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

The British reach Belsen and reveal appalling Nazi atrocities, worse even than at Buchenwald

American and Soviet troops join up at Torgau, 70 miles south of Berlin

Soviet armies form a complete circle around Berlin to isolate the city

Adolf Hitler marries Eva Braun in his bunker, and holds a champagne reception with Goebbels as the principal guest

Hitler chooses Admiral Dönitz as his successor and appoints his cabinet

Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun retire to their marital quarters in the Berlin bunker and commit suicide

Soviet troops storm the Reichstag in the centre of Berlin on the day when Adolf Hitler commits suicide in his bunker below them

Anglo-US Fascist William Joyce ('Lord Haw Haw') makes his final English broadcast from Hamburg

In the Berlin bunker, on the day after Hitler's death, Goebbels arranges for his six children to be lethally injected, and himself and his wife to be shot

The German general commanding Berlin, Helmuth Weidling, surrenders the city to the Allies

The unconditional surrender of all German forces is accepted at Eisenhower's headquarters

Heinrich Himmler, escaping in disguise, takes poison when he is identified

The Sudetenland is restored to Czechoslovakia, seven years after its transfer to Germany under the Munich Agreement

The four Allied powers (USA, UK, France, USSR) provide occupation forces for separate zones of Austria, Germany and Berlin

Truman, Stalin and Churchill meet for a summit conference in Potsdam

Winston Churchill, losing the postwar general election in Britain, has to yield his seat at Potsdam in mid-conference to Clement Attlee

[1939-1945] - in addition to 6 million Jews, the Nazi death camps have killed some 400,000 Gypsies and 100,000 'useless defectives'

Twenty-two German defendants are put on trial in Nuremberg, charged with war crimes

Germany's former foreign minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop, is sentenced to death at Nuremberg and is hanged

German conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler is acquitted of the charge of collaborating with the Nazis

Twelve of the defendants at Nuremberg are sentenced to death by hanging

Hermann Goering, sentenced to death at Nuremberg, kills himself with a potassium cyanide capsule the night before he is due to be hanged

Bertolt Brecht's play The Life of Galileo has its premiere in Los Angeles with Charles Laughton in the lead