World War Two
Published 10 Jul 2025In this special “Out of the Bullpen” episode, we answer your burning questions about Weimar Germany’s most turbulent years. From clandestine military pacts with the Soviets to the creative ways Germany sidestepped Versailles, we dig into aspects which shaped a republic on the brink.
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July 11, 2025
Why Didn’t France and Britain Stop Germany’s Secret Rearmament? – Out of the Bullpen 001
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June 27, 2025
Germany’s Constitution, Erotica, and a Pastor’s Dignity – Rise of Hitler 19, July 1931
World War Two
Published 26 Jun 2025A rogue preacher breaks into the Reichstag and steals silverware, banned erotica, and the 1848 German Constitution. As Germany’s banks collapse and panic spreads, the press is captivated by the strange tale of Walter Wohlgemuth: pastor, thief, and accidental symbol of a republic in crisis.
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June 25, 2025
H.G. Wells’ Things To Come: Through The Eyes of its Time
Feral Historian
Published 10 Jan 2025H.G. Wells’ Things To Come played much differently in 1936 than it does today. So much so that it offers us an insight into the politics of the period if we can step back from our post-WWII understanding and look at it on its own terms.
Link to the Coupland essay.
http://digamoo.free.fr/coupland2000.pdf00:00 Intro
02:08 Revolution Envy
05:15 The Gulf of Time
06:32 Wells and the BUF
08:02 Empire and Establishment
12:11 The World State
15:18 To Understand the Past …
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June 9, 2025
QotD: “Defending” democracy with totalitarian methods
One of the peculiar phenomena of our time is the renegade Liberal. Over and above the familiar Marxist claim that “bourgeois liberty” is an illusion, there is now a widespread tendency to argue that one can defend democracy only by totalitarian methods. If one loves democracy, the argument runs, one must crush its enemies by no matter what means. And who are its enemies? It always appears that they are not only those who attack it openly and consciously, but those who “objectively” endanger it by spreading mistaken doctrines. In other words, defending democracy involves destroying all independence of thought. This argument was used, for instance, to justify the Russian purges. The most ardent Russophile hardly believed that all of the victims were guilty of all the things they were accused of: but by holding heretical opinions they “objectively” harmed the regime, and therefore it was quite right not only to massacre them but to discredit them by false accusations. The same argument was used to justify the quite conscious lying that went on in the leftwing press about the Trotskyists and other Republican minorities in the Spanish civil war. And it was used again as a reason for yelping against habeas corpus when Mosley was released in 1943.
These people don’t see that if you encourage totalitarian methods, the time may come when they will be used against you instead of for you. Make a habit of imprisoning Fascists without trial, and perhaps the process won’t stop at Fascists. Soon after the suppressed Daily Worker had been reinstated, I was lecturing to a working men’s college in South London. The audience were working‐class and lower‐middle‐class intellectuals — the same sort of audience that one used to meet at Left Book Club branches. The lecture had touched on the freedom of the press, and at the end, to my astonishment, several questioners stood up and asked me: Did I not think that the lifting of the ban on the Daily Worker was a great mistake? When asked why, they said that it was a paper of doubtful loyalty and ought not to he tolerated in war time. I found myself defending the Daily Worker, which has gone out of its way to libel me more than once. But where had these people learned this essentially totalitarian outlook? Pretty certainly they had learned it from the Communists themselves!
Tolerance and decency are deeply rooted in England, but they are not indestructible, and they have to be kept alive partly by conscious effort. The result of preaching totalitarian doctrines is to weaken the instinct by means of which free peoples know what is or is not dangerous. The case of Mosley illustrates this. In 1940, it was perfectly right to intern Mosley, whether or not he had committed any technical crime. We were fighting for our lives and could not allow a possible Quisling to go free. To keep him shut up, without trial, in 1943 was an outrage. The general failure to see this was a bad symptom, though it is true that the agitation against Mosley’s release was partly factitious and partly a rationalization of other discontents. But how much of the present slide to ward Fascist ways of thought is traceable to the “anti‐Fascism” of the past ten years, and the unscrupulousness it has entailed?
George Orwell, “The Freedom of the Press“, 1945 (written as the introduction to Animal Farm, but not published in Orwell’s lifetime).
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June 8, 2025
The Canadian Retribution at Normandy | History Traveler Episode 196
The History Underground
Published 16 Feb 2022Throughout the Battle of Normandy, the Canadians of the 3rd Infantry Division and the Germans of the 12th SS Panzer Division found themselves locked in a battle of attrition that would mark some of the most vicious fighting of the entire campaign. After suffering a blow at Buron and Authie (as seen in the last episode) the fight shifted over to a place that has now become legendary in Canadian military history: Bretteville-l’Orgueilleuse. In this episode, we’re joined by Paul Woodadge of @WW2TV to show a small part of one of the most epic fights in the battle to take Normandy.
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June 7, 2025
The US President Saves Germany – Rise of Hitler 18 – June 1931
World War Two
Published 5 Jun 2025In June 1931, Germany teeters on the edge of collapse — facing riots, unemployment, and a banking crisis. Amidst chaos and international pressure, US President Herbert Hoover offers a dramatic moratorium on war debts, giving Germany a critical lifeline. Can this American intervention stabilize the Weimar Republic, or is disaster still on the horizon? Explore how global politics, economic turmoil, and desperate diplomacy shape a nation’s fate.
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The 12th SS Massacre of the Canadians in Normandy | History Traveler Episode 195
The History Underground
Published 9 Feb 2022In the days after D-Day, the Canadians of the 3rd Infantry Division found themselves up against the German 12th SS Panzer Division as they were making their way south through Normandy. Tragically, some of these men would find themselves as the victims of one the battle’s worst atrocities at a place called Abbey Ardenne. In this episode, we’re joining Paul Woodadge of @WW2TV as we retrace the final steps of these men as they made their way to a tragic fate at the hands of Kurt Meyer and a division of the most fanatical fighters that Germany threw into the Battle of Normandy.
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May 23, 2025
Did Germany Just Choose a King? – Rise of Hitler 17, May 1931
World War Two
Published 22 May 2025May 1931: 150,000 Stahlhelm men parade through Breslau before Crown Prince Wilhelm and other imperial relics, reviving monarchist hopes. Hitler hails his SA and calls for eastern expansion. But it’s economic collapse that dominates — Austria’s top bank nears default, threatening Germany’s own system. As Berlin pushes for a reparations pause and clings to its customs union with Vienna, France stands firm. And in Oldenburg, the Nazis take their first Landtag.
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May 21, 2025
The Butt Report – Nadir of the RAF – The Bomber War Episode 3
HardThrasher
Published 15 Dec 2023As the powers that be on YT have decided that this video is Evil and naughty they’ve removed the ads — which, like, is great from your point of view but a bit shite from mine. So if you wanted to it’d be awesome if you’d consider either hitting the Super Thanks button or consider becoming a super cool kid and joining my Pateron.
If you’d like to email me send a message to lordhardthrasher@gmail.com
In this episode, the Butt Report, what happened next and the arrival of Bomber Harris. Despite this being more than 50 minutes, I’ve skipped some detail e.g. The Singleton Report which basically said “eh – bit difficult this bombing thing” nor Tizard’s rubbishing of Cherwell’s Memorandum, nor really the detail of the Cherwell Memorandum. You’ll live. However if you want more on the subject then I recommend the Official History of Bomber Command to get more into the civil service fire fights.
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May 9, 2025
Nazi vs. Nazi – The Rebellion Within – Rise of Hitler 16, April 1931
World War Two
Published 8 May 2025April 1931 plunges Hitler’s Nazis into crisis as SA leader Walter Stennes leads a dramatic internal revolt, challenging Hitler’s oath to legality. Meanwhile the Nazis loose their only ministerial post and President Hindenburg’s emergency decree intensifies clashes with communists, leading to mass arrests during banned protests.
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May 8, 2025
Aftermath
I’ve read a few books on what happened in Europe after the surrender of Nazi Germany in May of 1945, but there is always more to learn about a continent-wide struggle to recover from a disaster of the magnitude of World War Two:
On a train journey earlier this year between Cologne and Berlin, I began to read Harald Jähner’s Aftermath, a fascinating account of the years when Germany emerged from the destruction and shame of the Third Reich.
The war ended 80 years ago today, and in the defeated nation the scenes were primeval and apocalyptic. In Berlin, journalist Ruth Andreas-Friedrich, along with a doctor, actor and musical conductor, discovered a white ox wandering through the streets and, after finding a Russian soldier to shoot it, found themselves suddenly surrounded by a ravenous mob. She recalled: “Suddenly, as if the underworld had been spying on them, a noisy crowd gathered around the dead ox. They crept from a hundred basements. Women, men, children. Were they lured by the smell of blood? Within minutes they were scrambling for meat.” The bourgeois of Middle Europe reduced to an animal state.
Germany was a pile of rubble; the ruins in the Reich‘s capital amounted to 55 million cubic metres, enough for a wall 30 metres wide and 5 metres high stretching all the way to Cologne. In West Berlin, for the next 22 years, up to 800 lorries a day unloaded so much rubble on the former Factory of Armaments Technology that it became known as Teufelsberg, or Devil’s Mountain. The last “rubble brigade” in Dresden only finished work in 1977.
Although Nazi party members were made to clear rubble as a punishment, the Germans hardly needed encouragement; on 23 April, the war not yet over, the municipal building of Mannheim had already declared WE ARE REBUILDING.
The communal process of clearing away seemed to serve a psychological function for a hungry, defeated people, and was encouraged by the new authorities — all the “heroic cinematic rhetoric” employed by the UFA film company of the Nazi regime now used to get the country clearing up. There was even a cinema genre called Trümmerfilm, rubble films, one — And The Heavens Above Us — ending with the Lord’s Prayer being recited among the ruins of Germany.
German POWs, “dispirited, disciplined and dutiful to the point of submissiveness”, made life easy for occupying soldiers while their former victims were far more troublesome. (Russian POWs in France caused such anarchy that they called in a Soviet liaison officer who selected ten at random and shot them, bringing the mob under control.) This led to a bizarre alliance between Allied and German law enforcement working hand-in-hand from the early days of the occupation, with joint raids and weapons searches on displaced persons from Poland and the Soviet Union, which the Poles and Russians “of course saw as an intolerable provocation”.
London cheered on May 8, 1945. In Berlin they searched for food and cleared rubble
In a strange irony, there was now a large-scale migration of Jews from Poland to Germany, fleeing fresh persecution despite the horror they had endured. Even here in a camp system under Allied control, there were anti-Semitic attacks from other survivors, so that Jews were eventually separated altogether following the conclusions of the Harrison Report. The Americans, in a likely first in European history, now made Jews an explicitly privileged group, with superior camp conditions.
The Polish Jews set up their own camp in the Munich district of Bogenhausen where locals were confused and disorientated by the new arrivals. These eastern Jews actually looked like the alien caricatures Nazi propaganda had bombarded them with, dressed in oriental clothes from the shtetl, totally unlike the assimilated German Jews they had grown up with. One local complained that “the Jews from the old days were really, how can I put it, very intelligent, polite and unusually friendly and elegant people. And of course the ones who turned up after the war included all sorts.” The Jews “from the old days” were “the good Jews”, he lamented.
Holocaust guilt was in the distant future for most, and newly re-established newspapers weren’t remotely shy about publishing anti-Semitic content. One printed a resident’s complaint about Polish Jews that “these were not people who had been persecuted” but “the sputum, the yeast and the scum of elements who were never deported but, to avoid regular work, came here from the eastern states, in many cases completely illegally, and are now spreading themselves raggedly about the place.”
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May 4, 2025
The Clean German Myth, Doomed B-17 Pilots, and Japan’s Rapid Victories – Out of the Foxholes Live
World War Two
Published 3 May, 20205Indy and Sparty tackle some more of your interesting questions in another live Out of the Foxholes. Today they look at loss rates of B-17 crews, the myth of the clean Wehrmacht, and ask why the West was apparently so unprepared for Japan’s attack.
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April 29, 2025
1984 and the Politicizing of Language
Feral Historian
Published 16 Aug 2024A dive into 1984 in relation to modern politics can’t be done without pissin’ in everyone’s Froot-Loops, so grab a tall glass of Victory Gin and let’s talk about how The Party functions, how doublethink makes us crazy, and how it’s not just those nutters on the other side that do it.
I take a few jabs at current sacred cows of the Left and Right here. Hopefully the comments won’t look like Hate Week.
00:00 Intro
01:46 Thoughtcrime and Doublethink
12:27 War is Peace
17:46 Oligarchal Collectivism
22:12 MiniTruePost-release edit: It’s been pointed out that I grossly oversimplified the military analysis later in the video, which is true. Man-portable air defense systems and maneuver warfare are a lot more complicated than this video implies. As for that one particular doublethink example mentioned so very briefly, some of the counterpoints have been … impressive contortions of language in their own right. But not interesting enough to discuss the matter further.
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April 19, 2025
Downfall: The Battle of Berlin 1945
Real Time History
Published 6 Dec 2024April 1945. After nearly six years of war, the Red Army stands massed on the banks of the Oder River in eastern Germany. The Nazi capital and Hitler’s bunker are just 60km away, but the Nazi Party and the Wehrmacht are preparing to fight to the bitter end in the final struggle of WW2 in Europe – the Battle for Berlin.
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April 11, 2025
Nazis and Communists Unite Against Weimar – Rise of Hitler 14, February 1931
World War Two
Published 10 Apr 2025February 1931 sees unprecedented chaos in Germany’s parliament as Nazis and Communists stage a dramatic walkout, ironically enabling democratic parties to pass reforms unopposed. Meanwhile, Hitler pushes eastward expansion, Berlin bans extremist newspapers — including Goebbels’ Der Angriff — and Röhm militarizes the Nazi SA. With democracy under strain and political extremes emboldened, what’s next for the Weimar Republic?
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