Angela Merkel rose to power in German politics after the fall of her mentor, Helmut Kohl. He had accepted secret donations on behalf of their political party the CDU. After the scandal erupted in December 1999 Angela Merkel wrote a newspaper article condemning his actions. Soon she was the party's new leader. Tim Mansel has been speaking to her ...…

Ramiro Osorio Cristales was just five years old when his family was murdered by the Guatemalan army, along with more than 200 other civilians from the Mayan village of Dos Erres. One of the soldiers who participated in the killings, Santos Lopez, took Ramiro with him and later adopted him. In November 2018, Ramiro gave evidence in the trial aga ...…

A catastrophic earthquake hit northern Armenia on the morning of December 7th 1988. At least 20,000 people were killed and thousands more injured. Anahit Karapetian was in school when the tremors hit her hometown of Spitak close to the epicentre. She was trapped in the rubble for hours, surrounded by injured and dead classmates. She has been sp ...…

Jean-Bédel Bokassa crowned himself Emperor of the Central African Republic in a lavish ceremony on the 4th of December 1977. He'd already been President for several years since taking power in a military coup - but he wanted more. Janet Ball has spoken to one of his sons, Jean-Charles Bokassa, and to a French journalist, about the events of tha ...…

At the end of WW2 much of Germany's capital had been destroyed by bombing and artillery. Almost half of all houses and flats had been damaged and a million Berliners were homeless. Caroline Wyatt has been speaking to Helga Cent-Velden, one of the women tasked with helping clear the rubble to make the city habitable again.Photo: Women in post-wa ...…

At the end of November 1994, Norway voted in a referendum not to join the European Union. The issue had split the country, and Norway was the only one of four countries that had referendums on EU membership that year to vote against. A senior member of the Yes campaign, former Norwegian foreign minister and Labour politician, Espen Barth Eide, ...…

The discovery of a nest of complete dinosaur eggs in Mongolia in 1923 provided the first proof that the prehistoric creatures hatched out of eggs rather than giving birth to live young. The American explorer who found them, Roy Chapman Andrews, became a legend and many consider him the inspiration for the film hero Indiana Jones. Claire Bowes s ...…

In 1982, Terrence Higgins became the first known British victim of a frightening new disease called HIV/AIDS. In his memory, his friends set up the Terrence Higgins Trust - now Europe's leading charity in the area. Simon Watts talks to his former partner, Dr Rupert Whitaker.PHOTO: Terrence Higgins (Courtesy: Dr Rupert Whitaker)…

A personal account of the huge Antarctic industry which left whales on the brink of extinction. For centuries, whaling had been big business. Whale products were used in everything from lighting, to food and cosmetics. Hunting had decimated the whale population in the north Atlantic so in the early 20th century, Britain and Norway pioneered ind ...…

In the early 1990s, Saddam Hussein ordered the draining of southern Iraq's great marshes. It was one of the biggest environmental disasters of the twentieth century and an ancient way of life, dating back thousands of years, was almost wiped out. In 2014 Louise Hidalgo spoke to Iraqi environmentalist Azzam Alwash, and to journalist Shyam Bhatia ...…

In 1957, just four years after Stalin's death, 30,000 students from 130 countries attended the 6th International Youth Festival in Moscow, a two week celebration of 'Peace and Freedom' with music, dance, theatre and sports. British student Kitty Hunter-Blair remembers a unique moment for young Russians, who were allowed, for the first time, to ...…

The Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat died in November 2004. French doctors treating him at the military hospital in France where he died said Arafat had an unidentified blood disorder and gave the cause of death as a stroke. Since then there have been allegations that he was poisoned. Leila Shahid was the Palestinian ambassador to France in 200 ...…

What did Lee Harvey Oswald do for two years in the Soviet city of Minsk? And why did the American authorities let him return without any fuss in 1963? A few months later he would be arrested for shooting the US President. Vincent Dowd has been listening to archive accounts of Oswald's time in the USSR and speaking to Anthony Summers who has wri ...…

During the last years of World War Two, the American government began hiring poor Mexicans to come to work legally on US farms. The scheme was known as the 'Bracero' programme and lasted until 1964. Mike Lanchin presents archive recordings of some of those involved in the programme, using material collected by the University of Texas at El Paso ...…

A man recorded by the BBC shares his memories of the funeral of the Duke of Wellington in 1852. The Duke was given a state funeral after defeating Napoleon at Waterloo in 1815. The British General was credited with preventing Napoleon Bonaparte from establishing a European empire. Frederick Mead was just five when he went with his parents to wa ...…

For decades disabled people in the UK were offered tiny, three-wheeled, turquoise cars as their main form of transport. They were known as Invacars and they were provided, free of charge, to people who couldn't use ordinary vehicles.They were phased out in the 1970s because they were accident-prone and people were given grants to adapt conventi ...…

When WW2 was over, a fanatical group of Japanese immigrants living in Brazil refused to believe that Japan had lost the war. They decided to punish their more prominent compatriots who accepted that Japan had lost. The extremists killed 23 people. Aiko Higuchi remembers the tragic day in February 1946 when her father became their first victim.P ...…

In November 1979, Iranian students seized the American embassy in Tehran after Washington agreed to allow the deposed Shah into the US for medical treatment. It would be more than a year before the US embassy hostages were released and the crisis irreparably damaged American-Iranian relations. Louise Hidalgo has been talking to diplomat Henry P ...…

Pearl Unikow was a young woman who grew up in a segregated Jewish community in Russia before WW1. Her stories, recorded in Yiddish in the 1970s, provide a rare account of traditional Jewish life. Her granddaughter Lisa Cooper wrote a book based on those recordings. Dina Newman has been listening to the tapes and spoke to Lisa Cooper. Photo: Pea ...…

On a hot summer day in 1971, six armed men invaded the house of former Congressman Rubens Paiva in Rio de Janeiro. He was taken from his wife and children, never to be seen again. Paiva was one of the most famous Brazilians to disappear during the military dictatorship. His son, writer Marcelo Rubens Paiva, tells how his family coped with decad ...…

After four years of war Germany was on the verge of defeat. Its armies were exhausted and in retreat, its civilian population enduring hardship and hunger. As unrest grew at home, the German government and military struggled to maintain control. The German Kaiser was forced to abdicate. Germany became a republic. Hear first-hand accounts from t ...…

During World War One, two British nurses set up a first aid station just a few hundred metres behind the trenches of the Western Front. Mairi Chisholm and Elsie Knocker became known as 'the Madonnas of Pervyse'. Mairi Chisholm spoke to the BBC in 1977, Lucy Burns has been listening to her story.(Photo: Mairi Chisholm (left) and Elsie Knocker. C ...…

At the start of World War One, British and German colonial forces went into battle in East Africa. Tens of thousands of African troops and up to a million porters were conscripted to fight and keep the armies supplied. Alex Last brings you very rare recordings of Kenyan veterans of the King's African Rifles, talking about their experiences of t ...…

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.

On 9 November1938 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 investigated what happened in her hometown of Karlsruhe that night and wrote a book, Heimat, about her family's ...…

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…

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 Wa ...…

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 speakin ...…

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 ...…

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. I ...…

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…

The former Chilean dictator, Augusto Pinochet, was arrested in London in October 1998. Spanish lawyers wanted him extradited to Spain to face charges of torturing and murdering political opponents in Chile. He claimed immunity as a former head of state. He was held under house arrest in the UK for over a year. Lucy Williamson spoke to public re ...…

In October 1984, one of South Africa's most well-known human rights activists, Desmond Tutu, was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his opposition to apartheid. Two years later he became the first black head of the Anglican church in Southern Africa. Archbishop Tutu's friend and former deputy, Bishop Michael Nuttall, has been telling Louise Hida ...…

In 1999 Belgian teenagers started to become ill after drinking Coca-Cola. Many ended up in hospital and the government banned the sale of all Coca-Cola products. But the fizzy drink was given the all-clear so what was making the children sick? Claire Bowes has been speaking to Belgian toxicologist, Benoit Nemery, about a country in crisis.(Phot ...…

In October 1993 news broke about an arms deal with Malaysia that led to the biggest development aid scandal in British history. It became known as the Pergau Dam Affair. Tim Mansel has been speaking to Tim Lankester, a British civil servant, who found himself caught up in the aid deal.Photo: Roger Briottet, director of the World Development Mov ...…

In the early 1970's, at the peak of political repression and persecution in Brazil, a collection of left-wing students and liberal professionals decided to move to a remote region in the Amazon to fight the military dictatorship. Two survivors from the so-called Araguaia Guerrilla War spoke to Thomas Pappon about how they endured life and war i ...…

In October 1973 Arab nations slashed oil production in protest at American support for Israel during it's war against Egypt and Syria. Oil prices sky rocketed. Alex Last heard from former deputy secretary general of OPEC, Dr Fadhil Chalabi, about the struggle for the control of oil in the early 1970s.Photo: Cars queuing at a petrol station in L ...…

The Italian authorities tried to divert the stream of molten lava pouring down the slopes of the Etna volcano on the island of Sicily in 1983. Susan Hulme has been speaking to volcanologist, Dr John Murray, who was there watching their efforts to save homes and businesses from destruction.Photo: Mount Etna erupting in 2017. Credit:Reuters/Anton ...…

The murdered Archbishop of San Salvador, Oscar Romero, is being made a saint of the Roman Catholic church. He was killed in 1980 by a right-wing death squad as he said mass at the altar. His death pushed El Salvador into its bloody civil war. Mike Lanchin spoke to local journalist, Milagro Granados, who was there at the moment of his assassinat ...…

In October 1945, Austria got its first provisional government since its annexation by Nazi Germany a year before the Second World War. Wilfriede Iwaniuk was 14 when Hitler marched into Vienna; she tells Louise Hidalgo about the harshness of the war years and how, after the war too, there was no food and few jobs.Picture: Wilfriede Iwaniuk in 19 ...…

During World War Two the German secret service compiled a book listing all the people they wanted to arrest in Britain if it fell to the Nazis. The top-secret 'Special Search Index GB' contained details of politicians and intellectuals and people who had fled Germany before the war - but it also included relatively ordinary British citizens. Vi ...…

In 1948 racist violence broke out against Romany-speaking traveller people in Sweden. The riots in the town of Jönköping lasted for several days. Birgitta Hellström and Barbro Gustafsson are sisters from the traveller community and they have been speaking to Tim Mansel about the events of that time. (Photo: Birgitta Hellström (L) and Barbro Gus ...…

Britain's Labour government was determined to get rid of the unelected aristocrats sitting in the House of Lords - Parliament's second chamber. But the hereditary peers didn't go without a fight. Susan Hulme has been speaking to Marquis of Salisbury the man at the centre of the backroom deal to keep some seats for the nobility.Photo: Lords at t ...…

Allen Ginsberg first read his poem Howl, at an art gallery in San Francisco in October 1955. It marked a turning point in American literature and is credited with starting the "Beat Generation" of American writers. Michael McClure, a fellow poet, took part in the reading that night. The programme was first broadcast in 2012.Photo: Allen Ginsber ...…

Slava Zaitsev was the first designer to create high fashion collections in the Soviet Union. He tells Dina Newman about the challenges he faced working under communism. Photo: a sketch of a dress designed by Slava Zaitsev; credit: courtesy of Slava Zaitsev.

How a chemist and a surgeon found a way of helping burns to heal. Chemist Ioannis Yannas was working alongside surgeon John Burke when they first made the breakthrough using a membrane made of collagen to cover burns which were too large for skin grafts.Photo: Professor Ioannis Yannas with some of his collagen membrane. Credit: MIT.…

On the 2nd and 3rd of October 1968, students from two neighbouring universities in the centre of São Paulo clashed in a battle which left one dead and many injured. Thomas Pappon talked to two former students who were at the so called 'Battle of Maria Antônia'.Photo: the 'Battle of Maria Antonia', São Paulo, 1968. Credit: Agência Estado/AFP…

The former West Indies cricketer, Learie Constantine, took the Imperial Hotel in London to court in 1943. It had refused to let him and his family stay because they were black. He won his case. Susan Hulme brings you his story from the BBC Archives.Photo: Sir Learie Constantine and his wife in the 1960s. Credit: Central Press/Hulton Archive/Get ...…

In 1993 work began to build Europe's longest road and rail bridge. The Oresund Bridge links Sweden to Denmark connecting them by land for the first time in thousands of years. In an unlikely twist, it also inspired a hit TV drama which has been broadcast in more than 150 countries. Claire Bowes spoke to Ajs Dam, head of information at the conso ...…

The war lasted for eight years. The death toll is estimated at over a million people. It began when Saddam Hussein sent planes and troops into Iran in September 1980. Ahmed Almushatat was a young Iraqi medic who was sent to the front line towards the end of the war. He spoke to Louise Hidalgo.Photo: An Iraqi tank in action. Credit:AFP/Getty Images…