Under Yakov Segal's direction, it begins stirringly, as crouching Soviet and Nazi troops silently scan each other, waiting for the first surrender gesture.

* 1941 – Tallinn, the Capital of Estonia is occupied by Nazi Germany following an occupation by the Soviet Union.

Assault guns were primarily used during World War II by the forces of Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union.

* 1945 – Elbe Day: United States and Soviet troops meet in Torgau along the River Elbe, cutting the Wehrmacht of Nazi Germany in two, a milestone in the approaching end of World War II in Europe.

In the summer of 1944, after having crushed the Nazi defence around Iaşi and Chişinău, the Soviet Army was approaching the Balkans and Bulgaria.

After the outbreak of war between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, Pasternak was elated.

Some were Nazi collaborators who had fought under General Andrey Vlasov, but most were ordinary Soviet officers and men.

Pasternak watched as ex-POWs were directly transferred from Nazi to Soviet concentration camps.

Relations further deteriorated when, in January 1948, the U. S. State Department also published a collection of documents titled Nazi-Soviet Relations, 1939 – 1941: Documents from the Archives of The German Foreign Office, which contained documents recovered from the Foreign Office of Nazi Germany revealing Soviet conversations with Germany regarding the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, including its secret protocol dividing eastern Europe, the 1939 German-Soviet Commercial Agreement, and discussions of the Soviet Union potentially becoming the fourth Axis Power.

The situation was especially pronounced in Nazi Germany, Francoist Spain and the Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin.

A year later, the Soviet occupation was taken over by a Nazi German one.

Finland and Nazi Germany were " co-belligerents " against Soviet Union during Continuation War ( 1941 – 44 ), but a separate peace with Soviet Union led to the Finnish-German Lapland War ( 1944 – 45 ).

Also, in spite of ideological differences, Fascist Italy was the first western country to recognize the Soviet Union, in 1933 Fascist Italy had signed a friendship and nonaggression treaty with the Soviet Union, and in the late 1930s both Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany supported rapproachment with the Soviet Union.

Nazi Germany faced multiple losses and steady Soviet and Western Allied offensives from 1943 to 1945.

Franco's rise to power had been directly assisted by the militaries of Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany during the Spanish Civil War, and had sent volunteers to fight on the side of Nazi Germany against the Soviet Union during World War II.

Finland's foreign politics before this deal had been varied: independence from Imperial Russia with support of Imperial Germany in 1917 ; participation in the Russian Civil War ( without official declaration of war ) alongside the Triple Entente 1918 – 1920 ; a non-ratified alliance with Poland in 1922 ; association with the neutralist and democratic Scandinavian countries in the 1930s ended by the Winter War ( 1939 ); and finally in 1940, a rapprochement with Nazi Germany, the only power able to protect Finland against the expansionist Soviet Union, leading to the Continuation War in 1941.

The " short twentieth century ", from 1914 to 1991, sees the First World War, the Second World War and the Cold War, including the rise and fall of Nazi Germany and of the Soviet Union.

Following the army into the Soviet Union, the Einsatzgruppen rounded up and killed Jews and others deemed undesirable by the Nazi state.

As many as 500, 000 Soviet prisoners of war died or were executed in Nazi concentration camps over the course of the war ; most of them were shot or gassed.

As the Germans were pushed back from Moscow in December 1941, signalling that the invasion of the Soviet Union had failed, Hitler and other Nazi officials realised that mass deportations to the east would no longer be possible.

* 1944 – Nazi German troops end the week-long Wola massacre, during which time at least 40, 000 people were killed indiscriminately or in mass executions.

* 1941 – Nazi troops massacre Polish scientists and writers in the captured Ukrainian city of Lviv.

The Antonescu regime played a major role in the Holocaust, following to a lesser extent the Nazi policy of oppression and massacre of the Jews, and Romas, primarily in the Eastern territories Romania recovered or occupied from the Soviet Union ( Transnistria ) and in Moldavia.

During the Holocaust, about 95 % of the 265, 000-strong Jewish population of Lithuania was murdered by the German units and Lithuanian Nazi collaborators, many of them in Paneriai, about 10 km west of the old town centre ( see the Ponary massacre ).

Within two years, Józef Ulam and the rest of his family were victims of the Holocaust, Steinhaus was in hiding, Kuratowski was lecturing at the underground university in Warsaw, Stożek and his two sons had been killed in the massacre of Lwów professors, Banach was surviving Nazi occupation by feeding lice at Rudolf Weigl's typhus research institute, and the last problem had been recorded in the Scottish Book.

The massacre was the largest single mass killing for which the Nazi regime and its collaborators were responsible during its campaign against the Soviet Union and is considered to be " the largest single massacre in the history of the Holocaust ".

During the development of Nazi Germany, Céline wrote the pamphlets Bagatelles pour un massacre ( Trifles for a Massacre ) ( 1937 ), L ' École des cadavres ( The School of Corpses ) ( 1938 ) and Les Beaux draps ( The Fine Mess ) ( 1941 ).

John Rabe a German member of the Nazi Party likewise saved thousands of Chinese from massacre by the Japanese military at Nanking.

Halifax is also mentioned in the 2011 novel The Afrika Reich, an alternate history novel in which Halifax became Prime Minister following the fictitious massacre of British forces at Dunkirk, the novel's divergence point, and negotiated an uneasy peace with Nazi Germany.

Despite claims by the Poles, the Soviet Union blamed Nazi Germany for the mass murders and attempted to hide their involvement, going as far as to ban all mention of the Katyn massacre in the USSR.

For a number of reasons, including ( but not limited to ): the large number of victims ; the fact that many of them were innocent civilians casually taken only to make up the number of those to be killed ; the cruel methods implemented ( even by Nazi standards ) to carry out the massacre ; the fact that the reprisal order had come directly from Adolf Hitler, and the hiding of the bodies, which were buried summarily instead of being returned to their families, the slaughter became a symbol of the various massacres carried out against civilians in Italy from September 8, 1943 until the German surrender on May 8, 1945.

The Vatican's role in the massacre came under particular scrutiny following the publication of Robert Katz's first book, Death in Rome ( 1967 ), in which he speculated that Pope Pius XII had advance knowledge of the Nazi orders and did little to forestall it.

He argued that this conspiracy theory motivated its supporters to seek the massacre of the Jewish people and became a major psychological factor in the Nazi Holocaust.

The Wawer massacre was considered to be one of the first large scale massacres of Polish civilians by Nazi Germany in occupied Poland.

In May 1941 she was sent into exile to the Soviet Union in exchange for Ion Codreanu, a former member of Sfatul Ţării ( Parliament of Bessarabia that voted for Union with Romania on 27 March 1918 ) detained by the Soviets after the occupation of Bessarabia in 1940, just in time to escape the policy of oppression and massacre of Jews by the regime of Ion Antonescu, in alliance with Nazi Germany.

The Man from Barbarossa begins with a prelude that includes some background information on the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union codenamed Operation Barbarossa, the massacre at Babi Yar that occurred not long after, and information on Josif Voronstov, a fictional character said to be a deputy of real-life Paul Blobel who was primarily responsible for the massacre.

U. S. Army Signal Corps photographers soon arrived to document the Nazi crime and by April 19, 1945, the story of the Gardelegen massacre began appearing in the Western press.

Merhige presided over the Greensboro massacre trials of members of the Ku Klux Klan and American Nazi Party members.

He was murdered in July 1941 during the Nazi occupation of Poland in what became known as the massacre of Lviv professors.

A subsequent investigation conducted by the Polish Institute of National Remembrance did not support Gross thesis on issues such as the number of people murdered, and the extent of Nazi German involvement in the massacre.

The permanent exhibition is displayed through contrasting areas in black and red where picture rails hang clear of the wall and depict the Nazi movement and the advance of the division " Das Reich " towards Oradour, and light areas which depict in a much softer way the village and people of Oradour before the massacre.

This pogrom, ( far from the black-ops, secrecy and deceit of the Nazi German evacuations and exterminations ) and massacre was perpetrated