Rachel Maddow Presents: Ultra

Rachel Maddow built this two-season series around a historical thread most Americans have never heard of: the organized effort by Nazi sympathizers to infiltrate American politics in the 1930s and 1940s, and then the postwar scramble to cover it up. Season one follows the sedition trial of 1944 and the network of domestic fascists who operated openly in the United States. Season two picks up after the war, tracking an American traitor who fled to Germany and the people in Washington who wanted certain truths to stay buried. With 22 episodes total, it is a contained narrative -- you can finish it in a week of commutes. The research is meticulous, drawn heavily from primary sources, and Maddow narrates with the intensity she is known for. Over 31,000 ratings and a 4.8-star average tell you something about the impact. Some listeners find the background music a bit heavy-handed, and there is an unavoidable contemporary political undertone to the storytelling. But the history itself is genuinely surprising and well-documented. The show works because it tells a specific, largely forgotten story rather than trying to be a general WWII overview. It is investigative history at its best. The connections it draws between past and present are genuinely unsettling and necessary.