Curated playlist
Fascist states
- Federal State of AustriaThe Federal State of Austria lasted just four years, from 1934 to 1938, but its story is one of the most compressed political dramas in modern European history. A chancellor seized dictatorial power using a World War I emergency law. A…
- 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…
- 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…
- 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…
- 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…
- Kingdom of GreeceThe Kingdom of Greece was born from a secret society formed in 1814 by three men who met in Odesa. Nikolaos Skoufas, Emmanuil Xanthos, and Athanasios Tsakalov had one purpose: to unite all Greeks in an armed uprising against Ottoman rule,…
- 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…
- 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…
- 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…