Curated playlist
Eastern European theatre of World War II
- 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…
- 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…
- Occupation of Czechoslovakia (1938–1945)On the 1st of October 1938, German troops crossed into the Sudetenland, and Czechoslovakia began to disappear. What followed was not a sudden conquest but a methodical dismemberment, stretching across seven years and carried out in stages…
- Romania in World War IIRomania in World War II began with King Carol II proclaiming neutrality, then ended with the country having sent more troops to fight the Soviet Union than all of Germany's other allies combined. In the summer of 1940, the USSR occupied…
- 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…
- Hungary in World War IIIn 1920, the Treaty of Trianon stripped Hungary of two-thirds of its territory. This loss defined Hungarian politics for the next two decades. The Great Depression deepened the national despair. By 1932, Regent Miklós Horthy appointed…
- Winter WarThe Winter War began on the 30th of November 1939, when the Soviet Union sent 21 divisions and 450,000 men across the Finnish border. Within hours, bombers struck Helsinki, killing around 100 civilians and leveling more than 50 buildings.…
- Lapland WarThe Lapland War began not with a declaration but with a surrender demand issued at around 08:00 on the 28th of September 1944, when Finnish advance units halted a small German rearguard contingent some 20 kilometres southwest of…
- Slovak National UprisingThe Slovak National Uprising, known in Slovak as Slovenské národné povstanie and abbreviated SNP, is remembered today as Povstanie roku 1944, the Uprising of 1944. It ranks among the largest uprisings against Nazism and its allies anywhere…
- Balkans campaign (World War II)On the 28th of October 1940, Italian troops crossed into Greece, setting off a chain of events that would consume the entire Balkan peninsula within seven months. That single act of aggression did not unfold as Benito Mussolini planned.…
- Eastern Front (World War II)The Eastern Front of World War II began in the predawn hours of the 22nd of June 1941, when ninety-nine German divisions crossed into Soviet territory from the Baltic to the Black Sea. Historian Geoffrey Roberts has calculated that more…