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On 8 May 1945, hundreds of thousands of Londoners took to the streets to celebrate the end of World War II in Europe. BBC correspondents captured the scenes of joy across the city - from the East End to Piccadilly...
Josef Stalin died on 5 March 1953. Valentin Berezhkov was his translator - at the Russian leader's side for negotiations with Hitler, Roosevelt and Churchill during the World War Two.
In February 1945 US Marines fought the Japanese in one of the fiercest battles of WW2. Thousands of lives were lost in almost five weeks of fighting for control of the Pacific island. Witness speaks to 91-year-old former Marine, John...
On February 13th 1945 the Allies began a series of air raids against the German city of Dresden. The bombing started a firestorm in which tens of thousands of civilians were killed, and the cultural and architectural centre of...
In the early months of 1940, Finland was in a desperate fight for survival against the might of the Soviet Union. Hear from Finnish veteran, Antti Henttonen, who was 17 when he joined up. He survived the war but lost...
In 1943, a group of Belgian Jews escaped from a train bound for the gas chambers at Auschwitz. In the only incident of its kind, they were helped by members of the Belgian resistance. Simon Gronowski was just 11...
The Swedish diplomat, Raoul Wallenberg, saved tens of thousands of Jews from the Nazis in Hungary, but he was taken into Soviet custody in January 1945 and disappeared. His fate remains a mystery. (Photo: An undated file photo of Swedish diplomat...
Fought during the winter months of 1944, it was the last major German attack on the Western Allies in World War II. Witness speaks to Keith Davis, an American survivor of the Battle of the Bulge. Photo: American tanks in...
In October 1942 Norwegian commandos began a series of raids on a heavy water plant in German-occupied Norway. They had to destroy it in order to stop the Nazis from developing an atomic weapon. Joachim Ronneberg is the last...
Kitty Hart-Moxon and her mother were sent to the Nazis' most notorious death camp in April 1943. More than a million people died in Auschwitz. Kitty tells Witness how she and others survived. Photo: Family at the raiway terminal of Auschwitz-Birkenau...
In August 1944, a US Air Force plane crashed into a village, Freckleton, in northwest England, killing 61 people. More than half the victims were children attending the local primary school. Survivor Ruby Currell speaks to Witness. PHOTO: Ruby Currell in...
In August 1944, French and US forces freed Paris from German occupation. The liberators were met by crowds of celebrating Parisians. Listen to reports of some of the war correspondents who arrived first in the liberated city. Photo: A Parisian...
At the start of the Second World War hundreds of thousands of Polish civilians were imprisoned in the Soviet Union following the occupation of their country by the USSR. But in August 1941, after Nazi Germany invaded Russia, many...
In the early hours of 5 August 1944, hundreds of Japanese prisoners of war being held near the Australian town of Cowra staged the largest breakout of World War Two. Hear oral history accounts of that night from the archives...
On 1 August 1944, resistance fighters in the Polish capital rose up against German occupying forces. The uprising lasted for 63 days and some 200,000 people were killed - the city itself was largely destroyed. Zbigniew Pelczynski was one of...
German army officer, Colonel Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg attempted to kill Adolf Hitler by planting a briefcase bomb in a meeting at Hitler's headquarters on 20 July, 1944. The attack was supposed to be the trigger for a coup...
In June 1942 the village of Lidice in German-occupied Czechoslovakia was completely destroyed in retaliation for the assassination of a top ranking Nazi. Adolf Hitler was so outraged by the murder of Reinhard Heydrich that he ordered that all the...
On 6 June 1944, Allied forces launched their long awaited invasion of Nazi-occupied France. It was a crucial step in the liberation of western Europe. Using original BBC reports from the time - from Chester Wilmot, Richard Dimbleby, Robin Duff,...
In May 1939 more than 900 Jews, many of them young children, fled Nazi Germany aboard a luxury cruise liner. They were trying to get to Cuba and the USA, but the ship was turned away in Havana and its...
In April 1945, thousands of Italians crowded into a Milan square to see the body of the wartime fascist dictator, Benito Mussolini. He, his mistress and his close associates had been shot by partisans, and their corpses strung up by...
In February 1941, a ship carrying nearly 30,000 cases of whisky was wrecked off the Scottish island of Eriskay in the Outer Hebrides. The islanders began to salvage the bottles from the wreck - and the incident later became the...
In 1939 tension was growing in Europe, over Nazi Germany's expansionist plans. One young British camerman headed to Danzig (now Gdansk) to film what happened next. His name was Douglas Slocombe and he is now 101 years old....
In February 1946 the first 'war brides' ship sailed from the UK to Canada reuniting women with the foreign husbands they'd married while serving in the UK during World War Two. Witness speaks to two women who sailed on the...
In February 1944, the world's first electronic computer began attacking encrypted Nazi messages, from the secret British codebreaking centre at Bletchley Park. Hear from one of the engineers tasked with building and maintaining Colossus during World War Two.
In 1943, Rome's Jewish citizens were promised that if they gave gold to the Nazis, they would escape deportation. Despite handing over 50kg of gold - more than 1,500 of the city's Jews were rounded up and sent to...
During World War Two conscientious objectors could volunteer for medical experiments. Hear the story of one young American who had refused to fight, but was prepared to starve for his country. Marshall Sutton is now 95 - he took...
On the 3rd of January 1946 Britain's most famous wartime traitor was hanged. His name was William Joyce but he was better known as Lord Haw Haw. Throughout WW2 he broadcast Nazi propaganda from Germany to Britain. At the end...
Thousands of foreign civilians were interned in camps when Japanese troops occupied the Philippines in World War II. Many of the inmates suffered from acute malnutrition. We hear the story of one boy, Desmond Malone, who was interned at the...
In November 1943, Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchill all met together for the first time to discuss the progress of World War Two. The meeting was held in Tehran over four days. (Photo: Joseph Stalin (left), Franklin Roosevelt (centre), Winston Churchill...
In 1937, Hitler and the Nazi party organised a huge exhibition of modern art in Munich. It was designed to ridicule works of art which they disapproved of - they called it Degenerate Art. It went on to be...
In 1949, Iva Toguri, a Japanese-American woman, was wrongly convicted for making propaganda broadcasts on behalf of Japan during the Second World War. She was accused of being the infamous radio presenter known to American servicemen as "Tokyo Rose". Witness...
Hundreds of Jewish slave labourers in a Nazi death camp staged a revolt and escaped in October 1943. Many were caught and shot. Around 50 made it to the end of the war. Listen to the story of Thomas...
In October 1943, at the height of the Second World War, most of the Jews in Denmark evaded Nazi plans to send them to death camps. They were warned about a planned roundup by a German diplomat. Hear the story...
During World War II, African soldiers were a vital part of the Allied forces. Many of them were sent to Burma as reinforcements for the British troops there. Hear just some of their memories - recorded by the BBC...
On September 30th 1938, Neville Chamberlain returned from negotiations with Hitler promising "peace in our time". He had agreed for Hitler to take over the Sudetenland in western Czechoslovakia, as part of a policy known as appeasement.
In World War II , Britain set up a secret organisation which waged war in Nazi occupied Europe. Noreen Riols, a former member of SOE, who helped train the agents, recounts her experiences in Churchill' s secret army. (Photo: A...
The early 20th Century was a golden age for physics with pioneers such as Max Born, Robert Oppenheimer and Werner Heisenberg working together at Gottingen University in Germany. But the rise of Hitler forced Born and many other Jewish scientists...
In 1945, the allies dropped an atomic bomb over the Japanese city of Nagasaki. The explosion was bigger than the blast at Hiroshima three days earlier and killed 70,000 people. Louise Hidalgo introduces BBC archive recordings of survivors of Nagasaki....
In the last days of World War II, an American warship, the USS Indianapolis, was torpedoed in the Pacific. For days, no one came to the survivors' rescue. Left adrift in shark-infested waters, hundreds of sailors died. We hear from...
On July 8 1943, at the height of World War Two, the leader of the French Resistance was killed by German forces. Hear from Daniel Cordier who worked alongside Jean Moulin as his radio operator and secretary in the...
In 1943, the Royal Air Force attacked a set of dams in Germany's Ruhr valley which were considered indestructible. Flying low and at night, the crews used special bouncing bombs to bring down two of their targets. The Dambusters mission...
The story of Jack Humble, whose ship was torpedoed while escorting a convoy inside the Arctic Circle. From 1941-45, Allied sailors and ships battled storms, bombers and U-boats to ferry war supplies to Russia in WW2. (Photo: Frozen deck of...
On April 30th 1945 as Red Army soldiers closed in on the German capital Berlin, Adolf Hitler killed himself. But first he married his lover Eva Braun, and dictated his will. Hear from one of the secretaries who was in...
In 1943, a few hundred Jewish fighters rose up against the German army as it began its final push to erase all traces of Jewish life in the Polish capital. Krystyna Budnicka is one of the very few Jews...
How severely burnt Second World War airmen learnt to overcome their terrible injuries. They were all patients of the revolutionary plastic surgeon, Sir Archibald McIndoe at a specialist burns unit. Two of the surviving "guinea pigs" tell their stories. Photo:...
It's 70 years since 173 people were crushed to death at an air-raid shelter in east London during World War II. They were killed as they sought refuge in an underground train station. Sixty-two children were among the dead. We...
In February 1942 Britain's stronghold in South East Asia fell to the Japanese. Tens of thousands of Commonwealth soldiers were taken prisoner. They were sent to prison camps across the region and set to work. Maurice Naylor worked on...
It is 70 years since German troops lost their battle to take the Soviet industrial city. They had spent a harsh Russian winter fighting from house to house on starvation rations. Eventually they were cut off from their supply...
In January 1946 a young woman was given Hitler's will to translate into English. She had been sent to post-war Germany as part of the occupying forces. It was the culmination of her work for the British Army intelligence corps....
At the end of World War Two, millions of people in the west of Nazi-occupied Netherlands faced starvation. The lucky ones survived on watery bread, potato peel or tulip bulbs. Witness speaks to one Dutchman who lived through what became...