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On the afternoon of May 14th, 1940, beleaguered citizens in the Dutch city of Rotterdam looked skyward as they heard the approaching drone of German bombers; through the thick, noxious smoke drifting upward from burning buildings, they could just make out the massed formations of Heinkel HE-111’s, the infamous black balkenkreuz insignia stark against their white undercarriages. For the next quarter of an hour, over a thousand high explosive bombs would smash the Dutch into submission, murdering over 700 civilians and devastating an entire city, callously shattering its short-lived defiance in the face of Nazi tyranny. When the dust had settled, questions arose about how this atrocity - which German field commanders claimed was accidental - happened? Worse, were the theories that it was a deliberate act intended to force Dutch capitulation...

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Jonathan Glazer's 2023 critically acclaimed film The Zone of Interest follows the life of Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Hoss and his family as they go about their daily lives, right next to the infamous concentration camp. It shows the unsettling juxtaposition between the comfort felt by the well off Hoss family, and the atrocities committed just over the other side of the wall. 

In reality, this was very much the case: Nazi officials of all ranks simply went about their comfortable day to day lives whilst huge populations of people were being systematically murdered,  in some cases literally, on their doorstep. It can be argued that Adolf Hitler experienced this comfort more than most, as we will explore in today's video. When Hitler wasn't actively taking part in political action, he spent much of his time at the Berghof - a picturesque holiday home in the Bavarian Alps. In fact, with the exception of his headquarters in East Prussia, he spent more time at the Berghof than he would any other location during the course of his time as Fuhrer. Today, we will be exploring the history of the Berghof in detail, discovering how it was used, how the land it sat on came under the possession of one of History's most reprehensible figures.

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“I don’t think of all the misery but of the beauty that still remains.” These are the words of an extraordinary young girl whose words have provided light in one of the darkest chapters of Human history. These are the words of Annelies Marie Frank, more commonly known as Anne and her life has become one of those most in recent history as she recorded the events surrounding her family and their ultimately doomed effort to escape the persecution of the Nazis as they cast their shadow over Europe during the first half of the 1940s. It is a story of youthful hope, the ordinary struggles of everyday adolescent life against a far from ordinary backdrop of fear and persecution and of surviving those extraordinary events not just physically but mentally. This is the tragic tale of Anne Frank.

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How The "Tet" Began the End of The Vietnam War...

In early 1968, while the battle for US outpost Khe Sanh raged on, General Vo Nguyen Giap of the People’s Army of Vietnam, or the PAVN, orchestrated a series of coordinated assaults on over 100 South Vietnamese cities and towns. Considered a major escalation, the Tet Offensive was one of the largest military campaigns of the Vietnam War, resulting in the deaths of over 14,000 civilians, around 5,000 South Vietnamese soldiers and approximately 45,000 North Vietnamese soldiers. In this episode, we will explore the offensive strategy, launched by the Communist North Vietnamese forces, during what should have been a brief respite of peace. These are the events which made up the Tet Offensive.

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The Battle of Khe Sanh was a brutal conflict during the Vietnam War... 

The Khe Sanh Combat Base was located in the Khe Sanh area of northwestern Quảng Trị Province, a coastal province of South Vietnam during the Vietnam War. In late January 1968, the People’s Army of North Vietnam orchestrated a brutal bombardment on the US base, leading the US Marines stationed there to fight back. What ensued was one of the most gruesome battles of the Vietnam War. Welcome to Wars of the World...

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The Soviet-Afghan War raged for nine years and is considered a major part of the overarching Cold War between the US and its allies, and the Soviet Union. A major faction was the Afghan Mujahideen - the Islamist resistance groups that fought against the Soviets and the Republic of Afghanistan - backed by the US, UK, China, Iran and the Arab states of the Persian Gulf, all of whom had waged war against the communist Afghanistan government after it had seized power in 1978 on the back of a coup. The Soviet-Afghan War led to the deaths of around three million Afghans, while refugees fled to Pakistan and Iran. As much as 11.5% of Afghanistan’s population was killed during the conflict, sometimes referred to as “The Soviet Union’s Vietnam.” In this episode, we will explore the Battle for Hill 3234, which took place just over one year before the end of the Soviet-Afghan war, in January of 1988. It saw members of the Soviet Union, supported by the Republic of Afghanistan, attacked by over 200 Mujahideen rebels and Pakistani mercenaries. The resulting conflict would see over 200 Mujahideen dead in a single day. Welcome to Wars of the World...

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During the 1980s, the United States was still struggling to come to grips with its involvement in the Vietnam War and as part of that effort, Hollywood churned out a number of movies with the conflict as its backdrop. For younger audiences especially, they provided an insight into what their fathers or older siblings may have experienced during their tours of duty in the jungles of southeast Asia. One of the most seminal pieces produced in this period was 1987’s Full Metal Jacket directed by legendary director Stanley Kubrick. 

The film demonstrates the process of turning ordinary young men into weapons to be used in war and how that impacts them when they get to the battlefield. Thus, the movie starts in a US Marine boot camp and then transitions to the battlefield of Vietnam just as the Tet Offensive gets underway, the main characters fighting in the streets of a city called Hue. For countless young people at the time, this may have been the first time they would have heard of Hue or been made aware of the battle that was waged there but for the veterans who fought in its streets in early 1968, its name is as engrained on their memories as Iwo Jima or Inchon was to the generations that came prior. In this episode, we are going to look at the origins of the battle, chart some of the key events and discuss its aftermath. This is the story of the Battle of Hue. Welcome to Wars of the World.

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British Army Sergeant Norman Midgley must have thought he had seen it all by April 1945. Even before the war started, he had seen his fair share of both the best and worst of humanity in his vocation as a staff photographer for the Daily Express newspaper based in Manchester, England. When the war started the British Army therefore had a specific task for him in mind given his experience and expertise; specifically as a member of the Army Film and Photographic Unit. 

It was his job to record in pictures the events experienced by British and Commonwealth forces in the fight against the Axis, he and his compatriots being embedded inside frontline British combat units. It was a role no less dangerous than any other soldier on the battlefield and in fact statistically, it was even more so with Midgeley’s unit alone suffering an appalling 1-in-4 casualty rate. 

By the time he found himself travelling in a jeep to a remote location being held by the British 11th Armoured Division in northern Germany, southwest of the town of Bergen on April 18th 1945, much of the fighting had begun to die down and instead he found himself with a new task; recording evidence of Nazi crimes. In that regard, he was told he was being taken to something particularly ghastly and inhuman.

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In this episode, we are going to examine the events leading up to and surrounding the tragedy of the Brno Death March as thousands of ethnic Germans were rounded up in Czechoslovakia and marched to the Austrian border all the while being subjected to the vilest abuse and mistreatment. Many would not make it in this genocide largely forgotten by history for it concerned those labelled as the enemy. Welcome to Wars of the World.

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November 1918 and the war to end all wars comes to its conclusion as the guns on the western front fall silent. For four years prior, the army of German Kaiser Wilhelm II had shot and shelled its way into France and Belgium but had been held back from total victory behind a line of trenches and barbed wire. France had survived but its lands were scarred, and its people felt loss like never before. Thus, when war loomed once again, the French swore they would be ready for it. Using the time given to them by the so-called Phoney War, the period following the invasion of Poland and Hitler striking west, they along with their British allies built up their defences and prepared to keep the German eagle east of their shared border. And yet despite this preparation, it would take the Fuhrer Adolf Hitler less than two months to force the French to sue for peace. In this episode we are going to examine the events leading up to the invasion of France, examine the strategies of both sides and chart the fall of France under the Nazi jagdboot. Welcome to Wars of the World.

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