November 1932. Western Australia. The Australian military mobilizes with Lewis machine guns and 10,000 rounds of ammunition to face a devastating enemy: 20,000 emus with an unfortunate taste for wheat.

What followed was one of the most embarrassing defeats in military history—not because the enemy had superior tactics or firepower, but because they were six-foot-tall birds who refused to cooperate with being shot.

This is the story of the Great Emu War: how World War I veterans armed with machine guns were systematically outsmarted by flightless birds, why the operation became an international laughingstock, and what it reveals about humanity's often disastrous attempts to wage war against nature.

Spoiler: The emus won. Decisively.

Bartholomäus Schink was sixteen when the Nazis hanged him without trial beneath a railway overpass in Cologne. His body was left swinging for days as a warning.

His crime? Membership in the Edelweiss Pirates—working-class teenagers who said no to the Hitler Youth and paid for it. But here's the twist: after the war ended, Germany still didn't want to call them heroes.

While university students who distributed pamphlets got monuments and films, these street kids got erased. For sixty years, they were dismissed as delinquents and criminals. The question is: why?

In this episode, we dig into the resistance Germany tried to forget and uncover what it reveals about class, memory, and who gets to decide which rebels become martyrs and which ones stay buried.

Spoiler: history loves a clean story. The truth is a hell of a lot messier.

Find out more at obscurarium.com

Bird poop. That's what built America's empire in the Pacific.

In 1856, while Europe was carving up Africa, the U.S. Congress passed one of the most audacious laws in American history: any citizen who found an island covered in seabird droppings could claim it for America. No diplomacy required. Just plant a flag, and the President would back you with gunboats.

What followed was absolute chaos—nearly 200 islands claimed, naval standoffs over guano deposits, Supreme Court cases about sovereignty over rocks that vanish at high tide, and labor conditions so brutal they sparked deadly revolts. All for fertilizer that could triple crop yields and fuel the explosives industry.

In this episode, we crack open the strangest gold rush in history and uncover the dark ironies nobody talks about: how America's territorial grab mirrored Europe's Scramble for Africa, how synthetic chemistry eventually made it all obsolete, and how the legal framework invented for bird-crap islands became the blueprint for American control over Puerto Rico, Guam, and beyond.

Plus: the ecological devastation, the geopolitical absurdity, and why nine of these forgotten rocks are still U.S. territory today.

Find out more on obscurarium.com