The Red Army liberates the surviving prisoners at Auschwitz, who include the Italian novelist Primo Levi

English painter Francis Bacon creates a sensation with his Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion

English author Nancy Mitford has her first success with the novel The Pursuit of Love

Austrian philosopher Karl Popper publishes The Open Society and its Enemies

Benjamin Britten's opera Peter Grimes has its premiere in London, at the Sadler's Wells theatre

Jean-Louis Barrault directs and stars in the film Les Enfants du Paradis

Alexander Solzhenitsyn is sentenced to eight years in a Soviet labour camp for critizing Stalin in a private correspondence

Igor Stravinsky's Symphony in Three Movements, premiered in New York, derives from music written for or inspired by films

Austrian composer Anton Webern is accidentally killed near Salzburg by a soldier in the US occupation force

British chemist Dorothy Hodgkin describes the molecular structure of penicillin

Le Corbusier's use of béton brut (raw concrete) introduces Brutalism

A new constitution strengthens Tito's hold on Yugoslavia, and is soon followed by repressive measures

Roosevelt, Stalin and Churchill meet at Yalta to discuss Allied post-war plans

Stalin agrees at Yalta to declare war on Japan after the end of the European war

Stalin, at Yalta, promises free elections in post-war eastern Europe

British bombers launch a devastating raid against Dresden, killing tens of thousands in a firestorm

The Germans surrender Budapest to the Soviets after a costly siege

The Soviets instal a puppet government in Romania while the fight continues against Germany

Tito becomes head of a provisional government in newly liberated Yugoslavia

Patton's Third US Army is the first Allied force to cross the Rhine, at Oppenheim, south of Mainz

Montgomery's Twenty-First Army Group crosses the Rhine at several points in the north

Adolf Hitler orders a scorched earth policy within Germany, in the path of the advancing Allies

Dietrich Bonhoeffer is executed in a Nazi concentration camp just a month before the end of the war in Europe

American troops discover the German concentration camp at Buchenwald

Russian forces reach and capture the Austrian capital, Vienna