How WWII Started

Dan Snow's History Hit

History Hit

History

4.7 • 12.9K Ratings

🗓️ 1 September 2024

⏱️ 65 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

On September 1st, 1939, Nazi Germany invaded Poland. Two days later, France and the United Kingdom declared war on the Third Reich. This was the beginning of what would become perhaps the most devastating clash in human history. By the end of the war, tens of millions of people had been killed, wounded or displaced, and the world order had been irrevocably altered. So how exactly did WW2 start?

In this episode, Dan explains how and why the Second World War came about. He examines both the immediate triggers and the big substructural forces that pushed humanity into a devastating conflict that continues to shape our world today.

Written and produced by Dan Snow, and edited by Dougal Patmore.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	I'm Peter Frankopen. And in our podcast, Legacy, we explore the lives of some of the biggest characters in history.
0:07.6	This season we're revisiting the life of Cecil Rhodes.
0:10.4	From Sickly Child to Diamond Tycoon, leading colonialist in South Africa, he was a bastion of British imperialism.
0:17.2	Over the past few years, campuses around the world have been met by students, chanting Rhodes must fall. His legacy has been completely transformed.
0:24.6	It's unbelievable how relevant roads still feels and how often his name is invoked by people
0:31.3	contesting really polarizing parts of our contemporary life.
0:35.6	But one of the questions about Rhodes is that he takes all the flag and therefore hides
0:39.7	away all the other people who were responsible for doing things that maybe not quite so bad.
0:43.7	That's why I think it's important to think not just about Rhodes and his own life, but about what that period
0:47.5	of British and colonial history meant.
0:49.2	And one of the things people often say is you have to judge these figures by the standards of their time
0:53.3	that's exactly what we're gonna do Peter isn't it so follow legacy now from
0:57.1	wherever you get your podcasts or binge entire seasons early and ad-free on
1:01.4	Wondery Plus. It's 1130 PM on the 2nd of September 1939 and the skies above London are torn by thunderstorms.
1:20.0	Neville Chamberlain has presided over his last peacetime cabinet as Prime Minister.
1:27.0	It was decided around that table that ultimatum would be presented to Hitler in Berlin at 9 o'clock the following morning.
1:37.0	That ultimatum would expire just two hours later.
1:49.8	The day before on the 1st of September 1939, Germany had invaded Poland. The old battleship Schleswig Holstein, with its mighty guns, had fired what were probably
1:57.2	the first shots of the Second World War in Europe at a Polish military facility, a kind of depot really on the mouth of the river
2:04.5	Vistula. Aircraft from the German Luftwaffe had then struck
2:08.9	at several Polish targets in the early hours of the 1st of September and troops flooded across the border
2:16.0	the hours that followed.
	...

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