Year 44 (XLIV) was a leap year starting on Wednesday (link will display the full calendar) of the Julian calendar. At the time, it was known as the Year of the Consulship of Crispus and Taurus (or, less frequently, year 797 Ab urbe condita). The denomination 44 for this year has been used since the early medieval period, when the Anno Domini calendar era became the prevalent method in Europe for naming years.

Adam Whitney Savage (born July 15, 1967) is an American industrial design and special effects designer/fabricator, actor, educator, and co-host of the Discovery Channel television series MythBusters. His model work has appeared in major films, including Star Wars: Episode II - Attack of the Clones and The Matrix Reloaded. He is a prominent member of the skeptic community. He lives in San Francisco with his twin sons and wife, Julia.

Born in New York City, Savage was raised in Sleepy Hollow in Westchester County New York. He graduated from Sleepy Hollow High School in 1985. His father, Whitney Lee Savage (1928-1998), was a painter, filmmaker and animator known for his work on Sesame Street, and has a permanent exhibit in the Avampato Discovery Museum. His mother is a psychotherapist. His sister Kate Savage is also an artist. As a teenager in Sleepy Hollow, he routinely visited the local bike shop to have flat tires fixed. The shop showed him how to do the repairs himself. From this experience, Savage said, "I realized you could take a bike apart and put it back together and it wasn't that hard...I've been building and putting bicycles together since then."

Wilhelm Gustloff (January 30, 1895 - February 4, 1936) was the German leader of the NSDAP (Nazi) party in Switzerland; he founded the Swiss branch of the party at Davos in 1932., which grouped Nazi party members who lived outside the German Reich.

Gustloff, who worked as a Swiss government meteorologist, joined the NSDAP in 1929 and put much effort in the distribution of the anti-Semitic book The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, to the point that members of the Swiss Jewish community sued the book's distributor, the Swiss Nazi Party, for libel. Gustloff's wife Hedwig had been Hitler's secretary. Gustloff was shot and killed in 1936 by David Frankfurter, a Jewish student incensed by Gustloff's anti-Semitic activism.

Gustloff was given a state funeral in his birth place of Schwerin in Mecklenburg with Adolf Hitler, Joseph Goebbels, Hermann Göring, Heinrich Himmler, Martin Bormann and Joachim von Ribbentrop in attendance. Thousands of Hitlerjugend members lined the route. His coffin, which was transported on a special train from Davos to Schwerin, made stops in Stuttgart, Würzburg, Erfurt, Halle, Magdeburg and Wittenberg. His widow, mother and brother were present at the funeral and received personal condolences from Hitler. Ernst Wilhelm Bohle was the first at Gustloff's funeral to recite a few lines in honour of the deceased. Gustloff was made a Blutzeuge of the Nazi cause and his murder later became part of the propaganda serving as pretext for the 1938 Kristallnacht pogrom.