Curated playlist
Critics of Freemasonry
- Martin HeideggerPhilosopher Martin Heidegger joined the Nazi Party in May 1933. He did so while admired as a leading thinker of being.
- Ezra PoundEzra Pound cut T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land by about half. Eliot called the edits proof of Pound's critical genius.
- Wilhelm IIWilhelm II, the last German Emperor, spent much of his adult life holding a pair of white gloves in his left hand. The gloves made that arm look longer than it was. He reigned from 1888 to 1918 over a country that had become Europe's…
- Frederick William I of PrussiaPrussia's Soldier King sold a West African colony to the Dutch in 1717, preferring to fund his army.
- Thomas CarlyleA housemaid burned the only draft of Thomas Carlyle's first French Revolution volume. He rewrote it from nothing.
- Francisco FrancoFrancisco Franco was shot in the abdomen at 23 and was not expected to live. He ruled Spain from 1939 to 1975.
- Ion AntonescuHitler's ally Ion Antonescu at times refused to hand Romanian Jews to German death camps.
- Pope Pius VIIPope Pius VII was crowned in 1800 wearing a papier-mâché tiara. French forces had confiscated the real papal tiaras.
- Mikhail BakuninKarl Marx had the anarchist Mikhail Bakunin expelled from the First International in 1872.
- Lutz Graf Schwerin von KrosigkHitler's finance minister was among the first to say "Iron Curtain" on radio, on 2 May 1945.