Act one, scene one of the event that shaped the 20th century: the world’s strongest army on the march at the beginning of the first world war in August 1914. Confident, unbloodied German troops make their way through a Flanders field. They personify the Schlieffen Plan, the great swing through Belgium and north-western France intended to encircle Paris. Instead, stubborn resistance by French, Belgian and British troops, and errors by German generals, blunted the thrust and led to four years of bloody stalemate on the western front. Photograph: Bettmann/Corbis
Like milk bottles in a dairy, these heavy shells await delivery to a British army that could never get enough. All major belligerents underestimated shell expenditure, especially Britain, which started the war with a tiny army. A huge scandal over “bungling in high places,” notably about shells deficient in quantity and quality, erupted in London in May 1915. Asquith’s Liberal administration fell, forcing him into coalition with the Conservative party. David Lloyd George was appointed to a new ministry of munitions, to control an industry notable for employing large numbers of women. Photograph: Bettmann/Corbis
Adolf Hitler runs through his repertoire of rhetorical gestures while listening to a recording of his own speeches, for the benefit of his personal photographer. Despite his Austrian accent and harsh voice, Hitler was by all accounts a mesmeric speaker. The newsreels do not necessarily make this clear, but countless Germans attest to this dangerous gift. Hitler ordered Hoffmann to destroy the negatives, but Hoffmann disobeyed.
Photograph: Heinrich Hoffmann/Hulton Getty
Terrified Jewish families surrender to German soldiers in the Warsaw ghetto in the spring of 1943. In January of that year, the residents of the ghetto rose up against the Nazis and held their ground for several months, but they were defeated after fierce fighting in April and May. This is perhaps the most famous photograph of the Holocaust, principally because of the small, neatly dressed boy in the large cap on the right of the picture. For almost 70 years, people have attempted to identify the boy. Numerous names have been suggested, but the mystery remains unsolved. Photograph: Hulton-Deutsch Collection/CORBIS
Operation Barbarossa, Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union launched on 22 June 1941, flung some 150 divisions and 3 million men into battle along an 1,800-mile front from the Baltic to the Black Sea. Here, seven months later, at the southern end of the front, at Kerch in the Crimean peninsula (now part of an independent Ukraine), families identify the Soviet dead. Barely one week later, on 10 January 1942, Marshal Zhukov launched the great Red Army counterattack on the central front that forced the Germans to retreat for the first time.
Photograph: Dmitri Baltermants Collection/Corbis
A desolate image that captures the trauma of a Europe still struggling to recover from war. Valka Lager, set up in 1946 on the site of a former prisoner of war camp, housed refugees from the Baltic states and other countries in eastern Europe who had been displaced by the war. As late as 1951, it was still home to more than 4,000 refugees. The old man shown here pulling a trolley seems to be on some never-ending journey, trailing behind a younger woman whose arms are crossed as if to defend herself against the trials of the world.
Photograph: Herbert List/Magnum
Glinn took a famous series of photographs of the Berlin Wall as it was being constructed in 1961. Here, people in the West strain to see over the top of it as it rises, dividing the two halves of the city and separating friends and families.
Photograph: Burt Glinn/Magnum
A photograph that brilliantly evokes the first day of the 1960s and the dawning of a new, multicoloured world. A prosperous, well-dressed West German family stand amid rubble not of wartime devastation but postwar reconstruction. The father points up to the flat in the almost completed apartment block that the family will soon occupy. Three young lives will be shaped here, members of the new, self-confident Germany. A perfect blue sky welcomes a new age of peace, plenty and possibility. Topfoto
Photograph: Oskar Poss/akg-images
Margaret Thatcher electrified British politics after her election as prime minister in 1979. The long postwar social democratic consensus was at an end, and Thatcher’s conservative government sought to introduce root-and-branch reform to reduce the size of the state, lower taxation, reduce trade union power and encourage private enterprise. Here, photographed opening the Torness nuclear power station, she stands on top of the reactor itself, arms outstretched, an elemental force, her trademark handbag having for a moment been discarded. She commands all she surveys, as she did throughout the 1980s.
Photograph: Murdo Macleod
A young man sits atop the Berlin Wall and howls for joy as the hated symbol of the division of Europe between east and west is finally rendered redundant.
Photograph: Raymond Depardon/Magnum
Demonstrators gather in front of the headquarters of the Romanian Communist party during the revolution of 1989. Communist dictator Nicolae Ceausescu was toppled from power and, with his wife Elena, executed by firing squad on Christmas day 1989. More than 1,000 people were killed in clashes between rebels and Ceausescu’s security forces during what was the bloodiest of the wave of anti-communist revolts that spread across eastern Europe in 1989.
Photograph: Radu Sigheti/Reuters
Women run for their lives across “sniper alley” under the sights of Serbian gunmen during the siege of Sarajevo. The civil war in Yugoslavia scarred Europe at the end of the century, producing atrocities of a magnitude not seen since the end of the second world war.
Photograph: Tom Stoddart/Getty
