Images, above: Greater Germania's ancient families' coats of arms, from what is now Poland. See Hour 4, A Most Dangerous Book: Tacitus's Germania from the Roman Empire to the Third Reich by Christopher B. Krebs

JOHN BATCHELOR SHOW

Hour One

Saturday 21 December 2013 / Hour 1, Block A:  Fatal Crossroads: The Untold Story of the Malmedy Massacre at the Battle of the Bulge by Danny S. Parker  (1 of 4)

Saturday 21 December 2013 / Hour 1, Block B:  Fatal Crossroads: The Untold Story of the Malmedy Massacre at the Battle of the Bulge by Danny S. Parker  (2 of 4)

Saturday 21 December 2013 / Hour 1, Block C:  Fatal Crossroads: The Untold Story of the Malmedy Massacre at the Battle of the Bulge by Danny S. Parker  (3 of 4)

Saturday 21 December 2013 / Hour 1, Block D:   Fatal Crossroads: The Untold Story of the Malmedy Massacre at the Battle of the Bulge by Danny S. Parker  (4 of 4)

Hour Two

Map, right: Germania inferior: small province of the Roman empire, situated along the Lower Rhine. Its capital was Cologne.  From 57 BC until around 400 AD the Limes formed the border between the Roman Empire and the Germanic lands to its north. Remnants of the Limes can be found everywhere in the landscape.  The province of Gelderland has the largest number of visible reminders of the Limes in the Netherlands, but remnants and archaeological finds linked to it can also be found in the provinces of Utrecht and South Holland.

The Limes Germanicus includes not only border markings but also excavated shipwrecks, remnants of forts and settlements, roads and part of a Roman water mains.  The entire border extends for 568 kilometres. The Lower Germanic Limes runs from the Dutch North Sea coast near the town of Katwijk, along the Oude Rijn river to Arnhem and the German border and is the Netherlands' most extensive archaeological monument.  The other two sections, the Upper Germanic Limes and the Rhaetian Limes extend all the way to Kelheim, near Regensburg, on the River Danube. 

Saturday 21 December 2013 / Hour 2, Block A:  Soldaten: On Fighting, Killing, and Dying by Sonke Neitzel, Harald Welzer and Jefferson Chase  (1 of 4)   In 2001, spurred by a nagging curiosity over a transcript of a secretly recorded conversation he had come across in his research on the German U-boat wars, historian Sönke Neitzel paid a visit to the British national archives. He had heard of the existence of recorded interrogations of German POWs, but never about covert recordings taken within the confines of the holding cells, bedrooms, and camps that housed the prisoners. What Neitzel discovered, to his amazement, were reams of untouched, recently declassified transcripts totaling nearly eight hundred pages. Later, Neitzel would find another trove of protocols twice as extensive at the National Archives in Washington, D.C.

Though initially recorded by British intelligence with the intention of gaining information that might be useful for the Allied war effort, the matters discussed in these conversations ultimately proved to be limited in that regard. But for Neitzel and his collaborator, renowned social psychologist Harald Welzer, they would supply a unique and profoundly important window into the mentality of the soldiers in the Wehrmacht, the Luftwaffe, the German navy, and the military in general, almost all of whom had insisted on their own honorable behavior during the war. It is a myth these transcripts unequivocally debunk.

Soldaten closely examines these conversations, and the casual, pitiless brutality omnipresent in them, from a historical and psychological perspective. What factors led to the degradation of the soldiers’ sense of awareness and morality? How much did their social environments affect their interpretation of the war and their actions during combat? By reconstructing the frameworks and situations behind these conversations, and the context in which they were spoken, a powerful, unflinching narrative of wartime experience emerges. The details of what these soldiers did, after all, are not filtered the way they might be in letters to family, or girlfriends and wives, or during interrogations by the enemy. In Soldaten, Sönke Neitzel and Harald Welzer offer an unmitigated window into the mind-set of the German fighting man, potentially changing our view of World War II. 

Saturday 21 December 2013 / Hour 2, Block B:  Soldaten: On Fighting, Killing, and Dying by Sonke Neitzel, Harald Welzer and Jefferson Chase  (2 of 4)

Saturday 21 December 2013 / Hour 2, Block C:  Soldaten: On Fighting, Killing, and Dying by Sonke Neitzel, Harald Welzer and Jefferson Chase  (3 of 4)

Saturday 21 December 2013 / Hour 2, Block D:   Soldaten: On Fighting, Killing, and Dying by Sonke Neitzel, Harald Welzer and Jefferson Chase  (4 of 4)

Hour Three

Photo, below: reconstruction of an Iron Age farm, similar to those in Roman Germania 

Saturday 21 December 2013 / Hour 3, Block A:  Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin by Timothy Snyder (1  of 4)  “Timothy Snyder…compels us to look squarely at the full range of destruction committed first by Stalin’s regime and then by Hitler’s Reich. Each fashioned a terrifying orgy of deliberate mass killing…. Snyder punctuates his comprehensive and eloquent account with brief glimpses of individual victims, perpetrators and witnesses.” NYTBR

Saturday 21 December 2013 / Hour 3, Block B:  Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin by Timothy Snyder (2  of 4)

Saturday 21 December 2013 / Hour 3, Block C:  Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin by Timothy Snyder (3  of 4)

Saturday 21 December 2013 / Hour 3, Block D:  Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin by Timothy Snyder (4  of 4)

Hour Four

Saturday  21 December 2013 / Hour 4, Block A: A Most Dangerous Book: Tacitus's Germania from the Roman Empire to the Third Reich by Christopher B. Krebs (1 of 4) The Harvard classics professor Krebs writes a scholarly but lucid account of the abuse of history. Written in 98 C.E. by the Roman official Tacitus, About the Origin and Mores of the Germanic Peoples was lost for centuries but resurfaced around 1500 as Germans were growing resentful of foreign domination—in this case from the Catholic Church in Rome. The rediscovered book launched a primitivist myth that captivated admirers over the next 500 years, from Martin Luther to Heinrich Himmler, who loved its portrayal of ancient Germans as freedom-loving warriors, uncultured but honorable, in contrast to decadent Romans. In fact, Tacitus probably never visited Germany, Krebs notes. Rather, using books and travelers' reports, he wrote for a Roman audience who shared his romantic view of northern barbarians. Enthusiastic German readers, culminating in the Nazis, ignored Tacitus's disparaging comments, misread passages to confirm their prejudices, and proclaimed that the ancient historian confirmed their national superiority. This is an inventive analysis of, and warning against, an irresistible human yearning to find written proof of one's ideology. ---Publishers Weekly.

Photo, below: Poland Mount Sleza - ancient cult figure.

Saturday 21 December 2013 / Hour 4, Block B:  A Most Dangerous Book: Tacitus's Germania from the Roman Empire to the Third Reich by Christopher B. Krebs; 2 of 4

Saturday 21 December 2013 / Hour 4, Block C: A Most Dangerous Book: Tacitus's Germania from the Roman Empire to the Third Reich by Christopher B. Krebs; 3 of 4

Saturday 21 December 2013 / Hour 4, Block D:  A Most Dangerous Book: Tacitus's Germania from the Roman Empire to the Third Reich by Christopher B. Krebs; 4 of 4