Best Podcasts on the Second World War
The Second World War was the defining catastrophe of the twentieth century. Fought across six continents and every ocean between 1939 and 1945, it cost between 70 and 85 million lives — the majority of them civilians. It produced the HolocaustHolocaust holocaust The systematic, state-sponsored persecution and murder of six million Jews by the Nazi regime and its collaborators between 1933 and 1945. It was the culmination of a programme of escalating persecution, exclusion, and ultimately industrialised genocide without precedent in human history. The Holocaust — the Hebrew term is Shoah, meaning catastrophe — unfolded in stages. The Nazi seizure of power in 1933 brought immediately a regime committed to removing Jews from German public life: civil service dismissals, boycotts, the Nuremberg Laws of 1935 which stripped Jews of citizenship, Kristallnacht in 1938 which destroyed synagogues and Jewish businesses across Germany and Austria. The war began in 1939; with the invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, a qualitative shift occurred. The Einsatzgruppen — mobile killing squads — followed the German advance, shooting Jews and others in mass executions; at Babi Yar outside Kyiv, 33,771 Jews were shot in two days in September 1941. The Wannsee Conference of January 1942 coordinated the implementation of the Final Solution across the German bureaucracy; purpose-built extermination camps — Auschwitz-Birkenau, Treblinka, Sobibor, Belzec, Chelmno, Majdanek — processed and murdered hundreds of thousands of victims monthly. The killing extended across occupied Europe, from France to Greece, from the Netherlands to the occupied Soviet Union, coordinated by German agencies with varying degrees of local collaboration. By May 1945, approximately six million Jews had been murdered — two-thirds of European Jewry. The Romani people, Soviet prisoners of war, disabled people, homosexuals, and political prisoners were also killed in large numbers; the Jews were targeted for total extermination. The Holocaust has generated more historical scholarship than any other event in the twentieth century, and yet certain questions retain their analytical and moral difficulty. The debate about perpetrators — whether ordinary men became mass murderers through obedience to authority and peer pressure (Browning) or through a specifically German eliminationist antisemitism (Goldhagen) — remains unresolved, with most historians finding partial truth in both positions. The question of bystanders — ordinary Europeans who knew what was happening and did not intervene — raises uncomfortable questions about the relationship between knowledge and complicity. The question of uniqueness — whether the Holocaust was singular in character and should be considered distinct from other genocides, or whether it can be compared without minimising either event — has generated genuine scholarly and political controversy. None of these debates diminishes the Holocaust’s centrality to any serious engagement with the twentieth century; they reflect the difficulty of thinking adequately about events of this magnitude., the atomic bomb, and the Cold WarCold War The geopolitical and ideological confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union that dominated global politics from 1947 to 1991. It was fought not through direct military conflict between the superpowers but through proxy wars, arms races, espionage, and ideological competition across the developing world. The Cold War began before the Second World War had fully ended: American and Soviet disagreements over the post-war order in Europe were visible at Yalta in February 1945 and had hardened into open confrontation by 1947, when the Truman Doctrine committed the United States to resisting Soviet expansion and the Marshall Plan began binding Western Europe to American economic leadership. The term itself was popularised by journalist Walter Lippmann in 1947, capturing the essential quality of a conflict that neither side could allow to become hot — because both possessed nuclear weapons capable of annihilating the other’s cities. The resulting stalemate was managed through deterrence, alliance systems (NATO in the West, the Warsaw Pact in the East), and the deliberate avoidance of direct superpower confrontation even while both sides fought intense proxy wars in Korea, Vietnam, Angola, Afghanistan, and dozens of other theatres. The Cold War was simultaneously a strategic competition and an ideological one: each side claimed to represent the future of humanity, and each used development aid, propaganda, cultural diplomacy, and covert action to advance its model in the non-aligned world. It ended not with a military defeat but with the internal collapse of the Soviet system between 1989 and 1991. The Cold War’s most important characteristic was its globality: what began as a European dispute about occupation zones became a worldwide competition that shaped the politics of every continent. For the United States, it justified interventions that overthrew democratic governments (Iran 1953, Guatemala 1954, Chile 1973) on the grounds that any leftist government was a Soviet beachhead; for the Soviet Union, it justified the crushing of reform movements within its own bloc (Hungary 1956, Czechoslovakia 1968) on the grounds that any deviation threatened the socialist camp. The Cold War’s legacy is therefore not only the fall of the Berlin Wall but the long list of democracies destroyed, developmental alternatives foreclosed, and civil wars fuelled in the name of containing the other side. The Third World paid the price for a confrontation between two powers that never actually fought each other.. It ended the European empires and remade the world order. And it left a legacy of memory, myth, and unresolved moral questions that we are still grappling with today.
Explaining History has built the most comprehensive podcast archive on the Second World War available anywhere, with over 50 episodes covering every major theatre and dimension of the conflict. This page is your guide to the whole collection — use the links below to explore by topic, or browse the sub-collections for in-depth coverage of each campaign and theme.
Explore by Topic
The Eastern Front & Operation Barbarossa
13 episodes — Barbarossa (6 parts), Stalingrad (3 parts), the Caucasus campaign, Lend-LeaseLend-Lease Full Description The American programme, begun in March 1941, by which the United States supplied Britain, the Soviet Union, and other Allied nations with war matériel without demanding immediate payment. By 1945 the United States had supplied approximately $50 billion in goods including aircraft, tanks, food, and raw materials. Lend-Lease allowed Britain to maintain the war effort before American entry and provided the Soviet Union with crucial supplies — particularly trucks and food — that contributed significantly to its capacity to fight. Critical Perspective Soviet authorities consistently downplayed the significance of Lend-Lease during the Cold War, insisting that the Soviet Union had won the war alone. Western accounts often overcorrected in the other direction. The most measured assessment recognises that Lend-Lease was critical to Soviet logistics (over 400,000 American trucks revolutionised Red Army mobility) without claiming that it substituted for Soviet military effort and sacrifice, which vastly exceeded that of any other Allied nation., and Soviet memory of the war.
Britain’s War 1939–45
15 episodes — Battle of Britain, the Blitz, the Atlantic, RAF Bomber Command, and the road to victory.
France: The Fall, Vichy and the Occupation
6 episodes — the collapse of 1940, 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 under Vichy, and post-war reckoning with France’s civil war.
The Pacific War and Asia 1941–45
5 episodes — the fall of Singapore and Malaya, the Philippines, and the 140 days that led to Hiroshima.
North Africa and the End of the War
8 episodes — Rommel and the desert war, Berlin 1945, displaced persons, and the rebuilding of Europe.
The Holocaust
13 episodes — persecution, the death camps, Auschwitz, the role of ordinary Germans, and the long shadow of memory.
Related Collections
The Second World War did not begin in 1939, and did not end in 1945. To understand it fully, explore these connected collections:
- Weimar Germany and the Rise of Nazism — the ideology and political collapse that made Hitler possible
- Stalin and the Soviet Union — the Soviet state that bore the heaviest burden of the war
- The First World War — the unresolved conflict whose legacy directly caused the second
- India: Partition and Independence — how the war transformed India’s relationship with Britain
- The British Empire and Decolonisation — how the war accelerated the end of empire
- Browse all topics — the full Explaining History podcast collection
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New episodes on modern history every week — the Eastern Front, the Holocaust, decolonisation, the Cold War and beyond.
Further Reading
These articles from the Explaining History archive go deeper on the history behind these episodes:
- The Nazi Camps and the ‘Workshy’ — The Nazi camp system and its victims beyond the Holocaust.
- The Italian Civil War — The partisan and Allied struggle for Italy in the final phase of the war.
- The Great Disruption: WW2 and the Refugee System — How the Second World War permanently transformed how the world handles mass displacement.
