Witness History: World War Two history

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The Katyn Massacre

Tens of thousands of Polish officers were secretly executed in the USSR during World War 2. The German occupying forces reported the first mass grave, in the village of Katyn in 1943, but Moscow only admitted to the killings in 1990. Dina Newman speaks to the son of one of the murdered officers, Waclaw Gasiorowski. Photo: Gasiorowski family in Warsaw in 1936. Credit: family archive.

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  The Chindits

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  Nagasaki bomb

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  World War Two’s Rome escape line

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  VE Day celebrations

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  The death of Adolf Hitler

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  Exercise Tiger: Disastrous D-Day rehearsal

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  'I wrote Schindler's List'

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  The mystery of Raoul Wallenberg

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  The Purple Heart Warriors

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  The woman who saved 2,500 children from the Warsaw ghetto

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  Saving lives on D-Day

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  The woman whose weather report changed the date of D-Day

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  The 'comfort women' of World War Two

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  The last eruption of Mount Vesuvius

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  French child evacuees of World War Two

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  The WW2 escape line that fooled the Nazis