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

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

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

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

By the end of the war the total number of Jews killed by the Nazis is around 6 million

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

Daniel Malan moves swiftly to reinforce apartheid, South Africa's already existing system of racial segregation

Students are fired on in Budapest when protesting against repressive Communist policies

With his Hundred Flowers Campaign ('Let a hundred flowers bloom'), Mao Zedong invites criticism and then locks up the critics

South African police fire on a crowd in Sharpeville, near Johannesburg, killing more than sixty people

Papa Doc Duvalier, ruling through the brutal Tontons Macoutes, makes himself president of Haiti for life

Communist leaders Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping are attacked in China's Cultural Revolution as the biggest and worst 'capitalist roaders'

Mao Zedong unleashes China's teenagers as violent Red Guards to spearhead his Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution

Soviet and Warsaw Pact troops invade Czechoslovakia to end the Prague Spring

The outgoing Pakistan government, led by Yahya Khan, rejects the election result and sends troops to East Pakistan

The arrest of Mujibur Rahman, together with brutal attempts at repression, turn resistance in East Pakistan into full-scale civil war

Khmer Rouge guerrillas, led by Pol Pot, take Phnom Penh and launch a genocidal reign of terror in Cambodia

The invasion of East Timor by Indonesia begins decades of guerrilla resistance and brutal repression

Steve Biko, founder of Black Consciousness, dies of head wounds received in police custody in Pretoria

Saddam Hussein begins a reign of terror in Iraq, reading out at a meeting the names of fellow Ba'thists who are to be taken out and shot

Christian militiamen massacre Palestinian refugees in the Sabra and Chatila camps in Lebanon

The trade union movement Solidarnośc (Solidarity) is declared illegal by the Polish government

Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein uses chemical weapons against the Kurds of northern Iraq