Wars of The World

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The Great War – the First World War – had its own stories of Foo Fighters, again set against the paranoid backdrop of technology advancing seemingly out of control. The Airship Scare or Scareship phenomenon became a very real menace to the Allied powers in the years leading up to and during the First World War as the fear of German airship technology conjured up images of cities destroyed from the air, Allied defences being powerless to stop them.

Was this just mass hysteria as is generally accepted?  As we celebrate the month of October, in association with our UFO-themed sister channel Destination Declassified, we are going to examine how a world gripped with fear, began seeing mysterious airships and aircraft in the sky whether they were really there or not and how one of Britain’s most celebrated figures, was left egg-faced to explain them.  Welcome to Wars of the World.
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On the afternoon of May 14th, 1940, beleaguered citizens in the Dutch city of Rotterdam looked skyward as they heard the approaching drone of German bombers; through the thick, noxious smoke drifting upward from burning buildings, they could just make out the massed formations of Heinkel HE-111’s, the infamous black balkenkreuz insignia stark against their white undercarriages. For the next quarter of an hour, over a thousand high explosive bombs would smash the Dutch into submission, murdering over 700 civilians and devastating an entire city, callously shattering its short-lived defiance in the face of Nazi tyranny. When the dust had settled, questions arose about how this atrocity - which German field commanders claimed was accidental - happened? Worse, were the theories that it was a deliberate act intended to force Dutch capitulation...
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Jonathan Glazer's 2023 critically acclaimed film The Zone of Interest follows the life of Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Hoss and his family as they go about their daily lives, right next to the infamous concentration camp. It shows the unsettling juxtaposition between the comfort felt by the well off Hoss family, and the atrocities committed just over the other side of the wall. 

In reality, this was very much the case: Nazi officials of all ranks simply went about their comfortable day to day lives whilst huge populations of people were being systematically murdered,  in some cases literally, on their doorstep. It can be argued that Adolf Hitler experienced this comfort more than most, as we will explore in today's video. When Hitler wasn't actively taking part in political action, he spent much of his time at the Berghof - a picturesque holiday home in the Bavarian Alps. In fact, with the exception of his headquarters in East Prussia, he spent more time at the Berghof than he would any other location during the course of his time as Fuhrer. Today, we will be exploring the history of the Berghof in detail, discovering how it was used, how the land it sat on came under the possession of one of History's most reprehensible figures.
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“I don’t think of all the misery but of the beauty that still remains.” These are the words of an extraordinary young girl whose words have provided light in one of the darkest chapters of Human history. These are the words of Annelies Marie Frank, more commonly known as Anne and her life has become one of those most in recent history as she recorded the events surrounding her family and their ultimately doomed effort to escape the persecution of the Nazis as they cast their shadow over Europe during the first half of the 1940s. It is a story of youthful hope, the ordinary struggles of everyday adolescent life against a far from ordinary backdrop of fear and persecution and of surviving those extraordinary events not just physically but mentally. This is the tragic tale of Anne Frank.
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How The "Tet" Began the End of The Vietnam War...

In early 1968, while the battle for US outpost Khe Sanh raged on, General Vo Nguyen Giap of the People’s Army of Vietnam, or the PAVN, orchestrated a series of coordinated assaults on over 100 South Vietnamese cities and towns. Considered a major escalation, the Tet Offensive was one of the largest military campaigns of the Vietnam War, resulting in the deaths of over 14,000 civilians, around 5,000 South Vietnamese soldiers and approximately 45,000 North Vietnamese soldiers. In this episode, we will explore the offensive strategy, launched by the Communist North Vietnamese forces, during what should have been a brief respite of peace. These are the events which made up the Tet Offensive.
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