Hitler even sent military aid to Ethiopia during the 1935-6 Italian colonial conquest, that's how mad he was about the Austrian issue

It's amazing how much of it boiled down to Hitler saying, "he did WHAT?!" and then doing the thing he shouldn't do in response to that.

I see that the Axis never understood the power of friendship.

I might have missed it, but I think he left out Nanking. What Japan did there was so bad that it made the German representative intervene to save Chinese lives - sort of on theme for the video.

One lesson both world wars taught us: Doesn't matter how powerful your military on paper is if your allies turn out to be not very good it's not going to end well for you.

Thumbnail holds promise 😂

What's also surreal alongside Mussolini is that Pol Pot was also the Cambodian equivalent of an elementary school teacher for a number of years.

One moment you're teaching kids math and reading, the next you're leading one of the most brutal and depraved genocides in human history.

I love how removed from context he easily wrote the Axis as trying to one-up each other in the dumbest moves ever.

It would be more accurate to call him a Pathological Liar. Compulsive liars do it to hide from feelings, while pathological ones do it together eat what they want.

I was a little bit surprised by the appearance of the Taiwanese flag and then I realize that oh...right...1949 hasn't happened yet...

And we all just forgot about Finland. As a Finn whose family fought in ww2 that had me dying

Reading through some diaries from the siege of Leningrad, I came across a teen girl’s account of receiving the news of the attack on Pearl Harbor and Germany’s subsequent declaration of war on the US. For her and probably for a lot of other blokadniki like her, it was a brilliant spark of light and hope in what was for them the darkest period of the siege (the first winter). Her excitement and sense of renewed hope were palpable in her writing. Another aspect of the US entry into the war that doesn’t get talked about enough is the psychological effect it has on those holding out against the Axis. Japan and Germany shout themselves in the foot in more ways than one when they brought the US into the direct fight.

what we've learned class is that evil does not equate intelligent. if anything, the fact the axis was such a clown car of buffonnery means that the Allies actively put their stick in their own spokes by not dealing with this earlier.

Belgium wasn’t directly created as a buffer state between France and Germany. The Kingdom of the United Netherlands was created as a buffer state against France specifically.

Because of Dutch disenfranchisement of primarily the French/Walloon speaking population there is a revolution in Belgium and parts of the Southern Netherlands. The Netherlands military mostly defeats the uprising which is when France intervenes militarily and basically saves Belgium. They wanted to wrestle Belgium away from the Dutch and create a more French friendly and Francophone led state to their North

Just FYI, Jack Rackam posted a video explaining he’s transitioning his name to history abridged to fit the channel better

Actually many italians weren’t very happy about the alliance with Germany and even less to the idea of fighting alongside. At that time germans were seen as historical enemies to the italian people, because of ww1 and the indipendence wars (yeah, those were mainly austrians but they really couldn’t tell the difference).

You mentioned Germany not having great allies during either world war. A German from World War 1 said that being allied to Austria-Hungary was like fighting while tied to a corpse.

12:45 Your point about pre-war and WW2 leaders having already lived through WWI - as adults - is spot-on, and I'm not sure is talked about enough.  When I read about the period, I'm so often struck by how decisions and attitudes were shaped by experiences of the Great War.

28:40 when your soldiers are so cruel that they make the Nazis uncomfortable, you know there's something very wrong.

And yes, that's how the Germans referred to their actions. The Hungarian volunteers were so arbitrary and cruel that they were said to be engaged in "murder tourism" by the Nazis.

2:00 worth noting that France was really the one pressing for reparations. America and to a lesser degree Britain mostly wanted to be less harsh