The death of Franco

The death of Franco

General Francisco Franco died in November 1975, ending 36 years of dictatorship over Spain.

The general had been in power since 1939 after winning the country’s bloody civil war, and his death followed a long illness.

He was mourned by conservative Spaniards but those on the left celebrated, calling him a fascist who had once been an ally of Hitler and Mussolini.

In 2015, Louise Hidalgo spoke to Jose Antonio Martinez Soler, a young journalist about the ending of an era.

Eye-witness accounts brought to life by archive. Witness History is for those fascinated by the past. We take you to the events that have shaped our world through the eyes of the people who were there. For nine minutes every day, we take you back in time and all over the world, to examine wars, coups, scientific discoveries, cultural moments and much more. Recent episodes explore everything from the death of Adolf Hitler, the first spacewalk and the making of the movie Jaws, to celebrity tortoise Lonesome George, the Kobe earthquake and the invention of superglue. We look at the lives of some of the most famous leaders, artists, scientists and personalities in history, including: Eva Peron – Argentina’s Evita; President Ronald Reagan and his famous ‘tear down this wall’ speech; Thomas Keneally on why he wrote Schindler’s List; and Jacques Derrida, France’s ‘rock star’ philosopher. You can learn all about fascinating and surprising stories, such as the civil rights swimming protest; the disastrous D-Day rehearsal; and the death of one of the world’s oldest languages.

(Photo: General Francisco Franco lies in state in Madrid, 1975. Credit: Central Press/Getty Images)

Episoder(2000)

The Battle of Passchendaele

The Battle of Passchendaele

It was one of the defining battles of the First World War.Britain and its allies had ambitious plans to break through German lines - but they ended up mired in mud.Listen to the voices of soldiers who took part - from the BBC archive.Photo: Getty Images.

5 Nov 20188min

A Kristallnacht story

A Kristallnacht story

On 9 November 1938 Nazis led attacks on Jewish homes and businesses across Germany. Because of the number of windows that were smashed it would be remembered as the "night of broken glass" or Kristallnacht. Writer and artist Nora Krug has investigated her German family's wartime experiences for her graphic history "Heimat". She spoke to Kirsty Reid about what happened in her hometown of Karlsruhe that night in November 1938.(Photo: Nora Krug. Credit: Penguin Books)

2 Nov 20188min

Why I Slapped the German Chancellor

Why I Slapped the German Chancellor

In November 1968 a young activist hit Germany's leader in public, to draw attention to his Nazi past. The activist was Beate Klarsfeld - the Chancellor was Kurt Georg Kiesinger. Tim Mansel has been listening to Beate Klarsfeld's memories of what happened after she attacked the political leaderPhoto: Beate Klarsfeld today. Credit: Tim Mansel

1 Nov 20188min

Princess Margaret And The War Hero

Princess Margaret And The War Hero

In October 1955, Britain was gripped by a romance between the young Princess Margaret and a glamorous, but divorced, ex-fighter pilot called Captain Peter Townsend. The couple had been in love for years, but after opposition from Buckingham Palace courtiers, the princess eventually announced that she would not go ahead with a marriage. Simon Watts talks to Lady Jane Rayne, a former lady-in-waiting to Princess Margaret and one of the first to spot the chemistry between the pair.PHOTO: Captain Townsend with Princess Margaret in the 1940s (Getty Images)

31 Okt 20188min

Life With America's Black Panthers

Life With America's Black Panthers

Eldridge Cleaver, one of the leaders of the radical African American Black Panther party, spent more than three years in exile in Algeria in the late 1960s. He set up an international office for the Black Panthers, mingling with dozens of left-wing revolutionary activists who had also sought refuge in north Africa. Mike Lanchin has been speaking to Elaine Klein Mokhtefi, a left-wing American woman who lived and worked in Algiers, and who became Cleaver's fixer and close confidante.Photo: Eldridge Cleaver and Elaine Mokhtefi (credit: Pete O'Neal)

30 Okt 20188min

The KGB's Whistleblower

The KGB's Whistleblower

Senior KGB archivist Vasili Mitrokhin risked his life smuggling thousands of top-secret Soviet intelligence files out of KGB headquarters, and bringing them to the West. His archive was one of the largest hauls of information to leak out of a major intelligence service anywhere in the world. Louise Hidalgo talks to Cambridge historian Professor Christopher Andrew, one of the few people let into Mitrokhin's secret who helped him turn his archive into a book.Picture: Vasili Mitrokhin, taken in March 1992 when he walked into the British embassy in Latvia and announced he had a big haul of KGB intelligence (Credit: Churchill Archives Centre, University of Cambridge)

29 Okt 20189min

The Day Nigeria Struck Oil

The Day Nigeria Struck Oil

An eyewitness account of a discovery that changed Nigerian history. Chief Sunday Inengite was 19 years old when prospectors from the Shell D'Arcy oil company first came to his village of Oloibiri in the Niger Delta in search of crude oil. It was there in 1956, that commercial quantities of oil were first discovered more than 3km below ground. It marked the start of Nigeria's huge oil industry, but it came at a cost for villages in the Niger Delta. Alex Last spoke to Chief Sunday Inengite about his memories of those days and the impact oil had on his community.Photo: An oil worker watches over the drilling at of an oil well in Nigeria (Photo by © Hulton-Deutsch Collection/CORBIS/Corbis via Getty Images)

26 Okt 201811min

When Russia's Richest Man Was Jailed

When Russia's Richest Man Was Jailed

When Russian tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky was jailed in 2003, it was the start of President Putin's crackdown on the oligarchs. He shares his memories of that time with Dina Newman. Photo: former head of Yukos Mikhail Khodorkovsky leaving the courtroom in Moscow, Russia, September 22, 2005. Credit: Sovfoto/UIG via Getty Images

25 Okt 20189min

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