On August 1, 1919, a general strike in Basel escalated into violence when troops opened fire during unrest in Kleinbasel, resulting in five deaths. On the same date in 1996, Tadeus Reichstein died in Basel at the age of 99. Reichstein was a Polish-Swiss chemist and Nobel laureate who had moved to Basel in 1937, where he served as a professor of organic chemistry and conducted significant research, including the synthesis of vitamin C.