Today the Holocaust is misunderstood. At worst, it is simply equated with the death camp at Auschwitz, which actually killed only 1 in 6 Jews during the war, and became active, from the spring of 1943, only after three-quarters of all Jews killed in the Holocaust were dead. Contrary to popular belief, the vast majority of Jews killed never set foot in a concentration camp and most concentration camp victims were not Jews - concentration camps were not the same as death camps but housed slave labour, albeit in appalling conditions that led to many deaths. We tend to see the Holocaust as a single event, and as a purely German-directed undertaking, controlled from the top down, when in reality it was a complex, evolving, Europe-wide process, often inconsistent and contradictory, which could only have been carried out with the support and initiative of many non-German perpetrators, at a national, regional and local level. In Episode 5 of the new series of Unknown Warriors, one of the most eminent Holocaust historians Christian Gerlach offers a much more nuanced and complex perspective on the Holocaust which takes into account the wider context of the bitter Soviet-German struggle on the eastern front in which arbitrary and lethal violence was also perpetrated against millions of non-Jewish victims. If you think you know about WW2, it's time to think again. www.unknownwarriorspod.co.uk An Understanding History podcast

It's now abundantly clear that more people died of starvation and malnutrition in the Second World War than perished in battle. It's one reason why we describe this second global conflict as a total war, for civilians were victims of the struggle on a scale unprecedented in history. In most cases, death from hunger came about as a natural spin-off from the devastation that such a vast war brought with it - destroying as it did whole economies, entire towns and cities, as well as national and international infrastructures and transport links. But some combatant countries chose to export hunger to its enemies, using it quite deliberately as a weapon of war. The most obvious case was Nazi Germany's attempt to starve some 30 to 40 million people in the Soviet Union - a scheme labelled the Hunger Plan by its perpetrators - in order that the German forces invading the USSR from June 1941 could be self-sufficient in food. In the event, the Plan failed - forcibly requisitioning grain and livestock turned farmers against the invaders - with the result that the Wehrmacht on the Eastern Front soon ran critically short of food and had to be supplied from the Reich itself, so causing further rationing among German civilians. This was not how the Plan was meant to work at all. Social historian Lizzie Collingham tells us about the Nazi Hunger Plan and other ways in which food and its supply could create life-or-death situations in WW2. Listen to Episode 4 of the new series of Unknown Warriors - in which leading historians show how modern scholarship and fresh perspectives have transformed the received narratives of the Second World War. If you think you know about WW1 and WW2, it's time to think again. www.unknownwarriorspod.co.uk An Understanding History podcast

It's obvious that the Second World War was a global conflict, even more so than WW1, yet we still tend to look at it from a national perspective, which creates false assumptions and skewed parameters. But, equally, these national narratives are very diverse, spread as they are across Europe, the Middle East, the USSR and the Asia-Pacific region, and representing big and small countries, winners and losers, the free and the occupied. To take one tiny detail: VE Day on 8 May in Western Europe is Victory Day on 9 May in Russia. That's because the formal German surrender to the Allies in Berlin was signed late in the evening of 8 May 1945, so did not officially register in Moscow (which lay in a different time zone) until it was May 9. In Putin's Russia today, that difference only goes to underline what is seen as the unique nature of the Soviet contribution to what they call the Great Patriotic War. So, essentially, different combatant countries in WW2 fought different wars, and see and remember the conflict differently as a result. When you marry this sort of detail with the global dimension of the Second World War, you are confronted with a very complex phenomenon indeed. In the second series of Unknown Warriors, launched yesterday, leading historians examine the conflict from a global perspective, and in so doing re-introduce some of the nuance and complexity that, over time, our accepted narratives of WWII have erased or diminished. If you think you know about WW2, it's time to think again. www.unknownwarriorspod.co.uk An Understanding History Podcast

The Real First World War 10 Episodes - Leading Historians - New Perspectives www.unknownwarriorspod.co.uk

As we approach the 104th anniversary of the Armistice on November 11, 1918, it's an opportune moment to get away from the myths and half-truths and reflect on this first global conflict in a more considered way. The popular British narrative about the First World War is that it was wasteful and futile - 'lions led by donkeys'. This view grew to prominence in the 1960s and continued to flourish during the recent centenary of the conflict. But this is not a view shared by professional historians. Over the last twenty to thirty years, using new approaches and fresh sources, they have transformed the picture of 1914-18 that we  have been used to for so long. In books that came out to mark the centenary, they showed that this first global war was altogether stranger, more complex, and more modern, in every sense, than we've been led to believe. In Unknown Warriors, ten leading historians of the First World War tell us how their work challenges the traditional wisdom. If you think you know about the First World War, this series will make you think again. www.unknownwarriorspod.co.uk An Understanding History podcast

The Real First World War If you want to read about this unusual WW1 podcast series and the ideas behind it, you can go to the online magazine Military History Now where you will find an extended Q & A that summarises the thinking of today's leading historians about this first global conflict. The link is: https://militaryhistorynow.com/2020/01/03/unknown-warriors- podcaster-seeks-to-change-minds-bust-myths-about-ww1/ The article has a link to the first episode in the podcast. Enjoy - and please give feedback on the website if you want to ask questions, discuss issues or simply voice your appreciation: www.unknownwarriorspod.co.uk An Understanding History Podcast

Total War The idea of total war - which has come back into use during the worldwide battle against Covid - is usually associated with the Second World War. In fact, it had already come into being, out of necessity, during WW1, as the combatant nations began to understand that this was an existential conflict in which defeat could mean national destruction. WW1 historian William Philpott argues that attrition was a natural component of such a war. Listen to Episode 9 of Unknown Warriors. www.unknownwarriorspod.co.uk. An Understanding History podcast.

As we approach the 103rd anniversary of the Armistice.... Despite the global nature of the First World War, the popular British narrative of the conflict has tended to focus almost exclusively on the Western Front - and often only on the 'tragic' elements of that trench-bound struggle, the Somme and Passchendaele. And yet the year 1918, in which the Allied coalition decisively defeated the German army, is often overlooked. In my series Unknown Warriors, leading WW1 historians like Gary Sheffield, Jonathan Boff and Peter Hart look again at the war on the Western Front to reveal that the military on all sides had to learn the hard way how to overcome the problems of fighting with mass armies in a highly challenging theatre of combat. After many mistakes and false starts, the French and British finally, in 1918, got their act together to force a German retreat and collapse. How they did this - and how the Germans finally reached the end of their tether - is graphically described. www.unknownwarriorspod.co.uk. An Understanding History podcast.

Was WW1 a 'just' war? Big wars have a habit of changing what warfare means. If your enemy can find a means to best you, however heinous, they will almost invariably use it, for moral squeamishness quickly collapses in the face of national survival and the imperative to win. The Nobel Prize-winning German chemist Fritz Haber once said: 'During peacetime a scientist belongs to the world but during wartime he belongs to his country.' He practised what he preached and went on to develop poison gas, which the Germans first used on the Western Front in April 1915. The Allies soon responded in kind. Barely two weeks after those first chlorine clouds had floated into the French and Canadian lines at Ypres, the passenger liner Lusitania was sunk by a German U-boat, with the loss of almost 1200 people. Just over three weeks later a German Zeppelin randomly dropped bombs on London for the first time, killing seven and injuring 35, heralding a campaign of air raids on civilian centres that were carried out by both sides with increasing ferocity. Poison gas, the sinking of passenger ships and the aerial bombardment of civilians were all banned by pre-1914 international agreements on the conduct of war. Yet , as author and historian Diana Preston tells us, within just six weeks in 1915 all these ethical lines were crossed. WW2, of course, would take this moral slide to an unprecedented level of depravity, but it is perhaps no accident that Haber's team were later responsible for making Zyklon-B, the gas used in the Nazi death camps. Listen to Crossing The Line in the WW1 podcast series Unknown Warriors: www.unknownwarriorspod. co. uk An Understanding History podcast.

Exactly 105 years ago today, the 11th Battalion of the Border Regiment, nicknamed the Lonsdales (after their patron the Earl of Lonsdale), embarked from Folkestone for France and the Western Front. On 1 July, 1915 - the first day of the battle of the Somme - the battalion lost 490 other ranks and 25 officers out of a total of 850 men. 8 days later, after retrieving what was left of their dead comrades, members of the battalion were ordered on a trench raid. It never happened after the intervention of the battalion MO, who said the men were severely shell-shocked and had had enough. The upshot was that, after a court of enquiry, the doctor was relieved of his post and the Lonsdales were humiliated before the rest of the regiment, labelled a disgrace to the army. This brutal episode marked the beginning of the British Army's attempt to eliminate the incidence of shell shock on the Western Front by making an example of so-called 'shirkers' and by erasing any record of the term among casualties. Listen to the story of the Lonsdales - and its repercussions for the British Army in WW1 - as told by the historian Taylor Downing in Episode 5 of Unknown Warriors. www.unknownwarriorspod.co.uk . An Understanding History podcast.

Why, over 100 years later, do we still believe that the outbreak of the First World War was greeted with universal enthusiasm in the combatant nations? In France, for example, the authorities were worried that many people would ignore the call-up. In Germany it was mainly middle-class students who were gung-ho. On the eve of war, there was a huge demo in Trafalgar Square protesting against it. Photographs are partly to blame for the myth: crowds in 1914 throwing their hats in the air, queues at recruiting offices, etc. Historians now see this in a much more nuanced way, showing that only certain minority groups within these populations really wanted war. Listen to UCL's Professor Heather Jones talking about this and other popular misconceptions about WW1 in unknownwarriorspod.co.uk . An Understanding History podcast.

We tend to define the First World War as 1914-18, but for most of central/eastern Europe and the Middle East 1918 had no meaning. As huge empires imploded, war did not end in these territories; instead, brutal ethnic and civil conflicts erupted, rendering the 'inter-war' period a bit of a misnomer. Listen to Robert Gerwarth at unknownwarriorspod.co.uk An Understanding History podcast.