Outside Germany, the town is best known as where on 25 April 1945, the United States and Soviet Armies first met near the end of World War II.

In the 10th century it fell under the rule of the Holy Roman Empire, and a stone castle was built, around which the settlement congregated.

The town was located on the important trade route, the Via Regia Lusatiae inferioris, between Leipzig and Frankfurt an der Oder that crossed the river Elbe at a ford east of Torgau.

Following the Treaty of Leipzig partition of the Wettin inheritance on 26 August 1485, Torgau fell to the Ernestine line.

The Torgauer Artikel, a draft of the Augsburg Confession, was composed by Luther, Melanchthon, Bugenhagen and Jonas in the electoral superindenture in 1530 (Wintergrün).

[citation needed] Units of the U.S. First Army and the Soviet First Ukrainian Front met on the bridge at Torgau, and at Lorenzkirch (near Strehla), 20 miles to the south.

[citation needed] Torgau is home to one of the prisons in which Reinhold Eggers spent his postwar imprisonment after he had been sentenced by the Soviets.

[citation needed] After the war, the Soviet secret police agency NKVD established its Special Camps Nos.

[5] After World War II, Torgau was initially the district center of the state of Saxony Anhalt in East Germany.

The chapel was built in 1544 (designed by Nickel Gromann) and combines late Gothic with early Renaissance elements.