20th Century

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  • 🎧 Moscow's Communist Dorm

    In 1931, an enormous apartment building was completed in Moscow. Challenging the Kremlin for architectural supremacy on the Moskva River, it was the largest residential building in Europe, combining 505 furnished apartments with every modern luxury - a cinema, library, tennis court and shooting r...

  • 🎧 Nazi Megastructures

    Walking around Second World War fortifications, Patrick Bury is able to draw on his time in the infantry to tell the stories of the battles that occured over them. During his time working on Nazi Megastructures, Paddy accessed the lived history of the important structures built to protect and str...

  • 🎧 MI9: The Secret Service for Escape and Evasion

    Helen Fry joined me on the podcast to talk about the thrilling history of MI9. The WWII organisation engineered the escape of Allied forces from behind enemy lines.

  • 🎧 Max Eisen: Surviving Auschwitz

    Max Eisen was only 15 when he and his family were taken from their Hungarian home to the infamous Auschwitz Concentration Camp during the Second World War. All of his relatives were killed;only Max survived to see VE Day and eventual liberation. 75 years on from being liberated, he talks about th...

  • 🎧 Maud West, the Original Miss Marple with Susannah Stapleton

    Maud West, operated her own detective agency during the Golden Age of crime in the period after World War One. She used all manner of disguises and tactics to gather information for her clients and to subvert the expected roles for women in this period. Producer: Peter Curry

  • 🎧 Mata Hari: The Truth Behind The Legend

    More than 70 years after her death, Mata Hari is still a household name throughout the Western world. So who was this daughter of a Dutch hat-maker, who was executed for espionage after a secret trial during the darkest days of World War One? Julie Wheelwright joined me on the pod to guide me thr...

  • 🎧 M: Maxwell Knight, MI5's Greatest Spymaster

    Henry Hemming @henryhemming is a historian and author of five works of non-fiction including In Search of the English Eccentric, Misadventure in the Middle East, shortlisted for the Dolman Travel Book Award, and Churchill’s Iceman, published in the US as The Ingenious Mr Pyke, which became a New ...

  • 🎧 Life Before World War Two

    Victor Gregg is a veteran of World War Two and the Dresden Bombings, and travelled with Dan to visit Dresden for a documentary. In this episode, Dan discusses Victor's early life, and how he came to join the army.

  • 🎧 Life at Bletchley Park with Betty Webb

    Betty Webb was heavily involved with the work going on at Bletchley Park. While she was not part of the code-breaking team, her work was invaluable to the success of Bletchley, and Dan talks to her about her life and wartime experiences.

  • 🎧 Leading Germany's Resistance against The Nazis

    Norman Ohler joined me on the pod to discuss two remarkable lovers who led Germany's resistance against the Nazis. Harro Schulze-Boysen and Libertas Haas-Heye led a complex network of antifascists, which operated across Berlin's bohemian underworld. They infiltrated German intelligence leaked Naz...

  • 🎧 Latvia, Soviet Occupation and Family History with Inara Verzemnieks

    Dan talks to Inara Verzemnieks about the history of Latvia, Nazi & Soviet occupation, and the history of her family.

  • 🎧 Krystyna Skarbek

    Clare Mulley joined me on the podcast to talk about the extraordinary story of Krystyna Skarbek, who worked as a spy for the British Special Operations Executive during the Second World War.

  • 🎧 Kohima: The Battle for India with Akiko MacDonald and Richard Greenwood

    The Battle of Kohima was a critical part of the war fought between Britain and Japan during World War II. It acted as a turning point on the eastern front more generally, and Dan talks to Akiko MacDonald, the daughter of a Japanese soldier who fought in the battle and Richard Greenwood, a former ...

  • 🎧 Klaus Fuchs, the Greatest Nuclear Spy with Frank Close

    Dan talks to Frank Close about Klaus Fuchs, who leaked nuclear secrets to the Soviets. He informed the Soviets that the Allies had a bomb, and in doing so, may have been responsible for saving many millions of lives. Close argues that once Stalin realised the ballistic capacity of the U.S. and th...

  • 🎧 King George V in World War One with Alexandra Churchill

    King George V played a critical role in Britain's war effort during World War One, from the outbreak of war in 1914, until the King's Pilgrimage in May 1922, to visit cemeteries and memorials being constructed by the Imperial War Graves Commission. Alexandra Churchill has combed the Royal Archive...

  • 🎧 Jutland 1916: 12 Hours to Win the War

    Angus Konstam @Anguskonstam is an author and historian with over 60 books in print. He joins Dan Snow to discuss the Battle of Jutland, the most significant naval engagement of the First World War.

  • 🎧 Joking About Stalin

    Jonathan Waterlow joined me on the podcast to explore how ordinary people used political jokes to cope with and make sense of their lives under Stalinism in the 1930s.

  • 🎧 John F. Kennedy

    Fredrik Logevall joined me on the pod to discuss the life and legacy of John F. Kennedy. By the time of his assassination in 1963, John F. Kennedy stood at the helm of the greatest power the world had ever seen. Born in 1917 to a striving Irish-American family that had ascended the ranks of Bosto...

  • 🎧 Interwar Germany’s Secret Ally: The USSR

    After the First World War the German Army was in crisis. Limited in the size and its equipment by the Versailles Treaty which ended the war, it was a shadow of the mighty force it had been in 1914. Help came from a surprising source. Soviet Russia. Historian Ian Johnson explains to Dan how it was...

  • 🎧 Imphal and Kohima

    James Holland comes on the show to discuss the Battles of Imphal and Kohima, the decisive clash of the Burma Campaign during World War Two.

  • 🎧 Hunting the Bismarck

    In May 1941, the Royal Navy pursued Nazi Germany's largest battleship, the Bismarck, in the greatest chase story in the history of naval warfare. Bismarck represented the single most important threat to the Royal Navy and the vital Atlantic convoys they sought to protect; her armoured protection ...

  • 🎧 How Should We Remember WW2?

    The question of wars and how we remember them has always fascinated me. With WW1 we always seem to talk about the enormous, tragic loss of life - captured so beautifully by the likes of Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon. But WW2 seems to be more about stoicism, Spitfires and speeches. Lucy Noake...

  • 🎧 How Punk Brought Down the Berlin Wall with Tim Mohr

    Dan chats to Tim Mohr, a Club DJ turned writer, who has a very different story of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Tim talks about East German punks, who opposed the oppressive DDR government with their music and their actions, and describes how many of them were arrested because what they stood for ...

  • 🎧 HMS Caroline with Melissa Morton and William Hughes

    Dan explores HMS Caroline, the last surviving Royal Navy veteran of Jutland. The team from the HMS Caroline museum and William Hughes, the man in charge of much of its restoration and maintenance, give him a tour.