Witness History: World War Two history

In December 1945, one of America's most famous miltary commanders, General George S Patton, died from injuries sustained in a car crash, just months after the end of the Second World War. Witness talks to his grandson, George Patton Waters, about his memories of this colourful and often unorthodox man.Photo: General George Patton in Paris in August 1945 to celebrate the first anniversary of the city's liberation. (Credit: AFP/Getty Images)

On 7 December 1941, Japan launched a surprise attack on the US naval base at Pearl Harbour, Hawaii. Thousands of American servicemen died in a raid which brought their country into World War Two. Former Navy mechanic, Adolph Kuhn, tells Witness how he survived.(Photo: The USS Arizona sinking at Pearl Harbor. Credit: Getty Images)

How a devastating air raid on the Italian port of Bari during World War Two led to the deadly release of mustard gas. Winston Churchill ordered the incident to be kept secret for years. We hear from Peter Bickmore BEM, who was injured during the raid.(Photo: Seventeen Allied ships go up in flames in Bari, Italy, after a raid by German bombers on 2 December 1943. Credit: Keystone/Getty Images)

In November 1938, the SS commander Heinrich Himmler ordered the construction in Nazi Germany of the only concentration camp built specifically for women. It would be called Ravensbruck. Selma van der Perre tells Witness about the horrors of life in Ravensbruck, including experiments on women and children, and how she survived.Photograph: women at Ravensbruck concentration camp (Credit: Das Bundesarchiv)

In October and November 1942, the Allies fought a famous battle against German and Italian troops close to the small Egyptian village of El Alamein.General Bernard Montgomery, the British commander, knew that victory was crucial. But his offensive was in danger of stalling almost as soon as it began. Witness speaks to Len Burritt who was then a 24 year old wireless operator with the British Seventh Armoured Division.(Photo: A German tank is knocked out and British troops rush up with fixed bayonets to capture the German crew at the Battle of El Alamein. Credit: Getty Images)

In an act of defiance during World War Two, starving musicians in the besieged city of Leningrad performed Shostakovich's new Seventh Symphony. The piece was composed especially for the city, which had been cut off and surrounded by invading Nazi troops. During the siege an estimated one million civilians died from starvation, exposure, and the bombardment by German forces. Hear archive recordings of Ksenia Matus who played the oboe in the orchestra, and hear from Sarah Quigley, the author of a novel about Shostakovich's Seventh Symphony. Dina Newman reports.(Photo: Official Soviet picture of Dmitri Shostakovich working on his famous Seventh ("Leningrad") Symphony. AFP/Getty Images)

In 1943, the cellist, Anita Lasker-Wallfisch, was sent to the Auschwitz concentration camp. She expected to be killed in the gas chambers, but survived because she was recruited to play in an orchestra set up by the women prisoners. Anita Lasker-Wallfisch talks to Witness about her experience and the power of music in the darkest moments in history.PICTURE: Anita Lasker-Wallfisch in 1938 (Private Collection).

In the early hours of 19th August 1942, a convoy of Allied ships approached the port of Dieppe carrying more than 6,000 troops. The mainly Canadian force was supposed to carry out a hit and run raid that would help the Allies learn and plan for the real invasion of occupied France later in the war. But almost immediately things started to go wrong. Ronald Miles, then aged 20, was a crew member on a landing craft.(Photo: Two German prisoners brought back from the Allied raid on Dieppe, blindfolded after landing. Credit: Keystone/Getty Images)

On 1 August 1944, the Warsaw Uprising against the Nazi occupation of Poland began. Hundreds of thousands of people died during the fighting and Poland's capital was almost completely destroyed. Among the underground fighters were children, many of them members of the Scout movement. Andrzej Slawinsky was one of them.(Photo: Insurgents on the streets of Warsaw, 1944. Credit: HO/AFP/Getty Images)

In the 1930s Hitler began to rebuild Germany's armed forces. When WW1 ended Germany had been banned from having an air force under the Treaty of Versailles. Hear from Eric 'Winkle' Brown who as a very young man was invited to see the new planes and helicopters that had been developed for the Luftwaffe. He later went on to become a flying ace in Britain's RAF. Photo: September 1938: Giant bombers of the Luftwaffe leave a smoke trail as they fly over a Nuremberg rally in a show of German military might. (Photo by Max Schirner/Topical Press Agency/Getty Images)

In June 1944 the International Red Cross was allowed by the Nazis into the Theresienstadt concentration camp. The Nazis tried to use the visit to project a positive image of their treatment of the Jews. Hear from Ela Weissberger, who was an 11-year-old prisoner in the camp.(Audio archive courtesy of The National Centre for Jewish Film at Brandeis University)(Photo: Children in Theresienstadt, taken by International Red Cross delegates, June 1944; ICRC archives (ARR)/ Rossel, Maurice)

The Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann recorded hours of interview about his involvement in the Holocaust, before his capture in 1960 by Israeli agents. Witness talks to the daughter of the Dutch journalist, Willem Sassen, who recorded the Eichmann interviews in Argentina. Saskia Sassen talks about the tapes, her memories of their secret visitor and the night the Israelis snatched Eichmann off the streets of Buenos Aires.(Photo: Adolf Eichmann stands in a protective glass booth flanked by Israeli police during his trial in 1961 in Jerusalem. Credit: Central Press/Getty Images)

In February 1941, a ship carrying nearly 30,000 cases of whisky was wrecked off the Scottish island of Eriskay in the Outer Hebrides. The islanders began to salvage the bottles from the wreck - and the incident later became the inspiration for the film "Whisky Galore".Photo: An assortment of bottled whisky is displayed at Glenkinchie distillery March 13, 2008 in Edinburgh, Scotland.

In 1939 tension was growing in Europe, over Nazi Germany's expansionist plans. One young British camerman headed to Danzig (now Gdansk) to film what happened next. His name was Douglas Slocombe and he is now 101 years old. Hear his story.(Photo: Hitler Youth marching over a bridge in Danzig in 1939. Copyright: Fox Photos/Getty Images)

In February 1946 the first 'war brides' ship sailed from the UK to Canada reuniting women with the foreign husbands they'd married while serving in the UK during World War Two. Witness speaks to two women who sailed on the Mauretania.(Photo: Arnie and Grace Shewan's wedding day 1944. Courtesy of Grace Shewan)

In February 1944, the world's first electronic computer began attacking encrypted Nazi messages, from the secret British codebreaking centre at Bletchley Park. Hear from one of the engineers tasked with building and maintaining Colossus during World War Two.

In 1943, Rome's Jewish citizens were promised that if they gave gold to the Nazis, they would escape deportation. Despite handing over 50kg of gold - more than 1,500 of the city's Jews were rounded up and sent to the death camps. Alan Johnston reports from Rome.Photo: Survivor Settimia Spizzichino (far right)

During World War Two conscientious objectors could volunteer for medical experiments. Hear the story of one young American who had refused to fight, but was prepared to starve for his country. Marshall Sutton is now 95 - he took part in the Minnesota Starvation Experiment in 1944 in an attempt to help scientists understand how best to look after starving civilians in war-torn Europe.(Photo: Marshall Sutton today)

On the 3rd of January 1946 Britain's most famous wartime traitor was hanged. His name was William Joyce but he was better known as Lord Haw Haw. Throughout WW2 he broadcast Nazi propaganda from Germany to Britain. At the end of the war he was hated by much of Britain, but we hear from the son of one man who tried to save him from execution.

Thousands of foreign civilians were interned in camps when Japanese troops occupied the Philippines in World War II. Many of the inmates suffered from acute malnutrition. We hear the story of one boy, Desmond Malone, who was interned at the Santo Tomas camp in Manila.Photo: American inmates of the Santo Tomas internment camp after liberation by US forces in February 1945 (AP Photo/Pool)

In November 1943, Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchill all met together for the first time to discuss the progress of World War Two. The meeting was held in Tehran over four days.(Photo: Joseph Stalin (left), Franklin Roosevelt (centre), Winston Churchill (right). Credit: Keystone/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

In 1937, Hitler and the Nazi party organised a huge exhibition of modern art in Munich. It was designed to ridicule works of art which they disapproved of - they called it Degenerate Art. It went on to be one of the best attended modern art exhibitions of all time.Picture: Two men prepare to hang German Expressionist painter Max Beckmann's triptych 'Temptation' at the 20th Century German Art Exhibition at the New Burlington Galleries, London. The exhibition includes work by all the German artists pilloried by Adolf Hitler in the 'Degenerate Art' exhibition in Munich of 1937. (Photo by Topical Press Agency/Getty Images)

In 1949, Iva Toguri, a Japanese-American woman, was wrongly convicted for making propaganda broadcasts on behalf of Japan during the Second World War. She was accused of being the infamous radio presenter known to American servicemen as "Tokyo Rose". Witness speaks to Ron Yates, a reporter whose investigation helped to clear Iva Toguri's name.PHOTO: Iva Toguri in the 1940s (US National Archives)

Hundreds of Jewish slave labourers in a Nazi death camp staged a revolt and escaped in October 1943. Many were caught and shot. Around 50 made it to the end of the war.Listen to the story of Thomas Blatt, one of the survivors.Photo: Sobibor Death Camp (United States Holocaust Memorial Museum)

In October 1943, at the height of the Second World War, most of the Jews in Denmark evaded Nazi plans to send them to death camps. They were warned about a planned roundup by a German diplomat. Hear the story of Bent Melchior who was 14 years old when his family made the journey to safety in neutral Sweden.(Photo: Bent, aged 15 and living in Sweden)

During World War II, African soldiers were a vital part of the Allied forces. Many of them were sent to Burma as reinforcements for the British troops there. Hear just some of their memories - recorded by the BBC in the 1990s.Find out more about African troops in Burma in Another Man's War: The Story of a Burma Boy in Britain's Forgotten Army, a book by former BBC correspondent Barnaby Phillips, published June 2015. (Photo: East African soldiers in Burma fighting for Britain in WW2, unknown date. Credit: Topham Picturepoint)

On September 30th 1938, Neville Chamberlain returned from negotiations with Hitler promising "peace in our time". He had agreed for Hitler to take over the Sudetenland in western Czechoslovakia, as part of a policy known as appeasement.

In World War II , Britain set up a secret organisation which waged war in Nazi occupied Europe. Noreen Riols, a former member of SOE, who helped train the agents, recounts her experiences in Churchill' s secret army.(Photo: A group of SOE agents during training. BBC copyright)

The early 20th Century was a golden age for physics with pioneers such as Max Born, Robert Oppenheimer and Werner Heisenberg working together at Gottingen University in Germany. But the rise of Hitler forced Born and many other Jewish scientists to flee into exile. Max Born's son, Gustav, tells Louise Hidalgo about his memories of the period and his father's friendship with Albert Einstein.(Photo: A gathering of European scientists in 1927. Max Born is second from the right in the second row.)

In 1945, the allies dropped an atomic bomb over the Japanese city of Nagasaki. The explosion was bigger than the blast at Hiroshima three days earlier and killed 70,000 people. Louise Hidalgo introduces BBC archive recordings of survivors of Nagasaki. (Photo: Mushroom cloud in the sky. Credit: US Air Force/Press Association)

In the last days of World War II, an American warship, the USS Indianapolis, was torpedoed in the Pacific. For days, no one came to the survivors' rescue. Left adrift in shark-infested waters, hundreds of sailors died. We hear from Loel Dean Cox one of the few who survived.(Photo: Last rites for a crew member held by ship mates and men from the US base Peleliu) (Credit: TopFoto)

On July 8 1943, at the height of World War Two, the leader of the French Resistance was killed by German forces. Hear from Daniel Cordier who worked alongside Jean Moulin as his radio operator and secretary in the year before his death.(Photo: Daniel Cordier today)

In 1943, the Royal Air Force attacked a set of dams in Germany's Ruhr valley which were considered indestructible. Flying low and at night, the crews used special bouncing bombs to bring down two of their targets. The Dambusters mission was a huge propaganda success for Britain and later inspired a famous film.Simon Watts talks to Johnny Johnson, one of the few survivors of the raid.PHOTO: Johnny Johnson (far left) with the rest of 617 squadron (DAMBUSTERS) at RAF Scampton, Lincolnshire, 22 JULY 1943 (Imperial War Museum).

The story of Jack Humble, whose ship was torpedoed while escorting a convoy inside the Arctic Circle. From 1941-45, Allied sailors and ships battled storms, bombers and U-boats to ferry war supplies to Russia in WW2.(Photo: Frozen deck of a British warship on Arctic Convoy, Feb 1943. Credit: AP)

On April 30th 1945 as Red Army soldiers closed in on the German capital Berlin, Adolf Hitler killed himself. But first he married his lover Eva Braun, and dictated his will. Hear from one of the secretaries who was in the bunker when he died.Photo: Getty Images.

In 1943, a few hundred Jewish fighters rose up against the German army as it began its final push to erase all traces of Jewish life in the Polish capital. Krystyna Budnicka is one of the very few Jews who survived the Uprising. As her older brothers fought, she hid in a sewer beneath the ghetto.Photo: STF/AFP/Getty Images.

How severely burnt Second World War airmen learnt to overcome their terrible injuries.They were all patients of the revolutionary plastic surgeon, Sir Archibald McIndoe at a specialist burns unit.Two of the surviving "guinea pigs" tell their stories.Photo: Former airmen Jack Perry (left) and Sandy Saunders.

It's 70 years since 173 people were crushed to death at an air-raid shelter in east London during World War II. They were killed as they sought refuge in an underground train station. Sixty-two children were among the dead. We hear from one of the children who survived.Photo: Londoners sheltering from an air-raid in an underground train station, during World War II (Getty Images).

In February 1942 Britain's stronghold in South East Asia fell to the Japanese. Tens of thousands of Commonwealth soldiers were taken prisoner. They were sent to prison camps across the region and set to work. Maurice Naylor worked on the Thai-Burma railway until World War Two ended.

It is 70 years since German troops lost their battle to take the Soviet industrial city. They had spent a harsh Russian winter fighting from house to house on starvation rations. Eventually they were cut off from their supply lines and forced to surrender.Photo: Red Army troops in Stalingrad, January 1943. Keystone/Getty Images.

In January 1946 a young woman was given Hitler's will to translate into English. She had been sent to post-war Germany as part of the occupying forces. It was the culmination of her work for the British Army intelligence corps. Her name was Rena Stewart.Photo: Rena, front row, second from the left, in Germany in 1946.

At the end of World War Two, millions of people in the west of Nazi-occupied Netherlands faced starvation.The lucky ones survived on watery bread, potato peel or tulip bulbs.Witness speaks to one Dutchman who lived through what became known as the Hunger Winter.PHOTO: Hulton Archive/Getty Images.

In 1944, in the middle of World War Two, the Yugoslav partisan leader found sanctuary on a tiny island in the Adriatic Sea. His resistance to German occupation had made him a target and he was taken there for his own safety by the British. After the war he went on to lead Communist Yugoslavia until his death.Photo: Hulton Archive/Getty Images.

How exiles from the Nazis helped British intelligence listen in on German prisoners-of-war.Ninety-three-year-old Fritz Lustig, a refugee from Nazi Germany, is one of the last surviving members of the secret "M Room".He helped glean vital information from German POWs about Hitler's war machine. Photo: Sgt Fritz Lustig, circa 1942 (courtesy of Lustig family)

The memories of a German Jew who grew up across the street from Adolf Hitler. As a young boy, Edgar Feuchtwanger watched the comings and goings at the Nazi leader's luxury flat.Edgar's family were forced to flee Germany after the Nazis attacked Jewish homes and properties on Kristallnacht in November 1938. Photo: Edgar aged 12, courtesy of Feuchtwanger family.

At the end of World War Two, many ethnic Germans in Central Europe were forced to leave their homes.No longer welcome outside Germany they ended up in internment camps, sometimes for years at a time.Hear from one woman who lived through that time.(Photo: Martha Kent and her siblings after their release from Potulice concentration camp)

One girl's story of exile and soldiering during World War II.Danuta Maczka was just 14 when her family was sent to Siberia in 1940.By the time she was 16 she had been recruited into a Polish army in the Middle East and was fighting the Nazis.

For six years following the end of World War II in August 1945, Japan was occupied by the US. Akira Iriye was ten years old at the time and vividly remembers the surrender of his country to the Allied forces and the arrival of the first American GIs in Tokyo.(Photo: US President Harry S Truman holds up the official Japanese document of surrender with Emperor Hirohito's signature - Sept 1945. Getty Images)

During World War II, Allied bombing raids brought death and destruction to German cities.A controversial memorial to the British aircrew who flew on bombing missions is being unveiled in London.Douglas Hudson is one of the airmen who took part - many of his fellow fighters were shot down.(Image: British Airforce AVRO Lancaster Bomber of the 50 Squadron in flight during World War II. Credit: Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

In June 1947 the diary of Anne Frank was published for the very first time.Witness has been speaking to her first cousin and closest surviving relative, 87-year-old Buddy Elias.(Photo: Anne Frank/Press Association)