Secret D-Day rehearsal and YouTube begins

Secret D-Day rehearsal and YouTube begins

Max Pearson presents a collection of the week's Witness History interviews from the BBC World Service. Our guest is World War Two military historian and archivist Elisabeth Shipton.

We start by concentrating on two events from the last year of the Second World War.

Exercise Tiger took place in April 1944 in preparation for the D-Day landings of Allied forces in Normandy. But during that rehearsal a German fleet attacked and about 749 US servicemen died.

We hear remarkable archive testimony from Adolf Hitler's secretary who witnessed his last days in a bunker in Berlin before he took his own life.

Plus, 20 years since the video sharing platform, YouTube, was first launched.

We hear about the apartheid-era production of the play Othello in South Africa, which broke racial boundaries.

And finally, how in 1985, Coca-Cola messed up a reworking of the drink's classic formula.

Contributors:

Paul Gerolstein - survivor of Exercise Tiger (from archive audio gathered by Laurie Bolton, from the UK Exercise Tiger Memorial, and the journalist, David Fitzgerald).

Traudl Junge - Adolf Hitler's secretary.

Jawed Karim, Chad Hurley and Steve Chen - on the start of YouTube.

Dame Janet Suzman - on the staging of Othello in 1987.

Mark Pendergrast - author.

(Photo: US troops ahead of D-Day. Credit: Keystone/ Getty Images)

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The Russian Revolution: The Bolsheviks Take Control

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The Fake IDs That Saved Jewish Lives

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How tens of thousands of Hungarian Jews escaped the Nazis by using false papers; what happened when abortion became illegal overnight in 1960s Romania; the murder of campaigning Nigerian journalist Dele Giwa; the creation of British satire magazine Private Eye; and the love affair between writers Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir.Photo: False Hungarian ID document (BBC)

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