1945
Liberation of the camps
As Allied armies advanced across Europe in the spring of 1945, they walked into places whose names would become synonyms for horror: Bergen-Belsen, Buchenwald, Dachau, Auschwitz. Skeletal survivors; corpses stacked like cordwood; the machinery of genocide laid bare for the cameras. Six million Jews had been murdered, along with millions more. Soldiers wept. The century had found its bottom.
Trinity test lights the New Mexico desert
At 5:29 a.m. at a patch of scrub called Jornada del Muerto, the first atomic bomb exploded. The blast was visible for two hundred miles; the heat burned the sand to glass. Robert Oppenheimer thought of a Hindu scripture: Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds. Twenty-one days later Hiroshima vanished.
Hiroshima bombed
At 8:15 a.m. a single uranium bomb detonated nineteen hundred feet above the Japanese city. A three-mile firestorm consumed the center. Some seventy thousand died instantly; perhaps twice that number in the weeks after from burns and radiation. The city's name entered the language as a word for what weapons could do.
Indonesia proclaims independence
Two days after Japan's surrender, Sukarno stood on a veranda in Jakarta and read a brief declaration of Indonesian independence. The Dutch, returning to reclaim their East Indies, refused to accept it. Four years of war followed before the Netherlands gave up. Asia's largest new nation had been born in a hurry.
V-E Day
Germany signed unconditional surrender at Reims and Berlin. Crowds poured into the streets of London, Paris, New York, and Moscow. Churchill addressed the crowd outside Whitehall. Across a ruined continent, the war in Europe was over. Sixty million dead. Half the Jews of Europe gone. Nothing would quite be the same.
Hitler kills himself in the bunker
With Soviet tanks a few blocks from the Reich Chancellery, Adolf Hitler married Eva Braun, wrote a testament blaming the Jews, and shot himself in the mouth. Aides burned the bodies in the garden. A week later Germany surrendered unconditionally. Twelve years of the thousand-year Reich had ended in fire and suicide.
Nagasaki bombed
Three days after Hiroshima, with no Japanese surrender yet in hand, a plutonium bomb destroyed the port city of Nagasaki. Forty thousand people died in an instant. The same day Soviet armies swept into Japanese-occupied Manchuria. Within a week, Emperor Hirohito told his people on radio to endure the unendurable and surrendered.
Yalta Conference carves up postwar Europe
Roosevelt dies at Warm Springs
UN Charter signed in San Francisco
Battle of Okinawa
Dresden firebombed
Battle of Okinawa ends
Iwo Jima flag raising
Want 1945 in context? Print the whole 20th century as a one-sheet timeline chart.
Frequently asked
What happened in the year 1945?
Saeculum lists 14 curated events from 1945. The most significant is Liberation of the camps: As Allied armies advanced across Europe in the spring of 1945, they walked into places whose names would become synonyms for horror: Bergen-Belsen…
What era was 1945 part of?
1945 falls within the Modern Era (1901-2000). World wars, cold war, and the splitting of the atom.
Which regions saw notable events in 1945?
The curated events from 1945 span Europe, North America, East Asia and Southeast Asia.