becomes officially known as Thailand.

The gradual clarification of the British intention to grant self-government to India along the lines of British parliamentary democracy arouses Muslim apprehensions regarding ultimate political subjection to the Hindu majority.

Mohammed Ali Jinnah, as eager as any Hindu nationalist to bring British rule to an end, is finally driven to the conclusion that the only way to preserve Indian Muslims from complete subordination to the Hindus is to establish a separate Muslim state.

Romania has placed the province of Bessarabia under a centralized regime, at times military in character; in 1938, King Carol attempts to break up its historic unity by dividing it among newly created regions.

Porsche, fulfilling Hitler’s mandate to produce a “people’s car”, designs the Volkswagen ‘Beetle’.

Starting in 1931, Ferdinand Porsche and Zündapp developed the "Auto für Jedermann" (car for everybody).

This was the first time the name "Volkswagen" was used.

Porsche already preferred the flat-4 cylinder engine, but Zündapp used a watercooled 5-cylinder radial engine.

In 1932, three prototypes were running.

[2] All of those cars were lost during the war, the last in a bombing raid over Stuttgart in 1945.

Porsche Type 12, 1931/32 by Zündapp Nürnberg In 1933, Adolf Hitler gave the order to Ferdinand Porsche to develop a "Volks-Wagen" .

The name means "people's car" in German, in which it is pronounced [ˈfolksvagən]).

He required a basic vehicle capable of transporting two adults and three children at 100 km/h (62 mph).

The "People's Car" would be available to citizens of the Third Reich through a savings scheme at 990 Reichsmark, about the price of a small motorcycle (an average income being around 32RM a week).

[3] Erwin Komenda, Porsche's chief designer, was responsible for the design and style of the car.

Leon Sedov, Trotsky's son, is assassinated in 1938, also the year of the first assassination attempt against Trotsky.

Wall Street investment banking firm Brown Brothers Harriman, according to a Village Voice article that will be published 54 years later, “arranged for a loan of tetraethyl lead to the Nazi Luftwaffe” in 1938.

Prescott Bush, father of future US president George Bush, is a senior managing partner of the firm.

Tetraethyl lead is added to gasoline to make leaded gasoline, an essential component of mechanized warfare.

Standard Oil Co. aids Germany in procuring $20 million worth of aviation fuel and lubricants to be stockpiled for the coming war.

Standard Oil, according to an I.G.

Farben internal memo, has established “plants for us ready for production right away on the basis of all the experience that the Americans have had for years.” General Motors, controlled by the Du Pont family, owns 80 percent of the stock of Opel AG, maker of Germany’s passenger cars.

Opel has reportedly earned GM US$36 million over the past decade, but because Hitler has prohibited the export of capital from Germany, GM has reinvested a reported $20 million of its profits in German companies owned or controlled by Nazi officials.

International telephone and Telegraph (IT&T) holds substantial amounts of stock in a number of German arms companies, including fighter aircraft manufacturer Focke-Wulf.

IT&T, though reportedly permitted (unlike GM) to export its profits, reinvests its German profits in the German armaments industry.

The first main petroleum deposits are discovered in Saudi Arabia in 1938.

A 1938 German expedition to Antarctica stakes out 600,000 square kilometers in lands near the South Pole.

In March 1938, Germany annexes Austria.

Alleged abuses of ethnic Germans by Czechs in western Czechoslovakia’s Sudeten area causes an international crisis.

The European powers, meet at Munich to discuss Hitler’s claims on the Czechoslovakian-held Sudetenland, but fail to dissuade him.

In the person of Neville Chamberlain, Britain's "Round Tablers" and "Cliveden Set" orchestrate, with French compliance, Hitler’s initial appeasement.

Britain and France join Italy in allowing Hitler to formally carve away Czechoslovakia’s Sudetenland, which serves only to whet his appetite for lebensraum in the East.

The Nazis, deciding in 1938 to remove all Jews from German soil, begin mass arrests in May 1938 and establish slave labor camps.

Ernst vom Rath, a German legation secretary in Paris, is assassinated in early November 1938.

The Nazis use the event as an excuse for Kristallnacht (“the night of broken glass”) to invoke terror among Germany’s Jews.

On November 9—10, Nazi storm troopers arrest 20,000 people, torch 267 synagogues and destroy Jewish-owned shops and businesses.

The Nazis later assess Germany’s Jews with an atonement fee of $400 million for damage to their own properties.

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but its electoral successes move the dictatorial king Carol II to dissolve it in January 1938.

On January 21, Romania revokes Jewish citizenship.

Miron Cristea, patriarch of the Romanian Orthodox Church, declares: "The Jews are sucking the marrow from the bones of the nation."

As early as 1923, Ibn Sa'ud had granted an oil-prospecting concession to a British company, but this concession was never exploited.

After a long search for oil that has lasted around four years without success, the first accomplishment of Standard oil of California is in Dhahran in 1938, a well referred to as Dammam number 7.

The discovery of this well gives the company the hope to continue and flourish.

Scandium metal itself is first prepared in 1938 by the electrolysis of potassium, lithium, and scandium chlorides in a eutectic mixture.

In late 1938, Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann discover the phenomenon of nuclear fission in uranium bombarded by slow neutrons.