🎙️ Episode 45 – Hidden History: The Spy, the Secret Army, and the Playboy

While diplomats postured and treaties were signed, another war was already underway — fought in shadows, without uniforms, years before the first shot of World War 2. In Episode 45 of World War 2 in Focus, a Hidden History Special tells three true stories the history books left out.

A secret illegal army of tens of thousands hides inside Weimar Germany's "labor battalions" — and murders its own men to keep the secret, in killings so notorious they revived a medieval word: the Feme. A quiet British passport officer in Berlin turns out to be MI6's top spy in Germany — and uses his desk to pull Jews out of concentration camps, ten thousand lives saved with a rubber stamp. And an Australian playboy flies a private plane over the Reich with hidden cameras in the wings, charming Luftwaffe officers into joyrides while photographing their airfields below.

Inside this episode:

• The Black Reichswehr: Germany's illegal shadow army, run by a future field marshal and a future chancellor
• The Feme murders — soldiers executing their own "traitors," and the trials that exposed who really ruled Weimar
• Frank Foley, the spy who saved 10,000 Jews and walked into Sachsenhausen to pull prisoners out alive
• Sidney Cotton's spy plane — hidden cameras, Luftwaffe joyrides, and the last civilian flight out of Berlin in 1939
• Why all three stories stayed buried for decades

Available now on Spotify and everywhere you listen to podcasts.

This episode covers the Black Reichswehr, the Feme murders, the Küstrin Putsch, Frank Foley, MI6 espionage in Nazi Germany, the rescue of German Jews, Sachsenhausen, Kristallnacht, Sidney Cotton, aerial reconnaissance, and the secret history of the years before World War 2.

World War 2 in Focus: Echoes Through AI

Created by Hector Sanchez, U.S. Navy veteran.

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