Year 1939 (MCMXXXIX) was a common year starting on Sunday (link will display the full calendar) of the Gregorian calendar. This year also marks the start of the Second World War, the deadliest human conflict in history.

Below, events of World War II have the WWII prefix.

Stefan Aust (born 1 July 1946 Stade, Lower Saxony) is a German journalist and was the editor-in-chief of the weekly news magazine Der Spiegel from 1994 to February 2008.

Two of Aust's books have been made into films: Der Pirat 1997 by Bernd Schadewald and Der Baader Meinhof Komplex 2008 by Uli Edel.

German journalist Stefan Aust reflects that uneasy relationship with his country's traumatic past in his new history of the terrorist movement launched by Andreas Baader, Ulrike Meinhof and Gudrun Ensslin. Aust, for many years the editor of Der Spiegel, the German newsweekly, has a long history with the RAF. He even played a big part in one of the gang's exploits, helping to retrieve Meinhof's young twins from a Palestinian orphans' camp after she had abandoned the girls there.

Sherlock Holmes ( /ˈʃɜrlɒk ˈhoʊmz/) is a fictional detective created by Scottish author and physician Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. The fantastic London-based "consulting detective", Holmes is famous for his astute logical reasoning, his ability to adopt almost any disguise, and his use of forensic science skills to solve difficult cases.

Holmes, who first appeared in publication in 1887, was featured in four novels and 56 short stories. The first novel, A Study in Scarlet, appeared in Beeton's Christmas Annual in 1887 and the second, The Sign of the Four, in Lippincott's Monthly Magazine in 1890. The character grew tremendously in popularity with the first series of short stories in Strand Magazine, beginning with A Scandal in Bohemia in 1891; further series of short stories and two novels published in serial form appeared between then and 1927. The stories cover a period from around 1880 up to 1914.

All but four stories are narrated by Holmes's friend and biographer, Dr. John H. Watson; two are narrated by Holmes himself ("The Blanched Soldier" and "The Lion's Mane") and two others are written in the third person ("The Mazarin Stone" and "His Last Bow"). In two stories ("The Musgrave Ritual" and "The Gloria Scott"), Holmes tells Watson the main story from his memories, while Watson becomes the narrator of the frame story. The first and fourth novels, A Study in Scarlet and The Valley of Fear, each include a long interval of omniscient narration recounting events unknown to either Holmes or Watson.

Tyrone Edmund Power, Jr. (May 5, 1913 – November 15, 1958), usually credited as Tyrone Power and known sometimes as Ty Power, was an American film and stage actor who appeared in dozens of films from the 1930s to the 1950s, often in swashbuckler roles or romantic leads such as in The Mark of Zorro, Blood and Sand, The Black Swan, Prince of Foxes, The Black Rose, and Captain from Castile.

Though renowned for his dark, classically handsome looks that made him a matinee idol from his first film appearance, Power played a wide range of roles, from film leading man to light comedy. In the 1950s, he began placing limits on the number of films he would make in order to have time for the stage. He received his biggest accolades as a stage actor in John Brown's Body and Mister Roberts. Power died from a heart attack at the age of 45.

Power was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, in 1914, the only son of Helen Emma "Patia" (née Reaume) and the English-born American stage and screen actor Tyrone Power, Sr. Power was descended from a long theatrical line going back to his great-grandfather, the actor and comedian Tyrone Power (1795-1841). His father's ancestry included Irish, English, and Protestant French Huguenots (the latter through his paternal grandmother's Lavenu and Blossett ancestors). His mother had Catholic French Canadian (through the Reaume family) and German (from Alsace-Lorraine) ancestry. Through his paternal great-grandmother, Anne Gilbert, Power was related to the actor Laurence Olivier; through his paternal grandmother, stage actress Ethel Lavenu, he was related by marriage to author Evelyn Waugh, and through his father's first cousin, Norah Emily Gorman Power, he was related to the theatrical director Sir (William) Tyrone Guthrie, founder of the Stratford Festival (now the Stratford Shakespeare Festival) in Canada and the Tyrone Guthrie Theatre in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

Henry Jaynes Fonda (May 16, 1905 – August 12, 1982) was an American film and stage actor.

Fonda made his mark early as a Broadway actor. He also appeared in 1938 in plays performed in White Plains, New York, with Joan Tompkins. He made his Hollywood debut in 1935, and his career gained momentum after his Academy Award-nominated performance as Tom Joad in The Grapes of Wrath, a 1940 adaptation of John Steinbeck's novel about an Oklahoma family who moved west during the Dust Bowl. Throughout six decades in Hollywood, Fonda cultivated a strong, appealing screen image in such classics as The Ox-Bow Incident, Mister Roberts and 12 Angry Men. Later, Fonda moved both toward darker epics as Sergio Leone's Once Upon a Time in the West and lighter roles in family comedies like Yours, Mine and Ours with Lucille Ball.

Fonda was the patriarch of a family of famous actors, including daughter Jane Fonda, son Peter Fonda, granddaughter Bridget Fonda, and grandson Troy Garity. His family and close friends called him "Hank". In 1999, he was named the sixth-Greatest Male Star of All Time by the American Film Institute.