October 1: German troops begin to occupy the Sudetenland.

October 3: Eddie Cochran, rockabilly musician, is born in Albert Lea, Minnesota.

October 5: Winston Churchill makes a famous speech to the House of Commons calling the Munich Agreement 'a total and unmitigated defeat.'

October 5: All German passports held by Jews are invalidated. Jews are required to surrender their old passports to have them revalidated by having a letter 'J' stamped on them.

October 11: Charles Lindbergh and wife Anne begin their third visit to Nazi Germany.

October 13: The film The Wizard of Oz begins production.

October 17: Evel Knievel daredevil, is born in Butte, Montana.

October 19: Hermann Goering presents Charles Lindbergh with the Service Cross of the Order of the German Eagle. Lindbergh's acceptance of the award will become very controversial in the United States, though Lindbergh claims the award had been sprung on him without warning.

October 22: Buddy Ebsen becomes ill on the set of The Wizard of Oz and is hospitalized after the aluminum dust makeup from his Tin Man costume renders him barely able to breathe. Ebsen will be replaced by Jack Haley.

October 24: Hitler sends his foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop to meet with Polish ambassador Józef Lipski at Berchtesgaden. Ribbentrop declares it was time for Danzig to revert to Germany, but Lipski replies that the Polish government was unlikely to agree.

October 28: Some 12,000 Polish Jews are deported from Germany in the vicinity of the border town of Zbąszyń. Many of the expelled Jews are denied entry into Poland on the basis of the country's new denaturalization law. Some return to Germany and about 5,500 stay in disused stables and other temporary shelters around Zbąszyń with nowhere else to go.

October 28: Barcelona holds a farewell parade for the International Brigades.

October 30: A radio drama performance of The War of the Worlds directed and narrated by Orson Welles aires over the CBS radio network. It will become famous for allegedly causing a nationwide panic among people who thought the drama about an alien invasion by Martians was a real news broadcast, but such accounts are wildly exaggerated. (source: Wikipedia)