Photo Gallery The Second World War
On May 10, 1933, the Nazis publicly burned roughly 20,000 books by authors such as Sigmund Freud, Lion Feuchtwanger and Erich Kästner, whom they believed to be ideologically dangerous.
Members of the SA march through Berlin in 1938. The signs they carry read: "Germans, defend yourselves! Don't buy from Jews!"
The September 1938 Munich Agreement remains the classic example of the appeasement policy pursued by Neville Chamberlain, the British prime minister. Along with French Prime Minister Edourad Daladier and Benito Mussolini of Italy, Chamberlain agreed that Czechoslovakia should yield the Sudeten region to Germany.
This photograph shows German troops during the invasion of Poland on Sept. 1, 1939.
Johann Georg Elser made an attempt on Hitler's life on Nov. 8, 1939 by planting a bomb in a Munich beer hall. Hitler left the beer hall a few minutes ahead of schedule and survived. Elser was imprisoned in Dachau concentration camp and murdered shortly before the end of the Second World War.
King George VI and Queen Elizabeth of Britan pose in front of a bombed out house in London. Germany's blitzkrieg strategy saw German bombers killing some 14,000 people in London between the summer of 1940 and December of the same year.
On Dec. 7, 1941, Japan -- a German ally -- attacked the US fleet in Pearl Harbor on Hawaii. The attack on the US Navy led to the United States's entry into the Second World War.
This photograph shows Soviet prisoners of war near Smolensk. The German military attacked the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941. Before the end of the month, the German military had already committed one of the worst massacres of the war, at Babi Yar near Kiev in Ukraine. German soldiers and SS troops shot almost 34,000 Jewish citizens in two days.
The Soviet Union's Red Army surrounded the sixth division of the German Wehrmacht outside Stalingrad on Nov. 22, 1942. The German troops surrendered only in late January of the following year. By then, some 150,000 of them had starved, frozen to death or been killed in battle.
This photograph shows the Eilbek neighborhood of Hamburg after an Allied bombinng. July 25, 1943 marked the beginning of "Operation Gomorrah," the concerted British and US bombings of Hamburg.
Hans Scholl (left), his sister Sophie and Christoph Probst formed the dissident group "White Rose" in Munich. They were executed on Feb. 22, 1943.
This photograph, taken from an SS report, shows a Jewish boy being escorted from the Warsaw Ghetto on Apr. 19, 1943. The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of that year saw Jewish partisans shooting and throwing grenades at German troops. About 7,000 Jewish partisans died in the fighting; a further 6,000 were subsequently burned or gassed alive in bunkers by the German military. The remaining 50,000 ghetto inhabitants were sent to German extermination camps, mainly to Treblinka.
Hitler, Hermann Göring and Martin Bormann inspect the destroyed rooms of the German military high command in Rastenburg, East Prussia, following a failed attempt on Hitler's life carried out by a group of German military officers around Claus Graf Schenk von Stauffenberg, a conservative army colonel. Stauffenberg and his co-conspirators were executed by strangulation in Plötzensee Prison, Berlin on Aug. 10, 1944.
This photograph shows Allied landing operations on the coast of Normandy, on June 6, 1944 (D Day).
This picture was taken during the liberation of the German Auschwitz extermination camp by the Soviet Red army in Apr. 1945. Estimates of the number of people killed in Auschwitz range from 1.1 million to 5 million.
The city center of Dresden was fire-bombed by Allied bombers on the night between Feb. 13 and 14, 1945. Between 25,000 and 35,000 Germans are thought to have died in Dresden during the bombing.
Members of the Soviet Red Army march past Brandenburg Gate in Berlin's city center on May 20, 1945. The Red Army's assault on Berlin began on Apr. 16, 1945 under the command of Marshal Zhukov. About 33,000 Soviet soldiers died during heavy fighting around the Seelow Heights near Berlin before the city's defenses were breached. The Red Army suffered a further 360,000 casualties during fighting in the city itself. The Germans sustained 450,000 casualties including civilians.
This photograph shows the mushroom cloud above Nagasaki, Japan following the dropping of an atomic bomb there by the US Air Force on Aug. 9, 1945. The two atomic bombs dropped on Nagasaki and Hiroshima killed more than 200,000 people. Japan's capitulation following the dropping of the bombs marked the end of World War Two.
