The Red Army liberates the Auschwitz concentration and extermination camp, where about 1.1 million people were murdered; the date is now International Holocaust Remembrance Day.
Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin meet at Yalta to discuss the post-war reorganisation of Europe and the world.
As the Red Army closes in on Berlin, Adolf Hitler kills himself in his underground bunker.
The Allies formally accept Nazi Germany's unconditional surrender, ending the Second World War in Europe.
An international military tribunal tries leading Nazi figures for war crimes and crimes against humanity.
Allied forces carry out the largest seaborne invasion in history on the Normandy coast, opening a Western Front to liberate Western Europe.
At Fulton, Missouri, Winston Churchill declares that an "iron curtain" has descended across Europe, a symbolic marker of the early Cold War.