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In this episode of the Explaining History Podcast, we hear from history teacher and writer Larry Auton Leaf about Mao, Stalin, Khrushchev and Sino Soviet Split Explaining History helps you understand the 20th Century through critical conversations and expert interviews. We connect the past to the present. If you enjoy the show, please subscribe and share.▸ Support the Show & Get Exclusive ContentBecome a Patron: patreon.com/explaininghistory▸ Join the Community & Continue the ConversationFaceboo
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In 1941 Sachsenhausen concentration camp became the first of the existing pre war concentration camps to become a site of mass killings as 9,000 Soviet POWs were murdered there by gas or shooting. Heinrich Himmler, anxious to find more efficient methods of mass murder, was kept informed by his henchman Theodore Eicke and took a keen interest in the killings, knowing that the methods used at Sachsenhausen would be later employed in the mass murder of the Jews. Explaining History helps you unders
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After the appointment of Adolf Hitler as chancellor in 1933, Stalin began to privately regret his decision to prevent a popular front of communist and social democratic forces emerge in Germany. Across Europe communist parties found themselves in uneasy alliances with social democrats and in Britain the threat of the British Union of Fascists galvanised this process. The popular front government in Spain that came under assault in 1936 drew communist and non communist volunteers from Britain and
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In the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, civilian governments struggled to establish law and order and in many cars failed to prevent a wave of vigilante violence against those suspected of collaboration. The complicity in Nazi crimes and the everyday experience of occupation created huge divisions in societies of western and eastern Europe and a deep suspicion on the police, who had often been used by the Nazis and collaborationist governments Explaining History helps you understand
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During the 1950s, as Britain attempted to hold on to its African colonies, it had to deal with the ambitions of white colonial settlers for domination of the black population on a more explicitly racist model of government, exemplified by apartheid South Africa and the growing force of black nationalism. The British attempted to foster ‘moderate’ African leaders who might be compliant in a new state, the Central African Federation, which incorporated North and South Rhodesia and Nyasaland. Outma
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The rapid industrialisation of the USSR, poor housing, poverty and family breakdown led to countless children being abandoned to fend for themselves by uncaring and cruel parents and step parents. The Soviet state often intervened and prosecuted fathers who refused to pay for the upkeep of their families. Explaining History helps you understand the 20th Century through critical conversations and expert interviews. We connect the past to the present. If you enjoy the show, please subscribe and sh
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As French power and influence declined in Vietnam from 1953 onwards, the conflict started to become a proxy for the wider cold war and not simply an anti colonial struggle. The enormous French miscalculation at Dien Bien Phu, where the garrison was surrounded in a north Vietnamese valley by DRV armies came just as France prepared peace talks at Geneva with the government of Ho Chi Minh. Explaining History helps you understand the 20th Century through critical conversations and expert interviews.
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Despair and defeatism defined the French political class’s response to the worsening situation in Vietnam following the French defeat at Cao Bang in 1950. This lack of hope led to a gradual decline in the necessary resources to defeat the Democratic Republic of Vietnam. At the same time the DRV was becoming an increasingly professional and organised fighting force. Explaining History helps you understand the 20th Century through critical conversations and expert interviews. We connect the past
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In the half decade after the Second World War, a stream of wanted Nazi war criminals, including Adolf Eichmann and Josef Mengele fled from Germany and escaped via Italy to Argentina and Brazil. They lived relatively openly in the established German communities in both countries and only a handful were ever brought to justice. In this special edition of the Explaining History podcast, we hear from Guy Walters, whose book, Hunting Evil examines the hidden history of this often mythologised chapter
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The German airforce was designed to support its army on the battlefield and act as a tool for rapid military operations or ‘blitzkrieg’. Unlike British and American air fleets that pursued a policy of strategic bombing away from the battlefield, lighter German aircraft were focused on ground support. Their role in the terror bombing of the defended city of Warsaw was to force capitulation of the army and other defenders, but this came at a deliberate massive civilian cost. Explaining History hel