On this day in 1945, as millions of people around the Allied world celebrated the end of World War II in Europe and scientists in the New Mexico desert began preparations for the first experimental atomic bomb detonation, deposed former German chancellor Adolf Hitler was handed over to a detachment of U.S. Army MPs under the terms of the surrender articles signed by the German government the previous day.

The Führer, who'd been incarcerated in a secret Luftwaffe detention camp since his overthrow by Hermann Goering back in January, would be indicted for war crimes two months later as the first of dozens of defendants scheduled to be prosecuted by a multi-national tribunal in the city of Nuremburg.

On this day in 1945, Allied troops began their occupation of Germany; the vanquished former Reich was divided into four occupation zones, the largest of which was under Soviet control (pictured) and encompassed most of Germany's eastern half.

The zone divisions were meant to be temporary pending a final conference to settle the question of the country's postwar political future, but ideological differences between the Western Allies and the Soviet Union hardened those divisions and Germany would spend the next four decades split into separate nations.

From his cell at the now Allied-controlled Spandau Prison in Berlin, Adolf Hitler raged against the partition of Germany and called on his fellow Germans to rise up in revolt against the occupation forces. But few of them were willing to his rhetoric anymore; many of them actually accused the ex-Führer of leading their homeland to ruin. One prominent German, former Leipzig mayor Carl Gordeler, openly advocated Hitler's execution.

On this day in 1945, Franklin Roosevelt left Washington for what would be his final trip abroad as President of the United States to meet with Winston Churchill and Joseph Stalin at the Russian Crimea resort town of Yalta for discussions regarding Germany's political future and the timetable for the Soviet Union's entry into the war with Japan.

Less than two months after the Yalta summit Roosevelt would be dead, leaving his successor and former vice-president Harry S. Truman to oversee the final stages of the war in the Pacific.

On this day in 1945, Allied occupation forces in western Germany began confiscating surviving Luftwaffe combat aircraft that had been grounded in the last days of the Second World War in Europe due to lack of fuel.

Of particular interests to the occupation forces were two prototypes of the Messerschmitt Me-262 (pictured), one of the world's first jet fighters. These prototypes would inspire a string of design innovations by Western aerospace engineers in the late 1940s and early '50s; by 1951 America's first swept-wing jet fighter, the F-86 Sabre, would be in service with the U.S. Air Force in Korea. A third Me-262 prototype, seized by the Red Army in eastern Germany, would become the basis for the Sabre's chief adversary in Korea, the MiG-15.