Curated playlist
World War II occupied territories
- 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…
- German occupation of AlbaniaOn the 8th of September 1943, Italy signed an armistice with the Allied forces. Within days, German troops were crossing into Albania, and the question of who would control this small Balkan nation was suddenly answered in a language no…
- Italian occupation of FranceOn the 10th of June 1940, Italy declared war against France and Britain. Ten days later, Italian troops crossed into French territory. The German offensive had begun on the 10th of May, pushing forces onto French soil by mid-month. By…
- Anglo-Soviet invasion of IranThe Anglo-Soviet invasion of Iran began before dawn on the 25th of August, 1941, when Royal Air Force aircraft crossed into Iranian airspace and dropped bombs on Tehran and Qazvin. The attack had a name: Operation Countenance. It would be…
- Territories of Poland annexed by the Soviet UnionSeventeen days after Germany invaded Poland in September 1939, the Soviet Union sent its own forces across Poland's eastern border. The region they entered was known as the Kresy, a vast stretch of land totaling more than 200,000 square…
- BizoneBizone is the name for the merged American and British occupation zones in Germany, created on the 1st of January 1947. After World War II, the Allies split defeated Germany four ways. The Americans held the south, the British held the…
- Allied-occupied GermanyAllied-occupied Germany begins not with peace but with erasure. On the 5th of June 1945, the Berlin Declaration extinguished Germany as a sovereign state and placed every square kilometer of it under foreign control. The country that 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…
- 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…
- Protectorate of Bohemia and MoraviaOn the 16th of March 1939, Adolf Hitler stood at Prague Castle and proclaimed that for a thousand years the provinces of Bohemia and Moravia had formed part of the Lebensraum of the German people. With that declaration, a new kind of…
- SudetenlandThe Sudetenland sits at the heart of one of modern Europe's most consequential territorial disputes. In September 1938, Adolf Hitler stood before a crowd at the Sportpalast in Berlin and declared that the Sudetenland was "the last…
- Italian East AfricaItalian East Africa announced itself to the world from the balcony of Palazzo Venezia on the 9th of May 1936, when Benito Mussolini addressed a crowd of two hundred thousand people and declared that Ethiopia was Italian. The territory he…
- Soviet occupation zone in GermanyFour Allied powers claimed German territory in 1945, and the Soviet occupation zone in Germany was Moscow's share. The Potsdam Agreement of August 1945 fixed its borders. Within those borders, the Soviet Military Administration built a…
- Occupation of JapanOn the 2nd of September 1945, aboard the USS Missouri anchored in Tokyo Bay, Japan signed the instrument of surrender that ended the largest war in human history. What followed was something with no real precedent: a foreign power taking…
- Syria–Lebanon campaignThe Syria-Lebanon campaign of 1941 was a war fought between Allied and French forces - but the French on the other side of the line were not fighting for Hitler. They were fighting for Vichy France, a government that had made itself a…
- Allied-occupied AustriaAllied-occupied Austria came into being on the 27th of April 1945, when a provisional cabinet led by Karl Renner declared independence from Nazi Germany, even as fighting still raged in the streets of Vienna. The country that emerged from…
- Battle of MadagascarThe Battle of Madagascar began on the 5th of May 1942, when British forces landed on a remote island in the Indian Ocean that most people had never given a second thought. Madagascar was Vichy French territory, officially neutral in the…
- General GovernmentThe General Government was a zone of German occupation carved out of the defeated Polish state in 1939, and for nearly six years it served as one of the most brutal administrative experiments in the history of modern Europe. Hitler…
- 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…
- World War II in YugoslaviaWorld War II in Yugoslavia was not one war but several, all happening at the same time. On the 6th of April 1941, the German Luftwaffe bombed Belgrade, and within little more than ten days the Royal Yugoslav Army surrendered…
- 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.…
- Soviet occupation of Bessarabia and Northern BukovinaAt 22:00 on the 26th of June 1940, Soviet People's Commissar Vyacheslav Molotov summoned the Romanian minister to Moscow and handed him an ultimatum. Romania had four days to withdraw its military and civil administration from Bessarabia…
- 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…