Axis History Podcast : A History of Tyranny in the 20th Century

Americans who remember World War II reminisce about how it brought the country together. The less popular truth behind this warm nostalgia: until the attack on Pearl Harbor, America was deeply, dangerously divided.

Bradley W. Hart's Hitler's American Friends exposes the homegrown antagonists who sought to protect and promote Hitler, leave Europeans (and especially European Jews) to fend for themselves, and elevate the Nazi regime.

Some of these friends were Americans of German heritage who joined the Bund, whose leadership dreamed of installing a stateside Führer. Some were as bizarre and hair-raising as the Silver Shirt Legion, run by an eccentric who claimed that Hitler fulfilled a religious prophesy. Some were Midwestern Catholics like Father Charles Coughlin, an early right-wing radio star who broadcast anti-Semitic tirades. They were even members of Congress who used their franking privilege—sending mail at cost to American taxpayers—to distribute German propaganda. And celebrity pilot Charles Lindbergh ended up speaking for them all at the America First Committee.

We try to tell ourselves it couldn't happen here, but Americans are not immune to the lure of fascism. Hitler's American Friends is a powerful look at how the forces of evil manipulate ordinary people, how we stepped back from the ledge, and the disturbing ease with which we could return to it.

Purchase your copy of Hitler's American Friends here: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250148957

Attribution For The Opening Speech Source: In 1939 the Nazis Held a Rally at Madison Square Garden | Topic

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eq9yst4W-6c&t=243s

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In this series Doctor Craig Coenen guides us through the fascinating andterrifyinghistory of Auschwitz.

But in this series we don't start with the camp and the foreboding train tracks of terror, instead we start with a town in the Medieval world.

Taking us back to the Middle Ages Dr. Coenen will take us through the history of this town as we watch a variety of peoples attempt to settle it while various powers fight to control it. From social harmony to vicious antisemitism we see a complicated history that in a way is telling of the horror that is to come and especially as we approach the birth of the twentieth century.

Song Attribution: "Schindler's List " - Yerushalayim Shel Zahav ~ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=92UaUyJZ6ZE

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'It's like being in a dream', commented Joseph Goebbels when he visited Nazi-occupied Paris in the summer of 1940. Dream and reality did indeed intermingle in the culture of the Third Reich, racialist fantasies and spectacular propaganda set-pieces contributing to this atmosphere alongside more benign cultural offerings such as performances of classical music or popular film comedies.

A cultural palette that catered to the tastes of the majority helped encourage acceptance of the regime. The Third Reich was therefore eager to associate itself with comfortable middle-brow conventionality, while at the same time exploiting the latest trends that modern mass culture had to offer. And it was precisely because the culture of the Nazi period accommodated such a range of different needs and aspirations that it was so successfully able to legitimize war, imperial domination, and destruction.

Doctor Moritz Föllmer turns the spotlight on this fundamental aspect of the Third Reich's successful cultural appeal in this ground-breaking new study, investigating what 'culture' meant for people in the years between 1933 and 1945: for convinced National Socialists at one end of the spectrum, via the legions of the apparently 'unpolitical', right through to anti-fascist activists, Jewish people, and other victims of the regime at the other end of the spectrum. Relating the everyday experience of people living under Nazism, he is able to give us a privileged insight into the question of why so many Germans enthusiastically embraced the regime and identified so closely with it.

Support Dr. Föllmer by purchasing his books here: https://global.oup.com/academic/product/culture-in-the-third-reich-9780198814603?cc=us&lang=en&

Link to his Academia Page: https://uva.academia.edu/MoritzF%C3%B6llmer

For more information on Doctor Moritz Föllmer Check here :https://www.uva.nl/profiel/f/o/m.foellmer/m.foellmer.html?cb

Music Attribution: Beethoven - Symphony n°9 - Berlin / Furtwängler 1942

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_AI9kp02eq0

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This is the story of the biggest seaborne landing in history.

Codenamed Operation HUSKY, the Allied assault on Sicily on 10 July 1943 remains the largest amphibious invasion ever mounted in world history, landing more men in a single day than at any other time. That day, over 160,000 British, American and Canadian troops were dropped from the sky or came ashore, more than on D-Day just under a year later. It was also preceded by an air campaign that marked a new direction and dominance of the skies by Allies.

The subsequent thirty-eight-day Battle for Sicily was one of the most dramatic of the entire Second World War, involving daring raids by special forces, deals with the Mafia, attacks across mosquito-infested plains and perilous assaults up almost sheer faces of rock and scree.

It was a brutal campaign - the violence was extreme, the heat unbearable, the stench of rotting corpses intense and all-pervasive, the problems of malaria, dysentery and other diseases a constant plague. And all while trying to fight a way across an island of limited infrastructure and unforgiving landscape, and against a German foe who would not give up.

It also signaled the beginning of the end of the War in the West. From here on, Italy ceased to participate in the war, the noose began to close around the neck of Nazi Germany, and the coalition between the United States and Britain came of age. Most crucially, it would be a critical learning exercise before Operation OVERLORD, the Allied invasion of Normandy, in June 1944.

Based on his own battlefield studies in Sicily and on much new research over the past thirty years, James Holland's SICILY '43 offers a vital new perspective on a major turning point in World War II. It is a timely, powerful and dramatic account by a master military historian and will fill a major gap in the narrative history of the Second World War.

GET YOUR COPY HERE:https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/111/1118944/sicily--43/9781787632936.html

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The legendary and renowned historian of the Third Reich, Professor Sir Richard Evans challenges and debunks many myths and conspiracy theories relating to Hitler and Nazi Germany.

"The idea that nothing happens by chance in history, that nothing is quite what it seems to be at first sight, that everything is the result of the secret machinations of malign groups of people manipulating everything from behind the scenes - these notions are as old as history itself. But conspiracy theories are becoming more popular and more widespread in the twenty-first century. Nowhere have they become more obvious than in revisionist accounts of the history of the Third Reich. Long-discredited conspiracy theories have taken on a new lease of life, given credence by claims of freshly discovered evidence and novel angles of investigation." ~The Hitler Conspiracies Synopsis.

In this episode, Sir Evans leads us into history, historiography and the dangers of conspiracy theories and fictions that are presented as alternative truth.

Join us as we attack and forever lay to rest these five conspiracy theories:

(1) The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, its origins and its supposed influence on the Nazis.

(2) The Stab in the Back, the myth and fictitious propaganda that the German Army was stabbed in the back by Jews and Socialists.

(3) That the Nazis burned down the Reichstag in order to seize power.

(4) That Rudolph Hess flew to Germany on a mission by Adolf Hitler only for the mission to be suppressed by Winston Churchill.

(5) That Hitler didn't commit suicide but instead fled Berlin and made his way to a foreign land.

Thoroughly, this great historian and scholar valiantly leads us on a journey through history, misinformation and lies to forever set the record straight in a most knightly and valiant manner, while leaving us with a sobering message and that is the daily attack that history is under from those wish to bend it to their agenda and will. And we are reminded that it is our job to make history matter and ensure that it is taught rightly and correctly.

Preorder your copy today: https://www.amazon.com/Hitler-Conspiracies-Protocols-Reichstag-Rudolf/dp/0190083050/

Music Attribution.

Adolf Hitler Speech at Krupp Factory in Germany (1935) British Pathé

Das Lied der Deutschen [Former German anthem][ English translation]

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