Operation Bagration
The Red Army shatters Army Group Centre in two months
On 22 June 1944, three years to the day after Germany invaded, the Red Army attacked in Byelorussia, destroying 28 divisions of Army Group Centre and retaking Minsk. German losses are put at about 450,000, and in July some 57,000 prisoners were marched through Moscow, twenty abreast; the column took 90 minutes to pass.
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Meanwhile around the world (±25 years)
Whole world
- 1939–1945 World War II — 5 years earlier
- 1944 Bretton Woods Conference — same year
- 1947–1991 Cold War — 3 years later
- 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights — 4 years later
- 1949 Founding of NATO — 5 years later
Europe
- 1928 Discovery of penicillin — 16 years earlier
- 1933 Hitler comes to power — 11 years earlier
- 1936–1939 Spanish Civil War — 8 years earlier
- 1941–1945 The Holocaust — 3 years earlier
- 1953 Discovery of the DNA double helix — 9 years later
Middle East
- 1932 Kingdom of Saudi Arabia proclaimed — 12 years earlier
- 1941 Anglo-Soviet invasion of Iran — 3 years earlier
- 1948 Founding of the State of Israel — 4 years later
- 1948–1949 1948 Arab–Israeli War and the Nakba — 4 years later
- 1953 Iranian coup against Mosaddegh — 9 years later
Africa
- 1935–1937 Italy invades Ethiopia — 9 years earlier
- 1948 Apartheid begins in South Africa — 4 years later
- 1952 Egyptian revolution of 1952 — 8 years later
- 1956 The Suez Crisis — 12 years later
- 1958 Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart — 14 years later
Asia
- 1943 Bengal famine — 1 year earlier
- 1945 Atomic bombing of Hiroshima — 1 year later
- 1945 Indonesia proclaims independence — 1 year later
- 1953 First ascent of Everest — 9 years later
- 1966–1976 Cultural Revolution in China — 22 years later
Americas
- 1929 Wall Street Crash — 15 years earlier
- 1933–1939 New Deal — 11 years earlier
- 1945 ENIAC, the first general-purpose electronic computer — 1 year later
- 1947 Invention of the transistor — 3 years later
- 1969 Moon landing — 25 years later
Oceania
- 1936 Death of the last thylacine — 8 years earlier
- 1941 Attack on Pearl Harbor — 3 years earlier
- 1942 The Battle of Midway — 2 years earlier
- 1954 The Castle Bravo test at Bikini — 10 years later
- 1959 The Antarctic Treaty — 15 years later
Alive at the time
- Mahatma Gandhi (aged 75)
- Winston Churchill (aged 70)
- Joseph Stalin (aged 66)
- Albert Einstein (aged 65)
- Pablo Picasso (aged 63)
- Adolf Hitler (aged 55)
- Charlie Chaplin (aged 55)
- Mao Zedong (aged 51)
- Georgy Zhukov (aged 48)
- Nelson Mandela (aged 26)