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Think you know everything about ancient Rome? These 25 facts will prove otherwise

2025-12-01T14:38:05.000Z

1. The Romans lived in an independent state for more than 2,200 years

According to tradition, Rome was founded in 753 BC, shortly after the beginning of the Italian Iron Age. Its inhabitants were Latin-speaking pagans who lived along the river Tiber in what is now central Italy. The empire of Trebizond, the last independent Roman kingdom descended from that state, was captured in 1461 by an Ottoman army equipped with gunpowder weapons. The people living in Trebizond also called themselves ‘Roman’, but they were Christians who lived in a city on the Black Sea coast of modern Turkey and spoke a language they called Romeika (which translates as 'Roman', but which we now call Greek).

2. The Roman empire once included all, or part of, nearly 50 countries

At the empire’s greatest extent in AD 117, Roman territory stretched from what is now the Atlantic coast of Portugal to the Persian Gulf beaches in Kuwait, from southern Egypt near the current Sudanese border to northern England, and from just south of Casablanca in Morocco to the Caspian Sea shores of Azerbaijan. The land area of the Roman empire was smaller than Australia, but if one included the territorial waters controlled by Rome (as is customary with modern states) the empire would rank as the fifth-largest country on earth if it existed today.

3. As much as one-third of the world’s population lived under Roman control

Late during the reign of the emperor Trajan (ruled AD 98–117), it is thought that the Roman empire reached a population of 80 million, out of a total world population of around 230 million. In modern terms, Rome’s share of the world population at that moment would be nearly equivalent to a country with the combined populations of India and China.

4. Rome was the first city in the world with a million residents

Rome reached a population of 1 million during the first century BC, and aside from temporary population decreases caused by plagues or natural disasters, did not fall below that level until the end of the fourth century AD. This is even more remarkable considering that poor sanitation and crowded conditions meant that the city lost as much as 3 per cent of its population each year to disease – a number far greater than the birthrate. Rome’s massive population was sustained through large-scale migration from other parts of the empire, nearly every year, for five centuries.

5. Hadrian’s Wall was NOT the longest Roman wall – and nor was it the most northern

Almost everyone has heard of Hadrian’s Wall, the defensive structure that once stretched 73 miles across what is now northern England. However, an even longer fortification built under Hadrian and his successor, Antoninus Pius, extended nearly 190 miles across southern Germany. It began roughly where the Rhine turns west at Mainz, and extended to meet the Danube near Regensburg.

Antoninus Pius also ordered the construction of the empire’s northernmost wall – the eponymous Antonine Wall – which stretched 39 miles across what is now Scotland, from the Firth of Clyde to the Firth of Forth.

6. The Romans produced more than 25 million coins each year

Following a reform instituted by joint emperors Diocletian and Maximian in AD 294, the Romans established a network of 15 mints across the empire – all the way from Londinium (London) to the Egyptian city of Alexandria. Although production slowed around 100 years later, no state in the world would again match Rome’s numismatic productivity until the 19th century.

Read more | How the Romans "reversed circumcision" and 5 other shocking medical realities from the ancient empire

7. Rome’s ‘eighth hill’ is a load of old rubbish… literally

The Testaccio region of Rome is now famous for its nightlife, but it takes its name from Monte Testaccio, an artificial hill that is 35 metres tall and created from the remains of ceramic shipping containers offloaded from barges along the Tiber. Most of the pottery has been dated to the period between AD 140 and 250, though the base of the hill may be much older.

Despite its unusual provenance, Monte Testaccio is sometimes described as Rome’s ‘eighth hill’, in addition to the seven other hills within the city walls: the Aventine, Caelian, Capitoline, Esquiline, Palatine, Quirinal and Viminal hills.

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8. The Pantheon is the oldest intact, continually used building in the world

Originally created in the style of a conventional Roman temple in the first century BC, the Pantheon was rebuilt under the direction of the emperor Hadrian in the AD 120s. The ground level was originally much lower than it is today, and when one approached the structure from the front, it appeared to be a normal temple because the structure’s 43-metre-wide dome was obscured by its triangular pediment (gable).

Nearly two millennia later, the Pantheon’s dome remains the largest of its kind in the world – its survival no doubt linked to the decision to convert the building into a Christian church in AD 609.

9. There was once a giant city plan, carved on marble blocks, that showed every street and building in Rome

Between AD 203 and 211, the emperor Septimius Severus ordered the creation of a 234-metre-square map of the city of Rome that included accurate renderings of the ground-floor architectural plans for every building in the city. Carved on marble blocks, the map was hung on a wall of the Temple of Peace, which now forms the northern exterior of the Basilica of St Cosmas and Damian.

As of 2025, more than a thousand fragments of the Severan Marble Plan have been discovered since the Renaissance, representing around 10 per cent of the original map. Because many of these include the name of the building they represent, it has been extremely useful for archaeologists looking to identify newly discovered architectural remains. Today, the fragments are on display in the new Museo della Forma Urbis on Rome’s Caelian Hill.

10. Rome is still surrounded by its ancient walls

The Aurelian Walls that surround the city of Rome were built in the AD 270s, but they continued to be used by the city’s defenders until the late 19th century. The breaching of the walls by the army of the Kingdom of Italy in September of 1870 represented the final step in Italian unification.

11. You can find an ancient wall in McDonald’s

The Servian Walls of the fourth century BC may be less famous than the Aurelian Walls, but they have much more character. Stretching around 12 miles, multiple fragments of the walls still speckle the modern city of Rome. The largest fragment can be found next to Termini Station, but the most memorable remains are now found in the McDonald’s restaurant on the train station’s lower level.

12. Rome’s walls were formidable… but Constantinople’s were MUCH more difficult to breach

Rome has been captured numerous times since the Aurelian Walls were built, but the city of Constantinople (modern Istanbul, Turkey) – which became the Roman empire’s eastern capital in AD 330 – has fallen to invaders on just three occasions. The city remained under Roman control for nearly 900 years until its walls were breached by the soldiers of the Fourth Crusade in 1204, before being recaptured by the Romans in 1261. It then fell to the Ottomans in 1453, but has not been seized since.

13. The Roman empire was home to one of the most fought-over cities in the world

Although only 134 miles from Constantinople, Adrianople (modern Edirne, Turkey) has been the site of at least 15 different battles and sieges. The last two occurred in 1913 when Bulgaria captured the city from the Ottoman empire before losing it again later that year.

14. The Colosseum was the largest (but not the only) amphitheatre

Rome’s Flavian Amphitheatre, or Colosseum, was once capable of seating 50,000 people, making it almost 30 per cent larger than the empire’s next-largest arena in Capua. But the Colosseum was unique because of its remarkable size, not because amphitheatres were rare. In fact, the remains of more than 230 amphitheatres have been found in former Roman cities, stretching all the way from Britain to Israel. One such example in Cahors, France, was discovered during the construction of a car park that is now aptly named the Parking Amphithéâtre. Another, found in suburban Paris, now serves as the courtyard for a high school.

15. Arenas weren’t just for gladiator fights

Thanks in part to the 2000 movie Gladiator and its recent sequel, Roman amphitheatres are now commonly associated with clashes between sandal-wearing warriors. However, gladiator battles weren’t the only events to take place in these ancient arenas. In fact, spectators were as interested in events that displayed exotic wild animals like rhinos, lions and ‘camel-leopards’ (giraffes). The largest games on record – the 100 days of spectacles marking the opening of the Colosseum in AD 81 – saw upwards of 9,000 animals killed.

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16. Commodus was a much better fighter than Hollywood would have us believe

In comparison to Maximus (Russell Crowe), Gladiator’s main antagonist, Commodus (Joaquin Phoenix), is depicted as an unremarkable fighter – but this is a distortion of the truth. Following a failed assassination plot orchestrated by his sister Lucilla, the real-life Commodus sent for instructors from around the world to teach him how to shoot arrows, throw javelins, and excel in hand-to-hand combat. As his skills increased, Commodus wanted to show his subjects what he could do. In one memorable display in the Colosseum, the senator Cassius Dio witnessed the emperor “dispatching, with his own hands, five hippos and two elephants in two days. He also killed rhinos and a camel-leopard”.

Another time, Commodus arranged for “a hundred lions to appear in one group” and then “killed the entire hundred with exactly one hundred javelins” so that “no one saw a single extra javelin.” While Dio did not approve of these displays, even Commodus’s worst critics could not deny his talent.

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17. Chariot racing was HUGELY popular

The Circus Maximus in Rome, the main site for chariot races, adjoined the imperial palace and had seating for at least 150,000 people. On competition days, 800 horses could race in as many as 24 different contests. The last races held in the Circus Maximus took place in AD 549, but racing continued at Constantinople’s 100,000-seater Hippodrome into the 13th century.

18. Chariot racing was the football of its day

Rome originally had four charioteer teams: the Reds, Whites, Greens and Blues. The Reds and Whites were the most historic, but they were surpassed in prominence by the Greens and Blues during the first century AD. The teams had franchises that competed in major cities across the empire and even boasted organised groups of supporters (akin to modern football ultras) prone to riotous behaviour.

Star drivers, who could often change teams during their careers, frequently earned enormous amounts of money. The tombstone of Gaius Appuleius Diocles, one of the greatest charioteers of the second century AD, mentions that he won 1,462 races and earned 35,863,120 sesterces in prizes across a 24-year career spent racing for the Reds, Whites and Greens. Although he is believed to have died at the age of 42 and would have kept only a portion of his winnings, his career earnings exceeded the fortunes of most Roman senators.

19. Rome became the first large empire to enact universal citizenship

In AD 212, the emperor Marcus Aurelius Antoninus – better known by his nickname, Caracalla – issued a law making all free people in the empire Roman citizens. The new citizens had to legally change their names to honour their new benefactor, flooding the Roman bureaucracy with tens of millions of people now bearing the name ‘Aurelius’.

The reason for Caracalla’s generosity? He wanted everyone in the empire to celebrate the murder of Geta, Caracalla’s brother and co-emperor who was killed in his mother’s arms.

20. Roman trade across the Indian Ocean was hugely lucrative

When we think of ancient trade, the Silk Road – the sprawling network of trade routes stretching some 4,000 miles between China and the Mediterranean – often springs to mind. Yet, it wasn’t the only source of wealth for the Romans. Merchants also travelled across the Indian Ocean to Kerala, Tamil Nadu and Sri Lanka, carrying gold coins and bringing back spices and exotic animals.

At times, the demand for Roman coins in India and Sri Lanka so exceeded the supply that Indian mints struck their own coins featuring the portraits of Roman imperial figures and legends written in Latin.

21. The Romans developed a sophisticated financial system

From the second century BC, Roman bankers managed investment accounts that their clients could use for depositing money and making transfers. The system was so sophisticated that emperor Trajan used subsidised government loans to fund social welfare programmes in the second century AD.

22. The Romans invented some truly terrifying military technology

The Romans developed a napalm-like substance commonly known as ‘Greek fire’ which was placed in hand grenades or sprayed from hoses equipped with special nozzles – usually against enemy naval forces. When the substance ignited, it even burned on water.

The technology was first deployed in AD 672 and was used for more than 500 years against the navies of the Bulgars, Rus’ and Arabs. The empire lost the ability to manufacture Greek fire just before AD 1200, although no one really knows why.

23. The longest-serving Roman emperor was actually pretty unremarkable

He ruled for 66 years between AD 962–1028, but Constantine VIII’s passions for fine food and horses meant that he took little interest in state affairs until the last three years of his life. He instead trusted his older brother and co-emperor – the much more famous and capable emperor Basil II – to govern the empire for most of their lives. Coincidentally, Basil’s term in office (AD 960–1025), is the second-longest in Roman history.

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Father-and-son duo Gordian I and Gordian II ruled for a mere 22 days in AD 238. The Gordians, who were governing a province in north Africa without an army stationed there, foolishly rebelled against Maximinus Thrax – one of four other men who also claimed to be emperor that year. Although the Gordians received senatorial support in Rome, they were quickly dispatched by a general loyal to Maximinus.

As for the second-shortest reign, the emperor Nepotian barely outlasted the two Gordians by holding Rome for 28 days in June of AD 350.

25. It took a VERY long time for the Romans to adopt Christianity

When Constantine I famously converted to Christianity in AD 312, the territory he ruled was only around 10 per cent Christian. In fact, the Roman empire did not become a Christian-majority state until the AD 390s, and some pagan-majority communities lasted long enough that they negotiated the surrender of their cities to Muslim generals in the AD 630s. The Syrian city of Harran (now part of modern Turkey) even maintained temples dedicated to its moon god into the 11th century AD.

Edward J Watts is Alkiviadis Vassiliadis Endowed Chair and Distinguished Professor of History at the University of California, San Diego. He is the author of the The Romans: A 2,000-Year History (John Murray Press/Basic Books, 2025)

Who won the crusades? The causes, death toll, and number of medieval holy wars explained

2025-11-24T18:47:54.000Z

The crusades were a centuries-long sequence of era-defining medieval holy wars that transformed dynamics of power and religious ideas across Europe and the Middle East.

But who won the crusades, and just how many crusades were there?

Those are two of the questions answered by professor Rebecca Rist, an expert on the crusades and their broader medieval context. Speaking about the topic on an episode of the HistoryExtra podcast, Rist steps into the dust of medieval roads and the heat of besieged cities to explain why these campaigns erupted, what the major expeditions set out to accomplish, how those ambitions played out on the ground, and how the long arc of conflict finally came to an end.

Who won the crusades?

Overall, the Muslim forces won the crusades, and the Christians lost.

However, as Rist explains, while that was the final state of play, the granular details were far from that simple.

"The final bastions of the crusader states were lost in 1291 (having been founded originally in 1099) to Muslim forces. In that sense, obviously the Muslims won the crusades and the Christians were defeated.

"However, the crusades span a very long period of time, starting with the First Crusade in 1095 and ending with the loss of Acre in 1291. There were many individual crusades within that period, some of which were won by the Christians – by the Western Franks, like the First Crusade – and others by Muslims. For example, the Muslim forces were successful in the Fifth Crusade in capturing Damietta."

In other instances, Rist says there were greater degrees of complexity. "In some crusades, we have partial victories. If we take the Third Crusade, Richard the Lionheart was partially successful, in the sense that he was able to take and maintain Acre. But, of course, he didn't win back Jerusalem with a military victory."

How many crusades were there?

"There were eight crusades during the period from 1095 to 1291 in the Near East," says Rist.

However, Rist is careful to caveat this: it's a number that's subject to debate, as what precisely counts as a full-scale crusade is difficult to define.

Still, according to Rist, the eight major crusades were broadly as follows:

"The First Crusade (1095–99), is where the crusaders take Jerusalem and set up the crusader states. The Second Crusade (1147–50), is a subsequent response to the fall of the first crusader kingdom of Edessa (the crusader kingdom in the north). The Third Crusade (1189–92) is launched to try to win back Jerusalem and is perhaps the most famous because it involved Richard the Lionheart. The Fourth Crusade (1202–04) doesn't end up in the Holy Land at all, but the crusaders instead sack the town of Zara and then Constantinople. The Fifth Crusade (1217–21) is an attack that the crusaders make on Egypt, on the town of Damietta in particular (and this ends in failure). The Sixth Crusade (1228–29) is very interesting because it's not authorised by the papacy, but it’s a crusade where emperor Frederick II, goes out under excommunication. He has a lot of success and makes a truce with the sultan and gets Jerusalem back for 10 years. Finally, I like to think of the Seventh (1248–54) and Eighth (1270) Crusades, which are the two crusades of Louis IX, launched respectively at Egypt and at Tunis."

Read more | Is the world still living in the shadow of the crusades?

In addition to these eight core crusades, there were other conflicts that need to be recognised.

"There were also many more minor expeditions [with] small groups of fighters between these major crusades as well. So we can think of the Barons’ crusade of 1236, for example, or the crusade by Edward, prince of England, sometimes called the Ninth Crusade (1271–72). These little ventures are going on between these major responses [when] great papal calls are put out, and very large armies take up that call."

How many people died in the crusades?

The crusades' death toll likely came in at around 5-6 million, possibly reaching as high as 9 million, according to Rist.

But, once again, there are serious caveats to consider.

"It's very difficult to estimate [the crusades' death toll] because of the source material. We're dealing with very unreliable sources: medieval chroniclers are notoriously unreliable when they give figures of battles and losses."

Despite the problems with the sources, it's still possible to come to a very broad conclusion.

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"There are figures ranging from 1 million to 9 million over the whole period from 1095 to 1291. John Robertson famously, in his Short History of Christianity – a very old but seminal book first published in the early 20th century – had that really huge figure of 9 million. But I've seen other historians estimate much lower numbers. When I'm giving these figures, I'm including Christians, Muslims and all those who followed the armies, not just the combatants.

"Historians generally prefer to try to give estimates for individual battles rather than for the crusades overall, and I think that gives us a better sense of the carnage and the losses. Regarding the overall estimates between 1 million and 9 million, certainly one million seems far too few to me."

She concludes, "I would go for a much higher figure: 5 or 6 million."

What caused the crusades between 1095–1204?

The motivations behind the crusades were a mixture of: "religious, political, social, and economic," says Rist.

"To highlight a few definite motivating factors: I think the papacy granting a ‘remission of sins’ in the 12th century is a driving force. People want to be free from their sins, to try to wipe the slate clean, and they know that crusading will assure them that spiritual privilege. There is another religious motivation: to help fellow Christians. The pope had called for the First Crusade to help the Byzantines in the east. The Byzantine emperor, Alexius Comnenus, had asked for help from the west because the Byzantines were struggling against the Seljuk Turks at this time."

But it was far from just religion that motivated the conflicts, as Rist explains.

Read more | Did the crusaders fight for God or gold?

"There are many other non-religious motivations, such as the charismatic preaching that we see happening with these crusades. Take a figure like Bernard of Clairvaux on the Second Crusade. He preaches all over Europe drawing large crowds, and influences kings to ‘take the cross’.

"I think crusaders were also spurred on by the idea of the glory that can pertain to their families if they take part in these great expeditions. Certainly, kings and emperors think it will do their ‘PR’ no harm. They take the cross often when they become kings. Often, it's a way of showing that there is a new reign and that they’re different from their fathers.

"There's no doubt that there were also ideas of adventure. At the time of the First Crusade, there had been very bad harvests; there was famine in Europe, so people wanted something different and new. Of course, when they get out there, they didn't necessarily like it. But there were all kinds of romantic and adventurous ideas associated with the crusades."

Ultimately however, Rist stresses that the motivation behind crusades was neither singular, nor homogenous.

"An individual crusader doesn't just have to have one motivation. He can be conventionally very pious. He can also be hoping to be in favour with his lord. He can be hoping that there might be some land parcelled out to him. He can be inspired by charismatic preaching."

How did the crusades end?

The crusades ended in 1291 "when the Mamluks captured Acre," says Rist.

She concludes, "For decades, Acre had been the centre of what remained of the kingdom of Jerusalem – and so it was the most important city that was still left of the crusader states. It fell to the Mamluk Sultan Khalil in 1291. In the days that followed, the rest of the remaining crusader towns – Beirut, Haifa, Tyre, Tortosa – all fell in a domino effect."

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After Franco: Spain's miraculous transition to democracy

2025-11-20T09:01:04.000Z

When General Francisco Franco died on 20 November 1975 – 39 years after the start of the brutal civil war that brought him to power – the prospect of a bloodless transition to democracy in Spain appeared vanishingly small. Franco had prepared a rigid framework to guarantee the permanence of the dictatorship over which he had ruled with an iron fist for almost four decades. Spain teetered on the edge of bloodshed and chaos, with powerful groups at the political extremes ferociously opposed to compromise.

And so, as El Caudillo (‘The Leader’) was buried in the vast Valley of the Fallen memorial just outside Madrid – acclaimed by tens of thousands of blue-shirted supporters – few commentators would have predicted a future of pluralism and relative peace. Yet that’s exactly what was achieved. That the Spanish people were, over the next 10 years, able to negotiate a perilous path towards democracy through the minefields laid by Franco himself – and the ambushes set by terrorists of both right and left – counts as an extraordinary achievement. Even from a distance of 50 years, it surely ranks among modern Europe’s most remarkable stories. So how did it happen?

Blurring the past

To answer that question we must rewind to the end of the Second World War. Terror had underpinned Franco’s regime from the moment he was propelled to power at the end of the 1930s. But defeat for the Axis powers in 1945 shattered his initial plans for a fascist future – one in which Europe was dominated by authoritarian regimes. Franco realised that he needed to end Spain’s international ostracism in the postwar period and be incorporated into the western community. To achieve that, a new approach was required.

And so, to blur the Spanish dictator’s Axis past, a scheme was devised by his crony, naval captain Luis Carrero Blanco, to perpetuate the regime behind a monarchist facade. The Law of Succession of 26 July 1947 established Spain as a kingdom with Franco as its head of state. Franco would govern as regent until prevented by death or incapacity – and he had the right to nominate his own royal successor.

The dictator didn’t name that successor immediately. In fact, it wasn’t until July 1969 that Franco announced to the world the identity of the man who would become head of state following his death. That man was Juan Carlos – grandson of Alfonso XIII, king of Spain from 1886 to 1931. This would not be a restoration of the legitimate royal family but the installation of a monarchy created by the Falangists – the far-right nationalist political group fronted by Franco. Juan Carlos would be compelled to uphold the fundamental laws of the regime, and could be removed if he strayed from them. As such, he was very much at the regime’s mercy. And yet, though no one knew it at the time, he would show the courage and vision to lead Spain’s transition to a democratic future.

In the late 1960s, that future lay some way off. Franco was still very much alive. By now, the dictator had delegated day-to-day administration of the regime to Carrero Blanco, an appointment that, rather than consolidate the regime, merely accelerated its disintegration. Facing an inexorable rise in working-class and student dissent and the armed opposition of the Basque separatist terrorist organisation, ETA, Carrero intensified repression, employing neo-Nazi organisations, off-duty policemen and civil guards to do his dirty work. It was a strategy that poisoned relations with the Basques, the clergy and workers, and fomented disquiet among the most perceptive elements of the regime.

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It also made him a target for assassination. On 20 December 1973, Carrero was blown up in Madrid by a bomb planted by four ETA operatives. Things got little better under his successor, Carlos Arias Navarro. In fact, an early trickle of defections under Carrero turned into a flood from 1974. With their country blighted by military interventionism, the virulence of the extreme right, violence in the Basque Country, obsolete industries and uneven development, moderates among the ranks of both the regime and the opposition were rapidly reaching the conclusion that only negotiation could prevent a bloodbath.

Franco’s invading army

Yet those seeking compromise in the wake of Franco’s death in November 1975 were confronted with seemingly insuperable obstacles – chief among them that, under Franco, Spain was governed as if it were a territory conquered by an invading army. The civil war had been provoked and fought by a coalition of rightwing forces to defend their sectoral interests against the reforming ambitions of the democratic Second Republic. Landowners, industrialists and bankers wanted to safeguard their economic privileges; the army to defend the centralised organisation of the Spanish state; and the church to retain its cultural hegemony. Each contributed to Franco’s war effort, financially, militarily or ideologically.

The regime’s long-term survival was facilitated by total control of the media and of what passed for an education system to implement a national brainwashing that fomented fear of the return of the ‘reds’. After the civil war, these diverse forces of Francoism remained united by fear and by networks of corruption. Hardline Francoism was entrenched in the army, the police and the Civil Guard.

However, for those such as Juan Carlos seeking an alternative future for Spain, there were glimmers of opportunity. Mass demonstrations revealed an overwhelming popular urge for democracy. Juan Carlos knew that important sectors of Spanish capitalism saw the political apparatus of Francoism as an obstacle to growth. In opting boldly for progress, he would be following the advice of British, European and American leaders.

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While Juan Carlos may have been the most high-profile figure in Spain’s post-Franco reform project, he was far from the only politician seeking to transform the nation. In fact, the brains behind the operation can be said to be Juan Carlos’s one-time tutor, Torcuato Fernández-Miranda, an expert in Francoist constitutional law. As president of the Cortes (Spain’s parliament, which would have to ratify any reform scheme) and of the Council of the Kingdom (which had to endorse prime ministers), Fernández-Miranda would facilitate the ‘legal’ reform that was to be the real basis of the transition.

Fernández-Miranda also played a key role in the elevation, in the summer of 1976, to prime minister of the young liberal Falangist Adolfo Suárez. Albeit impelled down the road to democratisation by popular pressure (1976 saw violence, enormous demonstrations and industrial strikes sweep the country) Suárez would be the perfect man for the historic task of steering democratic reform through the Francoist institutions. It was he, more than any other figure, who convinced other politicians that the reform project was serious.

As for Juan Carlos, his contribution lay firstly in persuading major figures to join Suárez’s cabinet. Secondly, by dint of constant journeys throughout Spain he generated support for reform and rode out the storm of opprobrium provoked by his nomination of Falangists like Suárez. Above all, by appearing in the uniform of commander-in-chief, and through his private meetings with officers, he neutralised the high command of the army and restrained military hostility to the democratic process.

In the autumn of 1976, with great skill, Suárez managed to steer Fernández-Miranda’s astute reform project through the Francoist institutions. In mid-November, it was approved in the Cortes by a huge majority of its members, the largely unelected procuradores. Suárez later called it a collective suicide by the “procuradores del harakiri”.

Juan Carlos made a considerable effort to make contact with members of the opposition to convince them of the need for moderation. This was rewarded on 15 December when the referendum on political reform saw the project approved by a majority of more than 90 per cent. The opposition’s calls for abstention were ignored by the leftwing rank-and-file – a telling manifestation of popular readiness to make sacrifices to secure the basic framework of democracy. The referendum was a victory for Suárez but also for the mass pressure throughout 1976 that had pushed the government towards democratisation.

A SYMBOL OF RECONCILIATION

How an amnesty helped Spain confront its past, and its future

On 15 June 1977 something remarkable occurred across Spain: people went to the polls in free elections for the first time since 1936. With Adolfo Suárez’s UCD party securing victory, the complex process of building a democracy could now begin. Yet how was this to be achieved without plunging Spain back into dictatorship or the horrors of another civil war? The widespread consensus was that sacrifices would have to be made – and that meant an amnesty.

On 14 October, that amnesty passed through Spain’s parliament, the Cortes, into law. This hugely consequential piece of legislation effectively stated that acts of terrorism in opposition to the Franco dictatorship – which meant the sporadic guerrilla warfare of the 1940s and ETA terrorism – and the crimes against human rights in its defence, could not be subject to judicial proceedings. As such, it wiped the slate clean and rested on a tacit, collective agreement of the great majority of the Spanish people to renounce any settling of accounts with Franco’s regime. The public pressure for such an amnesty had been building for months – the previous year, 80,000 people had taken to the streets of Barcelona on successive Sundays to call for one. Yet the passing of the legislation was not without controversy. In early October, Suárez had met with representatives of all parties and warned them that the army, the banks and, to a lesser extent, the church had voiced their objections to an amnesty for political prisoners. That’s why the law that passed through parliament excluded both army officers who had fought for the Republic during the civil war and those involved in the Unión Militar Democrática, a pressure group of liberal officers punished for trying to ensure that the army would not block democratic transformation.

Given the numerical discrepancy between the relatively few people involved in acts of violence against the regime and the many involved in its brutal imposition, the law required democratic forces to make a major sacrifice. It was also accompanied by the systematic destruction of the archives of the Franco regime’s repressive apparatus. Yet despite these issues, the amnesty – backed by a near-unanimous vote – seemed to symbolise reconciliation in a country that had been plagued by violence, bitterness and bloodshed for decades. As the basis of the ‘pact of oblivion’ (pacto del olvido) instituted across the political spectrum following Franco’s death, it would be one of the pillars of the transition to democracy.

The trump card

With elections scheduled for June, Suárez needed to create a party. Convinced that his best chance of success lay with a centre party, Suárez cobbled together the Unión de Centro Democrático by exploiting the need of many small centre right parties for alliances. His trump card was government control of Radio-Television Española and of local administrative machinery. UCD fused five main groups, each in turn composed of several others, all desperate to be part of an electorally viable movement. Ideological and ethical considerations took a back seat.

Suárez’s skilful use of the media was rewarded with victory. UCD won 165 seats in the new Cortes, followed by the Socialist PSOE (who enjoyed considerable international support) with 118. The Communist Party of Spain and rightwing Alianza Popular trailed way behind with 20 and 16 seats respectively.

But an essential part of the progress towards the elections also posed the greatest obstacle to the long-term consolidation of democracy. The legalisation of the Communist Party on 9 April confirmed the military’s conviction that its job was less to defend Spain from external enemies and more to safeguard Franco’s civil war victory.

This wasn’t the only threat to the nascent democracy. From 1977 until 1982, on a monthly basis, Juan Carlos had to impose his authority as commander-in-chief of the armed forces on officers outraged because Suárez’s minister of defence, General Manuel Gutiérrez Mellado, manoeuvred liberal officers into, and reactionaries out of, key positions. The situation was worsened by the relentless provocation of ETA’s attacks on officers. The response of the ultras within the army was golpismo – conspiracy to restore the dictatorship. At frequent receptions for senior officers at his Zarzuela Palace and on tense visits to garrisons, Juan Carlos argued powerfully for unity and discipline.

Nevertheless, the crisis intensified and in late 1980 a plot was hatched to launch a military coup. The ex-secretary general of the royal household, General Alfonso Armada, persuaded other generals, most notably the Captain-General of Valencia, the ultra Jaime Milans del Bosch, that he had royal approval to instigate regime change.

At the end of January 1981, facing a revolt from within his own party as his popularity crumbled, Suárez resigned as prime minister. This left the king as the most visible guarantor of democracy but his meetings with Armada enabled the latter to give the impression of royal collusion in what was being plotted – and on 23 February, the plotters struck. Lieutenant-Colonel Antonio Tejero seized the entire Spanish political elite as they attended the Cortes investiture of a new cabinet under Leopoldo Calvo Sotelo, while Milans del Bosch ordered tanks into the streets of Valencia.

Read more | The bombing of Guernica: who was responsible?

Alone with his immediate staff, the king courageously headed the operation to dismantle the coup. In the course of a tense night, he appeared on television insisting that he would uphold the constitution. He telephoned Milans, effectively informing him that he would have to kill him in order to succeed: “I swear to you that I will neither abdicate nor leave Spain.” His intervention effectively ended the putsch. By the end of the month, the conspirators were in prison.

Plots to kill a king

In October 1982, the Socialists won a substantial victory in a new round of elections. From this moment forward, Juan Carlos no longer had to be called out as a ‘fireman’, and could act more as a constitutional head of state.

The twin problems of Basque terrorism and military subversion remained, and there were ETA plots to assassinate Juan Carlos in 1985, 1986, 1995 and 1997. What’s more, the king still had to walk the tightrope of keeping both left and right onside – persuading the opposition that he would play a role in democratisation, while maintaining the support of Francoists by seeming to respect the constitutional laws on which, until 1977, his ‘legitimacy’ rested.

In this, it certainly helped that the king was a naturally affable type. A telling example derives from the period in 1978 when the new democratic constitution was being elaborated by a parliamentary commission, or Ponencia. There was a reception for the haughty French president Giscard d’Estaing, who was visiting Madrid. At one point, Juan Carlos sidled over to Miquel Roca i Junyent, a member of the Ponencia, and whispered: “Don’t you think he looks more like a king than I do?”

Looks can be deceptive, of course. And from the nightmare that threatened to envelop Spain following Franco’s death, the self-deprecating monarch and his colleagues had achieved something remarkable: they had successfully harnessed a people’s collective determination never to face civil war and
dictatorship again.

SURVIVING FRANCO

A timeline of the 40-year battle for the soul of Spain

1936–39 Nationalist forces headed by General Franco overthrow the Second Republic in the Spanish Civil War. Franco establishes a dictatorship that will endure until the 1970s.

26 July 1947

The Law of Succession establishes Spain as a kingdom with Franco as head of state. Franco has the right to nominate his successor.

July 1969

Franco announces the identity of his successor: Juan Carlos, grandson of King Alfonso XIII.

20 December 1973

Franco’s prime minister Luis Carrero Blanco is assassinated by ETA.

20 November 1975

Franco dies. Juan Carlos becomes king and head of state.

5 July 1976

Adolfo Suárez becomes prime minister. Later that year, the Spanish parliament overwhelmingly approves his reform project.

15 June 1977

Suárez’s UCD party secures victory in Spain’s first free elections since 1936.

14 October 1977 An amnesty passes into law effectively stating that crimes committed in support of, or opposition to, Franco’s regime could not be subject to judicial proceedings.

23 February 1981

Rightwing army officers attempt a coup. After Juan Carlos tells them that he will neither abdicate nor leave Spain, the perpetrators are placed behind bars.

Paul Preston is a historian of the Spanish Civil War. His most recent book is Perfidious Albion: Britain and the Spanish Civil War (Clapton, 2024)

This article was first published in the December 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine

It was Operation Unthinkable: Churchill's "impossible" plan to start World War 3

2025-11-11T12:01:59.000Z

In the summer of 1945, Europe lay in ruins.

But for the first time in close to a decade, the continent was contemplating the prospect of peace. Hitler was dead, the Nazi high command had collapsed, and while the war raged on in the Pacific, bombs had at least finished dropping across Europe. It was a fresh and uneasy peace – but it was still a peace.

But even as celebrations were filling the streets of Europe’s great cities, British prime minister Winston Churchill was already considering another conflict.

At Churchill’s request, the British chiefs of staff had drafted a proposal codenamed Operation Unthinkable. Its goal was immense: a plan to drive the Red Army out of eastern Europe and restore the independence of the nations that had now fallen under Soviet control. Within weeks of the Second World War ending, Britain was already assessing the possibility of a third.

It was, as its name implied, almost inconceivable. And yet, Churchill insisted on seeing the plans. Speaking on the HistoryExtra podcast, historian Tim Bouverie explained how the idea developed.

From WW2 allies to adversaries

During the war, Britain, the United States and the Soviet Union had fought together against Nazi Germany. But their alliance was built on a pragmatic necessity rather than trust, or a sense of shared politics. By the time of the Yalta conference in February 1945, the cracks were already showing.

Read more | The rise and fall of the Third Reich

At Yalta, Churchill, US president Franklin D Roosevelt and Soviet leader Joseph Stalin agreed on a postwar settlement for Europe, including a promise that liberated countries would hold free elections. Yet, as Bouverie explains, those promises began to crumble almost immediately.

“In the months following the Yalta agreement, Roosevelt was bombarded with messages from Churchill,” says Bouverie. “He gave details of how the Soviets were breaking the Yalta accords, how they were refusing to allow Allied observers into eastern Europe, how Stalin was dragging his feet on the exchange of prisoners of war, how he was progressing his plans to dominate these countries by force.”

While Roosevelt still hoped for cooperation, Churchill grew increasingly alarmed as Soviet control expanded through Poland, Romania and the Balkans. The uneasy alliance that had won the war was quickly hardening into mistrust.

The ‘percentages deal’

But Churchill’s suspicion of Stalin had predated Yalta.

“[During] Churchill’s mission to Moscow in October 1944, he came up with the infamous ‘percentages deal’ with Stalin over how the British and the Soviets were going to divide influence in the Balkans,” says Bouverie.

On a scrap of paper, Churchill jotted down rough proportions of influence: 90 per cent Soviet in Romania, 90 per cent British in Greece, and equal shares elsewhere. Stalin ticked the paper and passed it back. Even if he couldn’t stop Soviet domination outright, Churchill at least hoped to provide some limit to it.

Read more | Who was Hermann Göring?

But by early 1945, it was clear Stalin intended to keep what he had taken. Churchill’s appeals to Roosevelt for a firmer response went largely ignored. It was out of that frustration that he came up with a more drastic idea.

Planning the impossible

In the spring of 1945, as Soviet troops rolled towards Berlin (doing so more quickly than the British and Americans had expected) they consolidated control over eastern Europe. “[It was then that Churchill] asked his chiefs of staff to look at the military feasibility of driving back the Red Army to the Soviet Union’s supposed natural frontiers; to where they were before the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact of August 1939.”

Read more | The eastern front in WW2: how it all went wrong for the Germans

The proposal envisioned British and American forces (and, controversially, rearmed German soldiers) launching a surprise offensive to push Soviet troops east. The chiefs of staff produced a preliminary report, codenaming the plan Operation Unthinkable. Its stated aim was to compel Stalin to accept a limitation to Soviet boundaries, but it would have meant an Anglo-American war against their recent ally within weeks of victory in Europe.

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Why it could never happen

Churchill’s advisers quickly concluded that Operation Unthinkable was impossible on every level.

“It was unthinkable for two reasons,” says Bouverie, “and these are reasons which surely Churchill knew.”

Militarily, the Red Army was vast. It outnumbered the Allied forces several times over, occupying most of eastern and central Europe. Even if an attack succeeded in Poland, Stalin could retreat deep into Russian territory, forcing the Allies into a long, unwinnable campaign. “Suddenly it wouldn’t have been the Wehrmacht freezing to death outside Moscow,” Bouverie notes, “but the British and the Americans.”

Read more | The Nuremberg Trials: the tribunal that brought Nazi leaders to justice

Politically, the idea was even more untenable. “The British and American publics had been fed on a pro-Soviet, pro-Red Army propaganda diet for the last three years,” Bouverie explains. “[Stalin] was Uncle Joe; these were our comrades-in-arms.”

To persuade exhausted soldiers and civilians to fight again, in the harshest of fronts, was unimaginable.

Churchill’s fears, and the Cold War to come

Operation Unthinkable was quietly shelved by June 1945. A month later, Churchill was voted out of office in the general election that brought Clement Attlee’s Labour government to power.

Read more | Did the Cold War ever really end?

Still, the episode revealed how profoundly Churchill distrusted Stalin and anticipated the coming divide in Europe. “From 1943 onwards,” Bouverie notes, “Churchill was increasingly obsessed with trying to save as much of eastern Europe as he could from the USSR’s domination and from communism.”

But his concerns, for all they foreshadowed the Cold War, didn’t matter.

“The idea of asking the British and the American people to engage in another conflict – against an emerging superpower, after five years of war to defeat Hitlerite Germany – was completely and utterly unthinkable.”

Tim Bouverie was speaking to Danny Bird on the HistoryExtra podcast. Listen to the full conversation.

“I hope I would have defended the Nazis at Nuremberg”

2025-11-07T16:43:29.000Z

To have defended someone like Hans Frank, the governor-general of Nazi-occupied Poland during WW2, charged with the murder of four million human beings, is a tough thing to imagine.

Nevertheless, when I asked Philippe Sands – lawyer and writer – whether he would have defended the Nazis in the dock at the Nuremberg Trials, he told me “I hope so! I'm a believer that everyone is entitled to have their lawyer to defend their rights and their interests, irrespective of who they are or what they've done.”

That was my final question to Sands after we’d recorded four episodes of an upcoming HistoryExtra podcast series on the Nuremberg Trials at the conclusion of the Second World War. I wanted to know where he’d stand on that question, because our conversation had reminded me how complicated some of the moral, as well as legal, questions were around the decision by the Allies to put a selection of leading Nazis on trial in November 1945.

As a UK barrister, Sands is subject to the ‘cab-rank rule’, which obliges members of his profession to “take on any case provided that it is within their competence and they are available and appropriately remunerated”, but the idea of having to defend a Nazi war criminal, quite understandably, gave him pause for thought.

Read more | Hitler's downfall and the end of the war and the Third Reich

The trial of the century

We shall all be given pause to reflect on the Nuremberg Trials as they hove back into public consciousness on their 80th anniversary. The trials ran from November 1945 through to October 1946. Twenty-four leading Nazis were indicted, though only 21 of them eventually stood trial in the courtroom proceedings. Neither Adolf Hitler nor the SS leader Heinrich Himmler were among them, as both had already taken their own lives. That left the biggest name in the dock as Hitler’s successor Hermann Göring, along with Hans Frank, Rudolf Hess, Admiral Karl Donitz and others.

As with many big anniversaries, there will be media depictions, and so we have Russell Crowe playing Göring in the film 2025 film Nuremberg.

Read more | Life in Nazi Germany

We don’t see any of the lawyers who defended Göring and the other Nazis in the film, but rather we follow the efforts of the American chief prosecutor Robert H Jackson (played by Michael Shannon) to ensure that the crimes of the Nazis were exposed to the world.

Plus, there is the fascinating side story of the US psychiatrist Douglas Kelley (Rami Malek) who was tasked with assessing the mental state of the defendants.

A trial unlike any other

After watching the film I was drawn to reflect on how it compared to what I gleaned from Sands. Where it matches up is in its depiction of the wrangling over who should be put on trial and for what crimes. This was an international court with no precedent.

The film also captures some of the urgency of the planning for the trial. Given that the Second World War only ended in Europe in May 1945, it was a very tight schedule to have the court up and running by November of the same year.

Obviously there was a lot of thought given to the idea of a trial before the end of the war, though it was not a certainty that it would happen. Soviet leader Josef Stalin and US President Franklin D Roosevelt wanted a trial, but British Prime Minister Winston Churchill initially preferred the idea of summary justice. He wanted the Nazi leaders lined up and shot. He came round though, and at the Yalta Conference in February 1945, Churchill, Roosevelt, and Stalin agreed there would be a trial for Nazi leaders. With the Allied commanders in accord, the lawyers could get to work.

Read more | When and why did the US get involved in WW2?

“It seems almost incredible that such an enterprise as the famous Nuremberg Trials were put together in so short period of time,” said Sands.

“There are two really big issues they had to decide on. The first one is, who do you go for? And an early decision was taken to go for leaders. They wanted people who had planned, who'd been in government positions or who were serious industrialists. In the end, they chose 24 top political and financial leaders in Germany.

“But the second issue, and this was even more complicated, was what were the crimes? As of February 1945, there was only one international crime, and that was war crime, which is the targeting of civilians in times of war.”

Read more | Was the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki by the US in WW2 justified?

The answer was that the Allies invented new crimes.

“Crimes against humanity; crimes against peace, (which was waging illegal war), and then as a subhead of war crimes, [and] genocide, which makes its way in through the back door.”

What the film gets right

The film captures those deliberations well, along with the practicalities of actually running the trial, rebuilding the damaged courthouse, housing the prisoners, and gathering the international legal teams and global media in the shattered ruins of Nuremberg.

It also, I think, demonstrates another point that Sands stressed to me, which is that the trial had to be fair, and had to be seen to be fair, under the glaring bulb of the press cameras. Though it was a form of victors’ justice, in that the Allies made the rules and ran the trial, Sands notes that “The defendants basically felt they got a fair trial. No one complained about the quality of the proceedings. No one complained about the behaviour of the judges.”

A running theme of the film is the jeopardy that the Nazis might not be found guilty; that the Allies would be exposed to international ridicule. That was the risk of running a fair trial. Perhaps proof of that fairness is that some of the defendants were in fact acquitted.

The film concludes, reasonably enough, with the hanging of those who were found guilty, but it omits to mention that some of those in the dock were sentenced to imprisonment and some were acquitted and walked free.

The film also does well at showing the media interest in the trials, and particularly how the evidence presented by the prosecution of the crimes enacted in the concentration camps was brought to global attention via the court. The showing of film reel from the camps in the courtroom evinced global shock, as the true horror of the Nazi Final Solution was revealed to many observers around the world for the first time.

Göring and Kelley

One of the key themes of the film is the relationship between Göring and the psychiatrist Kelley. Russell Crowe’s portrayal of the Nazi leader is something to behold, and is pretty uncomfortable viewing in the first half of the film as the viewer is tempted to find some likeable elements to the character, through his dealings with Kelley. In the real trial, incidentally, the psychologist Dr Gustave Gilbert played a key role, as is depicted in Sands’ book East West Street.

This isn’t something I discussed with Sands, but we did talk about the cross-examination of Göring by Robert Jackson. This scene is the dramatic highlight of the film, and it shows Crowe’s Göring getting the better of Shannon’s Jackson, only for Richard E Grant, playing the British lawyer David Maxwell Fyfe, to step in and rescue the situation. Sands told me that a relevant must-read is the account written by the American journalist Janet Flanner.

Read more | The 1943 battle of Kursk: was it the biggest tank battle in history?

“From Janet Flanner, we get the most extraordinary account of the cross-examination by Robert Jackson of Herman Göring. She observed that Göring runs rings around Jackson, and the reason was that Jackson was essentially an appellate lawyer. He didn’t know how to cross examine,” says Sands.

“Flanner writes an excoriating account of Jackson’s performance as a cross examiner. She describes how eventually he had to stop. And a British lawyer, David Maxwell Fyfe, who knows how to cross examine, comes on and destroys Göring in short order. These accounts, absolutely brilliantly written, give you the full flavour of what’s going on in the courtroom.”

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As courtroom drama scenes go, Nuremberg’s Goering cross-examination is not quite up there with Jack Nicholson barking ‘You can’t handle the truth’ at Tom Cruise in A Few Good Men, but Crowe’s moment in the dock is nevertheless a memorable one.

The film ends with a moralising message about how we need to take heed of the lessons of Nuremberg. I wasn’t convinced by the conclusion – it felt a bit forced to me. But the legacy of the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg in 1945-46 is certainly something we should take note of.

"Nuremberg was a revolutionary moment” says Sands. “It was the first time in human history that countries came together and said the power of the state, the sovereign, the king, president or prime minister, is not absolute; you cannot anymore treat your own nationals or the nationals of other countries as you wish. You can’t kill and disappear individuals; you can’t kill and disappear groups. You are subject to constraints, not imposed by your own legal order, but by international law."

The rule of international law depends on lawyers prepared to defend those charged with having broken it. So it makes perfect sense that Sands, as a vocal defender of the international legal system that owes so much to Nuremberg, should hope that he would have been prepared to act for the Nazis in the dock there.

For more content like this, check out the best historical movies of all time as chosen by historians and ranked by you, history TV shows and films to stream tonight, and our picks of the new history TV and radio released in the UK this week

Who was Hermann Göring? The truth about Hitler’s drug-fuelled enforcer who met his downfall at Nuremberg

2025-11-07T16:44:41.000Z

Hermann Göring held a uniquely prominent position among the architects of Nazi Germany. As the founder of the Gestapo, commander-in-chief of the Luftwaffe, and Adolf Hitler’s chosen successor, his name became synonymous with the Third Reich at the height of its power – and while it collapsed.

To the rest of the world, Göring often appeared as the public face of Nazi Germany during the 1930s as an example of the regime’s ambition and arrogance. And within Nazi Germany, he was Hitler’s closest ally, who served as a bridge between the Führer’s radicalism and the traditional elites.

Read more | Hitler's downfall and the end of the war and the Third Reich

When the Second World War ended, Göring was the most senior surviving Nazi official to stand trial at Nuremberg. There, his intelligence, arrogance and courtroom performances made him the defining symbol of the proceedings.

But how did he get there?

Who was Hermann Göring?

Hermann Göring was a decorated First World War pilot who became Hitler’s second-in-command, head of Germany’s air force – the Luftwaffe – and the most prominent Nazi leader tried at Nuremberg for his central role in the crimes of the Third Reich.

But before he reached the highest strata of the Nazi war machine, he had been an ambitious opportunist, whose charm and vanity had carried him from serving in a cockpit during the First World War to the heart of Hitler’s new Reich.

Hermann Göring’s early life and career

Hermann Wilhelm Göring was born in January 1893 in Rosenheim, Bavaria, into a family with strong military and colonial ties.

His father, Heinrich Ernst Göring, had served as governor of German South-West Africa, and his mother, Franziska, was from a Bavarian family. Hermann’s godfather was a Prussian nobleman, which was a connection that opened doors within the officer class of Kaiser Wilhelm II’s Germany.

Read more | 10 facts you (probably) didn't know about the First World War

Friends and biographers described a young Göring as gregarious and theatrical. He could be personally charming, but also impulsive, vain and manipulative. His fascination with pageantry and symbols of authority became a defining feature of his personality.

He entered a military academy at 16, was commissioned into the infantry, and in 1915 transferred to the Imperial German Air Service. By the end of the First World War he was a celebrated fighter ace, credited with 22 aerial victories and had commanded the famed ‘Flying Circus’, the fighter wing once led by Manfred von Richthofen, the so-called Red Baron.

But the war’s end left Göring disillusioned. The collapse of the German empire and the punitive Treaty of Versailles would fuel his later political choices.

Hermann Göring during the Weimar years, and the road to Nazism

The 1920s saw Göring struggling to live up to the military glory of his recent past.

He now worked as a commercial pilot in Scandinavia, married to a Swedish baroness, Carin von Kantzow, and had become enamoured with the romantic nationalism sweeping post-war Germany. Returning home, he encountered Adolf Hitler and joined the Nazi Party in 1922. He soon proved an asset to the party, his war hero reputation lending credibility to what was then still a fringe movement.

When Hitler attempted to seize power in the Beer Hall Putsch of November 1923, Göring led stormtroopers into the confrontation and was seriously wounded. Doctors prescribed him morphine, a treatment that began his lifelong addiction to the drug. After the putsch’s failure, Göring fled Germany and lived in exile in Austria and Sweden, with his health and finances in tatters.

He returned after a general amnesty in 1927, and was soon back at the forefront of Germany’s rapidly evolving political landscape.

In the late Weimar years, he established himself as one of Hitler’s most capable political operatives. He was elected to the Reichstag in 1928, and became its president in 1932, using parliamentary procedure to block democratic opposition. His cunning made him a vital part of Hitler’s ascendency.

Hermann Göring at Hitler’s side

When Hitler was appointed Chancellor in January 1933, Göring was rewarded with multiple key posts. He became Minister-President of Prussia, giving him control of the largest German state, including its police force. After the 1933 Reichstag Fire was blamed on communists, he created the Gestapo, the Nazi regime’s secret police, and began the systematic purge of political opponents.

Göring was an important instrument of the Nazification of the state, ensuring that Germany’s civil institutions fell into line behind the new regime. He also became a central figure in rearmament and economic management – both policies which defied the terms of the Treaty of Versailles – founding the Reich Air Ministry in 1933 and later overseeing the Four-Year Plan to prepare Germany for war.

At this point, having known Hitler for a decade, Göring was among the few Nazi leaders who could speak to him on equal terms. Hitler reportedly admired Göring’s ruthless ability, and how he managed to project an image of stability and credibility to foreign governments.

By 1938, Göring was reaching the height of his personal power, and over the next two years he was named Reichsmarschall, the highest military rank in the Reich, and officially designated as Hitler’s successor. He amassed immense wealth, acquired vast estates such as Carinhall (named for his late wife, who died in 1931) and became one of Europe’s most prolific collectors of looted art. He was insatiable.

Hermann Göring’s role in WW2

At the outbreak of the Second World War in September 1939, Göring commanded the Luftwaffe, the air force he had built into a symbol of Nazi might.

Early campaigns appeared to vindicate his leadership: the Luftwaffe’s role in the invasions of Poland, France, and the Low Countries demonstrated the effectiveness of Blitzkrieg tactics – to hit targets hard and fast. Göring was hailed as the regime’s leading military hero.

But the limitations of he and his Luftwaffe force would soon become apparent. During the Battle of Britain in 1940, Göring promised Hitler that air superiority would bring Britain to heel, alongside the rest of Europe. Instead, it began the long decline of the Luftwaffe’s reputation. As Allied production and technology advanced, Göring proved unable to keep pace with the change.

Another failure he bore direct responsibility for was the terror bombing of civilian targets across Europe. It was part of a strategy intended to crush morale. But instead, it hardened resistance.

Now faltering, Göring retreated to Carinhall, surrounding himself with luxury and comfort, and his morphine dependency worsened. Nevertheless, he retained vast formal authority. He supervised the exploitation of occupied economies, directed the looting of Europe’s art, and sat on the Central Planning Board, which oversaw the use of forced labour.

But, by 1943, Hitler’s patience with Göring had run out. The Luftwaffe’s failures during the Battle of Stalingrad and inability to defend Germany from Allied bombing raids meant that Hitler’s faith in Göring had evaporated. Still, with a power base of his own, Göring was able to cling to his titles and prestige. This wouldn’t last.

In April 1945, as Soviet forces closed in on Berlin, Göring sent a telegram to Hitler suggesting that he should assume leadership if the Führer were incapacitated. In response, a paranoid Hitler branded him a traitor, stripped him of office and ordered his arrest.

Hitler’s order was never carried out. Instead, Göring was captured by American troops as war in Europe drew to a close.

Why was Hermann Göring put on trial at Nuremberg?

The victorious Allied powers set up the Nuremberg Trials to bring leading members of Nazi Germany to justice. Held in the German city of Nuremberg between November 1945 and October 1946, these were the first international tribunals in history to prosecute individuals for war crimes.

Led jointly by judges and prosecutors from the United States, the United Kingdom, the Soviet Union, and France, the trials sought to hold Nazi leaders accountable for their roles in the atrocities of the war. The chief American prosecutor, Justice Robert H Jackson, played a central role in presenting the case against the accused.

Read more | “I hope I would have defended the Nazis at Nuremberg”

At Nuremberg, Göring was the most senior Nazi official still alive, and the principal defendant at the International Military Tribunal. In lieu of prosecuting Hitler himself, now dead, Göring became the figurehead upon which the weight of Nazi atrocities could be placed.

He was charged with crimes against peace (planning and waging aggressive war), war crimes, and crimes against humanity.

When captured, Göring was overweight and suffering from high blood pressure, heart problems, and morphine addiction. American doctors carefully detoxified him in prison, replacing morphine with mild sedatives and controlling his diet. He lost nearly 80lbs before the trial began.

Psychologists assessing the defendants administered intelligence and personality tests. Göring’s IQ was among the highest at 138, and he scored high for extroversion and dominance on personality scales. The prison psychiatrists described him as the natural leader among the defendants, noting his ability to charm those around him – even his guards.

How did Hermann Göring act under cross-examination at Nuremberg?

Prosecutors presented evidence of his involvement in every major decision of the Nazi regime, from early rearmament and the annexation of Austria and Czechoslovakia, to the looting of occupied Europe and the formulation of anti-Jewish decrees. He denied direct knowledge of the Holocaust, but the court found his claim impossible to reconcile with his central role in government.

During the trial, Göring dominated proceedings with his bravado. He portrayed himself not as a criminal, but as a patriot who had served Germany, and he defended the Nazi regime as a bulwark against Bolshevism and impending European chaos.

His early exchanges with chief US prosecutor Robert H Jackson became some of the most dramatic moments of the tribunal. Initially, Göring’s composure and rhetorical skill allowed him to defend himself against Jackson’s questions effectively, but it was his arrogance by which he was ultimately undermined. As Göring asserted himself as a figure of great importance, prolonged cross-examination sealed proof of his complicity.

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Was Hermann Göring’s conviction a foregone conclusion?

For all the drama of the trials, the verdict against Göring was never in doubt.

The documentary evidence tied Göring to every phase of Nazi aggression. The Tribunal convicted him on all counts and sentenced him to death by hanging.

Hermann Göring’s death and the cyanide mystery

In his final appeals, Göring requested to be executed by firing squad, claiming the rights of a soldier rather than those of a common criminal. The judges refused.

But, on the night of 15 October 1946, hours before his scheduled execution, he was found dead in his cell. He’d ingested a cyanide capsule.

How he obtained the poison remains unclear.

Some believe he’d concealed it in a tin of skin cream, or among his personal items. Others suggested that sympathetic guards smuggled it in. A later US Army investigation concluded that at least one guard may have been bribed or manipulated.

Göring’s suicide robbed the Allies of the symbolic closure they sought in publicly hanging the regime’s most senior surviving figure.

His body was cremated, and his ashes – along with those of the other executed Nazis – were scattered over the Conwentzbach, a tributary of the River Isar near Munich, to prevent any grave or shrine from becoming a site of pilgrimage.

The Nuremberg Trials: the real history behind the post-WW2 tribunal that brought Nazi leaders to justice

2025-11-07T16:37:15.000Z

In the autumn of 1945, in a bombed-out Germany still reeling from defeat and occupation, the victorious Allies launched a remarkable experiment in international justice: the Nuremberg Trials.

The first of these, conducted by the International Military Tribunal (IMT) between 20 November 1945 and 1 October 1946, was convened by the four major Allied powers: the United States, the United Kingdom, France and the Soviet Union. It was established under the London Agreement and Charter of 8 August 1945, which created the IMT and defined its authority.

What were the Nuremberg Trials?

The purpose of the Nuremberg Trials was to hold the senior surviving leaders of the defeated German Reich accountable for their crimes: for aggressive war-making, gross violations of the laws of war (war crimes) and for what was then – in international law – a new category: “crimes against humanity”.

In essence, the Nuremberg Trials represented a watershed in the history of international justice. Their significance lies not only in the punishment of high‐profile Nazi leaders but in the very idea that state actors and military commanders could be held to account before a tribunal created by victorious powers, under new international legal standards.

Read more | Life in Nazi Germany

They raised profound questions about justice, victors’ rights, legal innovation and moral precedent. They were not simple theatrical show trials, nor were they flawless, but they marked a deliberate choice by the Allies to pursue legality over vengeance, to document evil rather than simply bury it, and to assert that even leaders are not above the law.

Their legacy is significant: they laid the foundation for international criminal law, inspired the later Genocide Convention (adopted by the United Nations General Assembly in 1948), and provided a public accounting for the Third Reich’s atrocities.

The trials, which opened in November 1945, are also the subject of a new film entitled Nuremberg, starring Rami Malek and Russell Crowe.

Who was on trial at Nuremberg?

At the first and most famous of the Nuremberg Trials (the IMT), 24 major figures from the military and political elite of the Third Reich were indicted.

Among them were:

Hermann Göring, Reichsmarschall, head of the Luftwaffe and Hitler’s designated successor
Joachim von Ribbentrop, foreign minister
Rudolf Hess, the former deputy führer
Wilhelm Keitel, field marshal and chief of the OKW (Armed Forces High Command)
Ernst Kaltenbrunner, senior SS officer and head of the Reich Security Main Office (RSHA)
Alfred Rosenberg, ideologue of the Nazi regime
Hans Frank, governor-general of occupied Poland
Wilhelm Frick, interior minister of Nazi Germany and then Reich protector for Bohemia and Moravia
Julius Streicher, former editor of the newspaper Der Stürmer and a rabid Nazi propagandist
Albert Speer, minister for armaments and war production
Fritz Sauckel, plenipotentiary for labour deployment, responsible for Germany’s forced labour procurement
Karl Dönitz, former head of the navy and Hitler’s successor as head of state of Nazi Germany

Of the 24 names originally indicted, three were absent when the trial started. Martin Bormann, Hitler’s former Nazi party secretary, had not been found (in truth, he had died in the battle for Berlin) and so was tried in absentia. Meanwhile Robert Ley, head of the German Labour Front, took his own life before the trial started, and Gustav Krupp, head of the Krupp industrial conglomerate, was deemed unfit to stand on the grounds of senility.

Why were the Nuremberg Trials held in Nuremberg?

The decision to hold the trials in the city of Nuremberg (known as Nürnberg in German) was both practical and deeply symbolic. On one hand, the city’s Palace of Justice had survived the war relatively intact, with a large courtroom capable of holding the proceedings and an adjacent prison in which the accused could be securely housed.

On the other hand, Nuremberg had been the site of the Nazi party’s huge annual rallies and thus one of the locations most synonymous with the Nazi movement and its propaganda. In addition, holding the trial in the heart of former German territory – rather than abroad – reinforced the idea of a public accounting for Nazi crimes.

The Nuremberg Trials were intended to make a deliberate political and moral statement: the former epicentre of the Nazi regime would become the place of judgment.

Were the verdicts in the Nuremberg Trials a foregone conclusion?

The question of whether the verdicts of the Nuremberg Trials were inevitable is a complex one. Of course, the scale of evidence assembled by the prosecutors was overwhelming: including film footage, photographs, documents and the material gleaned from the cross-examination of survivors and witnesses.

Nonetheless, the legal machinery of the trial was novel. International law for crimes against humanity and aggressive war had never previously been applied in this way, so the legal basis was less than entirely sound. Some have argued that the trial invented post-facto standards (i.e. crimes defined after the events) or stretched legal concepts. Indeed, critics at the time and since have questioned whether full impartiality was even possible, given the severity of the crimes under consideration and the fact that the victors were also sitting as judges and prosecutors.

Read more | Why did the Allies win the Second World War?

Pragmatically, though, the notion of a ‘foregone conclusion’ must be qualified: among the 22 defendants tried by the IMT, three were acquitted. Furthermore, the sentences handed down for the remainder ranged from death to long prison terms. So there was clearly scope for a degree of differentiation in the judgments.

Overall, given the nature of the crimes and the vengeful political climate, there was always a strong likelihood that convictions would follow. Yet the trial still required enormous research, the preparation and presentation of evidence, legal argument and defence representation. Though the expectation of guilt for many of the defendants was high, the verdicts were not a foregone conclusion.

Why didn’t they just summarily execute the Nazis?

There were, perhaps, some compelling arguments at the time for immediate execution or summary justice – after all, the atrocities committed by the Nazi regime were immense, and their crimes had often been blatant. But the Allies rejected this route, and for a number of reasons.

The first was that of legitimacy. Stalin famously told Churchill at the Teheran Conference in 1943 that he favoured the summary execution of as many as 100,000 leading Nazis so that Germany would be unable to plan another war. Instead of such a brutal course of action, however, the victorious Allies opted for a very public trial so as to ensure that the Germans would not be able to claim that the admission of war guilt had been extracted from them under duress.

Then there was the rule of law. The London Agreement and Charter, which had established the legal and procedural basis for the trials, had emphasised that due process would be applied. The Allies were adamant that – unlike the regime whose surviving representatives they were trying – they were wedded to the principle of lawful justice, not simple vengeance.

Read more | Your guide to the Yalta and Potsdam conferences, 1945

Thirdly, the Allies found themselves restrained by moral and political caution. Collective punishment or mass executions without trial would violate the foundational principles that they hoped to represent and would risk a backlash, which could in turn undermine the postwar reconstruction of Germany. Put simply, the mass execution of SS or Gestapo members would have constituted a crime that would have fundamentally undermined the moral superiority that the Allies had claimed for themselves.

Lastly, the Allies saw that there was a need for the collection and presentation of evidence of Nazi atrocities. The trial allowed for the Nazi leadership’s crimes to be publicly documented, recorded and exhibited for posterity. The visual evidence, the courtroom transcripts and the verdicts were all to be added to the historical record.

So, rather than a swift vengeance, the Allies chose the path of legal process: trial, judgment, execution or imprisonment. This was not intended to relativise the crimes, or to lessen the moral weight of the sentences handed down; if anything, it amplified them by setting a solid legal precedent.

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Did any of the defendants get acquitted?

Yes. Of the 22 defendants who stood trial at the IMT, 12 received death sentences, seven received long prison sentences and three were acquitted. The latter category comprised Hjalmar Schacht, an economist and banker who had largely been responsible for the German economic recovery after 1933; Franz von Papen, a former diplomat and chancellor of Germany, who had belonged to the conservative clique that had brought Hitler to power; and Hans Fritzsche, a renowned broadcaster and the former head of radio propaganda.

These acquittals demonstrated that the tribunal did not simply rubber-stamp guilty verdicts across the board. Importantly, the judgments handed down showed a degree of objectivity and impartiality.

How quickly were the trials carried out?

By modern standards, the timing of the IMT’s proceedings is striking. The trial began on 20 November 1945 and the verdicts were handed down between 30 September and 1 October 1946.

In that sense, then, the trial moved extraordinarily swiftly given the magnitude of the task at hand, which included assembling the necessary evidence, interrogating and cross-examining the defendants and organising the necessary interpreters to translate the court sessions into English, Russian, French and German.

Following the verdicts, the executions of the condemned took place on 16 October 1946. This means that the major war criminals were tried, judged and executed within roughly a year – a remarkable speed for such landmark international legal proceedings.

It is worth noting that the later Nuremberg trials – the US military tribunals held in the city between 1946 and 1949 – considerably extended the timeframe foreseen.

What happened to the bodies of the executed Nazis?

The bodies were handled with deliberate care and secrecy by the Allied authorities, in part to prevent them becoming objects of glorification or martyrdom. After the IMT verdicts, 12 defendants were sentenced to death. On the morning of 16 October 1946, 10 men were executed by hanging in the gymnasium of Nuremberg prison. Of the remaining two: Martin Bormann was sentenced in absentia, and Hermann Göring had escaped the noose by taking his own life the night before his scheduled execution, using a cyanide capsule that had been smuggled into his cell.

Following the hangings, the bodies of the dead were transported to the crematorium of Ostfriedhof cemetery in Munich, where they were cremated. Their ashes were then scattered in the Isar river – a method of disposal that was both pragmatic and symbolic. There were to be no tombs, no monuments and no headstones.

Read more | The 1943 battle of Kursk: was it the biggest tank battle in history?

The reason for this elaborate procedure was to deny the executed Nazis a grave or resting place that might become a shrine for neo-Nazis or other extremist admirers. It was to prove a prescient precaution. In 1988, the body of former deputy führer Rudolf Hess – who had died while serving a life sentence the previous year – was interred in a provincial cemetery in Bavaria. However, the attentions of fanatics and neo-Nazis meant that his remains were removed in 2011 and subsequently cremated. His grave was then destroyed.

Was anyone else tried after Nuremberg?

Yes. While the first IMT trial is certainly the most famous, it was by no means the only one that took place in the wake of the war. From December 1946 to April 1949, the United States (in its occupation zone) conducted 12 further trials of war criminals in the same courthouse in Nuremberg. These are collectively known as the ‘Subsequent Nuremberg Trials’ or the Nuremberg Military Tribunals (NMT).

These trials covered a broader range of defendants: SS and police leaders, industrialists (e.g. those who had used forced labour), judges (in the Judges’ Trial), doctors (the Doctors’ Trial), bureaucrats (the Ministries’ Trial) and others. All of them were people who, in various ways, had enabled the machinery of Nazi genocide and oppression.

Read more | Was the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki by the US in WW2 justified?

In total, some 199 defendants were tried at Nuremberg (IMT and NMT), resulting in 161 convictions and 37 death sentences.

Moreover, war crimes trials continued elsewhere and for decades: in West Germany, in eastern Europe, and, in the most recent years, in the prosecutions of the last surviving perpetrators for their roles in Nazi crimes.

The legal legacy of Nuremberg thus continues to this day. The trials set in motion global efforts to hold individuals accountable for the crimes committed by numerous odious regimes, and many more similar trials have followed.

Was Henry V really DESTINED for greatness?

2025-11-07T12:07:34.000Z

Henry V may have only reigned for a short period of time, but his legacy looms large over the medieval landscape.

Remembered as a heroic warrior king, who bested the French at Harfleur then marched his forces to victory at Agincourt, few monarchs could boast such a distinguished reputation. But 'Prince Hal' wasn't always destined for greatness. Was he really the gadabout youth Shakespeare would have us think? In the third episode of our three-part HistoryExtra podcast series 'Tyrant, Usurper, Hero', Helen Castor sits down with Dan Jones to uncover Henry's life beyond his most famous battles – and highlight what lessons he learned from the turbulent chaos caused by Richard II and Henry IV.

Watch now, or listen to the ad-free podcast below:

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(Ad) Helen Castor is the author of The Eagle and the Hart: The Tragedy of Richard II and Henry IV (Penguin, 2024).

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(Ad) Dan Jones is the author of Henry V: The Astonishing Rise of England's Greatest Warrior King (Bloomsbury, 2024).

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Terror in the deep: how Hitler's U-boats pushed Britain to the brink

2025-11-03T09:01:03.000Z

On the night of 13 March 1944, the Greek-registered steamship SS Peleus was en route from Freetown to Buenos Aires when she was hit amidships by two torpedoes, launched by a German U-boat, U-852. The twin-masted merchantman, of around 5,000 tons, swiftly began to sink, her internal bulkheads ruptured by the detonations. Within three minutes, the Peleus disappeared below the surface, leaving the surviving members of her 39-strong crew clinging to rafts and flotsam in the darkness.

As sinkings go during the naval war, it was unremarkable, one might even say routine. But what followed would set it apart. Soon after, U-852 surfaced close to the debris field, hoping to identify her prey and glean some information. Her captain, 27-year-old Kapitänleutnant Heinz‑Wilhelm Eck, ordered one of his men – who spoke some English – to come up to the bow to question one of the survivors. After learning the identity of his target, Eck gave the order for U-852 to move away. But then he changed his mind.

Eck was nervous. Prior to his departure from port, he had been given a lecture from his superiors on the perils of passing through the Atlantic Narrows, around Ascension, and was told that all four of the previous patrols undertaken by his predecessors had ended with the vessels being sunk. Due to the heightened risk of air attack he was urged to take every precaution to avoid being spotted by enemy aircraft. Even debris from a sinking, it was stressed, could give away his position.

Calculating that he could be only some 200 miles away by daybreak, when the wreckage of the Peleus would doubtless be spotted, he made the decision to attempt to destroy the debris. He brought a party of his men up on deck and ordered them to open fire on the rafts and other debris with machine guns. In the moonless night, they were largely firing blind, but the operation continued for hours, with grenades being thrown and U-852’s anti-aircraft gun even being brought to bear.

The number killed by these actions is unknown, but only four members of the Peleus’ crew – three Greeks and a Briton – survived among the wreckage. Three of them would endure until they were finally picked up by a Portuguese steamer, more than a month later.

A bloody exception

It is often assumed that the brutal treatment of the survivors of the Peleus was somehow the norm: that U-boat crews thought little of brutalising, even of murdering, their victims. That certainly was the assumption of Doris Hawkins, a young British nurse who was torpedoed and then picked up by a U-boat in 1941. “We had heard so many atrocity stories,” she later wrote. “We feared a shower of machine gun bullets.”

Bearing in mind the atrocities that were routinely committed by German forces elsewhere in the war – especially in eastern Europe – this assumption is entirely understandable. But, if the written records are to be believed, it is also entirely wrong. The example of the Peleus was very much the exception. Indeed, it was the only documented example of a U-boat action in the Second World War resulting in a war crime.

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Sceptical readers might question this assertion – and rightly so. For one thing, it is well known that Hitler was instinctively secretive and had a preference for issuing verbal rather than written orders when dealing with sensitive matters.

Consequently, at the Nuremberg trials, the prosecution was keen to assert that the available documentary record of the U-boat war was somehow incomplete, or that mendacious amendments could have been made. More than that, given the brutality with which most branches of the German armed forces conducted their war, is it perhaps naïve to imagine that the men of the Kriegsmarine somehow managed to resist both the heat of the moment – and the bloodthirsty rhetoric of their superiors – and refrained from straying into barbarism?

Licence to kill?

At Nuremberg, Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz, the erstwhile commander of U-boat forces, rejected robustly the claims that the Germans had somehow covered up atrocities committed during the war at sea. Yet the testimony of Korvettenkapitän Karl-Heinz Moehle, former commander of the 5th U-boat Flotilla, suggested that the culture within the U-boat arm may have been less ‘clean’ than Dönitz was willing to admit.

Moehle’s testimony centred around the so-called Laconia Order, Dönitz’s instruction to his crews, issued in 1942, to refrain from assisting shipwrecked crewmen. When he asked his superiors about the implications of the order, Moehle was told that it was a coded instruction to kill survivors. And that’s how he passed it on to his officers, albeit with the caveat that each individual commander had to act according to his own conscience.

It is quite possible, then, that there were other atrocities committed by U-boat crews against stricken merchant crewmen, but that circumstances conspired to consign them to oblivion. Perhaps there were no survivors to tell the tale, or the perpetrators were themselves sunk later in their patrol. Absence of evidence, then, should not be confused with evidence of absence.

Nonetheless, it is striking that so few examples of atrocities committed by U-boat crews have come to light. And this should prompt the curious to seek to understand why. The reasons why commanders might have resisted the urge to kill survivors – assuming they felt it at all – would have been multi-layered and would doubtless have evolved with time. But a few explanatory factors are worth bearing in mind.

Read more | In October 1939, two coffins were wheeled through Edinburgh draped in Nazi flags. But why?

For one thing, the typical U‑boat – such as the Type VII – was small and cramped. With its crew of around 50, it had no space to accommodate survivors and only limited capacity to offer material assistance. Bearing that in mind, it is remarkable how often, in the opening phase of the war, U-boat crews assisted the surviving crewmen from the ships that they had sunk, offering food, cigarettes, blankets and a compass bearing.

In the most astonishing example, the commander of U-35 opted to take the 28 surviving crewmen of the Greek-registered Diamantis aboard his submarine and sailed more than 30 hours to the beach at Ventry, in western Ireland, where they were then ferried ashore in a dinghy.

Such chivalrous actions could scarcely survive in the age of total war, of course, and after the Laconia Order, all such humanitarian impulses were formally banned by the German naval command. As a result, after the initial phase of the war, contact with survivors was effectively forbidden. By mid‑1942, then – aside from a brief interrogation to confirm the identity of the sunk vessel – U‑boats tended to avoid survivors altogether.

The culture within the U‑boat arm is also worth consideration. One should be wary of underestimating the influence of ideology in any arm of the Nazi state, but it is notable that even contemporaries considered that the Kriegsmarine was less ideologically aligned with Nazism than other branches of the armed forces. Hitler himself is said to have complained that he had “a Nazi air force, a Prussian army and a Christian navy”.

That quotation, though apocryphal, may nonetheless have had the ring of truth. Crewman Hans Goebeler, aboard U-505, recalled that – on his boat at least – ideology simply didn’t seem to matter: “Who were the Nazis aboard our submarine?” he asked: “I never met one. We were identical to the sailors from every nation who faced the hazards of war and the sea during those years. Party members or not, we performed our duties with professionalism and honour.”

Every boat would have had a cross-section of German society aboard, from fervent Nazis to the apolitical and even those who opposed the regime. Yet the question of how far the U-boat arm was indoctrinated is an interesting and complex one.

Dönitz himself was a convinced Nazi, who was fiercely loyal to Hitler, and a few of his commanders shared that enthusiasm. But active indoctrination of the U-boat arm appears to have been limited. While other branches of the German armed forces were increasingly subjected to ideological control as the war progressed, this was simply not the case for the navy.

Despite his own enthusiasm for Nazism, Dönitz appears to have stopped short of establishing genuine ideological oversight over his men. The office responsible for indoctrination within the navy, for instance, was staffed largely by men without Nazi backgrounds and – given that they were also not permitted to ‘ride along’ on patrol – they were in any case prevented from exerting any real influence over operational units.

This doesn’t mean that the U-boat arm was some sort of haven for anti-Nazi thinking or oppositional attitudes. It was not. The Kriegsmarine was far from apolitical, but its leaders held the view that its coordination to Nazi goals was self-evident, a natural corollary to the patriotism and sense of duty that were essential components of their collective identity. Dönitz held the attempts to enforce ideological conformity at arm’s length, not because he disagreed or was minded to resist, but because he considered such measures to be an unnecessary imposition. The Kriegsmarine, he believed, was already wholly on side.

We should also keep in mind that there was no single ‘way of war’ practised by the forces of the Third Reich in the Second World War. The murderous methods deployed on the eastern front, for instance, were only rarely in evidence in the west, while the war in the desert, lacking an ideological dimension, tended to be similarly unsullied by atrocities. These differences in behaviour by German forces were not the result of whim or happenstance. Rather, they were contingent on the nature of the enemy and whether Nazi ideology deemed them to be civilised and worthy of respect – as in the west – or to be subhumans slated for extermination, as in the east.

The available evidence shows that the naval war, and the submarine war in particular, cleaved more to that western model than to anything else. It is hard to escape the conclusion that the U-boat war does indeed appear to have been the ‘cleanest’ of the theatres of the European conflict, with many more instances of the old fashioned ‘solidarity of the sea’ in evidence than there were examples of atrocities.

Moral outrage

Such logic cut little ice with the judges at Nuremberg, of course, as Dönitz was found guilty on two of the three charges against him and was sentenced to 10 years’ imprisonment. As the former commander of the Kriegsmarine, and Hitler’s successor as Reich President, he deserved neither leniency nor sympathy. And, in the first flush of moral outrage over the crimes of Nazism, the Nuremberg judges were inclined towards the view that all Germans were Nazis and that everything that German forces had done was evidence of Nazi barbarism.

Nonetheless, it was a verdict that provoked no little controversy, even from some senior Allied naval officers. US Admiral Daniel V Gallery – who had spent most of the war hunting U-boats – was especially vociferous in his condemnation. Dönitz’s trial, he said, was an “outstanding example of barefaced hypocrisy”, and his conviction was “an insult to our own submariners”. “If the old gentleman ever gets out of jail,” he wrote, “I hope I never meet him. I would have trouble looking him in the eye. The only crime he committed was the crime of almost beating us in a bloody but ‘legal’ fight.”

He had a point. Dönitz’s defence at Nuremberg – brilliantly conducted by his lawyer, Otto Kranzbühler – had turned largely on the apparent hypocrisies of the Allies’ accusations, given that they, too, had effectively been carrying out unrestricted submarine warfare for most of the war. To hammer home the point, Kranzbühler had produced an affidavit from Admiral Chester Nimitz, wartime commander-in-chief of the US Pacific Fleet, which asserted that it had been customary for US submarines to attack Japanese merchant ships without warning, and that ‘general principles’ did not permit US submarines to rescue enemy survivors. In short, Nimitz’s testimony implied that the US Navy had conducted its submarine war precisely as Dönitz claimed to have conducted his.

The truth on this point was more damning than Kranzbühler could have known. Naval records released in the 1960s would reveal that the crew of the American submarine USS Wahoo had themselves participated in an action not unlike that involving the Peleus. In January 1943, the Wahoo sank the 5,000-ton Japanese troopship Buyo Maru, north of Papua New Guinea, which had been carrying Japanese soldiers and nearly 500 PoWs from the British Indian army. In the aftermath, as Japanese and Indian survivors bobbed around some 20 lifeboats, the crew of the Wahoo opened fire with machine guns. “We proceeded to have a field day,” said the captain, Lt Commander Dudley Morton.

Biological hatred

In his defence, Morton claimed that he was returning fire, but this is disputed. Some of his crew were even shocked by his evident “biological hatred” of the enemy. Whatever justification he felt he had, Morton’s attack on the Buyo Maru cost the lives of some 87 Japanese soldiers and more than 195 Indians. His after‑action report included the shooting, but he faced no punishment, and the incident was suppressed by his navy superiors. In postwar narratives, the example of the Buyo Maru was quietly forgotten, while that of the Peleus would be held up as symbolic of Nazi brutality.

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This is not a game of moral equivalence. It would be wrong to draw from a few isolated cases the false conclusion that the Allies and Axis were morally indistinguishable. The broader war aims mattered. However ‘clean’ the U-boat campaign may have been, it was serving a regime synonymous with evil. Conversely, even when the Allies faltered morally, their cause – resisting tyranny – remained just.

The point, rather, is to challenge the lazy assumption that German U-boat crews were sadistic murderers. The Peleus atrocity was very real, but it was an outlier. U-boats dealt devastating blows to Allied shipping and caused enormous loss of life, but there was only one confirmed instance of the deliberate killing of survivors.

The murder of the Peleus survivors was not a feature of the U-boat war. It was a chilling, singular exception.

Britain's near-death experience

How U-boats drove a nation to the brink of economic strangulation

During the early years of the Second World War, Britain came perilously close to defeat in the Battle of the Atlantic – a prolonged struggle against German U-boats aiming to sever the maritime lifelines sustaining Britain. As an island nation dependent on imports for food, fuel and war materiel, Britain faced an existential threat from the Kriegsmarine’s submarine campaign.

Between 1939 and 1945, German U-boats sank more than 2,700 Allied merchant ships, totalling approximately 14.5 million gross tons. The most dangerous period came in 1942, when 1,160 ships were lost to U-boats– more than 6.2 million tons – much of it along the poorly defended US coast during Operation Drumbeat.

Britain’s shipping losses outpaced production for much of 1941–42, and food rationing became more severe. At one point, Britain had only six weeks’ worth of grain reserves. Winston Churchill later wrote that the U-boat threat was the only thing that truly frightened him during the war.

The crisis peaked in early 1943, when monthly merchant shipping losses reached around 700,000 tons. German Admiral Karl Dönitz believed victory was within reach, committing more than 100 U-boats to mid-Atlantic ‘wolfpack’ operations.However, from May 1943 – dubbed ‘Black May’ by the Germans – the tide turned. Allied advances in radar, sonar, Ultra intelligence, long-range patrol aircraft and escort carriers decimated U-boat fleets. That month alone, the Germans lost 41 U-boats, forcing a temporary withdrawal from the Atlantic.

Though never completely severed, Britain’s shipping routes were

strained to their limits. Without technological breakthroughs, convoy reforms and American shipbuilding – producing Liberty ships faster than U-boats could sink them – Britain might have been economically strangled into submission.

In the end, the U-boat campaign claimed the lives of more than 30,000 Allied seamen. But it failed to deliver a knockout blow.

How the Allies turned the tide

A timeline of the war against the U-boats

3 September 1939: The British liner SS Athenia is sunk by U-30 just hours after Britain had declared war on Germany, marking the start of the Battle of the Atlantic 14 October 1939: U-47 penetrates Scapa Flow and sinks the battleship Royal Oak, killing 833, shocking the Royal Navy and boosting German morale June 1940: Following France’s fall, Germany gains Atlantic U-boat bases at Lorient, Brest and elsewhere. This dramatically extends U-boat reach into the Atlantic and intensifies Allied shipping losses

March–June 1941: U-boats enjoy high success against British shipping, aided by poor Allied convoy tactics and limited air cover, marking their most effective early-war period 12 September 1941: U-156 sinks RMS Laconia carrying civilians and PoWs. After surfacing to help survivors, the U-boat is attacked by US aircraft. This prompts the Germans to introduce the Laconia Order, forbidding the rescue of survivors October 1941: German U-boats operate in coordinated ‘wolfpacks’ to attack convoys, reaching peak effectiveness in the mid-Atlantic and causing severe shipping losses, despite increased Allied defences December 1941: Following Pearl Harbor, U-boats begin Operation Drumbeat, targeting unprepared US coastal shipping. This results in catastrophic losses early in 1942 May 1943: In what the Germans will dub ‘Black May’, the Allies turn the tide with improved radar, codebreaking and air cover. U-boat losses spike dramatically, forcing Germany to temporarily withdraw many boats from the Atlantic June 1944: U-boats fail to disrupt Allied landings in Normandy. With air superiority, improved technology and better escorts, the Allies dominate the Atlantic, further reducing U-boat effectiveness 5 May 1945: Admiral Dönitz orders all remaining U-boats to surrender. More than 150 comply, marking the official end of the U-boat war and the wider naval conflict in Europe

This article was first published in the November 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine

Just how many Bayeux Tapestries were there?

2025-10-30T09:01:09.000Z

The Bayeux Tapestry is an amazing artefact – and it’s exceptional not least because of its very existence today. Precious few pieces of embroidery from the medieval period survive, let alone ones that are almost 70 metres long. And, of course, the story it tells – of the conquest of England by the Normans – is one of immense historical significance. So we rightly celebrate it, and excitement about its forthcoming loan from Bayeux to the British Museum is high.

But what if this artefact wasn’t really so very exceptional at the time it was made? What if it was just one of several embroideries produced to commemorate the Norman victory over the English at the battle of Hastings in October 1066?

Professor John Blair, an expert in the Anglo-Saxon period at the University of Oxford, believes that might be the case.

“This is a reaction against the idea that the Tapestry had to be something extraordinary or unique, beyond the fact that it is an extraordinary and unique survival,” he says. “There are abundant references to decorative domestic hangings, but of course they had virtually zero chance of survival. The Tapestry is a wonderful piece of design, but the actual stitching isn’t particularly fine, and a big team of embroiderers in a workshop could have done it quite expeditiously.”

Purported patron

Why did the Tapestry survive when so few other embroideries did? Well, most scholars agree that it was probably made some time after the battle that it records, so in the mid-late 11th century, and likely on the orders of – or to curry favour with – Bishop Odo of Bayeux.

Odo, the half-brother of William the Conqueror, was made Earl of Kent after the conquest. The case for him being the Tapestry’s patron rests on the fact that he plays a particularly prominent role in the embroidery. Additionally, three lower-profile characters called Wadard, Vital and Turold are specifically (and surprisingly, given their status and role in the story) named in the Tapestry. These three men are thought to have been Odo’s followers.

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One line of thought suggests that the Tapestry was made to be displayed in Odo’s new cathedral in Bayeux on its consecration in 1077. We know nothing of what happened to the embroidery in the four centuries that followed – until the late 15th century, when we have a documentary reference to it in an inventory of that cathedral, noting that it was displayed annually on a specific feast day. It’s possible that the Tapestry survived for such a long time because, except for its annual airing, it was kept in a chest in the church. It therefore wasn’t subjected to the wear and tear of daily display that might have caused other contemporary embroideries to fray and fall apart. One theory even has it that the Tapestry might have been walled up in a crypt below Bayeux Cathedral for centuries.

So, if Professor Blair is right in his theory that the uniqueness of the Tapestry rests principally in its survival, what does he think about its original manufacture? Where was it made, by whom – and was it one of a kind?

“Since it seems most unlikely that none of the other members of the Norman elite had embroidered hangings representing the Conquest,” he explains, “the possibility struck me that there might have been a set of stock designs, which the workshop then customised for each individual patron: we just happen to have the one made for Odo.

“On that argument, the scenes highlighting Odo – the meal before the battle, Odo brandishing his club, and so on – and Odo’s named followers Wadard, Vital and Turold would be insertions into the standard sequence,” he continues. “To take that further would need a closer analysis of design, sequence, correlation with the borders and so on than I have done. But the Wadard scene definitely does have possibilities, since the mounted knight captioned ‘Hic est Wadard’ does rather look as though he has been interposed into a sequence of three houses and three followers.”

To see how that might have worked, we’ve doctored that section of the Tapestry (above) so that you can compare the original sequence with a version in which the mounted Wadard has been removed.

Mass production

Gale Owen-Crocker – professor emerita of the University of Manchester, one of the most respected and well-published Tapestry scholars, and author of the forthcoming book The Design of the Bayeux Tapestry – likes the idea. “I am sure that there were workshops making these woollen hangings,” she says. “The workmanship is too assured for the Bayeux Tapestry to be a one-off.”

She has previously argued, along with her co-author, Maggie Kneen, that the Tapestry designers employed templates for the motifs and images that were most likely drawn onto the linen cloth as guides for the final stitching by the embroiderers. That, too, accords with Professor Blair’s theory.

Read more | The Bayeux Tapestry: a political football for 900 years

Manchester Metropolitan University’s Dr Alexandra Makin, an authority on early medieval embroidery and author of The Lost Art of the Anglo-Saxon World, is minded to agree in broad terms:

“There’s no denying that the Bayeux Tapestry is an important embroidery, but we have evidence that indicates wall hangings that told stories were a popular way of memorialising the heroic deeds of family members,” she says. “An example is the Byrhtnoth wall hanging that was made by that ealdorman’s wife, Ælfflæd, and possibly other women in the household. It depicted the ‘great deeds’ of the ealdorman, and was given to the monastery at Ely at some point after his death at the battle of Maldon in 991.

“Meanwhile, in a poem written by Baudri of Bourgueil to William the Conqueror’s daughter, Adela of Blois, Baudri describes three different wall hangings, one of which is very similar to the Bayeux Tapestry,” she adds.

“The way the Bayeux Tapestry’s narrative is set out also brings to mind the woven tapestries found in the ninth-century Oseberg ship burial in Norway, which are thought to tell stories relating to warrior ideology in the Viking world,” Dr Makin continues. “The Bayeux Tapestry sits in a long tradition of telling heroic stories through textiles, so early medieval people were well aware of this and understood what it was telling them. This also suggests that other people could have commissioned embroidered or woven wall hangings to tell their own story of what happened in 1066. Whether these were as big as the Bayeux Tapestry is another question.”

According to Dr Makin, the way the embroidery was made lent itself ideally to the purpose for which it was designed. “The materials and stitches used to create the Bayeux Tapestry are perfect for the job,” she says. “They are bold, quick to work, cover the ground fabric easily and would be seen from a distance. This is not a fine piece of work like the 10th-century gold-and-silk embroidered stole, maniple and ribbons found in the tomb of St Cuthbert in Durham Cathedral – but using tiny stitches would not have worked for a wall hanging that was meant to be seen by lots of people at a distance.

“When the stitching is examined, its precise execution, and the economical use of thread, demonstrates that the Bayeux Tapestry is an accomplished piece of work,” Dr Makin concludes. “But we simply cannot compare it to pieces made from gold and silk threads. They were meant to do a different job.”

Evidence for uniqueness

Professor Michael Lewis, another leading Tapestry expert based at the British Museum, is less convinced by Professor Blair’s theory. He contends that Bishop Odo’s presumed key role in the making of the Tapestry actually argues for it being a one-off embroidery:

“We know from Domesday Book that Bishop Odo, the Tapestry’s likely patron, was a cultured man with the considerable wealth needed for the creation of a monumental artwork like the Bayeux embroidery,” he says. “Surely it was his unique position as Earl of Kent that also enabled access to the illuminated manuscripts that were evidently used in the Tapestry’s designs. Perhaps he could have granted similar access to other potential patrons – but is that likely or realistic?

“Another aspect to consider – key, perhaps – is whether the Tapestry was ever actually used for its original purpose, presumably to be displayed from place to place as an advocacy piece for Odo’s role in the Conquest,” he continues. “The likely period of its creation (1072–77) was within a new political environment in which William was moving towards a more oppressive regime than in the early days of the Conquest. Yet the Tapestry’s story seems to reflect a pre-1070s narrative, with William hoping to bring the English around by more persuasive means. So maybe it was never toured [because it didn’t reflect the newly prevailing narrative] and was unlikely to be emulated.”

Professor Lewis further wonders whether the scale of the embroidery and, thus, the resources required would have made duplicate versions less likely:

“It is true that the Bayeux embroidery uses relatively simple materials – flax for linen, wool for its threads, and plant material as dyes – but its scale, which could have been even larger than its extant 70m, suggests a different level of resources than might have been typical,” he notes. “This has not been explored in any meaningful way, and surely it is an opportunity not to be missed [when the Tapestry is conserved in 2027] for scientifically investigating its materiality?”

If Professor Blair’s theory does hold water – and clearly more research is needed to bolster the case – it demands that we consider the Tapestry and its message in a different light. As it stands, the Bayeux Tapestry is a key source for our understanding of the Norman conquest. The narrative it offers, which is at once celebratory for Duke William, conciliatory towards King Harold, and exclusionary of other dimensions to the story – the most obvious omission being Harald Hardrada’s invasion in northern England before Hastings – has had a significant influence on the way we see 1066. If it was only one of a number of similar but different embroideries, then we need to review our interpretative framework, and consider why this particular version showed this particular narrative.

Read more | Why the Nazis fell in love with the Bayeux Tapestry

“Should this idea turn out to be right, it would emphasise both the sophistication and the complexity of 11th-century life, with major embroideries produced for several aristocratic households on a factory-line basis,” Professor Blair remarks. “When trying to understand material culture in the early Middle Ages, we have to remember what a minute and unrepresentative sample has come down to us.”

Hopefully, this article might lead to further research on this interesting theory. In the meantime, if anyone reading happens to be descended from one of the leading Norman families of the 11th century and has an unopened chest lying around, please feel free to have a look – and get in touch if it contains a 70 metres long embroidery.

This article was first published in the December 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine

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