The second season of Rachel Maddow's podcast "Ultra" is full of facts I never knew.
I already said this when I wrote about season one, but once again: As a person born in the late 1950s who thought she knew a fair amount about World War II and the period after it, it surprises me how much I don't know about that era.
So far, four "Ultra" episodes have been released, and I think it could make sense to listen to just numbers 3 and 4 to get the gist of what I'm talking about (though you miss an important precursor without listening to episode 1). Here are the key things that surprised me:
- I've never heard of the Malmedy Massacre, which happened during the Battle of the Bulge.
- I didn't know there were war crime trials at Dachau after WWII as well as at Nuremberg.
- I knew the Chicago Tribune was a conservative newspaper, but I didn't know its owner/publisher was part of the pro-Nazi movement during the war... and afterward.
- Like most people my age, I knew about Joseph McCarthy's HUAC activities, but I didn't know about what he did when he first got into the Senate just after war to support the Nazis.
This stuff is hair-raising.
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