HistoryExtra
type: channel
link: https://www.historyextra.com
description: Home of Britain’s bestselling history magazine and award-winning podcast
date: 2026-03-10T17:06:00.000Z
update period: hourly
update frequency: 1
update base: 2000-01-01T12:00+00:00
items: Meet the embattled French WW2 leader who withstood the Nazis – and Winston Churchill
items: What inspired the darkness of Lord of the Flies? The disturbing history behind the novel
items: Before the Nuremberg Trials, this was Winston Churchill’s shocking plan for Nazi war criminals
items: How Nazi investigators used secret tools to create Hitler’s Holocaust ‘hitlist’
items: Following the footsteps of a WW2 prisoner of war
items: Step inside Hitler's U-boats to witness the nightmarish reality of life on board
items: In the aftermath of WW2, why did FDR’s Latin American experiment end in abject failure?
items: Quality or quantity? With WW2 tanks, there was a surprising winner
items: Churchill and de Gaulle: a strange relationship
items: How grim was life on Hitler's U-boats?

Meet the embattled French WW2 leader who withstood the Nazis – and Winston Churchill
type: item
date: 2026-03-10T17:06:00.000Z
creator: James Osborne
subject: Period
subject: Second World War
subject: Discover / Apple News
description: In June 1940, as France collapsed and Britain faced the prospect of resisting the Nazis alone, Winston Churchill searched for a French leader willing to keep fighting
encoded: In early June 1940, Europe was in freefall. Germany’s invasion of France and the Low Countries – launched in May 1940 – had overturned the presiding strategic assumptions of the First World War. Instead of the slow stalemate of trench warfare, German ‘Blitzkrieg’ tactics had combined tanks, aircraft and rapid manoeuvre to devastating effect. German armoured divisions had burst through the Ardennes and driven deep into France, prompting the evacuation of the British Expeditionary Force from Dunkirk from 26 May, fleeing from the incoming Nazi military storm. Paris would then fall on 14 June. The French government was retreating in stages, and within weeks, the Third Republic – France’s democratic regime since 1870 – had effectively fallen. For Britain – now led by Winston Churchill, who had taken office only weeks earlier – the stakes seemed existential. Churchill had replaced Neville Chamberlain in May 1940, inheriting a war effort that was already faltering. If France were to leave the war, Britain faced the very real prospect of an attempted German invasion. If there was anyone within the French political or military establishment willing to continue the war from overseas (perhaps from North Africa, where France still possessed territory and troops) Britain needed that person to come to the fore. The individual who would rise to the moment, and come to symbolise Free France was not, at that moment, an obvious candidate. Churchill and de Gaulle’s first encounters in crisis Charles de Gaulle first came to London on 9 June, “which is when he first meets Churchill”, historian Richard Vinen explains, speaking on the HistoryExtra podcast. “Churchill likes him.” When de Gaulle fatefully arrived in London, he was far from the towering statesman who would come to define the coming decades of French history. He held the post of Under-Secretary of State for National Defence and War in the French government – a relatively junior position – and was little known outside France. …

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What inspired the darkness of Lord of the Flies? The disturbing history behind the novel
type: item
date: 2026-03-01T20:00:09.000Z
creator: Danny Bird
subject: 20th Century
subject: Cold War
subject: Period
subject: Second World War
subject: Trends-Entertainment
description: The first TV adaptation of William Golding’s haunting 1954 novel Lord of the Flies premiered on BBC One in February 2026. This disturbing and mesmeric four-part series of the modern classic challenges viewers to ponder human nature. Here, we look at the history of Golding’s dystopian masterpiece, and the real-life events that inspired him to write it
encoded: William Golding wrote Lord of the Flies in the shadow of the 1930s’ ideological polarisation, the Second World War and the Holocaust. These had convinced him that evil was not an aberration but was deeply ingrained in the human condition. He recognised that the Nazis had not simply imposed their murderous regime through sheer force alone, but that millions of everyday people had acquiesced or enthusiastically gone along with it. And though many in the postwar years assured themselves that they’d never have participated in its savagery, Golding was less sanguine. Read more | The myth of the innocent bystander: conformity and complicity in Nazi Germany “My book was to say: you think that the war is over and an evil thing destroyed. You are safe because you are naturally kind and decent,” he wrote while reflecting on the success of Lord of the Flies. “But I know why the thing rose in Germany. I know it could happen in any country.” As the most destructive conflict in history gave way to the Cold War and the mounting threat of nuclear annihilation, Golding’s bleak verdict seemed apposite. In later years, he maintained that “man produces evil as a bee produces honey.” Who was William Golding? Golding was born in 1911 in Newquay, Cornwall and raised in Marlborough, Wiltshire. He trained as a teacher, gaining first-hand insights into boys’ hierarchies and social rituals – knowledge that would later inform the tribalism in Lord of the Flies. Serving in the Royal Navy during the Second World War, he took part in the D-Day landings at Gold Beach in June 1944. The experience was formative, as he witnessed the machinery and the immense destructive capacity of modern warfare. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/02/WilliamGolding1983-2a64892-e1772205569790.jpg" width="1500" height="1500" alt="Black-and-white portrait of author William Golding in 1983, showing the Nobel laureate with a full white beard and wispy hair, wearing a collared jacket…

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Before the Nuremberg Trials, this was Winston Churchill’s shocking plan for Nazi war criminals
type: item
date: 2026-02-26T20:15:06.000Z
creator: James Osborne
subject: Period
subject: Second World War
subject: Discover / Apple News
description: As Europe lay in ruins following the end of the Second World War, Churchill’s instinct was to punish the surviving Nazi leadership without a trial. How was the decision made to stage the Nuremberg Trials instead?
encoded: In May of 1945, Allied forces pressed through Germany. With Adolf Hitler dead and Berlin fallen, the last remnants of Nazi military resistance were slipping away. As the Allied soldiers broke the Third Reich’s grip on Europe, they encountered scenes that defied belief. With each concentration camp liberated, the mountain of evidence of mass murder on a scale previously unimaginable grew taller. There was a question now looming large in the minds of the victorious Allies: what should be done with the remaining Nazi leaders, such as Hermann Göring, who had led Europe into catastrophe? There was no standing international criminal court, no established legal framework for prosecuting aggressive war, and no precedent for putting a defeated government on trial. International law in 1945 was largely concerned with relations between states, not criminal responsibility for individual political leaders. Some proposed that the most straightforward option would be to execute the surviving architects of Nazi rule and move on from a staggeringly awful chapter of European history. That was precisely the instinct of Britain’s wartime prime minister, Winston Churchill. So how did the Nuremberg Trials emerge from that backdrop? And how was Churchill convinced to support an unprecedented trial instead? Planning justice before the war had ended Nuremberg wasn’t conceived only after Germany surrendered in May 1945. The question of how to prosecute Nazi leaders had already been percolating for years. Reflecting on the origins of Nuremberg for a four-part HistoryExtra podcast series, international lawyer Phillipe Sands says, “Already in 1942, efforts were underway – with governments in exile in particular – committing to the prosecution of Nazi criminals for crimes committed on their occupied territories.” Nazi Germany | A short course from HistoryExtra Academy Member exclusive | Everything you need to know about Nazi Germany, guided by historian, author and broadcaster Laurence Rees. Exp…

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How Nazi investigators used secret tools to create Hitler’s Holocaust ‘hitlist’
type: item
date: 2026-02-24T15:19:43.000Z
creator: James Osborne
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Second World War
subject: Discover / Apple News
description: New research reveals that paper conservators and manuscript restorers helped make centuries-old records legible for Nazi racial investigations, demonstrating how highly specialised crafts became entangled in the machinery of the Holocaust
encoded: It was SS officers and concentration camp guards who implemented and actualised much of the genocidal policy that had been crafted by senior Nazi officials. The SS, led by Heinrich Himmler, oversaw the police, the concentration camp system and many of the administrative structures that carried out the mass murder of Jewish populations and minority groups. These officers may have been the most visible architects of the Holocaust during the Second World War. But many historians have long argued that the systematic genocide levelled against Europe’s Jewish populations could never have reached the scale that it did without the complicity and active aid offered by ordinary people in everyday professions. It was office administrators, clerks, railway workers and local officials whose work sustained the machinery of the Nazi state. Now, new research has added more occupations to that list: bookbinders, paper conservators and restoration specialists. According to findings by historian Dr Morwenna Blewett, first published in The Guardian, newly uncovered Nazi-era correspondence reveals a Europe-wide programme in which restorers repaired and chemically treated fragile archival documents so that they could be used to better trace Jewish ancestry. The work, she argues, helped Nazi authorities to compile genealogical records that functioned, in effect, as a bureaucratic “hitlist”. Uncovering Jewish ancestry In research that features in her upcoming book, Art Restoration Under the Nazi Regime, Blewett uncovered letters and administrative files showing how these expert restorers were recruited to clean and stabilise old church registers and civil records which documented local births, baptisms, marriages and religious conversions stretching back centuries. Many of these manuscripts had become illegible through years of decay. Rather than preserving them in accordance with proper conservation standards, restorers used aggressive chemical treatments, including saturating pages with …

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Following the footsteps of a WW2 prisoner of war
type: item
date: 2026-02-23T08:00:08.000Z
creator: Elinor Evans
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Second World War
description: Historian Malcolm Gaskill discusses his great-uncle Ralph’s experiences as a PoW in Second World War Italy
encoded: Captured in Libya, imprisoned in Italy, and twice an escapee: historian Malcolm Gaskill's great-uncle Ralph's experiences of the Second World War were certainly dramatic. Yet he left behind little more than a few photos, a wartime memoir, and a few stories filtered through family legend. But through years of research, travel and a unique partnership with an Italian historian, Gaskill has pieced together a story of quiet courage and unexpected connections. Here, in conversation with Elinor Evans, he discusses the resulting book, The Glass Mountain, and the challenges of telling such histories.

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Step inside Hitler's U-boats to witness the nightmarish reality of life on board
type: item
date: 2026-02-12T11:54:36.000Z
creator: James Osborne
subject: Period
subject: Second World War
subject: Discover / Apple News
description: Hitler’s U-boats were a feared component of his naval strategy during the Second World War. But what was life aboard these weaponised submersibles actually like?
encoded: Slipping unseen beneath the Atlantic, German U-boats were a terrifying development in the naval battles of the Second World War. They threatened Britain’s supply lines and seemed to offer Nazi Germany a way to starve the island nation into submission. Britain – heavily dependent on imported food, fuel and raw materials – was particularly vulnerable to attacks on its merchant shipping. German naval planners believed that cutting these lifelines could force Britain out of the war without the need for a costly invasion. As such, German propaganda cultivated an image of U-boats packed full of elite sailors waging a high-tech, daring campaign beneath the surface of the sea. Successful commanders were celebrated at home, and early victories against poorly protected Allied convoys helped create the perception of the U-boat as a uniquely deadly naval weapon. The reality was very different. As historian Roger Moorhouse explains on the HistoryExtra podcast, life aboard a U-boat was overwhelmingly and relentlessly degrading. Far from being glamorous, the experience was often “thoroughly, thoroughly horrible”. What were U-boats? U-boat is a shortened form of the German word 'unterseeboot', meaning “undersea boat”. Although submarines were used by several nations during the First World War, Germany had employed them with particular effectiveness, sinking thousands of Allied ships. When war broke out once more in Europe, Germany’s experience had prepared them. The backbone of their fleet was the Type VII U-boat, which Moorhouse describes as “an updated version of the U-boats used at the end of the First World War” and, by later standards, “a pretty primitive weapon”. Read more | Hitler's war on words: how the Nazis used art to bolster their murderous regime These boats were not true submarines in the modern sense. “It was meant to spend most of its time on the surface,” Moorhouse says. “It’s basically a submersible rather than a submarine.” They could dive to attack or evade dang…

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In the aftermath of WW2, why did FDR’s Latin American experiment end in abject failure?
type: item
date: 2026-02-10T16:19:02.000Z
creator: James Osborne
subject: Cold War
subject: Period
subject: Second World War
subject: Discover / Apple News
description: Before the Cold War hardened into coups and counterinsurgency, the United States backed reformist governments across Latin America. The abrupt reversal of policy after 1945 wasn’t inevitable, but it reshaped the politics of the northern and southern American continents for generations
encoded: The Cold War in Latin America is sometimes seen as an inevitable extension of rivalry between two emergent superpowers – the United States and the Soviet Union – in the new geopolitical context created in the aftermath of the Second World War. But the Cold War antagonism between the US and its southern neighbours wasn’t a foregone conclusion amid the wider ideological conflict. In the decades before the Cold War took hold, the US pursued a markedly different relationship with Latin America that had embraced national sovereignty, tolerated economic nationalism and actively supported the leadership of left-leaning reformers. As historian Greg Grandin, Professor of History at Yale University, explains on the HistoryExtra podcast, this earlier period shows that more cordial relations were possible, and demonstrates how quickly they were abandoned. Why Latin America mattered before the Cold War “You can’t really understand the Cold War unless you understand Latin America’s role in the 1930s and 1940s,” Grandin explains. During those years, Latin American governments were active participants in an anti-fascist coalition that spanned the Atlantic world. Several countries broke relations with the Axis powers early; they restricted German and Italian influence and aligned diplomatically and economically with the Allies well before the Second World War formally reached the hemisphere. WW2 | The Big Questions Member exclusive | Historian and broadcaster Laurence Rees explains major moments of the global conflict in this five-part series. Listen to all episodes now This partnership between the US and Latin American governments emerged against a long history of tension. Since the late 19th century, Latin American states had protested a right claimed by the United States to intervene militarily and politically across the hemisphere via the Monroe Doctrine, a claim first articulated in 1823 that purportedly justified intervention in order to protect US economic and military intere…

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Quality or quantity? With WW2 tanks, there was a surprising winner
type: item
date: 2026-02-05T16:23:04.000Z
creator: James Osborne
subject: Period
subject: Second World War
subject: Discover / Apple News
description: Amid the industrial warfare of the Second World War, battlefield performance depended on precise logistics and the ability to absorb catastrophic losses. How did America, Germany and the Soviet Union approach this problem?
encoded: As much as the Second World War was determined by soldiers exchanging gunfire on the ground, it was also a war of logistics. Tanks were a weapon that demonstrated that fact clearly. Their battlefield effectiveness was in no doubt as weapons of destruction – but the same effectiveness depended on how many could be built, how quickly they could be replaced, and whether an entire industrial system could sustain their use over years of attritional warfare. As historian Mark Urban explains on the HistoryExtra podcast, this exposes a central tension at the heart of 20th century conflict. “You have a constant trade-off between quality and quantity,” he says. “And of course in the Second World War, you see that very clearly.” The industrialisation of warfare By 1939, major powers unmistakably understood that victory would be decided, in part, by the output of industrial capacity. Tanks embodied this shift in thinking. They were vital but complex machines requiring steel, engines, optics, fuel, spare parts, trained crews and dedicated transport networks. That presented a challenge, and in their solutions to this problem of resource, Germany, the United States and the Soviet Union each diverged in their approach. The American solution was rooted in mass production. The United States entered the war with unmatched industrial depth and applied its civilian manufacturing logic to military hardware. “The Sherman is an iconic tank design of the Second World War,” Urban explains. “And the Americans made 49,000 of them.” Read more | When and why did the US get involved in WW2? And, output reached extraordinary levels. “They were making more than 2,000 in a month,” Urban says. This stunning speed was achieved through standardisation and simplified designs, and a relentless emphasis on speed. Technically, the Sherman wasn’t exceptional. “If you look at the Sherman and you compare it to the German Tiger, in many ways it’s very inferior,” says Urban. “The gun is less powerful. The armou…

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Churchill and de Gaulle: a strange relationship
type: item
date: 2026-02-02T08:00:48.000Z
creator: James Osborne
subject: Cold War
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Second World War
description: Richard Vinen traces the relationship between Churchill and de Gaulle, exploring their roles as wartime and peacetime leaders of their countries
encoded: After France fell in 1940, it was Charles de Gaulle who led the Free French forces against Nazi Germany and Vichy France. From the moment he assumed that position, de Gaulle was locked into a relationship with British prime minister Winston Churchill. The two men are the subject of the latest book by Professor Richard Vinen, The Last Titans, and here, in conversation with James Osborne, he shares his insights into the two men, their relationship, and their lasting impact.

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How grim was life on Hitler's U-boats?
type: item
date: 2026-01-26T08:00:13.000Z
creator: Spencer Mizen
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Second World War
description: Roger Moorhouse tells the story of the U-boat war from the perspective of the German crews themselves
encoded: "Statistically, they were on a suicide mission." That's Roger Moorhouse's assessment of the odds facing Hitler's U-boat crews in the final years of the Second World War. Speaking with Spencer Mizen, Roger relates the story of these missions from the German perspective – a tale encompassing scurvy, sleep deprivation, terror and acts of astonishing kindness. Roger Moorhouse is the author of Wolfpack: Inside Hitler's U-boat War (William Collins, 2025). Buy it now from Waterstones

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