Nazis and sex strikes

The History Hour

BBC

History, Society & Culture, Personal Journals

4.4 • 879 Ratings

🗓️ 12 April 2025

⏱️ 51 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Max Pearson presents a collection of the week's Witness History interviews from the BBC World Service. Our guest is Dr Katrin Paehler, Professor of modern European history at Illinois State University.

First, a journalist describes how he accompanied Hitler through the embers of the Reichstag fire in 1933.

Then, the harrowing recollections of a doctor who saved survivors of the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing.

Next, a woman describes how she was caught between her job and her clan during the UN's disastrous Somalia mission in the 1990s.

A Liberian woman explains how she helped end the country's civil war.

Finally, how Germany's 'death zone' became a natural paradise.

Contributors:

Sefton Delmer - British journalist at the Reichstag fire. Dr David Tuggle - surgeon at the Oklahoma City bombing. Halima Ismail Ibrahim - former UN worker in Somalia. Leymah Gbowee - Women of Liberia Mass Action for Peace. Professor Kai Frobel - co-founder of Germany's 'Green Belt'.

(Photo: Reichstag building on fire. Credit: Corbis via Getty Images)

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hi Curios, I'm Dara Brien.
0:03.5	And I'm Hannah Frye.
0:04.5	And we are back for another series of curious cases.
0:07.6	Where we investigate the scientific mysteries sent in by you.
0:10.9	I would like to know if anything in the universe is truly invisible.
0:14.7	Why do we lie?
0:16.1	What happens to our brains when we fall in love?
0:19.2	We tackle the mysteries of the universe through audacious experiments and expert insight.
0:23.8	Curious cases.
0:24.8	Listen first on BBC Sounds.
0:31.6	Hello and welcome to the History Hour podcast
0:36.3	from the BBC World Service with me, Max Pearson, the past brought to life by those who were there.
0:42.2	This week, life and death decisions in the aftermath of the 1995 Oklahoma bombing.
0:48.5	So he told her that he was going to have to amputate her lower leg to get her out, and that he was pretty quick and it was going to hurt,
0:56.5	but that was the only way.
0:58.3	Also, how life was cheap amid the chaos of the ill-fated UN mission
1:02.3	to end the civil war in Somalia.
1:04.9	Killing a human being, it's like killing a flight.
1:08.8	There's no difference, really.
1:10.6	It doesn't have a value.
1:12.5	And how Cold War Germany's death zone became the reunified Germany's Greenbelt.
1:18.3	They like to use the border posts at the top of the metal fence to sing from.
	...

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