The Martyr Made Podcast

Millions of German soldiers returned from the front to find their country riven by civil war, and beset by enemies on all sides. Bolshevism was pouring out of the borders of Russia into Central and Eastern Europe with indiscriminate savagery for which even four years in the trenches had not prepared them. The fighting men of Germany, enraged by betrayal and humiliation, were only too happy to meet the Communists on their own terms.

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Over the span of a handful of months, the most ancient ruling houses of Europe collapsed under the weight of deprivation and suffering brought about by the Great War. As communist revolutionaries burn Russia to the ground, their comrades preach blood and fire on the streets of Berlin, and while the Allied countries celebrate their noble victory, the starving, exhausted people of the German Reich face a new enemy more terrible than any they faced in the trenches.

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The First World War shattered a generation of Europeans. Killing took place on a monumental scale, as whole societies gave their all for their countries. German men who spent their young adulthood in the murderous trenches of the Great War, only to be crushed under the weight of a hostile world, would be senior officers in Hitler’s Wehrmacht, while their sons prepared for a rematch as young soldiers, sailors, and airmen. The harrowing experience of the First World War forged the men who fought the Second World War, so our story starts with that experience.

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Happy Easter, everybody.

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The Second World War was the greatest catastrophe in human history. Sixty million people dead. Entire nations destroyed. All sides engaged in the wholesale slaughter of enemy civilian populations. And the nuclear demon unleashed upon the world. It was the war in which the United States and our allies conquered the world, and eighty years after Germany's defeat, the story of the war remains our civilization's most important load-bearing myth. Myths are stories told by the winners to legitimize their victory, but in real history the losers have their own story to tell. This series will explore the deep history of the Second World War through the eyes of the Enemy.