It was late in the evening on 1 May 1945 and Karl Lehmann was working at his desk on the outskirts of Reading, 40 miles (65km) to the west of London.
Soviet forces were closing in on Berlin and the war with Germany had reached its final stages.
The 24-year-old was monitoring German state radio when listeners were told to prepare for an important announcement.
"They played solemn music and then they said Hitler had died," he recalls. "They said he had fallen fighting Bolshevism. It was announced in a very sombre way."
He and his younger brother, Georg, had been sent from Germany to Britain by their parents nine years earlier to escape the Nazis' increasing persecution of Jewish people. Their father was a German Jew.
"I felt total relief because [Hitler] had ruined my life."
