Hitler's chief architect, Albert Speer, is put in charge of Germany's armaments programme

Vidkun Quisling, founder of the Norwegian Fascist party, is appointed president of German-occupied Norway

The Nazis build a new style of concentration camp, at Auschwitz in Poland, in which the fit will work and the unfit will be killed

German industrial enterprises are moved from the vulnerable Ruhr valley to the slave labour facilities of Auschwitz

British engineer Barnes Wallis designs a bouncing and rotating bomb for use against German dams

Pierre Laval becomes head of the government in German-backed Vichy France

Germany launches a bombing campaign specifically targeting historic British cities with three stars in the Baedeker guidebook

George VI awards the George Cross (for civilian valour) to the entire besieged island of Malta

German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer flies to neutral Sweden to contact the British on behalf of conspirators against Hitler

Reinhard Heydrich is fatally wounded by Free Czech agents parachuted in from Britain

Hitler orders a massacre at Lidice, a village near Prague, in retaliation for the death of Heydrich

Anne Frank and her family go into hiding in an Amsterdam attic

Treblinka is constructed, in Poland, as the Nazis' first large-scale and purpose-built death camp

A renewed German campaign eastwards in Russia results in the capture of Sebastopol and the Crimea

Russia's new heavy industry is relocated to the east to escape the German advance

Bernard Montgomery is appointed commander of the demoralized British and Commonwealth Eighth Army in North Africa

Canadian troops provide most of the assault force in a disastrous raid on Dieppe

A desperate battle begins for the city of Stalingrad, with house-to-house fighting between Germans and Russians

The German V-2 rocket is successfully tested by Wernher von Braun and his team at Peenemünde

Hitler, disregarding the armistice, sends German troops to take control of Vichy France

Soviet tanks complete the encirclement of 20 German divisions at Stalingrad

French crews in Toulon scuttle the fleet to prevent it falling into German hands

The loss of merchant shipping to U-boats reaches a peak in the Battle of the Atlantic, with 1.5 million tons sunk in the last quarter of the year

An international declaration condemns Germany's 'bestial policy of cold-blooded extermination'

French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre expounds his theory of existentialism in Being and Nothingness ('L'Être et le néant')