On August 1, 1944 the Polish Home Army began an uprising to seize control of Warsaw before the Red Army arrived to take the city.
On August 23, King Michael of Romania led a successful effort to overthrow dictator Ion Antonescu and switch Romania’s allegiance from the Axis to the Allies.
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Fanfare
Opening War Theme
Symphony No. 5 in E minor
Composed in 1888 by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky. Public domain.
Public domain recording. Source.
Closing War Theme
Except when otherwise indicated, the contents of this podcast are © and ℗ 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024, 2025, and 2026 by Mark Painter, all rights reserved. Some music and sound effects used by arrangement with Pond 5.
Your coverage of the Eastern Front has been mired in all sorts of misconceptions, myths and outright fabrications that can be traced back to the Cold War and the fact that much of the western historiography on the subject was sourced from anticommunist defectors at best and the postwar memoirs of German generals at worst (“history written by the losers” as one historian put it). With the possible exception of the episode on the Battle of Moscow, the last couple of episodes have been the absolute worst in this regard. The opening of Soviet archives and relative intellectual freedom in Russia of the 1990s and early 2000s gave us a much clearer picture of what actually happened back then. Unfortunately, at least in the west, the common public perception of the Eastern Front continues to lag decades behind these developments, and your podcast, while obviously striving to present a neutral view of things, reflects all those old biases and falls in the same pitfalls all pop-history content on the subject does (Antony Beevor….)
I don’t know what your sources are and I can’t seem to find them on this website if they are listed anywhere. I suppose it’s too late now, but you really should have read the works of people like Jonathan House and David Glantz before covering this subject.
Perhaps most offensive to me (an ethnic Russian) is how we’re past Operation Bagration and approaching the end of the war, and yet you didn’t seem to cover the sheer scale and horror of Nazi war crimes. There were some courtesy references to it, but not anything with the details and scale and testimonies that the subject deserves. Barbarossa was an explicit war of extermination. It wasn’t anything like the war you saw in Italy or France, where both sides halfway respected each others as ‘equals’, in a sense. The Germans saw Slavs as mindless animals, and treated them as such.
I believe I covered Nazi war crimes in some detail. As for my discussion of military actions on the Eastern Front, if it contains myths and fabrications, perhaps you’d like to point to one or two of them.