Curated playlist
World War II political leaders
- Franklin D. RooseveltFranklin Delano Roosevelt won the presidency four times, the only person in American history to serve more than two terms. He took office on the 4th of March 1933, when a quarter of the workforce had no job and 32 of the 48 states had shut…
- Winston ChurchillWinston Churchill was born on the 30th of November 1874 inside Blenheim Palace, the ancestral home his family had held for generations in Oxfordshire. The building itself said something about who he was: a man descended from John…
- Joseph StalinJoseph Stalin signed his articles "K. Stalin", an alias drawn from the Russian word for steel, translated as "Man of Steel." The man who chose it was born Ioseb Besarionis dze Jughashvili, into poverty in the small Georgian city of Gori.…
- Neville ChamberlainNeville Chamberlain stepped off a plane at Heston Aerodrome on the 30th of September 1938 and waved a single sheet of paper at the waiting crowd. He had just returned from Munich, where he had signed away a piece of Czechoslovakia to Adolf…
- Heinrich HimmlerHeinrich Himmler was reluctant to open his mouth. A British doctor in Lüneburg leaned in to examine it on the 23rd of May 1945, and the prisoner jerked his head away. Then he bit down on a hidden potassium cyanide pill and collapsed onto…
- Mohammad Reza PahlaviMohammad Reza Pahlavi was born on the 26th of October 1919 in Tehran, the eldest son of a Brigadier-General who had not yet become king. He died in Egyptian exile on the 27th of July 1980-18 months after the revolution that ended his…
- Adolf HitlerAdolf Hitler was born on the 20th of April 1889 in Braunau am Inn, a town in Austria-Hungary near the German border. He died by suicide on the 30th of April 1945, in a bunker beneath a city in ruins. Between those two dates lies the…
- Benito MussoliniBenito Mussolini was named after a Mexican president. His father, a blacksmith and a socialist, chose the name Benito for the liberal Mexican leader Benito Juárez. The middle names, Andrea and Amilcare, honored the Italian socialists…
- Alexei KosyginAlexei Kosygin spent the last night of his life alone in a Moscow hospital, stripped of his government protection, his communications, and the luxury goods he had accumulated across five decades of Soviet power. When he died on the 18th of…
- Chiang Kai-shekChiang Kai-shek was born on the 31st of October 1887, in Xikou, a small town in Fenghua, Zhejiang, about 30 kilometers west of central Ningbo. His father died when he was eight years old. His mother, whom he later described as the…
- Harry S. TrumanHarry S. Truman became the 33rd president of the United States not by winning an election, but by walking into a room where Eleanor Roosevelt told him her husband was dead. He had been vice president for only 82 days. He had never been…
- Vyacheslav MolotovVyacheslav Molotov was the only person in the twentieth century to have shaken hands with Vladimir Lenin, Joseph Stalin, Winston Churchill, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Adolf Hitler, Rudolf Hess, Hermann Göring, and Heinrich Himmler. That single…
- Charles de GaulleCharles de Gaulle was born on the 22nd of November 1890 in Lille, the third of five children in a devoutly Catholic, conservative, and monarchist household. He died on the 9th of November 1970, leaving his presidential memoirs unfinished.…
- Clement AttleeClement Attlee walked into Buckingham Palace on the 26th of July 1945 to be appointed Prime Minister. King George VI stood waiting. Both men were famously reluctant talkers. A silence stretched between them until Attlee finally offered:…
- Carol II of RomaniaCarol II of Romania left his country on the 6th of September 1940 with a train loaded with 30 truckloads of his personal fortune. As the train passed through Timisoara station, the Iron Guard opened fire in a failed attempt to kill him.…
- Archibald Wavell, 1st Earl WavellArchibald Wavell lost his left eye at the Second Battle of Ypres in 1915, and he spent the next three decades commanding armies across some of the most strategically complex theatres of the twentieth century. He was a poet who disliked…
- Joachim von RibbentropJoachim von Ribbentrop was born on the 30th of April 1893 and hanged on the 16th of October 1946, and in the years between those two dates he rose from selling champagne across Europe to signing the documents that helped ignite the Second…
- Francisco FrancoFrancisco Franco was shot in the abdomen in 1916, aged 23, during an assault on Moroccan positions at El Biutz, in the hills near Ceuta. The wound was so serious that he was not expected to live. His Moroccan troops took his survival as a…
- Ion AntonescuIon Antonescu was executed by a military firing squad on the 1st of June 1946, at a site outside Jilava called Valea Piersicilor, the Valley of the Peach Trees. He refused a blindfold. When the order came, he raised his hat in salute. His…
- Mamoru ShigemitsuMamoru Shigemitsu walked with a cane and an artificial right leg to the deck of a battleship on the 2nd of September 1945 and signed the document that ended Japan's war. The leg was gone because of a bomb thrown thirteen years earlier at a…
- HirohitoHirohito reigned over Japan for 63 years, from 1926 until his death in 1989, the longest reign of any emperor in Japanese history. He sat on the Chrysanthemum Throne as the 124th emperor in the traditional order of succession. During those…
- Josip Broz TitoJosip Broz, known to the world as Tito, once wrote a letter that read: "Stalin. Stop sending assassins to murder me. We have already caught five, one with a bomb, another with a rifle." He added that if it did not stop, he would send one…
- Lutz Graf Schwerin von KrosigkLutz Graf Schwerin von Krosigk holds a strange and troubling distinction: he was the finance minister of Germany from 1932 all the way to 1945, outlasting three chancellors and serving under the man who would start the deadliest war in…
- Hideki TojoHideki Tojo was awakened at 5:00 a.m. on the 8th of December 1941 and told that Japanese planes had struck the American naval base at Pearl Harbor. Within hours, he was on the radio announcing that Japan was now at war with the United…
- İsmet İnönüİsmet İnönü stood inside a railroad car near Adana in January 1943, face to face with Winston Churchill. Turkey had spent years balancing between the Allies and the Axis, and Churchill had traveled to Ankara specifically to pull it off…
- 14th Dalai LamaTenzin Gyatso was born Lhamo Thondup on the 6th of July 1935, in a small farming hamlet called Taktser, on what the Dalai Lama himself has called the "real border" between the Tibetan region of Amdo and China. His family spoke neither Amdo…