The Paris hotel that hosted Holocaust survivors
At the end of the Second World War the grand Parisian hotel, the Lutetia, was allocated to receive thousands of prisoners and Nazi concentration camp survivors returning home from across a ravaged Eur...
29 Okt 20199min
Margaret Thatcher's anti-Europe speech
The British Prime Minister started expressing doubts about the European Union during a speech in the Belgian city of Bruges in 1988. The now famous "Bruges speech" is seen by many as the spark which i...
28 Okt 20198min
The fall of the Berlin Wall
The border between communist East Germany and the West opened on November 9th 1989. It marked the beginning of the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe. Michaela Graichen spoke to two East Germans ...
25 Okt 20198min
The Leipzig demonstrations
Mass demonstrations in the East German city of Leipzig in October 1989 shook the communist authorities to their core. The protests are seen as paving the way for the fall of the Berlin Wall just a mo...
24 Okt 20198min
East German refugees in the Prague embassy
Thousands of East Germans fled to the West in the summer and autumn of 1989, before the fall of the Berlin Wall. Many of them sought refuge in the West German embassy in Prague, where they camped in t...
23 Okt 20199min
The reburial of a Hungarian hero
In 1989 the body of Imre Nagy, Prime Minister during the 1956 Hungarian uprising, was reburied in a public ceremony in Budapest. He had been executed on the orders of Moscow. It marked the beginning o...
22 Okt 20198min
The legalisation of Solidarity
When the banned Polish trade union organisation, Solidarity, was legalised in April 1989 it was one of the first signs that communism was about to collapse in Eastern Europe. Within months Solidarity ...
21 Okt 20198min
Wangari Maathai Nobel Prize-winning environmentalist
Kenyan Wangari Maathai became the first African woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize in 2004. She was an environmentalist and human rights activist who founded the Green Belt Movement in the 1970s. She ...
18 Okt 20199min
