| 20th January 1945 | Franklin D. Roosevelt is inaugurated to an unprecedented fourth term as President of the United States. No president before, or since, has ever reached a third term in office. |
| 27th January 1945 | The Second World War Holocaust: The Auschwitz and Birkenau concentration camps are liberated by the 322nd Rifle Division of the Red (Soviet Union) Army. |
| 4th February 1945 | President Franklin D. Roosevelt, Prime Minister Winston Churchill and Soviet leader Joseph Stalin begin the week-long Yalta Conference, during which they discuss Europe’s post-war organisation. |
| 13th February 1945 | The Royal Air Force bombs Dresden in Germany. |
| March 1945 | Annelies Marie “Anne” Frank dies in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, following an outbreak of typhus in the prison. She later gains posthumous fame due to the publication of the diary that she had written whilst hiding during the German occupation of the Netherlands. |
| 4th March 1945 | Princess Elizabeth, later Queen Elizabeth II, joins the British Army as a driver. |
| 12th April 1945 | U.S. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt (b. 1882) dies suddenly at Warm Springs in Georgia; Vice President Harry S. Truman becomes the 33rd President. |
| 28th April 1945 | Italian dictator Benito Mussolini and his mistress Clara Petacci are executed by Italian partisans as they attempt to flee the country. Their bodies are then hung by their heels in the public square of Milan. |
| 30th April 1945 | Adolf Hitler and his wife of one day, Eva Braun, commit suicide as the Red Army approaches the Führerbunker in Berlin. Karl Dönitz succeeds Hitler as President of Germany and Joseph Goebbels briefly succeeds Hitler as Chancellor of Germany, before his own suicide the following evening. |
| 8th May 1945 | Nazi Germany surrenders and V-E Day (Victory in Europe Day) commemorates the end of the Second World War. |
| 26th July 1945 | Winston Churchill resigns as Britain's Prime Minister after his Conservative Party is soundly defeated by the Labour Party in the 1945 general election. Clement Attlee becomes the new Prime Minister. |
| 6th August 1945 | The United States detonates an atomic bomb nicknamed "Little Boy" on the Japanese City of Hiroshima. The bomb explodes at 08.15am local time and instantly kills 80,000 people. By the end of the year, many more thousands of fatalities are recorded due to radiation poisoning. |
| 2nd September 1945 | The official end of the Second World War: The final surrender of Japan, from a delegation aboard the battleship ‘Missouri’, is accepted by Supreme Allied Commander General Douglas MacArthur and Fleet Admiral Chester Nimitz. |
| 24th October 1945 | The United Nations is founded. |
| 20th November 1945 | Trials against twenty-four Nazi war criminals of the Second World War begin at the Nuremberg Palace of Justice. |
| 29th November 1945 | Assembly of the world's first general purpose electronic computer, the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer (ENIAC), is completed. It covers 1,800 square feet (170 m2) of floor space. |