20th Century Facts & Events

This episode has some disturbing descriptions. I began researching for this podcast about 2 1/2 years ago. I could not have imagined in 2021 that we would have witnessed the recent attack on Israel now. This episode seems like it might be poorly timed, but I think it is more important than ever to be aware of what the SS did to jewish people in Europe in World War II.

"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."

If you have not listened to part 1 of this series, I recommend doing that first. The purpose of the series is to understand the police state that Nazi Germany became and to see the difference between the SS, the SA, the SD, the Ordnungs Polizei and the Gestapo, if there is a distinction. But it is not possible to view the perpetrators without eventually considering what they were responsible for. Eugenics is part of the puzzle that led to the murder of millions and leads directly to the deaths in the Holocaust as well as the deaths of millions of Soviet civilians.

Thanks for listening!

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We all know about World War 2, and the Holocaust. We have watched movies and have a picture of what happened. But in this episode, I wanted to explore the evolution of what happened, the logistics of who the Schutzstaffel men were. And to examine the differences between the SS, the SD, the Gestapo, etc. This episode sets up for the beginning of the war, which will be the continuation in episode 2. Thanks for listening.

Here it is!  The finale - the culmination of the other three episodes where we have worked toward an understanding of where political forces stood in the mid-20th century.  I start this episode after the 1936-7 elections in India under the Raj and end it 10 years later with Indian and Pakistan Independence.  That decade packs a wallop for stuff happening.   

Primary characters in this episode are Muhammed Ali Jinnah, Mahatma Ghandi, Jawarhalal Nehru, Lord Louis Mountbatten, Sardar Patel if you want to look any of them up.

Thanks for listening - drop me a line at [email protected].

Greg

After the Mutiny of 1857 by military personnel in the employ of the East India Company, the British Crown took over rule in India.  It would last until Indian independence 90 years later.  It was a long, rocky road to independence - have a listen to find out about what happened in the intervening years.  One more episode to go after this one!

Thanks for listening - send me an email at [email protected].

In Episode 1, I discussed the different players contributing to the rising tensions in the Spanish Republic in the years leading up to 1936.  They were the same tensions that were growing across Europe during the years of the Great Depression and all of the instability that had come as a result of the poor economy, failing empires as well as growing communist and fascist movements.  Listen now to how the military coup turned into a civil war and how Franco remained the ruler of Spain until the 1970s.

The civil war that ravaged Spain in the years leading up to World War II has been a footnote to the greater conflicts in Europe in the early 20th century.  But it had much greater implications; in some ways it became an extension of the Russian civil war.   It was a testing ground for the Nazi war machine, and it allowed Hitler to see how far he could push the boundaries with France, Britain and Russia, years before the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact or Chamberlain's infamous "peace in our time".

The Spanish Civil War was a harbinger of things to come.  We should all pay close attention because tensions that exist now have a lot of similarities to what Spain was dealing with close to 100 years ago.

Enjoy part 1.

If you have patiently listened to the first 2 episodes of this series, I hope you feel educated about the long history of this region.  The previous hours have been a preparation to help explain what happened in the 1990s.  Yugoslavia is breaking apart in 1991 and there is growing tension between the different Yugoslav republics.  The politicians have started to prey on their citizens' worst fears about each other.  Hundreds of thousands of people will have to live through the worst European war since the end of World War II.

And international diplomacy will be challenged to rise to the call, and fail over and over again.  It is in Bosnia that we will learn the term 'ethnic cleansing' and relearn the word genocide, and learn that despite the promise to never let that happen again, when put to the test, we are more than willing to watch from the sidelines.