Category: British History

Alan Turing’s Life and Legacy, by Caitlin Sellis

Posted On By The Manchester Historian
Alan Turing mural

On the 10th September 2009, the British Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, issued an apology to Alan Turing, culminating with the words “we’re sorry, you deserved so much better”. This apology came over 60 years after Turing’s ingenious cracking of the German Enigma code, which explicitly led to many British victories in WW2, such as the Battle of the Atlantic. During the war, Turing worked at Bletchley Park – more specifically, Hut 8, which was a section of the Government Code and Cypher School, tasked with deciphering German naval messages. It is here that his most notable achievement, the Bombe machine, was created.

Category: Modern European/Western/Modern Western

Engaging With The Past – An Antifascist Antidote: Lessons From The German Example, By Jason Lee

Posted On By The Manchester Historian
People gathered around ruins

In recent years Germany has been presented as the exemplar western liberal democracy. Their recent election saw increased turnout, almost 10% higher than the 2019 UK General Election. Chancellor Merkel’s Conservative CDU/CSU party has led ‘GroKo’ – Grand Coalition governments with the Social Democrats for twelve of the last sixteen years. This coalition between the largest parties is difficult to imagine elsewhere, especially in the UK. Finally, in response to the 2015 Refugee Crisis, Germans accepted over a million refugees, whilst the UK pledged to take 20,000. Thus, it’s easy to assume Germany’s engaged, consensus politics and democratic culture as permanent and inevitable

Category: Modern European/Western

Commemorating the Babi Yar Massacre, by James Newman

Posted On By the Manchester Historian
Eastern Front WW2

Babi Yar, a name synonymous with the Holocaust. On the 29th and 30th of September 1941 alone 33,171 Jews were killed by SS Einsatzgruppen death squads, assisted by the Wehrmacht and Ukrainian collaborators. The mass shootings continued until November 1943. The final death toll, which also includes non-Jewish victims, Romani, Soviet Prisoners of War and Ukrainian nationalists, is estimated somewhere between 100,000 and 150,000.