Fascism remains one of the most dangerous and misunderstood forces in modern history. It didn’t emerge from nowhere: it grew from the specific traumas of the First World War, the economic chaos of the 1920s and 1930s, and the failures of liberal democracy to provide security and meaning to millions of people across Europe. Understanding fascism — its origins, its internal logic, its methods, and its legacy — is essential for making sense of both the 20th century and our own political moment.
The Explaining History podcast has spent over a decade examining fascism from every angle: its rise to power in Italy, Germany, and Spain, its brutal expression in civil war and genocide, its accommodation by European democracies, and its continuing influence on contemporary far-right politics. The episodes below represent the podcast’s most essential listening on the subject — covering the Spanish Civil War, Nazi Germany, Vichy France, fascist Italy’s international ambitions, and the post-war evolution of the European far right. Together they offer something rare: a genuinely analytical, historically grounded account of what fascism was, how it spread, and why it keeps returning.
Essential Explaining History Episodes on Fascism
Franco’s March on Madrid
In July 1936, a military coup against Spain’s elected Popular FrontPopular Front Full Description A political strategy adopted by communist parties in 1935, on Comintern instruction, to form alliances with socialist and liberal parties against fascism. In France and Spain, Popular Fronts won elections in 1936. The Spanish Popular Front government was the legitimate authority the Republic defended during the Civil War. The strategy represented a significant shift from the communist parties’ earlier “class against class” line, which had labelled social democrats as “social fascists.” Critical Perspective The Popular Front strategy has been debated ever since. Communist parties argued it was necessary to unite against fascism; critics on the left argued it subordinated working-class interests to bourgeois democratic alliances. In Spain, Communist Party insistence on prioritising military order over social revolution — and the NKVD’s suppression of revolutionary forces — ensured that even if the Republic had won the war, the social revolution many of its supporters sought would have been crushed. government plunged the country into civil war. This episode examines how Francisco FrancoFrancisco Franco Full Description:The Spanish general who led the military rebellion against the Republic and became dictator of Spain from 1939 until his death in 1975. Franco consolidated power by merging the Falange, monarchists, and Carlists into a single “National Movement.” He maintained Spanish neutrality during World War II while sending the “Blue Division” to fight alongside Germany on the Eastern Front. Critical Perspective:Franco was a master of survival, not a charismatic ideologue like Hitler or Mussolini. He won the civil war not through genius but through foreign support, Republican disunity, and a willingness to wage total war against civilians. His post-war regime was one of Europe’s longest-lasting dictatorships, kept afloat by Cold War anti-communism. Franco’s legacy remains contested in Spain: his tomb was removed from the Valley of the Fallen only in 2019, nearly 45 years after his death. He was not a fascist true believer but a pragmatic tyrant—which made him more durable, not less dangerous. , with crucial material support from fascist Italy and Nazi Germany, launched his campaign to take Madrid. It reveals how fascism as an international movement intervened directly to strangle European democracy — and how that intervention was allowed to succeed by the indifference of Britain and France.
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Britain, Abyssinia and AppeasementAppeasement Full Description The British and French policy of making concessions to Nazi Germany in the 1930s, associated primarily with Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain. Its most notorious expression was the Munich Agreement of September 1938, which ceded the Sudetenland to Germany without Czech consent. Chamberlain returned to London declaring “peace for our time.” Within six months, Germany had occupied the rest of Czechoslovakia. Appeasement has become a byword for the futile accommodation of aggressive dictators. Critical Perspective The post-war demonisation of appeasement — and of Chamberlain — has been substantially qualified by revisionist historians. Britain in 1938 was not ready for war: rearmament was incomplete, the dominions opposed conflict, public opinion was strongly against another war, and military advisers were pessimistic about British prospects. Appeasement bought a year’s time for rearmament. The deeper failure was not Munich itself but the preceding decade of disarmament and wishful thinking that made the choice between war and capitulation so stark.: 1935
When Mussolini’s Italy invaded Abyssinia in 1935, the world watched to see whether the League of NationsLeague of Nations
Full Description:The first worldwide intergovernmental organisation whose principal mission was to maintain world peace. Its spectacular failure to prevent the aggression of the Axis powers provided the negative blueprint for the United Nations, influencing the decision to prioritize enforcement power over pure idealism. The League of Nations was the precursor to the UN, established after the First World War. Founded on the principle of collective security, it relied on moral persuasion and unanimous voting. It ultimately collapsed because it lacked an armed force and, crucially, the United States never joined, rendering it toothless in the face of expansionist empires.
Critical Perspective:The shadow of the League looms over the UN. The founders of the UN viewed the League as “too democratic” and ineffective because it treated all nations as relatively equal. Consequently, the UN was designed specifically to correct this “error” by empowering the Great Powers (via the Security Council) to police the world, effectively sacrificing sovereign equality for the sake of stability.
Read more would act. This episode explores the Hoare-Laval deal’s political fallout and examines what ordinary British people made of fascist aggression abroad — revealing the roots of the appeasement policy that would have catastrophic consequences for the whole of Europe within three years.
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The Battle of the Ebro: Part One
By 1938, the Spanish Republic was fighting for survival. This gripping episode follows the Republic’s last major offensive across the Ebro River, drawing on Adam Hochschild’s Spain in Our Hearts to capture the desperate courage of the International BrigadesInternational Brigades Full Description:Military units composed of approximately 35,000 foreign volunteers from over 50 countries who fought for the Spanish Republic. Recruited, organized, and controlled by the Comintern (Communist International), they were idealized as symbols of anti-fascist solidarity. Brigades included the American Abraham Lincoln Battalion, the British Battalion, and the French Commune de Paris Battalion. They suffered catastrophic casualties, particularly at the battles of Jarama, Brunete, and the Ebro. Critical Perspective:The International Brigades are both the war’s most romanticized and most manipulated institution. The volunteers’ courage was genuine—many were unemployed workers, intellectuals, and veterans of previous struggles. But the Brigades were also a Soviet instrument, used to enforce Communist Party discipline within the Republican camp and to marginalize anarchist and non-Stalinist leftists. Their dissolution in 1938, ordered by the Republic to appease the Non-Intervention Committee, was a betrayal of the very idealism they embodied. . It is essential listening for understanding what it meant to take up arms against fascism at the moment when the European democracies had already decided to look the other way.
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The Battle of the Ebro: Part Two
The conclusion of the Ebro campaign. With Munich having sealed Czechoslovakia’s fate and Western democracies unwilling to intervene in Spain, the Republic’s final gamble was undone by fascist airpower and international abandonment. This episode is a powerful account of what happens when democracies fail to defend one another — and of the courage of those who fought on anyway.
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Himmler and Auschwitz
This episode goes inside the decisions being made at the highest levels of the Nazi state in 1942, as Heinrich Himmler visited Auschwitz-Birkenau. It shows how the industrial logic of the Nazi war economy intersected with genocide — revealing fascism not as an irrational explosion of hatred but as a system with its own warped internal logic of exploitation, racial hierarchy, and mass murder.
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France: CollaborationCollaboration
Full Description:The cooperation of local governments, police forces, and citizens in German-occupied countries with the Nazi regime. The Holocaust was a continental crime, reliant on French police, Dutch civil servants, and Ukrainian militias to identify and deport victims. Collaboration challenges the narrative that the Holocaust was solely a German crime. across Europe, local administrations assisted the Nazis for various reasons: ideological agreement (antisemitism), political opportunism, or bureaucratic obedience. In many cases, local police rounded up Jews before German forces even arrived.
Critical Perspective:This term reveals the fragility of social solidarity. When their Jewish neighbors were targeted, many European societies chose to protect their own national sovereignty or administrative autonomy by sacrificing the minority. It complicates the post-war myths of “national resistance” that many European countries adopted to hide their complicity.
Read more and Occupation 1940–45
France’s wartime experience remains one of the most complex and contested chapters in European history. This episode examines how a nation divided between resistance, collaboration, and ambivalence navigated four years of Nazi occupation — and why, until at least 1943, significant numbers of French people genuinely supported the Vichy regime. An unflinching look at what fascism demands of the societies it conquers.
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Churchill’s Spaniards: Veterans of the Spanish Civil War Who Fought for Britain
One of the most remarkable anti-fascist stories of the 20th century: Spanish Republicans who survived Franco’s conquest, endured internment under Vichy France, and then volunteered to fight in the British Army against Hitler from 1940 to 1945. Based on historian Sean F. Scullion’s deeply researched book, this episode is a moving account of courage, exile, and the remarkable commitment of men who had already lost one war against fascism and refused to stop fighting.
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Jean-Marie Le Pen and the Evolution of French Fascism
Fascism did not end in 1945. This episode traces the career of Jean-Marie Le Pen, founder of the Front National and the most influential European far-right politician of the post-war era. It examines how Le Pen built a mass movement by exploiting France’s post-colonial anxieties, economic insecurity, and the failures of the mainstream left — and how the movement he created has outlasted him to become a serious force in French and European politics.
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Trump’s ICE Brownshirts: An Historical Analysis
What does history tell us about the use of paramilitary forces to bypass legal norms and enforce state power? This episode draws on the history of the Nazi SA — the Brownshirts who dismantled Weimar democracy from the street up — to analyse the Trump administration’s deployment of ICE. Essential listening for anyone trying to understand the historical template for authoritarian erosion of democratic institutions, and why the pattern keeps recurring.
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Also Worth Listening To
If you want to go deeper on fascism, these episodes from other history podcasts are worth your time:
- Real Dictators — The Noiser series on Mussolini and Franco are among the best produced accounts of fascist leaders available in podcast form, combining narrative storytelling with expert interviews.
- The Rest Is History — Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook have covered Hitler’s rise and the ideological origins of Nazism across several episodes, and bring their characteristic accessibility to a dense subject.
- Revolutions (Mike Duncan) — While primarily about revolutions, Duncan’s treatment of the conditions that produced fascism in interwar Europe provides essential context.
Related Collections
- Weimar Germany
- The Holocaust
- The Spanish Civil War
- The Russian Revolution
- Approaches & Ideology
- Browse all topic collections →
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Further Reading
These articles from the Explaining History archive go deeper on the history behind these episodes:
- The Nazi Camps and the ‘Workshy’ — The full scope of Nazi terror, beyond its Jewish victims.
- The Italian Civil War — Partisans, Allies and Fascists in the brutal struggle for Italy, 1943–45.
- Magnus Hirschfeld and Weimar Modernity — What fascism destroyed: the progressive cultural world of Weimar Germany.
