Hello and welcome to the History Hour podcast from the BBC World Service with me Max Pearson,

the past brought to life by those who were there.

This week, many years after the Second World War, the court case that put the history of the Holocaust on trial.

This man who has said such outrageous things about the Holocaust,

that he would be suing me. It just seemed like theater of the absurd.

Plus, the world's first all-female peacekeeping force, and the man who stood up to the

mafia in Sicily and paid with his life.

If I give in, I would be giving up my dignity as an independent businessman.

If everyone followed my example, the extortionist would be destroyed.

That's coming up later in the podcast, but it's in the very earliest days of the Second World War that

we begin this week.

At the start of September 1939, 80 years ago, German troops marched into Poland, Britain, France and their allies

then declared war on Germany. What happened over the following six years shaped the fortunes of the

globe for the second half of the

20th century. In 2014, Vincent Dowd spoke to one of Britain's great cameraman

Douglas Slocum who as a young man was in Poland and filmed the buildup to World War II. In 1939 German newsreels were preparing the German people for the invasion of Poland. As tension in Europe rose, Danzig, a major port on the

Baltic was an obvious crisis point. Its population was split between Poles and Germans.

After the First World War, the League of Nations had declared Dansig, today's Gedansk,

a self-governing free city. By the middle of 1939, foreigners who could

were leaving fearing Nazi invasion. A young press photographer from England did exactly the opposite.

I'm Douglas Slocum, much older than I care to be,

recording things for the BBC, trying to remember things that happened years ago.

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