HistoryExtra
type: channel
link: https://www.historyextra.com
description: The official website for BBC History Magazine
date: 2025-04-09T10:12:51.000Z
update period: hourly
update frequency: 1
update base: 2000-01-01T12:00+00:00
items: "The outcome of one man's beliefs": why the Holocaust happened
items: The liberation of Auschwitz: 80 years on
items: “We need to understand the Nazis as human beings”: Richard J Evans on the motivations of Hitler’s followers
items: “Many, if not most, Nazi analogies are historically inaccurate”: Richard J Evans on the trouble with comparisons
items: Conspiracy: Hitler’s escape to South America
items: Fake news and Nazis: Richard J Evans on the spectre of conspiracies
items: Bitter end: Hitler's downfall and the end of the war and the Third Reich
items: Books interview with Richard J Evans: “For Hobsbawm, communism was a matter of life and death”

"The outcome of one man's beliefs": why the Holocaust happened
type: item
date: 2025-04-09T10:12:40.000Z
creator: Sir Richard J Evans
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Second World War
description: Why did the Holocaust happen? Sir Richard J Evans explains how Adolf Hitler's delusions led to the mass extermination of six million Jews
encoded: 80 years ago, early in 1945, what is now generally known as ‘The Holocaust’ – that is, the mass extermination of some six million European Jews – was more or less over. In the years 1941-45, in the midst of the Second World War, Jews all across the continent, in areas conquered or dominated by Nazi Germany, had been rounded up and killed. This was no accidental by-product of the war; it was an organised process, deliberately planned and executed. And it was above all the outcome of one man’s beliefs and delusions: Adolf Hitler. This programme of mass murder on a gargantuan scale was what Hitler and his Nazi Party termed “the final solution of the Jewish problem in Europe”, a problem that was entirely the product of their own warped imagination. In 1944, Polish-Jewish lawyer Raphael Lemkin coined a new term to describe what happened: ‘genocide’, meaning the destruction of an entire people or nation. Such was indeed the Holocaust, visited not upon the Jews because of their religion, their culture or their social position, but because of their race. Even people who were half- Jewish or quarter-Jewish were targeted by the Nazis. Hitler's beliefs Dismayingly, there have been other genocides since the end of the Second World War. But the Jewish genocide had an extra dimension not shared by any other. Antisemitism was, and remains, fueled by a paranoid conspiracy theory, according to which Jews of every kind were driven by what Hitler called their “racial instinct” to engage in a ceaseless and unrelenting “drive to world domination”. The only way to stop this – in Hitler’s view – was to exterminate them wherever they were to be found. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/04/GettyImages-1278103471-f23880c.jpg" width="769" height="1024" alt="Hitler's claimed in his political manifesto 'Mein Kampf' (first published in 1925), that “the idea came to me that I would liberate Germany, that I would make it great”.(Jim Heimann Collection/Getty I…

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The liberation of Auschwitz: 80 years on
type: item
date: 2025-01-27T12:56:58.000Z
creator: Sir Richard J Evans
subject: 20th Century
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Second World War
subject: Trends-Anniversary
description: The largest camp in the entire system of Nazi concentration and extermination camps, where more than 1 million people perished at the hands of Hitler’s regime, has become one of the best-known symbols of the Holocaust. On the 80th anniversary of its liberation, Richard J Evans charts the last days and legacy of Auschwitz
encoded: On 27 January 1945, as soldiers of the Soviet Red Army advanced across East-Central Europe, driving the retreating Germans before them, they came across a large complex of facilities in and around the town of Auschwitz (now Oświęcim, Poland), in the eastern part of Hitler’s ‘Great German Reich’. After fierce fighting, in which more than 200 Soviet soldiers were killed, they entered the main SS camp. A film taken by Soviet cameraman Alexander Vorontsov marked the moment for posterity, including scenes in the prison barracks where some inmates were asked briefly to return to give world opinion an impression of the terrible conditions in which they had been forced to live. HistoryExtra Academy | Nazi Germany This six-part video course covers everything you need to know about Nazi Germany, guided by historian, author and broadcaster Laurence Rees Find out more Roaming through the camp, the soldiers discovered huge piles of clothes, including more than 360,000 men’s suits and 44,000 pairs of shoes, along with sacks of human hair, prosthetic limbs, spectacles, and stacks of empty, abandoned suitcases. The ground was littered with the bodies of the dead and dying. The squalor and filth were indescribable. “When I entered the barrack,” wrote one Red Army officer, Georgii Elisavetskii, “I saw living skeletons lying on the three-tiered bunks. As in fog, I heard my soldiers saying: ‘You are free, comrades!’ I sense that they do not understand, and begin speaking to them in Russian, Polish, German, Ukrainian dialects; unbuttoning my leather jacket, I show them my medals… They think I am provoking then. They begin to hide. “And only when I said to them: ‘Do not be afraid, I am a colonel of the Soviet Army and a Jew. We have come to liberate you’… They rushed towards us shouting, fell on their knees, kissed the flaps of our overcoats, and threw their arms around our legs. And we could not move, stood motionless while unexpected tears ran down our cheeks.” The liberation of Auschw…

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“We need to understand the Nazis as human beings”: Richard J Evans on the motivations of Hitler’s followers
type: item
date: 2024-11-21T15:06:45.000Z
creator: Sir Richard J Evans
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Second World War
subject: Fascism
subject: Holocaust
description: Adolf Hitler and those at the top of the Nazi hierarchy are universally denounced as monstrous aberrations. But, as Sir Richard J Evans stresses, separating them from the lessons of human history is the last thing we should be doing at a moment when democracy is under attack
encoded: A little over two decades ago, the first volume of my history of the Third Reich was published. My aim was to produce a comprehensive study encompassing the origins and rise of the Nazi Party, the transformation of Germany under Adolf Hitler’s dictatorship, and the events and impacts of the Second World War. It was, of course, a major undertaking and, after the third and final volume was published in 2008, I moved on to other topics. But a commission to contribute to a nine-part television series, BBC Two’s Rise of the Nazis, shown from 2019 to 2022, prompted me to take a fresh look at the Third Reich and its crimes. What struck me forcibly, given the biographical orientation of the TV series, was that I knew relatively little about the individuals involved in Nazism and the Reich – and, specifically, very little about their personalities and motivations. For decades, German historians in particular had avoided biography, long tainted by its indirect association with the ‘great man’ approach to history – or, as they called it, personalisierende Geschichtsschreibung (‘personalising history-writing’). Read more | Fake news and Nazis: Richard J Evans on the spectre of conspiracies The rise of ‘perpetrator research’ Yet in recent years, a massive amount of new documentation and research has been published about the leading Nazis. What historians describe as ‘perpetrator research’ has been at the forefront of scholarship since the turn of the century, and has yielded innumerable fresh insights. A 12-volume edition of Hitler’s speeches before his seizure of power was completed in 2003. The final volume of the diaries of propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels appeared in 2008. The diaries of self-proclaimed Nazi philosopher Alfred Rosenberg were published in 2015. The second volume of SS chief Heinrich Himmler’s appointments diary, discovered in an obscure Russian archive, came out in 2020. And many other sources have come to light documenting the thoughts and actions of what…

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“Many, if not most, Nazi analogies are historically inaccurate”: Richard J Evans on the trouble with comparisons
type: item
date: 2023-04-12T13:56:04.000Z
creator: Sir Richard J Evans
subject: 20th Century
subject: 21st Century
subject: Membership
subject: Period
description: In March, leading sports presenter Gary Lineker was suspended by the BBC for a tweet likening UK government rhetoric to that of 1930s Germany. Richard J Evans argues that such comparisons risk eroding the full horror of history and the experiences of those involved
encoded: In early March, Gary Lineker sparked a political and media storm. The former footballer, now the BBC’s best-paid presenter, said that the Illegal Migration Bill introduced by UK home secretary Suella Braverman “is just an immeasurably cruel policy directed at the most vulnerable people [presented] in language that is not dissimilar to that used by Germany in the [19]30s”. Lineker’s comments were made not on a BBC channel but on Twitter, in a personal capacity. Nevertheless, the BBC suspended him from his presenting role on Match of the Day for breaching its impartiality guidelines. After other commentators and pundits declined to appear on the show without Lineker, he was reinstated a few days later. Lineker’s suggestion that Braverman’s language was “not dissimilar” to that used in Germany during Nazi rule was viewed as particularly offensive by the home secretary, who has stated that her husband is “a very proud member of the Jewish community”. But his comparison was far from unusual. It’s become increasingly common in recent years for politicians, journalists and pundits of various kinds to draw parallels between policies, language and institutions of which they disapprove, and the politics, language and institutions of Nazi Germany. Some conservative commentators have compared what they see as leftwing “cancel culture” to the censorship exercised by the Nazis. Meanwhile, leftwing commentators have likened the removal of books dealing with LGBTQ issues from school libraries in some states of the US to the book-burnings carried out by the Nazis in May 1933. The bowdlerisation of books by authors such as Roald Dahl has attracted similar parallels. Meanwhile, Hillary Clinton and other Democrats in the US have compared Donald Trump’s rallies to those of Adolf Hitler. Russian president Vladimir Putin has been widely compared to Hitler, his assault on Ukraine seeming – in the eyes of some, at least – to echo Germany’s invasion of the country. During the Covid pandemic,…

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Conspiracy: Hitler’s escape to South America
type: item
date: 2022-12-26T09:13:48.000Z
creator: Sir Richard J Evans
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Second World War
description: In our new series delving into historical conspiracy theories, Richard J Evans considers the idea that the Nazi leader escaped and led a long life in South America
encoded: Did Adolf Hitler really make it out of the bunker alive at the end of the Second World War? In the first episode of our new series on some of history’s most well-known conspiracy theories, we explore the idea that Hitler outlasted the downfall of the Third Reich in 1945 and began a new life overseas in South America. In conversation with Rob Attar, historian Professor Richard J Evans explains the origins of this theory and reveals why it continues to have adherents today. Read more about whether Hitler could have escaped the bunker Was the moon landing faked? Did Shakespeare actually pen his works? And did aliens build the pyramids? Find out more in our conspiracies series

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Fake news and Nazis: Richard J Evans on the spectre of conspiracies
type: item
date: 2022-12-26T08:01:31.000Z
creator: Sir Richard J Evans
subject: 20th Century
subject: Second World War
subject: Period
description: From the ‘stab in the back’ to Hitler’s escape from the bunker, conspiracy theories swirl around the Nazis. But how far do they really help us understand the Third Reich? | By Richard J Evans
encoded: Listen to this article: The idea that nothing happens by chance in history is as old as history itself. For a significant number of people, nothing is quite what it seems to be at first sight; everything that occurs is the result of the secret machinations of malign groups of people manipulating events from behind the scenes. Conspiracy theories seem to be growing more popular and more widespread in the 21st century: powered by the rise of the internet and then social media; enabled by the declining influence of traditional gatekeepers of opinion such as newspaper editors and book publishers; and encouraged by the spread of the uncertainty about truth and falsehood encapsulated in the perverse concept of ‘alternative facts’. Go on to social media and you will quickly realise how widespread conspiracy theories about key events in history have become. They have even found their way into television programmes, not just in fictional form, but in presentations that claim to pursue the ‘real’ truth that has up to now been suppressed by ‘official’ historians, or in other words, those who teach and research the past as a profession at universities and historical institutes. Few topics in history have attracted more conspiracy theories than Nazism. Conspiracists have focused on events such as the Reichstag fire in 1933, the flight of Rudolf Hess to Britain in 1941, and the death of Hitler in Berlin in 1945. And it is often claimed that the Nazis themselves were influenced by conspiracy theories such as the ‘stab-in-the-back’ theory of Germany’s defeat in World War I, or the infamous Protocols of the Elders of Zion. But, broadly speaking, the Nazis were not particularly obsessed with conspiracy theories themselves. Compared with Stalin, who saw plots and cabals everywhere and manufactured fake conspiracies supposedly hatched by some of his closest ‘Old Bolshevik’ comrades so that he could rid himself of potential rivals, Hitler was relatively disinclined to believe in conspir…

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Bitter end: Hitler's downfall and the end of the war and the Third Reich
type: item
date: 2022-11-11T06:20:00.000Z
creator: Sir Richard J Evans
subject: Period
subject: Second World War
subject: Second World War battles
description: The final months of the Second World War witnessed the slow strangulation of the Third Reich: while Allied forces advanced towards Berlin from both east and west, Adolf Hitler’s increasing detachment from reality condemned millions of his compatriots to death. Richard J Evans charts the bloody collapse of Nazi Germany...
encoded: In 1943 the fortunes of war began to turn against Nazi Germany. Early that year, the battle of Stalingrad – widely hailed as a turning point in the Second World War – inaugurated a long, steady advance by the Red Army on the eastern front. This was interrupted only briefly by the battle of Kursk, the largest tank battle in history, which the Germans lost comprehensively. In the south, Hitler’s Italian ally, Benito Mussolini, was deposed in July 1943 after the Allies launched their invasion of Sicily. The Germans now felt obliged to occupy mainland Italy, diverting much-needed troops from the east, but were steadily beaten back by the Allies from September onwards. The end of July saw the mass bombing of Hamburg, with the damage inflicted on German cities by Allied raids becoming ever more severe. All the while, morale on the home front began to fall, and the Nazi Party, the Gestapo and the SS started to tighten the screws of the repression that had played such an important part in creating the regime in the first place. Active Nazis rejoiced in the return, as they saw it, of the “time of struggle”, the old days before the Third Reich was securely established, when they were fighting against their enemies, real or imagined, on all sides. Read more | Should we be glad the 1944 July Plot to kill Hitler failed? By 1944 growing numbers of middle-ranking army officers, backed by a few more senior figures, had become so despairing of victory that they were plotting to remove Adolf Hitler and sue for peace – a futile enterprise, since the Allies had agreed to demand unconditional surrender early the previous year. On 20 July 1944, Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg detonated a time-bomb in Hitler’s eastern headquarters, but it didn’t kill the Nazi dictator and the coup failed. Already suspicious of the armed forces and contemptuous of their leadership, Hitler now lost all faith in them. They were either cowards or traitors. Willpower was what mattered in his view, willpower wou…

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Books interview with Richard J Evans: “For Hobsbawm, communism was a matter of life and death”
type: item
date: 2019-01-24T07:00:07.000Z
creator: Sir Richard J Evans
subject: 20th Century
subject: Membership
subject: Period
description: Richard J Evans talks to Rob Attar about his new biography of the world-renowned Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm, and discusses the legacy of his work today
encoded: In context Born in Alexandria in 1917, Eric Hobsbawm spent his youth in Vienna and Berlin, witnessing the rise of Nazism, before moving to Britain in 1933. He studied history at Cambridge and became a lecturer at Birkbeck in London. His books, notably The Age Of… series, which covered the years 1789–1991, were global bestsellers, making Hobsbawm one of the world's best-known and most influential historians. He was a lifelong communist, and his ideology infused his research and writing. Hobsbawm's other great love was the jazz scene, which he chronicled for the New Statesman under the pseudonym Francis Newton. He died in 2012 and his ashes were interred in Highgate Cemetery, close to the tomb of Karl Marx. Q: Your book is titled A Life in History. How far did Hobsbawm's life shape the history that he produced? A: One of the central arguments of my biography is that there is a dovetailing of Eric’s personal life and the subjects he wrote about. For instance, in the 1940s, when he was a very committed communist in many ways, he wrote about the rise of organised labour in the industrial revolution. But in the mid-1950s, when he broke in all but name with the Communist party in Britain and started to move in the bohemian world of Soho, he became interested in writing about deviant and marginal people in history. It was no longer about the rise of the wage worker, but about millenarians and bandits – what he called ‘primitive rebels’. Q: Hobsbawm's communism was a huge part of who he was. When did this begin for him? A: He was born in 1917 – coincidentally the year of the Russian Revolution – and grew up in Vienna. His parents died when he was quite young, so he was looked after by an uncle and aunt in Berlin. He was there in the early 1930s, when the Weimar republic was falling apart, and the choice in the high schools at that time was really between Nazism and communism. It was a much more extreme version of our own time, with the centre having fallen apart. Eric couldn…

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