World War Two

We may be wearing masks for a year, despite the V-Day 'watershed moment'

Sir Patrick Vallance: 'We don't know yet how good all the vaccines are going to be at preventing the transmission of coronavirus'

Dutch to show more 'humanity and goodwill' as government vows to return art looted by the Nazis

The Netherlands has been wrong to weigh up the interests of museums against those of the rightful heirs, says hard-hitting report

The best history books of 2020

In a year of mass protests and toppled statues, some clear-eyed historians helped put our present chaos into perspective

‘My aunt helped bring Nazis to justice during the Nuremberg trials’

Today's 75th anniversary of the war crimes tribunal feels personal for film-maker Jenny Ash, whose family escaped Nazi Berlin in 1938

The Crown’s greatest insult: why Charles would never have called Mountbatten a ‘quisling’

Peter Morgan’s fabricated exchange between the Prince and his uncle contains a very potent word – one that Charles is unlikely to have used

‘I couldn’t hate the Germans’: the heroism and humanity of Felix Sparks, the liberator of Dachau

The US Army officer, now the subject of a Netflix series, endured 500 days of hell to free the Nazis' prisoners. Then his true test began

My memories of the Coventry Blitz: 'We soon realised it was going to be the worst raid we’d ever seen' 

Eighty years on from the Coventry Blitz, Christine Jones, now 92, tells her daughter Sally about the moment incendiary bombs lit up her city

Hurricane fighter plane which cost £2m to restore 'wrecked' after 20-minute flight

A neurosurgeon from Cambridgeshire spent two years restoring the classic fighter plane after it was shot down in WWII

George Newman, music publisher and refugee from the Nazis who rescued rare books from Austria – obituary

He became a music copyist and was responsible for the design and layout of the text on all new Boosey & Hawkes music publications

Why was fearless and brave SAS hero Paddy Mayne never awarded a Victoria Cross?

Paddy Mayne is the most controversial Special Forces hero in history and the subject of a new BBC drama. So why wasn't he fully recognised?

Meet the remarkable 103-year-old who's the British Army's oldest surviving female veteran

Keen to see the world and play her part in the war effort, Ena Collymore-Woodstock left Jamaica and soon had a pivotal role in the campaign

Alan Turing items taken from UK in 1980s to be returned from US

Items including a miniature OBE medal were found in Colorado home of woman who removed them from Dorset school in 1984

One of the last surviving French resistance fighters dies as Macron hails a 'hero'

Pierre Simonet was just 17 when he joined the fight to free France

Behind the Enigma by John Ferris review: decoding the secrets of GCHQ

GCHQ opened its archives for this official history. The result is myth-busting – but why isn’t it more fun?

More needs to be done to commemorate the Commonwealth's WW2 soldiers, say generals

Most people believe doing more to recognise their contribution would be a positive and unifying development, revealed new polling

Hitler and Stalin by Laurence Rees review: a tale of two tyrants

This brilliant parallel study of Hitler and Stalin collects the testimony of their henchmen and victims

Chestnut tree in Ypres that survived two world wars wins Belgium's Tree of the Year

Chestnut was badly damaged in the 1914 to 1918 bombardment but grew back into a four-trunked giant and has now won Tree of the Year

The International Brigades by Giles Tremlett review: the rag-tag army who took on Franco’s fascists

Germany to pay £500m to Holocaust survivors to help them through pandemic

One-off aid payments will be made to 240,000 Holocaust survivors around the world

Group Captain Ken Parfit, Lancaster bomber navigator with the wartime Pathfinder Force – obituary

In 1974 he was station commander at RAF Episkopi in Cyprus when Turkish forces invaded

Edgard Tupët-Thomé, hero of the Resistance and Free French fighter who won an MC – obituary

He parachuted behind enemy lines and post D-Day played a significant role in facilitating the Allies’ rapid advance through France