Rare photos taken by a German soldier of the devastated beaches of Dunkirk after the evacuation have been found 70 years on by the family of a British war veteran.

The pictures were taken a few hours after 330,000 Allied soldiers were rescued from the beaches by an armada of little ships having been defeated by the Nazis.

The remarkable album was later taken from a German house as a memento by British serviceman Corporal Frank Smith.

It includes shots of the Germans surveying the wreckage of downed aircraft and scores of damaged trucks and tanks on the battle-scarred shores of Dunkirk.

One image shows a British warship washed up on the sand with a huge hole blown through the middle of it while another is of a huge pile of hundreds of rifles left behind.

The album of 200 photos and postcards was owned by an unknown German soldier.

Ironically, it was abandoned in a Nazi house on Luneburg Heath in northern Germany nearly five years later in 1945 as the Allied forces advanced towards Berlin....