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The failure of Nazi Germany to seize the small British mediterranean colony of Malta was a significant strategic error. In 1941, Hitler decided not to invade the island and instead decided to put his energies into the seizure of Crete, which he believed would pose a threat to Romania’s oil fields if it remained in British hands. General Erwin Rommel (later promoted to field marshal), had a year of almost unstoppable victories against the British during the 1942, but as he raced across the desert
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By 1939, the Royal Navy had lost a decade of growth, after budget cuts during the Great Depression and the closure of shipyards resulted in an older fleet than that of its enemies. The navy’s role as the defender of the sea lanes that bound the empire together meant that it was for much of the war, Britain’s primary line of defence against the Axis powers. The British were vulnerable as a net importer of food to U-Boat warfare and following the failure of the Battle of Britain and the decision b
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In the summer of 1940, German successes in Europe had been based on a very particular model of interaction between air and ground forces. The planned invasion of southern England and the seizure of London envisioned by Hitler presented the German airforce with entirely new problems. Some German commanders believed that the Luftwaffe alone could defeat the British, but it was Eric Raeder, the head of Hitler’s navy, who wanted an amphibious invasion to showcase the power of the Kriegsmarine. Hitle
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In present day Volgograd, one of the largest Second World War memorials in the world stands. The city, once known as Stalingrad, is home the gigantic concrete and steel sculpture, The Motherland Calls, which was built in 1967, eleven years after Stalin himself had been denonced and disgraced by his successor. The immense losses that the USSR suffered at the hands of Nazi Germany and its allies will shape Russian memory for centuries to come and this podcast explores the creation of the memorials
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British Prime Ministers in the 1920s and 1930s inherited a world created for them by David Lloyd George between 1919 and 1923, and were unable to cope with its challenges, complexities and risks. In the case of Stanley Baldwin, who ruled for most of the period as leader of a Conservative or National Government, the strain of dealing with a rapidly worsening international situation led to his resignation in 1937 and his replacement with Neville Chamberlain. The British public was steadfastly against war and rearmament, the memories of the First World War, which broke out to the shock and horror…
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In the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, the French Fourth Republic commenced a purge of former members of the wartime Vichy regime that had collaborated with the Nazi occupiers. However, by 1947, under the new conditions of the Cold War, the enthusiasm for anti fascist trials had waned and instead anti communism replaced it. This was accompanied by a swift revival of prewar fascist movements such as Action Francais, but the most successful figure on the fascist right by the 1950s was
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The Second World War was a national humiliation for France, enduring occupation, collaboration with the Nazis and Vichy complicity in the Holocaust. The violent purge of collaborationists after the war saw tens of thousands of mainly low level members of Vichy and the French civilians who had been friendly with the occupying Germans assaulted, imprisoned or killed. High profile collaborators like Peirre Laval were tried and executed, whereas other fascist figures evaded justice and re-emerged as
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Hitler, a cautious dictator for the first couple of years of his rule, had become reckless by 1941, and had gambled everything on a swift victory in the USSR. If Stalin’s regime could be crushed and thirty million Russians starved to death as a result, then there would be enough living space for Aryan German settlers and the resources to defeat any enemy in the west. The defeat of the USSR would have to be swift and decisive, an outcome that was only possible in the racial imaginings of Hitler and his inner circle. The first three to four months…
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The conquest of the Soviet Union was an idea that had been at the forefront of HItler’s thoughts since the 1920s. Exploiting the resources of Russia and the Ukraine for the benefit of Germany was not a new concept and it had most recently been tried during the last year of the First World War. Hitler and Himmler had grand visions of a transformed landscape, full of vast German cities, relying on Russian slaves to work the land for German farmers. When the USSR didn’t collapse quite as readily as
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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