Fritz Haber, the German chemist who was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1918, was quite a contradiction. By helping develop industrial fertilisers, he could claim to have enabled millions avoid starvation. At the same time, he was the father of poison gas, unleashed for the first time by the Germans on the Western Front in April 1915, and it was at his institute in Berlin after WW1 that Zyklon B was developed, initially as an insecticide but then, by the Nazis, as the principal killing agent in the Holocaust death camps. Jewish by birth and yet patriotically German, Haber's war record did not stop him being ousted by the Nazis from all his eminent posts in the 1930s. He died in exile a broken man in 1934, largely shunned by the Western scientific establishment as a war criminal. Haber once declared: "In peacetime, a scientist belongs to the world, in war he belongs to his country." As Robert Oppenheimer, the 'father of the atom bomb', was also to discover, war and ethics are uneasy bedfellows, nowhere more so than in the fields of science and technology. The historian Diana Preston explains how internationally agreed ethical red lines established before 1914 were rapidly smashed by the military imperatives of the First World War. Listen at unknownwarriorspod.co.uk. This is an Understanding History podcast.

Would Brexit have ever happened if we weren't an island? The idea of European unity is very appealing if, for centuries, your country has been invaded and re-invaded, as happened to most states in mainland Europe over the course of their history. In contrast, foreign occupation (as opposed to setttlement) has been a rarity in Britain, encouraging the popular (but wrong-headed) notion that WW2 in particular fostered, namely that 'we can stand alone'. It's a good example of a lesson from history being applied simplistically and unhistorically. Mull on this when you listen to Mark Connelly's compelling take on memory and the Great War in Ep 10 of unknownwarriorspod.co.uk. This is an Understanding History podcast

Understanding The First World War We think of the First World War as a well defined time span 1914-18, almost as if it took place in some historical vaccuum divorced from the rest of the 20th century. And the recent centenary of the conflict tended to reinforce this impression. But in fact historians of WW1 have long recognised the war's connection to events both before 1914 and after 1918 . In Episode 8 of Unknown Warriors, Professor Robert Gerwarth explains how 1918 did not see an end to war in much of central-eastern Europe and the Middle East as huge empires collapsed and new nation states emerged which themselves contained sizeable foreign minorities and whose borders were often bitterly contested. Well into the 1920s violence continued, particularly against civilians, as paramilitary groups and citizen revolutionaries whipped up a reign of terror that witnessed brutality and ethnic cleansing on an epic scale, foreshadowing the more familiar racialised atrocities of the 1930s and the Second World War. Find out more at www.unknownwarriorspod.co.uk . This is an Understanding History podcast.

Understanding The First World War Memory and remembrance have played a key part in the way we interpret the First World War. But memory tends to be selective and we generally look back at the past through the lens of the present, projecting onto historical events our own modern concerns and preoccupations. Mark Connelly is a leading historian of society, culture and war, and his most recent co-authored work on the famous Belgian town of Ypres, and the way it became a holy site of memory in the years after the First World War, sheds a revealing light on how later generations used the conflict to reinforce a particular, usually national, interpretation, and in so doing created enduring myths and omissions of the truth. The British and Germans alike had their own post-war agendas in memorialising aspects of the Western Front , while the Russians and the Irish read into the war what suited their own national and ideological narratives. Listen to Mark talking on this subject at: www.unknownwarriorspod.co.uk. An Understanding History Podcast.

Understanding The First World War Until recently, most general histories of the First World War either were narrative accounts or told from a national perspective; few attempted to look at the war as a total phenomenon and analyse what motivated the combatant nations and drove the process of waging an unprecedented kind of war that ended with the outcomes of 1918. But one general history of the conflict (published in 2014) does just that: it's called Attrition: Fighting the First World War. Professor William Philpott examines the war as an organic whole, charting how the struggle changed during its course to become a total, existential war of survival for all sides, requiring huge efforts not just from the armies in the field but from the societies which supported those armies. A war, in fact, much more like the Second World War. Listen at unknownwarriorspod.co.uk This is an Understanding History podcast.

Understanding The First World War In the popular British narrative, 1918 is the ‘forgotten year’ of the First World War. Instead, all the focus has tended to be directed at the more tragic campaigns on the Western Front (those with the highest Allied casualties) such as the Somme and Passchendaele. In Episode 7 of Unknown Warriors, PETER HART, for 30 years Oral Historian at the Imperial War Museum and the author of many highly acclaimed books on WW1, explains how 1918 was, in fact, vital to turning stalemate into Allied victory. After the Germans failed in their last great gamble to win the war in massive spring offensives, the Allied coalition relentlessly pressed home its growing advantage in men and resources to force a final German retreat, which culminated in the Armistice of. November 11. Listen to Peter at www.unknownwarriorspod.co.uk. This is an Understanding History podcast.

Understanding the First World War 1.5 million Indians volunteered to fight for the Allied cause during the First World War. And yet the Indian contribution - serving in some 50 countries and across all the key fronts of the conflict - has largely been ignored or misunderstood in histories of WW1. The fact that soldiers in the British Indian Army were fighting at a time when nationalist pressures were growing in India created tensions that have been underrated, as did Turkey's call to Muslims to mount jihad against the Allies. Find out more in my conversation with George Morton Jack at www.unknownwarriorspod. This is an Understanding History podcast.

Understanding The First World War Shell shock was unknown before the First World War, but rapidly grew to prominence during the conflict. In 1916 it reached epidemic levels at the five-month long battle of the Somme, with traumatised casualties rising fourfold in number. This divided the medics and terrified the military, who feared that troop morale and effectiveness would suffer. As the British Army saw it, it was a problem that had to be got rid of fast. Their brutal solution was as simple as it was callous, with the result that the incidence of shell shock dwindled into insignificance in 1917, even at the hellish battle of Passchendaele. The truth was, 'war trauma' hadn't gone away, it had merely been suppressed. Historian Taylor Downing tells this extraordinary and little known WW1 story at www. unknownwarriorspod.co.uk. Listen in and find out more. This is an Understanding History podcast.

Understanding The First World War Despite the fact that in the years before 1914 international conferences had agreed a set of rules to govern the conduct of warfare, when the First World War broke out, these red lines were rapidly and flagrantly crossed, by all sides, in the headlong rush to gain a military advantage once the stalemate of trench warfare had set in. This happened, notoriously, both on the Western Front as well as at sea and in the air, with poison gases, U-boat sinkings of merchant and passenger vessels, and the aerial bombardment of civilian populations, all being introduced within a six-week period in 1915 alone. And yet all these actions were expressly forbidden by international agreements. Listen to this unfamilar aspect of WW1 at www.unknownwarriorspod.co.uk. The world would never be the same again. This is an Understanding History podcast.

Understanding The First World War: Historians of WW1 now view the conflict through trans-national and global perspectives, not simply the old national narratives. This has meant that aspects and issues which we once thought familiar have started to take on different meanings. This is as true of the Western Front as anywhere on the WW1 battlefield, with the French and German view of this theatre of war transforming the landscape, both literally and metaphorically. In Episode 3 of my podcast series Unknown Warriors, Dr Jonathan Boff explains how, for the Germans, the French were a much more worrying enemy than the British - and how, even as they finally retreated in 1918, the Germans remained remarkably resilient and resolute, helping to reinforce the fateful post-war German narrative that their army had never really been defeated. Listen at www.unknownwarriorspod.co.uk. This is an Understanding History podcast.

The Real First World War: Forget the popular British narrative that's prevailed for so long - 10 leading historians tell us what this conflict was really about. The recent centenary of the First World War did little to change the dominant British narrative of this conflict, the war poets' view, which has flourished since the 1960s and earlier. And this was despite a host of new books marking the centenary in which professional historians told a very different story - of a war that was much stranger, more complex and more modern than anything we've been led to believe. In 10 half hours, some of these historians give us the benefit of newly mined sources and fresh perspectives to transform the landscape. You can listen to the whole series or individual self-contained episodes. This is an Understanding History podcast. www.unknownwarriorspod.co.uk