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A World War II Photo Essay


 

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Adolf Hitler (left) and Herman Göring (right) at a January 1933 Berlin rally
to celebrate Hitler's appointment as Chancellor.

Photo: Rabbi Herscel Schachter, courtesy of USHMM

 

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French citizens watch the Germans occupy Paris in June 1940.
Photo: U.S. National Archives.

 

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British soldiers at Dunkirk (France) captured by Germans in June 1940.
Photo: U.S. National Archives.

 

 

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London during the Blitz (1941).

 

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German soldiers in the Soviet Union after the June 1941 invasions.
Photo: U.S. National Archives.

 

 

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Germans murder four Jews near Kovno, Lithuania in 1941.

 

 

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Two brothers, Avram and Emanuel Rosenthal, five and two years old, shortly before they
were taken from the Kovno ghetto in Lithuania and murdered at Majdanek concentration camp.

 

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Japanese bomb Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, December 7th, 1941.
Photo: U.S. National Archives.

 

 

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U.S. Air Force gunner William Watts fires a machine gun at German fighter planes in 1942.
Photo: U.S. National Archives.

 

 

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British tank crews after capturing Tripoli in 1943.
Photo: U.S. National Archives.

 

 

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An Allied tanker goes down in the Atlantic in 1943, torpedoed by a German submarine.
Photo: U.S. National Archives.

 

 

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Jews captured during the 1943 destruction of the Warsaw ghetto in Poland by the SS;
they will be murdered at Treblinka concentration camp.

 

 

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An American munitions ship is hit by a German bomb and explodes off the coast of Sicily in 1943.
Photo: U.S. National Archives.

 

 

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American soldiers wading through water into Nazi machine-gun fire
on the coast of France, D-Day, June 6, 1944.

 

 

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Medics help an injured American soldier on the coast of France

 

 

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German POWs in Paris in August 1944.
Photo: U.S. National Archives.

 

 

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81 dead American soldiers of the 285th Field Artillery Observation Battalion, murdered by Waffen SS troops,
December 17, 1944, during the Battle of the Bulge near the Belgian town of Malmedy.
These Americans were killed after they surrendered.

 

 

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Bodies at Buchenwald concentration camp in April 1945. The camp was captured by
American soldiers just as the bodies were about to be burned by the Germans.
Photo: U.S. National Archives.

 

 

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Slave laborers at Buchenwald.

 

 

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U.S. soldiers pursuing Germans near Florence, Italy, in April 1945.
Photo: U.S. National Archives.

 

 

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German Field Marshall Wilhelm Keitel surrenders at Soviet headquarters in Berlin, May 9, 1945.
Photo: U.S. National Archives.

 

 

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August 9, 1945:  A U.S. plane drops an atomic bomb on the Japanese city of Nagasaki.
Photo: U.S. National Archives.

 

 

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Nagasaki after the bomb.
Photo: U.S. National Archives.

NOTE: For more photographs and a detailed historical timeline, go to www.historyplace.com/worldwar2/timeline

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