Curated playlist
Axis powers
- German–Soviet Axis talksIn November 1940, Vyacheslav Molotov stepped off a train in Berlin to what should have been an impossible scene: an orchestra inside Nazi Germany playing The Internationale, the anthem of world communism, for the first time since 1933. The…
- Pact of SteelThe Pact of Steel was signed on the 22nd of May 1939, binding Germany and Italy to go to war together. Foreign ministers Joachim von Ribbentrop and Galeazzo Ciano put their names to a document that obliged each country to aid the other…
- Case AntonCase Anton, known in German as Unternehmen Anton, was the military occupation of Vichy France carried out by Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy in November 1942. Within the span of two days, a regime that had existed in a kind of political…
- Continuation WarThe Continuation War placed Finland in one of the strangest positions of the entire Second World War: a small Nordic democracy fighting alongside Nazi Germany, insisting it was not actually an ally. On the 25th of June 1941, Finland…
- Vichy FranceVichy France began on the 10th of July 1940, the day the French National Assembly voted by 569 votes to 80 to hand absolute power to an 84-year-old military hero named Marshal Philippe Pétain. France had just suffered a catastrophic…
- A–A lineThe A-A line was a line drawn across a map of the Soviet Union that Germany's military planners believed would end the war in the east. Named for the two cities anchoring its ends, Arkhangelsk in the north and Astrakhan in the south, it…
- Soviet–Japanese Neutrality PactAfter Stalin signed the Soviet-Japanese Neutrality Pact, he did something almost no one had seen him do. He personally saw off Japan's Foreign Minister, Yosuke Matsuoka, at a train station. Stalin rarely appeared before foreign diplomats…
- Generalplan OstGeneralplan Ost, abbreviated GPO, was Nazi Germany's blueprint for the permanent colonization of Central and Eastern Europe through mass murder, forced starvation, and the wholesale removal of entire peoples. Had it been carried out in…
- Kingdom of RomaniaThe Kingdom of Romania was born on the 15th of March 1881, when the Romanian parliament raised the country to the status of a kingdom and crowned a German prince as its first king. That prince, Karl Eitel Friedrich Zephyrinus Ludwig von…
- Slovak Republic (1939–1945)On the 14th of March 1939, the Slovak parliament gathered in Bratislava and voted unanimously to break away from Czechoslovakia. The vote came under extraordinary pressure. Franz Karmasin, leader of the German minority in Slovakia, had…
- Axis occupation of GreeceThe Axis occupation of Greece has an unlikely prelude: a military defeat for the powers that would soon run the country. In the early hours of the 28th of October 1940, Italian ambassador Emanuele Grazzi woke Greek premier Ioannis Metaxas…
- Fascist ItalyFascist Italy is the name given to the period from 1922 to 1943, when Benito Mussolini's National Fascist Party ruled the Kingdom of Italy. The regime's own 1935 Doctrine of Fascism declared the Fascist State was "a synthesis and a unit…
- Thailand in World War IIThailand in World War II sits at one of history's stranger crossroads: a small nation that switched sides without quite surrendering, that declared war and then legally voided the declaration, and that ended the conflict without ever…
- Empire of JapanThe Empire of Japan lasted 79 years, beginning with the Meiji Restoration on the 3rd of January 1868 and ending with the ratification of the Constitution of Japan on the 3rd of May 1947. Albrecht Furst von Urach, writing in a 1942 booklet…
- Anti-Comintern PactOn the 25th of November 1936, in the offices of a semi-official diplomatic bureau that operated outside Germany's formal foreign ministry, two ambassadors put their signatures to a document that would reshape the alignment of the world's…
- Axis powersThe Axis powers launched the deadliest conflict in human history, and they did it with far less unity than their opponents ever imagined. Nazi Germany, the Kingdom of Italy, and the Empire of Japan stood at the center of the coalition, yet…
- Molotov–Ribbentrop PactThe Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact was signed in Moscow on the 24th of August 1939, and within a week Germany had invaded Poland. What made this treaty so astonishing was not merely its contents but the sheer improbability of its existence. Two…
- Kingdom of Hungary (1920–1946)The Kingdom of Hungary, as it existed between 1920 and 1946, had no king. That was the paradox at the heart of this central European state. An admiral with no fleet ruled a landlocked country in the name of a monarchy with no monarch, and…
- Kingdom of ItalyOn the 17th of March 1861, Victor Emmanuel II of Sardinia was proclaimed King of Italy in Turin. This event marked the birth of a new state from decades of struggle known as the Risorgimento. The movement to unite the Italian peninsula…
- Tripartite PactThe Tripartite Pact was signed in Berlin on the 27th of September 1940. Adolf Hitler stood by as Joachim von Ribbentrop, Galeazzo Ciano, and Saburō Kurusu each placed their signature on the document, representing Germany, Italy, and Japan.…
- Yugoslav coup d'étatAt 2:15 in the morning on the 27th of March 1941, military officers fanned out across Belgrade and seized control of radio stations, bridges, barracks, and government ministries. By 2:00 pm that same day, every strategic location in the…
- Nazi GermanyNazi Germany lasted just twelve years, from 1933 to 1945, yet in that span it launched the deadliest war in human history and carried out the systematic murder of millions of people. Adolf Hitler was appointed Chancellor of Germany on the…
- Japanese occupation of the PhilippinesThe Japanese occupation of the Philippines began on the 8th of December 1941, just ten hours after bombs fell on Pearl Harbor. Within weeks, Manila had fallen. Within months, tens of thousands of soldiers had surrendered on a peninsula…
- ManchukuoManchukuo lasted just thirteen years, from 1932 until its dissolution in 1945, yet it carried the grand title of empire and the trappings of a brand new civilization. A press release from the Japanese Information Service on the 1st of…
- Invasion of YugoslaviaThe invasion of Yugoslavia began on the 6th of April 1941. German-led Axis forces attacked the Kingdom of Yugoslavia in what became known as the April War, or Operation 25. Adolf Hitler ordered it after a Yugoslav coup d'état overthrew a…
- Italian Social RepublicThe Italian Social Republic existed for just 19 months, yet its name carries a weight that still shapes Italian politics today. Proclaimed on the 23rd of September 1943 in the chaos following Italy's armistice with the Allies, it was a…
- New Order (Nazism)On the 30th of January 1941, Adolf Hitler stood before his followers and proclaimed a "European New Order." The phrase sounded almost benign, like a bureaucratic reorganization. But the Nazi vision behind it was something far darker: a…
- UntermenschUntermensch. The word itself sounds like a verdict. In German, it literally means 'underman' or 'sub-man', and when the Nazi regime printed nearly four million copies of a pamphlet bearing that title, they were not writing philosophy. They…
- Italian EmpireThe Italian Empire, known in Italian as the Impero coloniale italiano, spanned nearly eight decades, from 1882 to 1960. At its height, between 1936 and 1941, it stretched across the territories of present-day Libya, Eritrea, Somalia, and…
- Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity SphereThe Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere was one of the most ambitious and cynical political projects of the twentieth century. Japan's Foreign Minister Hachiro Arita coined the name on the 29th of June 1940, giving a radio address that…
- Kingdom of HungaryThe Kingdom of Hungary endured for nearly a thousand years, from 1000 to 1946. That span covers crusades, Ottoman sieges, Habsburg wars, a communist revolution that lasted just a few months, and a regency that had no king. How does a state…
- German military administration in occupied France during World War IIThe German military administration in France arrived in Paris in June 1940, and within weeks a swastika flag hung from the Hôtel de Ville while another flew above the Eiffel Tower. Many Parisians could not get over the shock of seeing it.…
- Hakkō ichiuHakkō ichiu is a Japanese political slogan that translates as the divine right of the Empire of Japan to unify the eight corners of the world. Those six syllables shaped the ideological backbone of an empire and were used to justify wars…
- LebensraumLebensraum, the German word for "living space", began as a dry term in a biologist's book review and ended as the ideological engine behind the worst war of annihilation in human history. On the 29th of April 1945, with the Red Army…
- German-occupied EuropeGerman-occupied Europe was, at its peak in 1941-1942, a continent where more than half the entire population lived under the direct rule or influence of Nazi Germany and its Axis partners. Picture the geographic scale: Wehrmacht forces…
- Spain during World War IISpain during World War II occupied one of the strangest positions of any nation in the conflict. Francisco Franco, the dictator who had won power with German and Italian guns, sat at the edge of a war he had nearly joined, watching empires…