As of the Nazi's policies of ethnic cleansing, a great number of civilians were killed in Nazi occupied territories, of primarily Jews, Slavs and POWs. However, from all sources I can find on this, these crimes are split into two seperate actions; That of the holocaust and that of generalplan ost. The prior lists primarily Jews, Poles and POWs but the latter is almost exclusively slavs in occupied soviet territory. The prior is commonly cited with the 11 million figure and the latter I have seen figures typically around 14-15 million.

What firmly distinguishes these two genocides, what were the differences in how they were carried out, and is there any overlap in the death toll?

Inspired by a posting I saw earlier today about Grenadiers...

I was looking at the wikipedia page for Shock Troops and found it underwhelming. My impression was that there's a long history of shock troops/tactics going back to ancient Persia/Greece, but I was never 100% clear on:

1. What exactly are "shock tactics"

2. How is this any different from my shield wall bashing the crap out of your shield wall until it breaks?

3. How would these tactics differentiate between infantry and cavalry?

Finally, would we see such tactics used on a modern (minus 20 years, to keep within sub rules) battlefield or have they been rendered obsolete by changes in technology and tactics?

The interval of the augmented 4th/diminished 5th is sometimes referred to as "the devil's tone/interval". Was it actually banned (or was the dissonance generally regarded as too unpleasant)? If so, how could such a ban be enforced?

I am very curious in general about how much influence the church had over the development of western music. Other musical intervals are dissonant and somehow the tritone has been nearly abolished in practice.

Cheers for any thoughts.

It's said that Japan made a tactical decision to expand south towards China and Indochina instead of Soviet Siberia, but did they have a contingency plan for after the war if they successfully annexed South and East Asia? What made them decide to focus on South-East Asia over Siberia?

For example: Flavius, Valerius, Claudius, Fabius, Julius etc.

EDIT: Removed Scipio as it is a cognomen (see comment below).

When did people decide to have last names and how did they commence a family tree with their names?

I understand that having blue eyes came along as a genetic mutation in humans approximately 6,000-10,000 years ago somewhere in Europe.

Due to the time that it occurred, were the first people to have this trait considered to be some kind of Demon, God or just regular people?

Also, would there be men traveling from England to Jerusalem in this time? And if there were men who were not, what held them back?

What people did they find there that made their conquest of the peninsula unfinished? How did this people manage to keep them off their land? Were there other reasons for this sudden stop in the conquest?

An aircraft carrier is of course a mobile airport, which can make it difficult to find when you're trying to land on it. At Midway, the US carriers launched their planes and continued to the west toward the atoll, meaning that when the planes were ready to return the carriers were not where they were originally. How were the pilots able to find their carriers, or, in the case of the heavily damaged and eventually abandoned Yorktown, find an alternate carrier to land on?

I know that after Napoleon was decisively crushed at Waterloo, the victorious powers used the Congress of Vienna to attempt to redraw Europe to create a "Balance of Power" where no power would be too strong to defeat each other.

However, after listening to Dan Carlin's "Blueprint for Armageddon" podcast, I noted that he did say that the unification of Italy and Germany impacted the balance of power, which ultimately led to the First World War.

Historians: to what extent did these unifications impact Europe? How did they change the balance of power? If any of you had an answer to these questions, it would be much appreciated.

Thank you!

All right, eavesdroppers and spies of AskHistorians. Dig up some dirt from diaries, daybooks, miscellanies, memoirs, and other "personal" writing from your era of history.

Next week: Heavy Metal Thunder

I've been watching some stuff on some, hrm, less-than-savory YouTube channels and reading some stuff on equally-unsavory subreddits, and what they say is that granting further rights to women and letting women have positions of power have contributed to the fall of historic civilizations, like, say, Rome. They say Rome fell because they let women take charge. Is this true? I know Rome fell because of many reasons, but is that a part of it? They say it might happen again.

In two months I will be proposing to my girlfriend of two years. I'm convinced that I want to spend the rest of my life with her, but I need resources to figure out what institution of marriage means to me - as an atheist with philosophical outlook on life.

I'm looking for books, documentaries and blogs that present how the marriage had changed since the ancient times.

Could someone give the main reasons or link some articles that outline these reasons? Thankyou in advance

Surely past scientists must have thought it was possible at one point? E.g. Zorses / Ape-Humans?