Built on a river island in the 1830s and 1840s, the fortress at Brest hosted the treaty that took Russia out of the First World War, held Polish opposition leaders in the 1930s, and was attacked in the first hour of Operation Barbarossa. Its ruins now stand inside a vast Soviet-era memorial complex.
On the morning of 6 June 1944, 225 U.S. Rangers climbed a 30-metre cliff in Normandy under fire to capture a German gun battery. The guns were not in their casemates. Today the cratered headland is a memorial site, and a restoration project is under way to protect it from erosion.
Inside the Kohnstein hill near Nordhausen, the SS and German industry built the V-2 rocket with concentration camp labour. About 60,000 people passed through the Mittelbau-Dora camps, and at least a third did not survive. Part of the tunnel system can be visited on a guided tour.
