The mindset behind the Holocaust

In 1708, the Spanish galleon San José was sunk by a British warship off the coast of Colombia, vanishing beneath the waves with a treasure trove of unimaginable riches. The wreck's exact location remained a mystery for centuries – until a maritime archaeologist named Roger Dooley ...  Show more

When picturing a fairy, you might imagine a childlike creature with wings. But this is a far more modern image than we might think. In this episode, Matthias Egeler tells Lauren Good about the ways in which our perceptions of elves and fairies have changed throughout history – an ...  Show more

After Adolf Hitler’s rise to power in 1933, thousands of German Jews facing systematic persecution wanted to flee the Third Reich but found few countries willing to accept them. For refugees fleeing the Nazis, America’s immigration quotas, established in the 1920s and sustaine ...

As Hitler ramps up the German war machine, he remains obsessed with one idea: uprooting Jews from the Reich. The Nazis embark on a campaign of totalitarian oppression against them, persecuting Jewish people in every aspect of life. They are excluded from most professions, forbidd ...  Show more

By November 1938 the scene in Germany was at its darkest yet, as the full scale of Hitler’s intentions for the Jewish population of the German Reich was becoming evermore apparent. As the threat of another world war increased, so the Nazi anti-semitism machine went up a gear. Syn ...  Show more

“We must have a healthy people to dominate in the world”. In July 1933, Hitler’s Nazi party passed a new law for the compulsory sterilisation of anyone with a physical disability, or “congenital feeble-mindedness”. They claimed this was scientifically sound, and for the moral and ...  Show more