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Kazimierz Smolen, a 91-year-old Auschwitz survivor who after World War II became director of the memorial site, died Friday on the 67th anniversary of its liberation.

Smolen died in a hospital in Oswiecim, the southern Polish town where Nazi Germany operated Auschwitz-Birkenau during World War II, said Pawel Sawicki, a spokesman for the Auschwitz-Birkenau state museum.

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Keith Little, who joined the Marine Corps at age 17 and became one of the famed Navajo Code Talkers of World War II, died Tuesday at an Arizona hospital. He was 87.

Little, the longtime president of the Navajo Code Talkers Association, spent his last years touring the country to gain support and funding for a museum honoring the men whose use of the Navajo language in radio transmissions confounded the Japanese during the war in the Pacific.

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Nancy Wake, Australia's greatest World War II heroine and a prominent figure in the French Resistance known as the "The White Mouse" for her ability to evade the Germans, has died in London. Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard said the woman who was once the Gestapo's most wanted person, was "a devastatingly effective saboteur and spy".

"Nancy Wake was a woman of exceptional courage and resourcefulness whose daring exploits saved the lives of hundreds of Allied personnel and helped bring the Nazi occupation of France to an end," Gillard said.

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Rudolf Brazda, believed to be the last surviving person who was sent to a Nazi concentration camp because of his homosexuality, has died, a German gay rights group said Thursday. He was 98. Brazda was sent to the Nazis’ Buchenwald concentration camp in August 1942 and held there until its liberation by U.S. forces in 1945.

Nazi Germany declared homosexuality an aberration that threatened the German race, and convicted some 50,000 homosexuals as criminals. An estimated 10,000 to 15,000 gay men were deported to concentration camps, where few survived.

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Otto von Habsburg saw the crumbling of the empire his family had ruled for centuries and emerged from its ashes as a champion of a united and democratic Europe.

The oldest son of Austria-Hungary's last emperor fought Nazism and Soviet communism during his long decades of exile from his homeland, and was lionized by leaders across the continent as "a great European."

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The last surviving combat veteran from WWI, Briton Claude Choules, was laid to rest in Australia on Friday in a moving naval ceremony quietly marking the end of an era. Choules, nicknamed "Chuckles", died in his sleep at his hostel home in Perth two weeks ago. He was 110.

In his eulogy, son Adrian Choules said his sailor father had been a loving parent, had lived a very long and wonderful life, and "now belongs to the rest of the world". "The last time I spoke at a funeral I was sad, very sad," Adrian Choules said. "But today it is different... today is a celebration."

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Briton Claude Choules, the final World War I combat veteran, has died aged 110 in Australia, the last of more than 70 million military personnel mobilised during the conflict. Blind and almost totally deaf, Choules, nicknamed "Chuckles", died at his hostel home in Perth overnight.

After American Frank Buckles died earlier this year, Choules was declared the last known combat survivor of the Great War that left 37 million soldiers dead or wounded. The only other surviving veteran of World War I is said to be Britain's Florence Green, who served with the Royal Air Force in a non-combat role and is now aged 110.

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The world's certified oldest man, whose advice to others included the observation "you're born to die", has passed away aged 114 in the US.Walter Breuning was old enough to remember his grandfather recounting his part in the slaughter of the American Civil War, during the 1860s.

In his final years in Montana, he was passionate about ending two modern wars, those in Iraq and Afghanistan. His long good health he put down to a strict regime of two meals a day. "How many people in this country say that they can't take the weight off?" he asked in an interview with the Associated Press news agency in October.

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A blue plaque is to be unveiled at the last home in Devon of WWII heroine Eileen Mary Nearne. Ms Nearne died last September of a heart attack, at the age of 89. After her death her role and heroism as an agent in occupied France was revealed including her capture and torture at the hands of the Gestapo. The blue plaque, a scheme operated by English Heritage since 1986, will be unveiled on Tuesday at her former home in Torquay.

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The question of who, once dead, will lie in honor in the Rotunda of the Capitol is one that rises rarely and usually without the gossamer of political controversy. But the family of the longest surviving American World War I veteran, who died last month at 110, has been rebuffed by the leaders of the House and Senate, who have moved to deny the late soldier his day under the dome.

The family of the veteran, Frank Buckles, assisted by lawmakers from his home state, West Virginia, keep pressing on. Their desire to see Mr. Buckles lie in honor — only federal officials or military officers lie in state in the Rotunda — is not just about him, they insist, but also his fellow doughboys, now committed to history books and fading photos.

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The last surviving great-grandson of Ulysses S. Grant has died in a southwest Missouri home brimming with artifacts from the nation's 18th president and commander of the Union forces in the Civil War.

Ulysses S. Grant VI says his grandfather Ulysses S. Grant V died Wednesday at age 90 at his home near the town of Battlefield, named for its proximity to a Civil War clash. Grant V had previously suffered a stroke.

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Frank Buckles, who drove an Army ambulance in France in 1918 and came to symbolize a generation of embattled young Americans as the last of the World War I doughboys, died Sunday at his home in Charles Town, W. Va. He was 110.

He was only a corporal and he never got closer than 30 or so miles from the Western Front trenches, but Mr. Buckles became something of a national treasure as the last living link to the two million men who served in the American Expeditionary Forces in France in “the war to end all wars.”

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The world's oldest woman, Eunice Sanborn, has died in Texas, US. The US Census Bureau records that her birth was in 1896, making her 114 years old. But she insisted she had been born the previous year, meaning she could have been 115 when she died.

The title of the oldest living woman now goes to 114-year-old Besse Cooper of the US state of Georgia, according to the Gerontology Research Group.

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The last known survivor from the Lusitania ocean liner that was sunk by a German U-boat in 1915 has died. Audrey Lawson-Johnston from Melchbourne in Bedfordshire died in the early hours of Tuesday aged 95.

She was three months old when the liner bound for Liverpool from New York sank off the Irish coast on 7 May. Mrs Lawson-Johnston's family had been emigrating to England when the boat was hit in an attack that killed hundreds, including her sisters.

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Dick Winters, the former World War II commander whose war story was told in the book and miniseries “Band of Brothers,” has died. Dick Winters led a quiet life on his Fredericksburg farm and in his Hershey home until the book and miniseries “Band of Brothers” threw him into the international spotlight.

On D-Day, June 6, 1944, Winters and his troops from Easy Company, 506th regiment of the 101st Airborne Division, parachuted behind enemy lines to take on a German artillery nest on Utah Beach. His company fought through the Battle of the Bulge, the liberation of a death camp at Dachau and to Hitler’s Eagle’s Nest at Berchtesgaden.

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Michael Seifert, a former Nazi SS prison guard known as 'the beast of Bolzano' for his cruelty, has died in an Italian hospital aged 86. He was serving a life sentence in prison in southern Italy, and died in hospital in Caserta where he was admitted several days ago.

Seifert was convicted in absentia in 2000 by an Italian military tribunal of 11 murders at a prison camp in Bolzano. He was extradited to Italy from Canada in 2008.

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Eugenie Blanchard lived a really, really long life. The 114-year-old nun—believed to be the world's oldest person — died on Thursday in the French West Indies. Blanchard died in a hospital on Saint-Barthelemy, a French overseas territory where she was also born.

Now, an East Texan is the oldest person in the world. Eunice G. Sanborn, 114, of Jacksonville, was born on July 20, 1896, five months after Blanchard.

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More details are coming to light on the tragic life of World War II heroine Eileen Nearne, MBE.

Ms Nearne lived a hermit's life in her Torquay flat and the secrets of her work as a spy only emerged after she died of a heart attack, aged 89, on 2 September 2010.

Ms Nearne was parachuted into France in 1944 where she worked undercover for the Special Operations Executive (SOE). Her remarkable story is told in files at the National Archives in London.

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A wartime heroine who was captured three times by the Germans and endured spells in concentration and labour camps is to be buried by a council because no friends or family can be traced.

Eileen Nearne, 89, who died in her Devon home on 2 September, was one of 39 female agents sent to occupied France in her capacity as a member of the Special Operations Executive (SOE) during World War II.

Miss Nearne, who was fluent in French, was captured by the Germans just four months after arriving in France, but managed to persuade them she was an innocent French woman.

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