Forgotten Weapons
Published 8 May 2026When Walther first developed the P38, it was designated the Heerespistole — “Army Pistol”. Only after getting official Wehrmacht adoption did it get the designation P38. Walther offered models with both designations for commercial sale, albeit not to just anyone. Army officers, Party members, and other high-placed individuals could get pistols from Walther outside military orders. About 20,000 such guns were made during the war, and a tiny subset of them — just 225 — were made specifically in 7.65mm Parabellum instead of 9mm Parabellum. Today we are looking at two examples of those.
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September 21, 2026
Custom-Order Walthers: Model HP and P38 in 7.65mm Parabellum
September 20, 2026
September 15, 2026
The First Military Luger: Swiss Model 1900 s/n 01
Forgotten Weapons
Published 27 Apr 2026The first nation to adopt the Luger was Switzerland, which began testing in late 1898 and formally accepted the Luger in May 1900. Their guns were the first Lugers to be mass produced, as they were the first order received by DWM. The first batch of 600 arrived in Switzerland in May 1901, and today we are taking a look at the very first of that batch — serial number 01. It is the first production military Luger, and that’s a pretty cool landmark.
C&Rsenal Swiss Model 1900 video: • History of WWI Primer 145: Swiss Luger 19…
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QotD: Auftragstaktik or “mission-type tactics”
Mission Command or Auftragstaktik (also “mission-type tactics”) is a style of command and control which stresses flexible decision-making by smaller units pursuing an objective (the “mission” of mission tactics) rather than imposing a single rigid top-down plan on the entire force. Under this framework, upper-level commanders assign objectives to their subordinates, who can then use their better local knowledge and quicker reaction times (being closer to the front) to craft a flexible plan to achieve those objectives; this process is then repeated down the command structure. Originally a German concept, US doctrine embraces mission command as its ideal style of command. Russian doctrine, by contrast, has generally been substantially more top-down in nature (with implications for force structure as well); this has proven a liability in Ukraine as the top-down plan did not go to plan and lower-level Russian commanders and NCOs are not generally trained to deviate from the plan “on the fly”.
Bret Devereaux, “Miscellanea: A Very Short Glossary of Military Terminology”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2022-03-25.
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September 13, 2026
September 12, 2026
Berlin after 1918 … the decadence the Nazis fought
The period after the First World War in Weimar Germany was a huge break with the Wilhelmine past, especially in Berlin and some other large cities. Hitler wasn’t wrong about the moral decadence of the 1920s and the reaction helped build his movement. At The Grim Historian, Carlyn Beccia illustrates what life was like in Berlin for those who fully indulged in the excesses of the new liberalized society that so outraged Hitler and his supporters:
Metropolis by Otto Dix, 1927–1928,
Kunstmuseum Stuttgart
It’s 1929, and Berlin is having the kind of night respectable people will later insist never happened.
Neon bleeds across wet pavement. A taxi hisses past, throwing gutter water onto a woman whose dress has misplaced most of its back. Somewhere below street level, a trumpet murders a respectable German melody while a girl in a tuxedo leans in to kiss another girl.
Berlin, 1929: Haus Vaterland, where Berliners could drink, dance, dine around the world, and enjoy an hourly fake thunderstorm over the Rhine because subtlety had apparently taken the night off. The pleasure palace could accommodate as many as 8,000 people.
CC BY 4.0She goes in. Another comes out laughing. The door swings.
They call these women the Neue Frau — “new woman”. Hair bobbed to the jawline as though she took a knife to the nineteenth century. Hemline at the knee, one stocking laddered at the ankle.
The new woman works behind a counter at a department store. When the doorman holds out his hand, she pays him with her own wages from her own bank account. Today, we would call these progressive women “girlbosses” while silently hating ourselves for not having a less cringy word.
Berlin, 1929: Two women dance at the Eldorado, where lipstick, tuxedos, and heterosexual expectations were all optional. Four years later, the Nazis shut it down.
Bildarchiv Preussischer Kulturbesitz, via United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Holocaust EncyclopediaOther young women belonged to a more slippery category Berliners called the Halbseidenen — the “half-silks”. Half-silk was fabric woven partly from real silk and partly from cheaper thread. The fabric was glossy enough to pass at a distance, suspect once you got close.
The nickname landed on women who were equally difficult to classify — shopgirls, dancers, sexually independent working women, occasional prostitutes, girls dressed just a little better than their wages should have allowed.
These women do not dance politely. Anita Berber, Berlin’s cocaine-addicted queen of nude dance, had made Dances of Vice, Horror and Ecstasy infamous. Grosz and Otto Dix paint Lustmord — sex murder — as a genre, and sell it.
Otto Dix – Portrait of the Dancer Anita Berber, 1925
Public DomainInside the club, smoke curls from red-stained lips like a genie escaping its lamp. Champagne sweats in silver buckets and sloshes in chipped glasses. A folded banknote, a razor’s quick flash, two white lines cut across a mirror while dancers stamp and spin inches away.
Women arrive as men, men arrive as women, and bankers disappear into back rooms with people their bankers’ wives would not have invited to luncheon.
This particular den of iniquity has competition. Weimar Berlin supports somewhere between 65 and 80 gay bars and another fifty lesbian ones.
And the sexual revolution does not stop at closing time. It is sitting on the newsstands. By the end of the decade, more than twenty publications cater to gay, lesbian and gender-nonconforming readers — romance serials, political essays, personal ads, and club listings. A lonely girl in Leipzig can get Die Freundin without ever setting foot in a dancehall.
Berlin, 1929: Die Freundin, Germany’s lesbian weekly, advertises two women’s clubs at the Amerikanischer Tanzpalast. The fine print reads: “Men are not admitted.” I added the flowers. Weimar Berlin did not. | Forum Queeres Archiv München.
Across town, Magnus Hirschfeld has spent years trying to drag sex out of whispers and into science. The physicians in his Institute for Sexual Science would soon help pioneer some of the first gender-affirming surgeries. The institute also offers birth control and counseling, and works with Berlin police on “transvestite passes” — documents that let trans people walk the city without being arrested for their clothes.
Berlin has somehow managed to give gender nonconformity paperwork.
Not everybody finds this charming. Berlin has been hearing the opposite sermon since the republic was born. Ten years earlier, in the political convulsions after World War I, a poster showed a crowned Berlin locked in a waltz with a skeleton, “Berlin, halt ein! Besinne dich. Dein Tänzer ist der Tod” — Berlin, stop. Come to your senses. Your dance partner is Death.
The poster was not about lesbians in tuxedos. It came from the political chaos of 1919. But the accusation is already there.
Berlin is losing itself. It must return to the past and what once made it great.
Of course, by the late 1920s, the people making that nostalgic argument have begun pointing at sex. In 1927, Wilhelm Frick warns that homosexuality will lead to the “disintegration of the German people”. Large numbers of Germans describe Weimar’s new sexual visibility as decadent, immoral, and evidence of national degeneration. Right-leaning religious organizations and parties preach family, restraint, and traditional German culture.
Looking back on the inflation era, Austrian writer Stefan Zweig remembered the city transforming into “the Babel of the world”, with gay bars multiplying like mushrooms and transvestite balls so extravagant he thought ancient Rome had been outdone.
Berlin read the room. Berlin went on dancing, spending, and fucking.
Berlin, 1919: Ten years before Fritz stands outside our nightclub, Berlin is already being warned about its dance partner. “Stop! Come to your senses! Your dancer is Death.” | Van Santen, Berlin, Stop! 1919.
Lithograph. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division. Public DomainBerlin’s own tourist bureau was advertising Jeder einmal in Berlin! — everyone should visit Berlin at least once. In 1929, nearly 1.7 million guests did.
But not everyone enjoyed watching Berlin turn its private vice into a tourist attraction.
Because while people inside experienced liberation, and the moral right experienced decadence and national decline, young men experienced something else.
Exclusion.
September 7, 2026
The Backbone of the Nazi Panzer War – Panzer III
World War Two
Published 5 Sep 2026The Panzer III was intended to become the backbone of Nazi Germany’s panzer divisions. Emerging from clandestine Weimar-era experimentation and formally developed from 1934, it combined mobility, a five-man crew, a three-man turret, and comprehensive radio communication in one highly effective prewar design.
In this episode, Spartacus follows the Panzerkampfwagen III from secret German-Soviet tank trials at Kama through its production and deployment in Poland, France, North Africa, and Operation Barbarossa. We examine its evolution from the 3.7 cm gun to increasingly powerful 5 cm weapons, the advantages provided by crew specialization and radio-coordinated warfare, and why the Soviet T-34 and KV-1 exposed its diminishing margins in armor and firepower.
By 1943, the Panzer III had been displaced as Germany’s principal gun tank by the more adaptable Panzer IV. Its chassis, however, found an extraordinarily productive second life beneath the Sturmgeschütz III. The Panzer III was not a failed tank. It was an effective prewar design overtaken by an armored arms race it lacked the capacity to survive. Its fate also reflected Nazi Germany’s wider strategic failure: it had built weapons for short campaigns, then unleashed a coalition war whose demands exceeded Germany’s resources.
Watch our episode on the Sd.Kfz. 251: • The Halftrack That Made Blitzkrieg Possibl…
Watch Ten Days in Sedan: • Ten Days in Sedan
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September 3, 2026
The Last Tiger
The Tank Museum
Published 24 Apr 2026The war has raged for more than 5 years.
In the Essel Forest, on the north German plain, a troop of British Comet cruiser tanks halts for a brew.
A shot rings out
It’s a Tiger!
Within seconds one of the Comets is hit.
The war is far from over …
This is the story of a fascinating and dangerous moment in time – one of the last duels between the brilliant Comet and the legendary Tiger.
00:00 | Introduction
00:42 | The Last Tiger
04:55 | The Rise and Fall of the Kampfgruppen
06:40 | The British Armour
07:52 | Tiger v Comet
13:08 | April 13th 1945This video features archive footage courtesy of British Pathé.
In this film, join Chris Copson as he tells the story of one of the last tank duels of the Second World War. On one side, the Tiger. With its 88mm gun and almost impenetrable armour, it had inspired fear in many Allied tank crews. But on the other side, the Brits were prepared with the latest in tank technology – the Comet. Both were imposing sights on the late WWII battlefield, but who would come out on top in the depths of the Essel Forest?
Want to learn more about the Tiger and Comet tanks? Here are some of the sources we used to make this film:
Battleground, Zaloga (Ed), Osprey, 2011.
Crouching Tiger, Hidden Comet, Fletcher, 2017
Encyclopaedia of British and American Tanks of WW II, Chamberlain and Ellis, Cassell 2014.
Encyclopaedia of German Tanks of WWII, Chamberlain and Doyle, Cassell 2011.
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August 31, 2026
A Fighter to Make the European Skies Nazi – Nazi Rearmament 03 – Bf 109
World War Two
Published 30 Aug 2026The Messerschmitt Bf 109 was designed to solve one of the fundamental problems of modern warfare: how do you gain control of the air long enough for everything else to operate unhindered? Germany’s answer was a fast, heavily armed, highly advanced fighter that became the spearhead of the Luftwaffe‘s pursuit of air superiority.
In this German Rearmament special, we trace the Bf 109 from its origins in the clandestine development programs of the 1930s to its first combat missions over Spain and its emergence as one of the defining fighters of the Second World War. We examine its revolutionary design, its development and production, its role in the emerging doctrine of Bewegungskrieg, and its deployment from the opening campaigns in Poland and France to the Battle of Britain and the vast air war over the Eastern Front.
But the 109 also exposes the limits behind the image of an unstoppable German war machine. Its narrow-track landing gear made it notoriously unforgiving, its short range limited its effectiveness over Britain, and its ageing airframe became increasingly difficult to improve as the war progressed. By the later years of the war, Germany could still produce thousands of Bf 109s, but lacked the fuel, experienced pilots, industrial resources, and ultimately the air superiority needed to make those aircraft decisive.
The Bf 109 was an exceptionally advanced fighter for its time, and in the hands of an experienced pilot it remained lethal long after its first flight. But it also became a symbol of a deeper problem within the Nazi war economy: the growing inability to replace yesterday’s weapons with tomorrow’s.
This is the story of the fighter that made Blitzkrieg possible, and the machine that stayed in the sky long after Germany had lost control of it.
Never Forget.
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Terrible Naval Plans – Five of the worst ideas of naval history
Drachinifel
Published 22 Apr 2026Today we look at some of the worst thought out naval strategies and plans of all time, as selected by me.
00:00 – Intro
00:34 – Selection Criteria
02:17 – The 1914 Dardanelles Bombardment
11:38 – Britain’s post-WW2 Carrier Plan
29:01 – Germany’s High Seas Fleet Build-Up
38:43 – French attempts to invade Ireland
44:16 – The US “we don’t need a navy” plan
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August 25, 2026
The Halftrack That Made Blitzkrieg Possible
World War Two
Published 23 Aug, 2026The tanks get the glory. But Blitzkrieg could not work on tanks alone.
The Sd.Kfz. 251 was designed to solve one of the fundamental problems of armored warfare: how do you keep infantry moving fast enough to fight alongside the Panzers? Germany’s answer was an armored half-track that helped turn infantry from a slow-moving follow-up force into an integral part of the Panzer division’s combined-arms assault.
In this German Rearmament special, we trace the Sd.Kfz. 251 from clandestine development under the restrictions of the Treaty of Versailles to its first production runs on the eve of World War Two. We examine its design, its role in the emerging doctrine of Bewegungskrieg, its deployment in Poland and France, and the extraordinary range of variants that turned it into one of the Wehrmacht’s most versatile vehicles.
But the 251 also exposes the limits behind the image of a fully mechanized German war machine. It was complicated and expensive to manufacture, there were never enough of them, and most German infantry continued to march or rely on horses and trucks. Even as production soared later in the war, Germany’s shortages of fuel, materials, manpower, and industrial capacity increasingly overwhelmed the advantages its engineers and tacticians had created.
The Sd.Kfz. 251 helped make the early German style of armored warfare possible. It also became another example of a sophisticated weapon system serving a war of aggression that Nazi Germany ultimately lacked the resources to sustain.
This is the story of the half-track that made Blitzkrieg possible.
Never Forget.
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August 22, 2026
August 20, 2026
The Frankfurt School – The most destructive intellectual project of the 20th Century
People tend to underestimate how influential intellectual movements can be, as they rarely get outside attention until they’re deeply entrenched in the university system. The Frankfurt School‘s damage record is unmatched by any other intellectual movement of the era:
Notable members of the Frankfurt School in Heidelberg, April 1964 at the Max Weber-Soziologentag. Max Horkheimer is front left, Theodor W. Adorno front right, and Jürgen Habermas is in the background, right, running his hand through his hair. Siegfried Landshut is in the background left.
Photograph by Jeremy J. Shapiro via Wikimedia Commons.
The Most Destructive Intellectual Project of the Twentieth Century.
The Frankfurt School. You should know what it was, what it built, and why you are still living inside it.
1. The Institute for Social Research was founded in Frankfurt in 1923 and relocated to Columbia University in 1934 when Hitler came to power. The civilization they had decided to dismantle gave them refuge when another tried to kill them. They spent the next five decades producing the theoretical infrastructure for that dismantling. Western civilization itself was the problem: reason, the Enlightenment, the family, tradition, authority. Not reformed. Dismantled.
2. They called it Critical Theory – and the name is the program. Everything is to be criticized; nothing is to be built. In The Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944), Adorno and Horkheimer argued that Western reason — the reason that produced Newton and the rule of law — contained the seeds of Auschwitz. Not that reason had been misused, but that reason itself, taken to its conclusion, produces the death camp. This was not a critique of institutions. It was an indictment of the civilization itself.
3. Adorno gave them the psychological weapon. The Authoritarian Personality (1950) classified conservatism, religious faith, patriotism, and the traditional family not as political positions but as symptoms of a proto-fascist personality. If you believe in the nation or the father’s authority, you are pre-fascist. The opponent was no longer wrong – he was sick. You don’t argue with a pathology. You treat it. This made dialogue impossible. You don’t persuade someone who is wrong; you diagnose someone who is sick. Politics becomes therapy, and disagreement becomes pathology.
4. Marcuse gave them the political weapon. Repressive Tolerance (1965) argued that tolerating wrong ideas is itself oppression. True tolerance therefore requires suppressing intolerant ideas. The left decides which ideas are intolerant. Everyone else is silenced – not despite tolerance, but “in its name”. Censorship dressed in the vocabulary of liberation.
5. The generation that read Marcuse at Columbia, Berkeley, and Yale went on to run universities, media, foundations, NGOs, content moderation departments, and the EU regulatory apparatus. They implemented the argument sincerely because they had been taught it as philosophy. This was the Frankfurt School’s greatest achievement: it produced true believers.
6. French Theory picked up the tools and made them aesthetic. Foucault made the critique of power literary. Derrida made the critique of meaning philosophical. Deleuze made the critique of identity elegant. A political program became a cultural sensibility. You can argue with a program. A sensibility is in the air you breathe. By the time these ideas reached the American campus through the French conduit, they were no longer ideology. They were the water. The fish did not know they were wet.
7. A civilization stands on three pillars: truth exists and is accessible to reason; good is distinguishable from evil; and there is an inheritance worth transmitting. The Frankfurt School attacked all three – systematically and with considerable intellectual sophistication. It produced a generation that knows how to deconstruct and has forgotten how to build. That sees power everywhere and beauty nowhere. The ultimate achievement was to make destruction feel like progress. Every inherited institution became suspect; every constraint became oppression; every act of preservation became reactionary. Deconstruction became the default, while construction became something that needed to justify itself.
The answer is not another theory. It is the thing the Frankfurt School most feared: the builder who simply builds, the scientist who follows the evidence, the father who transmits what was transmitted to him.
The deconstruction machine runs on the assumption that nothing is worth building.
Prove it wrong.
Tell the truth, have courage, and build.
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August 19, 2026
Why The Allied Western Front Offensives in 1915 Failed
The Great War
Published 13 Mar 2026By the spring of 1915, the Western Front had bogged down into trench warfare. Allied offensives tried to break the deadlock in spring and fall 1915. The fall offensives were among the bloodiest of the war. After unprecedented bloodletting and use of munitions, the Western Front was still locked in a stalemate at the end of 1915.
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August 16, 2026
How Not to Be A Nazi – Death of Democracy 28 – Epilogue
World War Two
Published 15 Aug 2026Nazi Germany destroyed democracy in weeks, launched a war that killed tens of millions, and carried racial persecution to industrialized mass murder. But after 1945, Germans and Europeans faced another question: how could they prevent it from ever happening again?
In this final, independently viewable epilogue to Death of Democracy, Spartacus examines how West Germany transformed the lessons of dictatorship and war into the Grundgesetz — a constitutional system built around human dignity, enforceable rights, federalism, judicial independence, social stability, and a democracy empowered to defend itself.
We trace how the Federal Republic combined lessons from Weimar, the United States, Britain, Austria, France, and other democratic traditions; how Konrad Adenauer’s generation tied Germany to a new European order; and how the same determination to restrain power and prevent another continental war eventually shaped the European Union and the Lisbon Treaty.
Finally, we ask how well those democratic fortifications are holding in 2026 — and return one last time to the diarists, victims, witnesses, supporters, and resisters whose voices guided us through Germany’s descent into dictatorship.
From the comments:
@spartacus-olsson
12 hours agoThank you for joining me on this adventure. I hope it has been eye-opening. If you watched to the very end, you will know that I’m soon launching a World War 2 Trivia board game – I’ve been super punny and named it World War IIrivia (2rivia with Roman numerals).
After so many years of studying this and sharing it in the darkest possible way, I felt it was time to look at the whole affair in a way that’s fun, social, and still educational. So a couple of months ago I came up with something. It turned out to be one of those moments when the work seems like extra fun. Before I knew it, I was spending my sleepless nights on the idea, sketching rules in Word, writing questions into lists in Excel, designing the game in Photoshop, testing gameplay against myself, and redesigning. And then there it was — an actual game. It’s a game for both novices and experts, with some unexpected twists and turns. If you’re interested in this period of history and enjoy a night of board games, this is for you. Stay tuned for more updates about the launch.
Once again, many, many thanks to all of you for watching. Thank you to Iryna, Astrid, Anna, and Clara for your great work on the series. Thank you to the TimeGhost Army members for enabling me to do this. With that, as Mr. Murrow would put it:
Good Night and Good Luck,
Your Spartacus
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