US withdrawal: The fall of Saigon
The last remaining US forces pulled out of Vietnam on April 30th 1975 as communist North Vietnamese troops took control of the country. There was a desperate scramble to evacuate US personnel and some...
17 Aug 202114min
The man who coined the term genocide
Genocide has a long and grim history, but until the 1950s, the mass extermination of a people or a group was an atrocity without a name, a definition or an international law against it. One man did mo...
16 Aug 20218min
Inside an East German jail
Vera Lengsfeld was a prominent human rights activist in East Germany who was arrested and jailed for taking part in a peaceful protest. She was sent to Hohenschönhausen, the main political prison of t...
13 Aug 20218min
East Germany's nudists
For years Germans have been bathing nude at the beach. Many are members of a naturist movement called the FKK, which was banned under the Nazis and faced official disapproval during the early years of...
12 Aug 20218min
Exiled from East Germany: Wolf Biermann
East Germany's most famous singer-songwriter was exiled to the West in November 1976, causing an international outcry. Wolf Biermann was stripped of his GDR citizenship while on tour in West Germany.W...
11 Aug 20218min
Escaping from East Berlin
How a young West German student helped East Berliners escape communism at the height of the Cold War. Volker Heinz told Robin Lustig how he worked with a Syrian diplomat to smuggle people across the B...
10 Aug 20218min
The building of the Berlin Wall
In August 1961, communist East Germany began building the Berlin Wall, which divided the city for nearly three decades and became a symbol of the Cold War. Simon Watts introduces the memories of Germa...
9 Aug 20219min
Gay activism in 1990s India
In the early 1990s, when homosexuality was still a criminal offense in India, a group of gay men and lesbian women set up the Counsel Club in the city of Kolkata. It was one of the first queer support...
6 Aug 20218min
