HistoryExtrahttps://www.historyextra.comHome of Britain’s bestselling history magazine and award-winning podcast2026-09-28T10:47:49.000Zhourly12000-01-01T12:00+00:00India’s forgotten WW1 heroes: why it’s taken a century for these soldiers to be recognisedhttps://www.historyextra.com/membership/indias-forgotten-ww1-heroes-why-its-taken-a-century-for-these-soldiers-to-be-recognised/2026-09-09T14:30:37.000ZAmandeep Madra remembers his father telling him, almost in passing, that his uncle (Amandeep’s great uncle) had served with the British during the First World War. He had been blinded by sandstorms in Iraq; as a boy, Amandeep’s father had accompanied his uncle to Rupar in Ambala, in undivided India, to collect his army pension. “That was the whole story. Nothing else. And this wasn’t ancient history, it was inside my own father’s lifetime,” Amandeep told me.
Amandeep was born and grew up in Britain in the 1970s, his parents having come over in the postwar years. He never forgot that conversation with his father. Anecdotally, he knew a record had been kept of every man that served in the First World War from Punjab, where his family were from. “It felt almost mythical,” says Amandeep. “Something everyone had heard of, but no one had actually seen.”
But the records did exist. In the basement of Lahore Museum in Pakistan were 34 black, leather-bound registers gathering dust. They had been there largely undisturbed for nearly 100 years, until Amandeep Madra contacted them. Working with the University of Greenwich in the UK, it took Amandeep some years to gain their trust, permission and pull the money together in order for the museum to eventually photograph every single one of the 26,000 pages.
One of the first full registers Amandeep asked for was for Ambala, his family’s district. When the museum sent a printout, he located his father’s village. There he found the name of his great uncle, Bishen Singh, son of Jatti. It was an emotional moment for the family. Amandeep’s mother was tearful at seeing the names written down, but also knowing her husband, Amandeep’s father, was no longer alive to see it. More and more printouts were sent from Lahore. There were thousands of names in the registers, mostly written in dark ink. They listed the soldier’s rank, the village they came from, their caste, any injuries, and if they died.
- Read more | The First World War’s deadliest battle was stalling, but everything changed when Little Willie arrived
The registers had been put together by the Punjab government in 1919–20 after the war. It is believed they were compiled for postwar pensions and other veterans’ benefits.
The part that Amandeep and the University of Greenwich team of researchers were looking at was the subset of the register of those who died during the war. They compared the names against the Commonwealth War Grave Commission’s (CWGC) own lists. But the thousands of Punjabis who had died in action, listed in the registers in the Lahore Museum, were absent from the official record. This year, more than a century later, that omission has finally been rectified. Yet if this detail was known, and recorded by British civil authorities in undivided India, why has it taken so long for it to be included?
Rulings made by the British Indian government at the time meant Indian soldiers were not afforded war graves status, but that decision has since been overturned. Historians at the CWGC say most of the 9,909 men who were previously omitted from commemoration records were casualties who died of injuries away from the battlefield.
- Read more | The untold story of India’s WW2 prisoners of war
The CWGC says the new inclusion of the 9,909 names is not just to preserve the names of those who paid the ultimate sacrifice, but also part of a wider effort to redress Eurocentric views of the First World War. Commemoration, it says, should reflect the full global reality of that conflict. Those who have been working on digitising the names, and ensuring they are properly remembered, say that their inclusion represents the righting of a historical injustice.
Descendants in Britain can now search for their family members’ names and details of their service. Amandeep says it connects “people to their own place in history”. But in our collective memory it matters too. Punjab was one of the main recruiting grounds for the British army during the colonial period. The addition of the 9,909 names, even belatedly, puts these men back into the official historical record.
Amandeep believes it’s “a very rare chance to actually fix something, put the record right, commemorate these men and give people the chance to be part of that justice”.
This article was first published in September 2026 of HistoryExtra Magazine
]]>"Weimar's citizens cheered on Hitler": why the home of German democracy was easy prey for the Nazishttps://www.historyextra.com/membership/weimars-citizens-cheered-on-hitler-why-the-home-of-german-democracy-was-easy-prey-for-the-nazis/2026-07-08T13:56:39.000ZAdolf Hitler could not have been clearer. “I love Weimar,” he proclaimed at the end of 1925. He wasn’t talking about the Weimar Republic that had emerged from Germany’s defeat at the end of the First World War, but about the town that lent the ill-fated democracy its name.
Weimar lies in the heart of Germany, about halfway between Hamburg and Munich. It is a quaint place, conscious of history and tradition, both of which it has in abundance. Its cobbled streets are lined with timber-framed houses, elegant villas, churches and palaces – all embraced by vast, beautifully landscaped gardens. It’s this combination of cosy charm and cultural importance that made the town so attractive to Hitler. And he was far from the only one drawn to Weimar.
Between the two world wars, Weimar was a place where people dreamed big ideas, ranging from liberal democracy and utopian art to eugenics and a form of tyranny that would plunge Europe into conflict. Weimar was where the architects of the Bauhaus movement first experimented with new ways of living, but also where Buchenwald – the largest concentration camp on German soil – was established in a beech forest nearby. This uncomfortable proximity of idealism and barbarism makes interwar Weimar the perfect place to seek answers to one of the greatest questions of the 20th century: how did a nation that prided itself on its culture and civility enable the catastrophe of Nazism?
Today, few people outside Germany could point to the town on a map. Yet its name widely conjures powerful notions of noble experiments and fallen ideals. That’s because it was the cradle of Germany’s first full democracy. The Weimar Republic burned brightly, but endured for little over 14 years, from 1919 to 1933 – its demise sealed when Hindenburg appointed Hitler as chancellor.
The shock of the new
To understand how Weimar rose to such prominence, we need to look first at 1918, when Germany lost not just the First World War but also its monarchy. Kaiser Wilhelm II was forced to abdicate and the country became a republic, requiring a new constitution. Berlin, which had been the capital of Prussia and the German empire, remained capital of the new Germany, but would not be where its administration was set up. For one thing, Berlin wasn’t safe. At the beginning of 1919, when the country held its first-ever fully democratic elections on a franchise that included all adult Germans – including women – Berlin was the stage for bloody street battles between communist would-be revolutionaries and the war-hardened soldiers deployed to quell their uprising.
As a seat of the dethroned Hohenzollern dynasty, Berlin was also associated with the old, Prussia-led Germany and, therefore, with a brand of militarism that had contributed to the outbreak of war in 1914. Germany needed to convince the world – and itself – that it was open to the idea of reinvention.
Weimar seemed the ideal launchpad for a new national project. As the capital of the small state of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach, it was neither in Prussia nor in any of the other major German states. It was safe, centrally located and relatively untouched by the political violence that raged in larger cities. Most importantly, it was a powerful symbol that a new Germany could emerge from the ruins of the old.
Weimar was widely regarded as Germany’s cultural capital. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832), the closest thing Germany has to a national poet, had once lived and worked here, as had his friend and fellow writer Friedrich Schiller (1759–1805). Johann Sebastian Bach (1685–1760) resided in Weimar for years, as did composer Franz Liszt (1811–86) and philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900). Weimar’s place in German culture far exceeds its physical size. All in all, it was the ideal setting for an ambitious rebrand.
The Social Democrat Friedrich Ebert, elected as the first president of the republic, knew all this. When he opened the National Assembly in the town’s theatre on 6 February 1919, he proclaimed: “Here in Weimar we must achieve the transformation from imperialism to idealism, from world domination to spiritual greatness… Now the spirit of Weimar, the spirit of great thinkers and poets, must fill our lives again.”
So the first German republic became a “Weimar Republic”. It is telling, however, that the person who coined this term was Hitler. Officially, the postwar state was still called the German Reich (meaning ‘kingdom’ or ‘empire’), as it had been under the kaiser – a hint that regime change is easier than a change in culture. And in 1929, the future dictator and other enemies of the fragile democracy used its 10th anniversary to deploy the term ‘Weimar Republic’ in a derogatory fashion, deriding the system as un-German.
- Read more | Timeline: the rise and fall of the Third Reich
Designs on change
There was much about the new ‘spirit of Weimar’ that riled not just the Nazis but also many conservatives. In the early 1920s, the town drew radically creative minds. A key moment was when Walter Gropius agreed to settle in Weimar and establish the Bauhaus (literally: ‘building house’) art school in 1919. With his arrival, the town had attracted one of the most influential names in world architecture. Many other illustrious figures followed, among them the Russian painter Wassily Kandinsky and Swiss-born artist Paul Klee. In its revolutionary approach, fusing design and craftsmanship with industrial mass production, the Bauhaus had a huge influence on the way we live today, sowing the seed for everything from IKEA flat-packs to clearer typography, prefabricated housing and the cantilever chair.
Sensing the explosive potential of Bauhaus ideas, Weimar’s conservative elites pushed back hard. Their ire was aimed at both the burgeoning Bauhaus movement and those who represented it – students and teachers, an eclectic mix of men and women, many of whom had left-leaning outlooks that ranged from moderate to communist. Scandalously, some students lived in communes and went skinny-dipping in the river Ilm. Many wore distinctive, proto-hippy garments such as sandals and long, loose shirts provocatively referred to as Russen-kittel (Russian smocks), donned in protest against middle-class convention. It all smacked of social decay to conservatives, many of whom existed in a permanent state of moral panic brought on by the dizzying speed of postwar change. They drove Gropius’s art school out of town in 1925, and the Nazis closed the Bauhaus entirely in 1933.
Nursery of Nazism
Though Weimar was, in many ways, an epicentre of modernism, it was also an early stronghold of the Nazi movement. The first formal Nazi Party rally was held in Weimar in 1926, before such gatherings were relocated to Nuremberg. Weimar was where the Hitler Youth received its name, and where significant Nazi rituals such as the Hitler salute were first presented to the public. Nazi polling numbers in Weimar usually exceeded their average across Germany, and the town became the seat of the first state government to appoint a Nazi minister, in 1930, three years before Hitler became Germany’s chancellor.
As Weimar became a haven for the movement and a testing ground for Nazi ideas, its people found themselves on the frontline of the culture wars that played out across interwar Germany. With its peculiar combination of small-town life and cultural prestige, the town was home to both ordinary and illustrious people during the 1920s and 1930s, all striving to ride the waves of history – or, at least, to avoid being drowned. Individual stories of Weimar’s residents offer revealing and fascinating case studies of how people behave in times of crisis.
Take Carl Weirich, a stationer and bookbinder. He moved to Weimar from nearby Eisenach in 1914 to take over a well-established stationery shop in the heart of the old town, just a short walk away from the theatre in which the Weimar Republic was founded. He’d arrived with great hopes for the future – only to be faced by the impacts of two world wars and a multitude of crises that hit both his business and his family.
Weirich was fascinated by paper, ink, typewriters and the written word. He meticulously kept a diary that details his story and is often surprisingly frank, providing unique, granular insights into life between the wars. Fundamentally, he was not a political man. His diary records more on the hiking tours he conducted each Sunday – come rain, come shine, come democracy, come dictatorship – than on the minutiae of current affairs. Yet politics touched every aspect of his life. When the National Assembly convened a stone’s throw from his shop in 1919, he attended some of the public sessions to see how “the new people presented themselves who would represent the fatherland headed by Fritz Ebert”.
Running a small shop that offered bookbinding services as well as fountain pens for schoolchildren and postcards for tourists, Weirich wasn’t rich, but he was comparatively comfortable when the economy was stable. During times of crisis, however, it felt as if the rug was being pulled from beneath his feet. In the spring of 1923, when hyperinflation began to hit the young republic hard, he bought a used bicycle for 2 million marks. Had he held on to the money until September, the same amount would have bought him a loaf of bread or an egg.
During the Great Depression that followed the Wall Street crash of 1929, he once again suffered a reversal of fortunes as economic despair threatened to rob him and his young family of house, shop, home and livelihood. One government after another had failed to make things better. At the end of 1932, Weirich – like millions of his fellow Germans – was ready to pin his hopes on one “young man, the Führer of the National Socialist Party A. Hitler”. The war that “young man” would unleash just a few years later would leave Weimar – and, with it, the life Weirich had built for himself – in ash and ruin.
Hosting Hitler
Weimar’s women who found themselves caught up in events also tried to shape their own destinies. Take Rosa Schmidt, a hotelier of Jewish heritage who, together with her husband, Arthur – a decorated war veteran from an old Protestant Weimar family – ran the Hotel Hohenzollern by the train station. The couple struggled to keep their business afloat during the challenging postwar years and hyperinflation. So when Hitler and his supporters booked the hotel repeatedly for early Nazi visits to Weimar, the Schmidts saw welcome opportunities to save their business from catastrophe. Hitler had no idea that his meals were prepared by a Jewish woman, even as he unleashed his antisemitic rants in her hotel. Rosa had no idea that her guest would bring death to the majority of European Jews, and that her family would be no exception.
At the other end of town, Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche ran an archive that contained the papers of her late brother, Friedrich Nietzsche. After the philosopher suffered a mental breakdown in 1889, his sister became his carer until the time of his death 11 years later, and the self-appointed steward of his legacy thereafter. Permanently cash-strapped, she and the Nietzsche Archive relied on funding from generous donors and the various governments of the interwar era. Though not initially impressed by Hitler, Elisabeth soon embraced Nazism – and Nazism embraced Nietzsche.
Despite her politics, Elisabeth’s oldest friend remained the liberal Harry Graf Kessler, an Anglo-German aristocrat and diplomat who enjoyed the eccentric lifestyle of a cosmopolitan dandy. A gay man at a time when male homosexuality was illegal, he was careful not to draw too much attention to his relationships, but he nonetheless flaunted his bachelordom.
A mythical aura surrounded him almost from birth. Kaiser Wilhelm I had been so smitten with the boy’s beautiful mother that he had fostered the Kesslers’ swift rise, and became godfather to Harry’s younger sister, Wilhelmina. There were even rumours that the emperor was the illegitimate father of either or both of the Kessler children – something the younger man vehemently refuted. Multilingual, widely travelled and well-educated, the count felt as much at ease at court as he did in bars and ballrooms. He promoted art and moved to Weimar at the turn of the century, playing an integral part in its thriving cultural scene. There he befriended Elisabeth and helped to establish her brother’s archive.
Expressing an agony that will be familiar to modern readers, Kessler frequently complained in his diary that, in a deeply polarised society, it had become difficult to maintain friendships across the political divide. As Elisabeth became increasingly nationalistic and eventually outright supportive of Nazism, he remained staunchly liberal and had to flee Germany when Hitler rose to power. In one letter to his old friend Elisabeth, Kessler wrote: “I have strived my whole life to, yes, take politics seriously since it belongs to those things on which our daily life and work depends, but to bar it from entering into my relationships.” The pair agreed to avoid political subjects, but this proved increasingly difficult in an era in which everything was political.
Monstrous ideas
Weimar changed politically and physically in the 1930s. The Nazis intended it to be a model town for their murderous dictatorship, and thus reshaped it architecturally and ideologically. Its inhabitants were forced to respond to what was happening, whether they wanted to do so or not. Teachers had to decide if they were happy to teach ‘racial hygiene’ in their lessons. Jews were dismissed from public sector jobs, no matter what they did. Registrar Heinrich Fleischhauer, a civil servant, was soon expected to sign death certificates for the victims of the Buchenwald concentration camp.
Many of those who spent time in Weimar in the 1920s made remarkably contrasting choices in the 1930s. Take Marlene Dietrich, who was sent to Weimar in her late teens to study violin with the best musicians. Or Walter Gropius, the founder of the Bauhaus school. Neither found life in Nazi Germany bearable, and both chose to live in the US rather than remain in a country run by Hitler. Dietrich renounced her German citizenship in 1939 and became an American. Other inhabitants of Weimar embraced Nazism. Emmy Sonnemann worked as an actress at the Weimar theatre. One day in 1932, she happened to be sitting in the Kaiser Café when an important-looking man in uniform stepped in. It was Hermann Göring. The two married in 1935. Hitler was their best man.
- Read more | Who was Hermann Göring? The truth about Hitler’s drug-fuelled enforcer who met his downfall at Nuremberg
Very few citizens of the town actively resisted Nazism. One of those who did was Kurt Nehrling, a young Social Democrat who returned from serving in the First World War with a debilitating case of tuberculosis. He allowed neither his illness nor personal setbacks to deter him from fighting for his convictions and, in resisting Nazism, he put both himself and his family in grave danger. Nehrling didn’t survive the Second World War. Arrested by the SS, he was executed at Dachau in 1943.
When the Americans occupied Weimar in the spring of 1945, they found that people such as Nehrling represented a tiny minority. To quote the American documentary Death Mills, filmed at liberated concentration camps including Buchenwald, the majority of Weimar’s citizens “had put themselves gladly into the hands of criminals and lunatics”.
A zone of interest
What roles did the people of Weimar play in Germany’s descent into darkness? Were they were culpable for the horrors of Nazism? Weimar’s citizens had, after all, found it possible to go hiking and sledging a stone’s throw from a concentration camp, and sleep soundly in their beds at night. They’d cheered on Hitler and stood by when Jewish neighbours were sent to their deaths. It’s always easier to condemn than it is to explain, but in the latter lies the key to understanding history and, ultimately, to drawing meaningful conclusions from it.
Asking why Germans acted the way they did is not the same as justifying their choices. If we are to avoid the mistakes made by people in the past, the first step is to understand why these mistakes were made. No one is entirely free to act outside the circumstances in which they find themselves. But that doesn’t mean that people lack agency. Interwar Germany has long fascinated scholars and the public precisely because it embodies the tension between the individual and the collective, between inevitability and responsibility – and nowhere was this truer than in Weimar, where many of the contrasting pathways of the interwar era came together.
Weimar – with all of its inherent contradictions, with the hopes and fears of a nation stamped onto its houses and streets – acted as a crucible of German history between the world wars. In Weimar, both good and evil ideas were forged, tried and tested. The townspeople were, variously, observers, participants, perpetrators, bystanders and victims of events that shaped Germany, Europe and the world. Studying their behaviour, both as individuals and as members of society, gets us closer to understanding how Nazism took hold, and how it was able to spread its pernicious influence far beyond its fanatical core.
It is in these dynamics that we may find instructive points to help us safeguard democracy and freedom in our own time. When you piece together the human mosaic of Weimar, one stark lesson stands out: no amount of history, tradition or culture is sufficient on its own to safeguard against takeover by a ruthless totalitarian ideology. Democracy and civilisation are maintained or destroyed by the choices we make as individuals and as societies. There is no better place and time to study this than interwar Weimar, a town where people conjured up dreams of a better world – but woke to find themselves living under tyranny.
This article was first published in the July 2026 issue of HistoryExtra Magazine
]]>After two world wars, monarchies across the world collapsed. Why did Britain's survive?https://www.historyextra.com/period/second-world-war/why-british-monarchy-survived/2026-05-08T12:38:45.000ZAt the end of the 19th century, monarchy was still one of the world’s most familiar forms of government.
Across Europe, dynasties ruled vast empires: the Romanovs in Russia, the Habsburgs in Austria-Hungary and the Hohenzollerns in Germany. Beyond Europe, too, hereditary rulers still governed in parts of the Middle East, Asia and Africa.
But as the 20th century progressed, new challenges arose, and monarchies the world over succumbed to the weight of upheaval.
“It’s certainly the case that across the 20th century, monarchy around the world wasn’t exactly a growth industry,” says historian David Cannadine, speaking on the HistoryExtra podcast.
So why, at a time when monarchies were falling across the globe, did the British monarchy survive?
The collapse of monarchy in the age of war
The greatest blows to global monarchies came with the two world wars.
“The First World War saw the end of the great monarchies of Russia, Austria-Hungary, and Germany,” Cannadine explains.
In each case, military disaster triggered a political collapse. In Russia, the revolution of 1917 swept away Tsar Nicholas II and ended centuries of Romanov rule. In Germany, defeat forced Kaiser Wilhelm II to abdicate, clearing the way for a republic. In Austria-Hungary, the Habsburg monarchy disintegrated as the empire itself broke apart into successor states.
The aftermath of the Second World War also proved fatal to many thrones.
In Italy, the monarchy was abolished by referendum in 1946 after the fall of fascism. Elsewhere in the mid-20th century, monarchies in states such as Egypt and Iraq were overthrown amid coups, revolution and the rise of assertive nationalist politics.
Across much of the world, the trend was quite stark. Monarchy was retreating, and often doing so under pressure of war, defeat and an appetite for political instability.
A rare survivor
The British monarchy wasn’t the only one to survive the century. Other European states, especially in Scandinavia, as well as Belgium and the Netherlands, also retained their royal houses.
But in broader global terms, monarchy was plainly in decline.
“The survival of the British monarchy stands out against the general trend,” says Cannadine.
One of the most important reasons for its survival is quite straightforward.
“I think part of the answer is that it was a fluke that Britain was on the winning side in both the First and the Second World Wars,” Cannadine says. “The reason the Austro-Hungarian and the German monarchies disappeared was because of spectacular military defeats.”
Clearly, in the 20th century, monarchies were especially vulnerable when military defeat destroyed confidence in the political order and made subsequent change more possible.
Britain, by contrast, emerged from both wars victorious. That outcome strengthened, rather than shattered, confidence in the state and its institutions. The monarchy, as one of those institutions, benefited accordingly.
Inertia, loyalty and the difficulty of abolition
Wartime success, however, is only part of the story. Another is institutional inertia.
Long-established institutions often survive because abolishing them is politically difficult. That is especially true of monarchy, which is woven into the legal, ceremonial and symbolic fabric of the state.
Cannadine points out that predictions of royal collapse are a recurring feature of British public life. “We are constantly told that whatever the latest crisis is could spell the end of the House of Windsor,” he says. As it stands, such predictions have rarely amounted to much.
“What would it take to get rid of the British monarchy?” Cannadine asks. In practice, there is no clear answer.
Monarchy in a democratic system
The British monarchy’s endurance also reflects the way it fits into the country’s constitutional order.
Over the course of the 19th century, Britain evolved into a parliamentary democracy in which real governing power rested with elected politicians rather than monarchs. In this new political world, the monarch became a primarily ceremonial head of state.
That arrangement can seem contradictory. How can a hereditary office survive in a democratic political culture?
One classic answer was offered by the 19th-century writer Walter Bagehot, who distinguished between the “dignified” and the “efficient” parts of the constitution. Government and parliament carried out the practical work of rule, while the monarchy embodied continuity, ceremony and national identity.
“It’s probably a better arrangement to have a head of state and a chief executive… and for them not to be the same person,” Cannadine explains.
In presidential systems such as that of the United States, those roles are combined, meaning there is no head of state who transcends the turbulence of political disagreement. In the British context, the prime minister operates in the contested world of party politics, while the monarch stands outside it, symbolising the nation state without directly running it.
“The chief executive is chosen by the people … and if you want a head of state who is separate from that world and above that world, then why not make it hereditary?”
Naturally, not everyone finds that logic persuasive.
Elizabeth II and the power of continuity
If geopolitics and constitutional structures explain part of the story of the British monarchy’s continued existence, personality explains another crucial aspect – above all in the case of Elizabeth II.
“What became very important was that she was around for so long,” Cannadine explains.
Her reign lasted from 1952 to 2022: seven decades in which Britain changed profoundly. The empire disappeared, old assumptions about class and deference weakened, and Britain’s place in the world order shifted repeatedly.
Through all this, to some it seemed like it was monarchy alone that remained a constant anchor. “There was that sense that she provided some kind of stable reassurance as so much else changed. That became enormously important,” Cannadine says.
Her style of monarchy mattered, too. She avoided overt political controversy, rarely gave away personal views, and maintained a disciplined public neutrality that helped preserve the monarch’s role as a unifying national figure sitting above the ebb and flow of politics.
Crisis – and resilience
None of this means the monarchy moved through the 20th century untouched by crisis.
“There were some pretty sticky patches,” Cannadine acknowledges.
The Suez Crisis of 1956 exposed Britain’s declining global power. Later decades brought repeated waves of criticism directed at the royal family itself, especially in the 1990s, when marital breakdown, media scrutiny and the aftermath following the death of Diana, Princess of Wales prompted serious questions about the institution’s future.
That resilience points to another reason for the endurance of the British monarchy: its ability to adjust without fundamentally changing its core role. It’s changed with the times but recognisably remains the same institution.
It’s these factors, Cannadine says, that – when taken together – help to explain why, in a century marked by the fall of thrones elsewhere, the British crown has kept itself alive.
David Cannadine was speaking to Danny Bird on the HistoryExtra podcast. Listen to the full conversation.
]]>Did Rasputin really bring down the Tsars? The truth behind the dark legend of the Russian mystichttps://www.historyextra.com/membership/did-rasputin-really-bring-down-the-tsars-the-truth-behind-the-dark-legend-of-the-russian-mystic/2026-05-06T16:00:15.000ZDanny Bird: When people hear the name ‘Rasputin’, they tend to picture an almost cartoonish villain shrouded in myth and scandal. What drew you to his story and is there anything you want your readers to unlearn about him from the get-go?
Antony Beevor: Grigori Rasputin was an extraordinarily influential figure. Alexander Kerensky, leader of the Provisional Government after the February 1917 Revolution, famously said that “without Rasputin, there would have been no Lenin”. That raises a compelling question: how did a virtually illiterate Siberian peasant play such a significant role in the downfall of the greatest autocracy the world had ever known? From that perspective, he is a phenomenally fascinating character and one that is crucial to understand.
Rumour also played an enormous role in Rasputin’s story. Even today, we tend to underestimate the power of rumour and its effects, and historians have often done the same.
What was it about Rasputin’s personality, beliefs or timing that made his rise to the apex of the Russian empire possible?
At the end of the 19th century and the start of the 20th, there was a widespread fascination with spiritualism, shamans and, often, outright frauds. St Petersburg society at the time was deeply corrupt and became even more so once the First World War began. When a so-called ‘man of God’ arrived on the scene, people were obsessed. Rasputin undeniably possessed extraordinary qualities. We know of his seductive power, but he also presented himself as a healer. This remains a subject of debate: how he was able, not to cure, but at least to alleviate the suffering of Tsar Nicholas II’s heir, Alexei Nikolaevich, who had haemophilia.
Where was Rasputin born and what was his early life like?
He began life as a ne’er-do-well in a village called Pokrovskoye in western Siberia, surrounded by vast forests and rivers. His father was a peasant; the family owned a few animals and worked in winter transporting goods by sledge. As a teenager, Rasputin was reputedly a heavy drinker. After marrying a simple but intelligent woman, he underwent what he believed to be a spiritual transformation and felt he had received a calling from God. Whether one accepts this or not, there is little doubt that he was sincere in that belief.
This did not alter other aspects of Rasputin’s character, which later emerged more clearly. He was profoundly contradictory: genuinely religious and intensely spiritual, yet also deeply lascivious and a lecher of the worst order. He claimed to love women but was predatory and a rapist. Yet he had an extraordinary ability to convince women that he alone truly understood them. When he arrived in St Petersburg, many society women, often neglected by their powerful husbands, were drawn to him with remarkable devotion.
Such contradictions are deeply Russian, and are one reason he remains such an intriguing figure. As the 19th-century poet Fyodor Tyutchev famously observed, “Russia cannot be understood by the mind alone.” There is a powerful current of spiritual emotion at its core, although one corruptible by cruelty and excess.
Rasputin embodied this paradox. He could be generous, giving money away freely, yet at the same time accepted bribes and cash from all sides. To portray him simply as a figure of pure evil is as misleading as depicting him solely as the holy man adored by the Empress Alexandra Feodorovna.
What were the circumstances that brought him to the capital of the Russian empire, St Petersburg?
He announced to his wife that he was leaving her to become a wandering pilgrim, setting out in search of God and enlightenment. At the time, around 1903–04, this was far from unusual. There were perhaps a million Russians on the roads, dressed in rags, carrying chains, practising a form of bodily mortification. They walked from monastery to monastery, praying, doing odd jobs and receiving just enough food to reach the next stop.
Rasputin travelled not only to holy sites across Russia but as far as Mount Athos in Greece. He later arrived in Kazan, on the river Volga, one of Russia’s ancient cities. There he attracted the attention of a wealthy and influential woman who became convinced he was both a healer and a man of God. But he was already behaving appallingly, persuading young women, including, reportedly, girls as young as 15, to wash him intimately in the bathhouse. This was central to his method of seduction and led many to suspect him of belonging to the Khlysty, a sect that believed sin was a necessary path to redemption. The logic was seductive: sin together and be redeemed together.
Despite this, the woman in Kazan introduced him to a powerful bishop in St Petersburg. This proved decisive. The bishop, like many others, was swept away by Rasputin’s ability to break down resistance through an intense, if often incoherent, spirituality. He could be rambling and barely intelligible, yet the less people understood him, the more fervently they invested meaning in his every word. He soon gained the support of senior churchmen, including the confessor to the royal family, as well as two Montenegrin princesses in the Romanov circle.
Through them, Rasputin was introduced to the tsar in November 1905, a critical moment. Nicholas II had just been humiliated by Russia’s disastrous defeat to Japan, which had triggered revolutionary unrest. Rasputin was able to present himself to the tsar and tsaritsa as a simple man of the people, someone they could trust and confide in. Both were drawn to him.
Interestingly, this was not without precedent. A few years earlier, a French mystic known as ‘Monsieur Philippe’ (Nizier Anthelme Philippe) had gained similar influence at court. He, too, was referred to as ‘our friend’ and credited with extraordinary powers. When he left, he reportedly foretold that another would come after him. In the empress’s subconscious, Rasputin seems to have fulfilled that prophecy.
The tsar and tsaritsa were nostalgic for a Russia that predated Peter the Great’s westernising reforms. Do you think they saw Rasputin as a manifestation of this older, primal version of Russia?
Absolutely. This was the core of Rasputin’s appeal: he was a man of the people, a living embodiment of ‘old Russia’. One must remember a fundamental tension within Russia itself: the split between slavophiles and westernisers. The slavophiles rejected the idea that Russia should follow a ‘western’ path. Instead, they believed it was rooted in an ascetic spiritual tradition unique to Russia and were suspicious of European influence.
This helps explain why Nicholas and Alexandra loathed the legacy of Peter the Great (reigned 1682–1725), who founded St Petersburg as a ‘window on the west’ and sought to modernise the country. Those reforms, and the brutal repression that accompanied them, created a recurring cycle in Russian history: modernisation followed by savage backlash.
This mindset was clearly visible during the celebrations for the 300th anniversary of the House of Romanov in 1913. The tsar insisted that courtiers dress in traditional boyar costume rather than in the western dress of Peter the Great’s era. For Nicholas and Alexandra, Moscow represented the spiritual heart of Russia, while St Petersburg symbolised corruption and dangerous European decadence. This outlook helps explain why they increasingly isolated themselves from Petersburg society altogether.
Rasputin became indispensable to Nicholas and Alexandra because of his ability to ‘heal’ complications arising from their son’s haemophilia. Do you think he believed in his powers or was he exploiting a desperate family?
This is a subject that may never be fully understood. I recall being advised, after injuring my back, to see someone who could apparently pass their hands over it without touching yet have a remarkable effect. It’s a bit like that with Rasputin. Whether one believes in it or not, some phenomena defy explanation.
There is no doubt that even the doctors were fascinated and at times embarrassed, as they were unable to relieve the suffering of the tsarevich. On several occasions, during crises such as when the family was in a Polish forest, the child suddenly calmed when Rasputin’s voice reached him via telephone. Doctors attributed it to coincidence, or perhaps to psychosomatic factors. Yet contemporaneous accounts describe the child being soothed by Rasputin’s presence and voice, despite his terrifying appearance.
- Read more | Did Anastasia survive the massacre of the Romanovs? The real history that debunks the conspiracy
Whether this was genuine healing or charlatanism is impossible to prove, but there is no doubt that Rasputin held extraordinary influence. He gave the empress a sense of power over her son’s wellbeing, and by extension over her husband, the tsar – a psychological authority no one else possessed.
Rasputin took advantage of the sexual excess and hypocrisy of Russia’s aristocracy in the years leading up to the 1917 Revolution. How vital was this ‘moral decay’ to his grip on high society?
It’s striking how sex and revolution often intertwine. Think of the French Revolution, with its lurid fantasies about Marie Antoinette and noble women. There are clear echoes in Russia in the early 20th century. Rumours that the empress was sleeping with Rasputin, or that he was involved with her daughters, were entirely false. Yet in a patriarchal society, such scandals could utterly undermine the tsar’s authority.
Nicholas II was naïve in allowing Rasputin unrestricted access to the empress and the palace, which inevitably fuelled gossip. Because the rumours were false, both he and the empress rejected them, refusing to acknowledge the growing tide of resentment and revolt that was mounting around them.
How far was Rasputin able to influence tsarist rule during these years?
Rasputin’s influence began modestly, but after 1915 it escalated dramatically. Persuaded by Rasputin and the empress, the tsar took personal command of the armies – a disastrous decision. He left Petrograd (the new name for St Petersburg after 1914), giving the empress and Rasputin free rein over government appointments. They removed or replaced dozens of provincial governors with loyal supporters and even intervened in the selection of prime ministers and the minister of the interior, effectively shaping the administration according to their will.
But Nicholas II’s mother, the empress dowager Maria Feodorovna, was against Rasputin.
She was strongly opposed to him, and there was a long-standing reason for her distrust. A diary reputed to have belonged to Rasputin, preserved in the Russian archives, contains material corroborated by other sources. According to it, when Nicholas’s mother was pregnant with him, she had a terrifying dream: she and her husband were climbing a hill when a baby appeared in her arms. She was told it was her future son. The baby then leapt from her arms and scrambled ahead, only to be confronted by a peasant in a blazing red shirt, wielding an axe, who beheaded the child.
Traumatised, the empress consulted a family wet nurse to interpret the dream, who offered a benign reading. Yet decades later, when she learned that her son and daughter-in-law were enthralled by a Siberian peasant, she was horrified. She recognised Rasputin’s presence as potentially dangerous and became the leading voice of opposition within the imperial family.
This account was also shared with me by Princess Olga Romanoff, whose father had told her the story of the dream. Her father was the brother of Princess Irina Alexandrovna, who was married to Felix Yusupov, the man who later murdered Rasputin, linking the family’s memory of these events directly to the dramatic arc of Rasputin’s influence and demise.
How did Russia’s involvement in the First World War amplify Rasputin’s influence at court and the sense that the system was in jeopardy?
Rasputin’s influence grew dramatically with Nicholas II absent at the front. The tsar hated politics and decision-making; he was weak but obstinate, a dangerous combination. He preferred life at the army headquarters, far from Petrograd, leaving the empress and Rasputin effectively in charge of domestic affairs. Rasputin and the empress made political appointments according to their preferences, which created chaos.
One notable example was Alexander Protopopov, who initially seemed a competent, liberal candidate and was vice president of the Duma. He became obsessed with the empress and was afflicted with advanced syphilis, which affected his judgment. Persuaded by Rasputin, he was given control over Russia’s rail network, a role critical for moving food to cities. Mismanagement here meant that food could not reach urban centres, notably Petrograd, contributing directly to the unrest that sparked the February Revolution in 1917.
The circumstances of Rasputin’s assassination are almost legendary. Could you talk us through what happened and what effect it had on Russia?
Rasputin was assassinated by extreme rightwing reactionaries in December 1916. The key figures were Prince Felix Yusupov, married, as I’ve said, to the tsar’s favourite niece, Princess Irina, and Grand Duke Dmitri Pavlovich, a popular and dashing cousin of the tsar. They were joined by Vladimir Purishkevich, an arch-monarchist, antisemite and leader of the ultraconservative Black Hundreds. Their plan relied on luring Rasputin to the Moika Palace, home to the Yusupov family, in Petrograd under the pretext of meeting Irina, who was, in fact, still in Crimea.
- Read more | Did a British agent murder Rasputin?
The conspirators first tried to poison him with cakes laced with cyanide, but Rasputin appeared unaffected. Panicked, they shot him multiple times, finishing him off at close range. The autopsy later confirmed the chaotic and incompetent nature of the assassination.
The murder shocked the tsar and empress, who feared it might be part of a wider palace coup. In Petrograd, the public reaction was paradoxical: some celebrated, but the broader effect was destabilising. Rasputin’s death, rather than restoring order, accelerated the decline of the Romanov autocracy.
What do you think Rasputin’s extraordinary life tells us about the tsarist system in its final years?
This episode illustrates the extreme strain on Russian society at the time. A reactionary state, forced into an unprepared war, was already fragile. Logistical chaos, military incompetence, and corruption compounded the crisis. Socially, the aristocracy and elite were widely seen as decadent and morally corrupt, with rampant infidelity, divorces and exploitation of women. Even prominent industrialists, while patrons of the arts, were implicated in corruption and vice.
Against this backdrop, Rasputin’s influence and eventual assassination were both symptoms and accelerants of a failing system, highlighting how power, truth and leadership were vulnerable under extreme societal strain.
Antony Beevor is a bestselling writer and historian, with four novels and 13 works of non-fiction already to his name. His books include Russia: Revolution and Civil War 1917–1921 (W&N, 2022) and Arnhem: The Battle for the Bridges, 1944 (Viking, 2018)
This article was first published in the April 2026 issue of HistoryExtra Magazine
]]>Creating fake Paris: why did one man build a hoax French capital?https://www.historyextra.com/membership/creating-fake-paris-how-one-man-built-a-mock-city-to-fool-ww1-german-bombers/2026-04-01T10:35:41.000ZTucked away in a British newspaper called The Globe in its edition of 4 October 1920 was a short story with an intriguing headline: “A Mock Paris: French Plan to Hoodwink German Raiders.”
The ruse, explained the paper, had only just come to light, and it was almost too fantastical to be true. “Camouflaged streets, factories, dwelling houses, railways, with stations and trains complete, and in fact a camouflaged capital, was the gigantic task on which French engineers were engaged when the Armistice put an end to military operations,” ran the report. It was the brainchild of an electrical engineer called Jacopozzi; a way to draw German aircraft away from the capital and onto a fake conurbation where bombs could fall without causing death and destruction. But the Germans sued for peace as the city began to take shape and Jacopozzi’s ingenuity was never put to the test.
Paris was first bombed by German aircraft on 30 August 1914, the first time that a capital city had been attacked in such a manner. Four small bombs were dropped from the hands of Ferdinand von Hiddessen and his observer from their Rumpler Taube monoplane. The casualties were minimal, but the wider psychological damage was profound. A little over a decade after the Wright brothers had made the first brief flight in an airplane, the Americans’ invention was a new and terrifying weapon of war.
The home front was now a battlefront, and women and children were no longer safe from enemy fire.
Death from above
There were other sporadic attacks in the 18 months that followed, including the first attack by Zeppelins (named after their inventor, Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin) in March 1915. The airships came from their bases in Belgium, but none caused serious casualties. However, on 29 January 1916, two Zeppelins appeared in the grey winter sky over the French capital. Their bombs wreaked havoc, killing 24 and wounding 30.
The funerals of the dead were held on 7 February 1916 in a service that brought Paris to a standstill. Thousands of mourners lined the streets as six gun carriages carried the coffins to the Church of Notre-Dame de la Croix, and politicians and other dignitaries walked behind. The service was conducted by Cardinal Leon Adolphe Amette, the archbishop of Paris, who delivered what one British newspaper described as a “moving oration”. “Before you lie the victims of German barbarity, who fell on no field of battle,” he proclaimed.
“Their death will help the cause of mankind and will strengthen the vigorous determination to conquer, to reduce the enemy to impotence, and to prevent a repetition of his crime.” But the impotence was all French as the air attacks increased in the months that followed. Paris had a respite in 1917 when the Germans switched the focus of their air attacks to London, using their latest bomber aircraft, the Gotha. One raid in June left 162 Britons dead. The French knew their turn would come. But how could they defend themselves?
How Fernand Jacopozzi built a fake Paris
A man who thought he had a solution was an electrical engineer called Fernand Jacopozzi. A Florentine by birth, Jacopozzi had previously worked on the Paris International Exposition in 1900, a world’s fair that celebrated the achievements of the past century and looked forward to what the next 100 years held.
Jacopozzi believed it would be a century of progress, one which could prove lucrative for an electrical engineer such as himself. He remained in Paris and, according to one contemporary newspaper, “made a special study of electric lighting”.
How Jacopozzi became involved in this secret project is unclear - for obvious reasons. But at some point in late 1917, he was commissioned by the DCA [Défense contre Avions, the War Office department charged with protecting France from air attacks] to build a fake Paris in order to fool German bombers.
As outlandish it sounds to modern minds, the plan made sense at the time. Enemy aircraft navigated their way to the capital at night not by technological aids but by topography. They simply followed the River Seine and then dropped their bombs. But the Seine is a meandering river that, once it cuts through the heart of Paris, under its famous bridges and past landmarks such as the Eiffel Tower, then doubles back on itself not once, but twice, like the humps of a camel. It was on the second of these ‘humps’, in the suburb of Maisons-Laffitte, that the French instructed Jacopozzi to construct his phoney city. However, there were to be two other “zones of false objectives”: a fake industrial zone would be created at Vaires-sur-Marne, situated 10 miles east of the capital, while the suburb of Saint-Denis would be relocated to Villepinte in the northeast.
Light railway system
Jacopozzi began his work at Villepinte in 1918, constructing a replica of the Gare de l’Est railway station - one of Paris’ busiest - and even fabricating a moving train. Drawing on his years of study of electrical lighting, the Italian used wooden boards for the train’s carriages, and for the interior lights he rigged up an ingenious system of lights on a conveyor belt. From the air it appeared that the train was moving.
The industrial zone was next. Jacopozzi once again used wooden boards for the shell of the factories and for the roofs he used canvases craftily dappled with various hues of paint. With a clever combination of different coloured lamps – whites, yellows and reds – he recreated the fires and vapours emitted by a factory during the manufacturing process. The key was subtlety; he didn’t want to arouse the Germans’ suspicion by lighting up his fake creations like a Christmas tree.
It was painstaking work but Jacopozzi had all but finished when German Gotha aircraft raided the capital on 16 September, dropping 22,000 kilos of bombs that left six dead and 15 wounded. Next time the bombers returned the subterfuge would be put into operation. But there wasn’t a next time. Two months later the war ended and Jacopozzi was denied the chance to see if his ingenuity had outsmarted the German pilots.
Nonetheless, the French government believed they had created an important form of defence should enemy bombers appear over Paris in a future war. A veil of secrecy was thrown over Jacopozzi’s creation, one which was lifted in 1920 when the British press got hold of the story. The Globe had the scoop at the start of October, but it was The Illustrated London News in its edition of 6 November 1920 that really brought Jacopozzi’s invention to life in a photo essay headlined: “A False Paris Outside Paris — a ‘City’ Created to be Bombed.” There were photographs, maps and explanations, all of which amounted to what the newspaper called “remarkably interesting revelations”.
Towering achievements
What they didn’t disclose, however, was the name of the man behind the sham city. But Jacopozzi was honoured by the French government with the presentation of the Legion d’Honneur, and he enjoyed great success in the 1920s. Having illuminated the Eiffel Tower, he also installed floodlights on the Place de la Concorde and lit up several other popular landmarks in the city. The corporate world spotted the potential in Jacopozzi’s talent and Citroën hired him to create a large luminous advertisement of one of their motor cars on the Eiffel Tower.
Jacopozzi died in Paris in 1932. “He attracted world interest by his illumination of the Eiffel Tower, and did much to make Paris the City of Light,” remarked The People newspaper in a short paragraph about his passing. There was no mention of Jacopozzi’s contribution to the French war effort but no news is better than fake news. Or in his case, a fake city.
Gavin Mortimer is a historian and author. His books include Guidance from the Greatest (Constable, 2020) and David Stirling: The Phoney Major: The Life, Times and Truth about the Founder of the SAS (Constable, 2022)
This article was first published in the April 2022 issue of BBC History Revealed Magazine
]]>Spy, hero, rebel, traitor: the story of Roger Casementhttps://www.historyextra.com/membership/the-story-of-roger-casement-podcast-rory-carroll/2026-03-27T08:00:24.000ZRory Carroll unpacks the dramatic final years of Roger Casement – an Irish diplomat and nationalist whose tangled legacy includes heroism, betrayal, and personal scandal. Carroll tells Elinor Evans about how Casement's support of Irish Home Rule in the early 20th century morphed into a bold plan. As the First World War raged on, and Britain's attentions were engaged elsewhere, Casement chose a fateful path: to ally with Germany, seeking arms and support for the nationalist cause.
Find out more about the cause of Home Rule, Irish Nationalism, and the 1916 Easter Rising. Go beyond the podcast.
]]>How the work of American folk song collectors inspired The History of Soundhttps://www.historyextra.com/period/first-world-war/history-sound-true-story/2026-02-04T17:20:02.000ZPeriod romance The History of Sound focuses on the relationship between two musicians, Lionel (Paul Mescal) and David (Josh O’Connor). The duo begin an affair at the New England Conservatory of Music in 1917, but their lives diverge with the US’s entry into the First World War. David is drafted to fight on the Western Front. Lionel, whose poor eyesight precludes military service, returns to his family’s modest farm in Kentucky.
Post-conflict, the men meet again for a trip across Maine, visiting rural homes to record folk songs on wax phonograph cylinders – sometimes called Edison cylinders after inventor Thomas Edison (1847–1931). But in a film of lost love, there’s no conventional happy ending here. The drama also deals with class, repression, missed opportunities, grief and the way we all time-travel across our own personal histories so that, to quote director Oliver Hermanus, we sometimes find ourselves “having conversations from the past in our heads”.
Underpinning the emotional truth of the drama is the filmmakers’ research into the early 20th century – and, more specifically, into the work of those hardy souls who set out to document the traditional music they heard in shacks, on porches and around campfires.
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Is The History of Sound a true story? And were Lionel and David real?
No, the History of Sound is not a true story – it’s based on Ben Shattuck’s 2018 short story of the same name – however, Paul Mescal’s Lionel and Josh O’Connor’s David are historically plausible figures, despite both being fictional.
From the 19th century onwards, men and women on both sides of the Atlantic were fascinated by the folk tradition and set out to catalogue songs, first by collating lyrics and annotating tunes, and later via making recordings.
Who were these real-life collectors?
In the UK, the major name in the field was Cecil Sharp (1859–1924). Among his many achievements, Morris dancing enthusiast Sharp co-founded the English Folk Dance Society. This later merged with the Folk-Song Society to form the English Folk Dance and Song Society (EFDSS), based at Cecil Sharp House in Camden, London, which remains a centre for those researching folk music.
Sharp also collected songs Stateside, in the Appalachian Mountains. However, it’s the Lomax family that’s most associated with song collecting in the US. It was John Lomax (1867–1948) who brought Lead Belly (1889–1949) to wider attention after hearing the folk-blues legend on a visit to Louisiana State Penitentiary, a notorious jail better known as Angola. Lomax was a key figure in building up the Archive of American Folk Song, the first national collection of the country’s folk music. John’s children, Alan (1915–2002), John Jr (1907–74) and Bess Lomax Hawes (1921–2009) were also important folklorists.
Some American collectors specialised in particular locales. Several names are particularly associated with Maine, where David and Lionel go collecting in The History of Sound. They include Fannie Hardy Eckstorm (1865–1946), who documented the music and culture of working people and Penobscot Native Americans, and field recordings pioneer Robert Winslow Gordon (1888–1961), born in Bangor, Maine and the first head of the Archive of American Folk Song.
- Read more | The great American U-turn: from isolationism to WW1 combatants
Why was this work important?
Generations of musicians have benefited from their work. What’s come to be known as the American Folk Revival began in the 1940s. Along with Lead Belly, important early figures included Woody Guthrie (1912–67), who in 1940 wrote ‘This Land is Your Land’ as a riposte to what he saw as the jingoism of Irving Berlin’s ‘God Bless America’, and the tireless activist Pete Seeger (1919–2014).
Many figures in the revival were associated with left-wing politics. Guthrie’s guitars in the 1940s bore the legend, “This machine kills fascists.” Seeger was blacklisted during the McCarthy era. In the 1960s, another generation picked up the baton, which had metaphorically been left in Manhattan’s coffee houses. It may be an exaggeration to suggest that, without song collectors, we wouldn’t have had Joan Baez or Bob Dylan, but these artists’ careers, and our shared cultural history, would have been very different.
Building the world of The History of Sound
Jonathan Wright spoke to the film's director, Oliver Hermanus
HistoryExtra: Ben Shattuck adapted his own work, his first screenplay. How did this come about?
Oliver Hermanus: It felt like the natural fit. You sensed that Ben had all of the bigger spaces of the story in his head. When you’re adapting a novel into a movie, it’s a process of reduction. In an interesting way, a short story is a more fruitful process because you get to add. It’s a bit like it’s a house, and Ben’s designed the whole house. And the short story is just the front room. When I come along, I want to see the kitchen and the upstairs bedrooms and the bathrooms, and he knows what they look like.
How did you go about finding the historical details that help establish the characters?
I’ve now made three different films back-to-back, all set in different periods and in different countries. I do love the process of learning. Of course, we make creative decisions about certain things historically, it’s not a documentary. But if you’re making something super-specific, you obviously want to get it right. The Smithsonian was very helpful to us. We were also able to make contact with community research and historical societies in different parts of America, in Kentucky and Maine. They had all sorts of things that we could use, either artefacts or information about how people lived – the size of farms and houses, and the wood people would use to build things.
Were there any details that to which you were particularly drawn? At one point, you show a mixed-race community in Maine.
That was definitely one of those moments of expansion with Ben. I asked him, “When they go to Maine, what else could they encounter?” Ben immediately suggested this story from Malaga Island. In history, the Malaga Island episode [where an interracial community was evicted from an island off Maine] happened in 1911 [before Lionel and David’s trip in 1920]. But it was one of those moments where you felt that the connection between community and music – and this migration of people from the south of America to the north, and how the music they brought with them might have differed from the music that existed in Maine or Massachusetts and Connecticut – felt like a worthy intersection for the characters to experience.
Considering my own background from South Africa [the son of ANC activists and part of a multiracial family living under Apartheid], it felt like something that gave me a sense of connection to American history.
Can you tell us a little about the role of folk singer Sam Amidon in shaping the film’s soundtrack?
The story was very much Ben’s love letter to this kind of music, its history and its context within the greater American narrative. From the very beginning, there was a playlist of songs that were part of Ben’s childhood and Ben’s life. The interesting thing is that we had loads of songs in this playlist, but we often had the same song done by different people in different times. And so you sensed how melodies and lyrics would be reimagined, re-orchestrated or redesigned.
The song ‘In the Pines’ [also known as ‘Where Did You Sleep Last Night?’] became a famous song for Nirvana, but that is a very old American song from the South. We knew that we would never use ‘In the Pines’, which was just too popular, but we wanted to find songs that had stories inside of them that felt like they were echoes of the story of The History of Sound. A lot of them are ballads of misplaced love or loss and grief. We also wanted to have songs that came from the right regions. Sam was very helpful in then taking these different songs and being able to arrange them in a palette that felt tonally appropriate.
The History of Sound is in UK cinemas now. It will be available to stream in the UK later in the year.
]]>The First World War’s deadliest battle was stalling, but everything changed when Little Willie arrivedhttps://www.historyextra.com/period/first-world-war/deadliest-battle-changed-impact-of-tanks/2026-01-29T12:18:38.000ZBy late 1915, the First World War had entered an entirely new phase of combat.
What had been expected to be a short, decisive conflict had hardened into a grinding stalemate. On the Western Front, opposing armies were locked into trench systems stretching from the Channel coast to the Swiss border. What little advances were made were measured in yards; the loss of life to claim those yards was measured in the tens of thousands.
The First World War had become one of endless attrition, dominated by artillery barrages and machine-gun fire. Both sides understood that while their troops could reach enemy trenches, they couldn’t cross the killing ground in between without being cut down. Traditional solutions were no longer working. Cavalry couldn’t operate in cratered terrain, and infantry couldn’t survive sustained fire.
But a new weapon of war was designed to solve this deadlock: the tank.
As historian and journalist Mark Urban explains on the HistoryExtra podcast, the tank began as a practical experiment – an attempt to answer this specific battlefield problem.
Why the Western Front needed something new
What armies needed was something that could move forward under fire, protect its crew, crush barbed wire and cross trenches. The idea of an armoured vehicle wasn’t new (an armoured warhorse served a not-too-distant function), but only recent technological developments made it feasible. Internal combustion engines, steel armour plates and continuous tracks finally made the machines possible.
The first of these was Little Willie.
Built by Foster & Co in Lincoln, Little Willie wasn’t intended to see combat. Instead, it was an idea that was designed to answer one crucial question: could a tracked vehicle move across shattered ground and trenches without breaking down?
- Read more | Life in the trenches during WWI
“That is the first tank. It’s a prototype,” Urban says.
Little Willie had obvious shortcomings. It struggled to cross wide trenches, had no turret, and had numerous mechanical weaknesses. But it proved that a tracked, armoured vehicle could operate on a modern battlefield.
From that experiment emerged a completely redesigned machine with a distinctive rhomboid shape, long tracks running around its body. This would become Mark I – the first tank actively used in combat.
Rushed into battle
The Mark I was slow, mechanically fragile and, resultantly, hazardous. Crews received minimal training and breakdowns on the battlefield were the norm.
But despite its many flaws, the Mark I represented something genuinely new to warfare: a mobile armoured platform capable of advancing with infantry through no man’s land.
By September 1916, the battle of the Somme had been raging for months. While casualties were enormous, gains were painfully small. And new offensives weren’t making any progress.
“General Haig [of the British Army] had launched his offensive a few weeks before,” Urban explains. “It had gone pretty disastrously, as we know. And at the end of it, he was looking for something to try and improve the result very late in the battle.”
Britain had only a few dozen machines available and, once revealed, the Germans would adapt quickly. Haig was warned of these concerns but, as Urban says, he
“didn’t listen”.
49 tanks were committed, scattered along the front in small groups. Many broke down before reaching the enemy. Others were hit by artillery or bogged down in mud so deep that even tracks could not cope.
“And the result was pretty unimpressive. The whole thing was, to be honest, a damp squib.”
- Read more | What caused the First World War?
Learning from failure
The disappointing debut prompted serious reassessment of how to use these new weapons.
Engineers worked to improve reliability, while crews gained experience. Most importantly, planners began to understand that tanks needed to be used in a more coordinated way.
By late 1917, the British were ready to deploy them properly.
In November 1917, at the battle of Cambrai, tanks were used on an unprecedented scale. More than 476 were concentrated along a narrow sector, supported by artillery and infantry.
But the Germans weren’t complacent. They had studied earlier tank attacks and redesigned their trenches, widening them beyond the known crossing ability of British machines.
“They thought this would stop the tanks,” Urban explains. “But the British had an answer.”
Each tank carried a massive bundle of brushwood – a fascine – which could be dropped into a trench to create a temporary bridge. When the attack began, tanks rolled forward, fascines were deployed, and trenches were crossed.
“When the German soldiers realised what was happening, there was mass panic,” Urban explains. “They were shooting rifles, machine guns, and everything at these big metal machines. The bullets were bouncing off.”
For the first time since 1914, a significant breakthrough was achieved without catastrophic loss.
What tanks really changed
“This was the thing that, through all the suffering of those first three years of the war in France, everyone had been longing for and waiting for,” Urban says: proof that stalemate could be broken. It was a psychological turning point, as much as a military one.
From this point on, tanks became a permanent feature of modern warfare, integrated with infantry, artillery and aircraft.
Little Willie itself never left Britain and never fired a shot. But it provided an idea that helped to end a devastating war.
Mark Urban was speaking to Emily Briffett on the HistoryExtra podcast. Listen to the full conversation.
]]>How tanks redefined warfarehttps://www.historyextra.com/membership/how-tanks-redefined-warfare-podcast-mark-urban/2026-01-21T08:10:15.000ZFrom the mud-churned battlefields of the First World War to the high-stakes clashes of the Cold War, the tank has shaped the course of conflict like no other machine. In this episode, Emily Briffett is joined by Mark Urban, as he reveals the dramatic evolution of armoured warfare through its iconic vehicles – and the engineers, commanders and crews who drove them into the history books.
]]>The First World War’s Christmas truce is a heartwarming story – but it never happenedhttps://www.historyextra.com/period/first-world-war/christmas-truce-football-match-did-it-happen/2025-12-24T10:45:32.000ZThe story is genuinely irresistible.
On a frozen battlefield in December 1914, the sound of artillery stops, and British and German soldiers fighting in the First World War climb out of the trenches.
They meet in the hellscape that is No Man's Land, transforming it into a site of warm Christmas spirit. They exchange gifts, sing carols and play football together.
It’s a reassuringly humanising moment that proves ordinary people could still recognise one another as individuals, even if they were still enemies.
The problem is that this version of events is largely a myth.
As historian Alex Churchill explains on the HistoryExtra podcast, what did happen across European battlefields during the Christmas of 1914 was far more limited and fragmented than popular memory suggests.
So, what really happened, and why does the myth persist?
No single Christmas truce, and no football match
“The Christmas truce is a misnomer,” Churchill says. “It’s Christmas truces: plural.”
There was no single, unified ceasefire stretching along the Western Front and crucially, as Churchill emphasises, “fighting didn’t officially stop”.
Instead, what occurred in late December 1914 was a series of highly localised, informal pauses in certain sectors, while in others, the war continued uninterrupted.
That’s one of the biggest misconceptions. Another is the story of the football match – perhaps the single most enduring part of the Christmas truce story.
In retellings, British and German soldiers are said to have organised an impromptu but orderly game in No Man's Land, complete with teams, goals and spectators. It’s subsequently become a symbol of the combatants’ shared culture, values and goodwill.
But, as Churchill sets out, this almost certainly never happened.
“What people think happened is the equivalent of a Premier League football match with thousands of people watching on a vast open space,” Churchill explains. “But that didn’t happen.” The physical environment alone makes the idea implausible. No Man's Land was not a flat, snowy field. It was a cratered wasteland littered with barbed wire and corpses.
At best, there may have been brief, informal kickabouts, most likely involving soldiers from the same side passing a ball between themselves. The idea of organised, cross-trench football matches is a later embellishment. “That whole image of a giant football game, and a big coming together, didn’t happen on the western front,” she says.
What fraternisation really looked like
The reality of what took place might be more revealing, when stripped of its mythology.
As Churchill explains, it’s true that, in some areas, soldiers cautiously emerged from their trenches to speak to the enemy. They exchanged cigarettes, buttons, food and small souvenirs. Some sang together too, especially in the days leading up to Christmas.
Churchill recounts one episode that captures this reality particularly well.
A territorial officer named George Fletcher – a languages teacher from Eton who spoke fluent German – was determined to arrange a truce in his sector. “He went on this relentless campaign to convince his battalion commander that they should pause the war and have a Christmas,” Churchill says.
But he was unsuccessful.
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“His commanding officer told him to stop being an idiot.”
When Christmas Day arrived, Fletcher’s own section remained quiet and hostile. Disappointed, he took matters into his own hands.
“He wandered down to a Scottish battalion next door,” Churchill explains, “and actually that’s where he experienced the Christmas truce.” There, soldiers were milling about in No Man's Land, talking and sharing cigarettes. A football was being kicked around, but without any real structure. At one point, men even began “scampering in and out of each other’s trenches”.
Even then, the limits were obvious. Fletcher himself eventually felt compelled to intervene. Churchill explains how he thought, “we need to be a bit more sensible about letting the enemy rampage round our lines”.
The episode ended soon afterwards, and the men returned to their positions.
“That’s a good example of what any Christmas truces did look like, and it does have participation from both Germans and British,” says Churchill.
When and if they occurred, they were brief, improvised encounters on borrowed time.
Why truces weren’t repeated
Christmas 1914 took place early in the war, before hatred had fully hardened and before the scale of the conflict became clear. Many soldiers still believed the war might be short. The trench system was not yet as rigid or heavily defended as it would later become.
In subsequent years, officers actively worked to prevent fraternisation, ordering artillery fire during holidays, and emphasising the need to maintain hostility.
But why does the myth remain so powerful?
The First World War was the first fully industrialised conflict, marked by mass mobilisation, mechanised killing and staggering loss of life. “It’s massively dehumanising,” Churchill says, “and I think the inaccurate stories of the Christmas truces are one small element that we can cling to that shows that actually people were still human and still reasonable.”
But even though the reality was less grand than the later myths suggest, it’s not less meaningful.
Christmas truces weren’t dramatic or cinematic pauses in the war when enemies came together to form friendships. However, they do point to a cautious optimism at a moment when it was still possible, early in the conflict, for enemies to recognise each other’s shared values.
It was an optimism that wouldn’t last.
Alex Churchill was speaking to Rachel Dinning on the HistoryExtra podcast. Listen to the full conversation.
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