Undoubtedly one of the most famous swindles in history, the Hitler Diaries were greeted with excitement around the world.

The con began in April, when a reporter for Germany's Stern magazine, Gerd Heidemann, claimed he had his hands on 62 handwritten volumes by the Nazi Fuhrer.

With a win of 413 seats and 40.7 per cent of votes, Labour swept to a historic third term, putting an end to the hopes of Conservative leader Michael Howard.

Mr Howard, whose grandmother died in Auschwitz after being deported from Romania, grew up in Llanelli in South Wales. He studied at Cambridge, passed the bar and won his first election in 1983.

The first female prime minister of Israel wasn't known as "the only man in the Cabinet" for nothing. Golda Meir, the woman who led Israel after the death of Levi Eshkol and during the 1973 war, personified the Israeli spirit with her rugged outlook and forthright honesty.

When Bergen Belsen, the concentration in which Anne Frank and around 50,000 others perished, was liberated by British troops, they found a place of disease, starvation and death.

The soldiers who first entered the camps later recalled witnessing piles of naked bodies left to rot all around. There were 60,000 people still inside, most barely clinging on to life.

Perhaps the most famous ocean wreckage in history, 99 years after it left Southampton its name still warns of the follies of poor disaster planning.

Almost exactly a month before the establishment of the state of Israel, 80 people – 79 Jewish doctors and nurses and one British soldier – were killed when a medical convoy taking aid to Hadassah Hospital was attacked by Arab forces.

Just weeks before the annual pilgrimage to Lag B'Omer – a major celebration time - Africa's oldest synagogue was targeted in an al-Qaeda plot.

It was a Thursday afternoon when a suicide bomber drove a truck loaded with explosives into the outer wall of the historic Tunisian El Ghriba synagogue, killing 21 and injuring 30 more.

In the aftermath of the terrible events on Easter Sunday in Kishinev, in modern-day Moldova – then the capital of Bessarabia - poet Chaim Bialik wrote his notorious verse "In the City of Slaughter".

On his death at the age of 70, the JC eulogised Ginsberg as "a lay cantor-rabbi for the worldwide "make love not war" movement". Fourteen years later, his name and straggly-bearded image remain as iconic as they were at the height of the hippie era.

As relations between east and west cooled, the United Nations, established just a few years earlier to strengthen international relations, was not enough for those worried about global security.