Curated playlist
Politics of World War II
- Europe firstEurope first named a strategy the United States never quite followed in its own opening moves. In the first six months after the US entered World War II in December 1941, its army sent more than 300,000 soldiers to the Pacific. Fewer than…
- Restatement of Policy on GermanyJames F. Byrnes, the US secretary of state, delivered the "Restatement of Policy on Germany" in Stuttgart on the 6th of September, 1946. It quickly acquired a second name: the Speech of Hope. That hope was not evenly distributed. Germans…
- German occupation of Estonia during World War IIThe German occupation of Estonia during World War II began in the summer of 1941 and lasted until 1944, a period that would leave a permanent mark on a small nation caught between two totalitarian powers. Just one week before German troops…
- Four PolicemenFranklin D. Roosevelt first voiced the idea of a global police force in August 1941 during his initial meeting with British Prime Minister Winston Churchill. He envisioned a trusteeship led by great powers to oversee smaller nations rather…
- 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…
- Declaration by United NationsOn the 1st of January 1942, four world leaders gathered in Washington D.C. and signed a single short document that would reshape the entire course of the war and, ultimately, the architecture of the modern world. Franklin D. Roosevelt,…
- Potsdam AgreementThe Potsdam Agreement was signed on the 1st of August 1945, at Cecilienhof Palace in Potsdam, as the guns fell silent across Europe but war still raged in the Pacific. Three men put their names to it: General Secretary Joseph Stalin,…
- World War II by countryWorld War II by country is a subject that forces a reckoning with scale. The war drew in almost every nation on earth, and estimates of the dead range from 40 million to 90 million people, a span so wide it reflects the sheer difficulty of…
- Anglo-German Naval AgreementPart V of the 1919 Treaty of Versailles imposed severe limitations on Germany's naval forces. The treaty allowed no submarines, no naval aviation, and only six obsolete pre-dreadnought battleships. German naval forces were restricted to…
- 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…
- Morgenthau PlanThe Morgenthau Plan began as a handwritten memorandum in 1944 and very nearly erased one of the world's great industrial nations from the map. Henry Morgenthau Jr., United States Secretary of the Treasury, titled his proposal 'Suggested…
- 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…
- AppeasementAppeasement, the diplomatic policy of granting concessions to an aggressive power in hopes of avoiding conflict, changed world history on the 30th of September 1938. On that date in Munich, Neville Chamberlain emerged from a conference…
- Armistice of CassibileThe Armistice of Cassibile was signed on the 3rd of September 1943, in a tent at an Allied military camp in Sicily, ending Italy's participation in World War II on the side of the Axis. The signing took just minutes. But the road to that…
- Allies of World War IIThe Allies of World War II were an international military coalition that formed in opposition to the Axis powers during the war that ran from 1939 to 1945. On the 1st of January 1942, representatives of 26 countries gathered their…
- Romani HolocaustThe Romani Holocaust was a genocide carried out against the Roma and Sinti people of Europe during World War II. Between 250,000 and 500,000 of them were killed by Nazi Germany and its collaborators. Some scholars place the death toll…
- 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…
- Occupation of the Baltic statesThe occupation of the Baltic states is one of modern Europe's longest and most contested erasures of national sovereignty. In August 1939, in the early hours before dawn, the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany signed a ten-year non-aggression…
- Atlantic CharterThe Atlantic Charter was born on the 14th of August 1941, in the waters of Placentia Bay off the coast of Newfoundland, months before the United States had fired a single shot in World War II. Two men had traveled there in secret to make a…
- 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…
- Opposition to World War IIOpposition to World War II took many forms. Few were stranger than May 1941, when Rudolf Hess parachuted alone into Scotland, carrying a peace proposal from inside Hitler's inner circle. The British did not negotiate. Hess spent the rest…
- Phoney WarThe Phoney War lasted eight months, from September 1939 to May 1940, and it may be one of the strangest intervals in the history of modern warfare. Two of the world's great powers had declared war on Nazi Germany. Their armies sat fully…