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Witness History Episodes

  1.

    Inside an East German jail

    Vera Lengsfeld was imprisoned by the communist authorities in East Germany in 1988

  2. East Germany's nudists

    The communist regime restricted many things in the GDR but not the freedom to go naked

  3. Exiled from East Germany: Wolf Biermann

    East Germany's most famous singer-songwriter was exiled to the West in 1976

  4. Escaping from East Berlin

    East Germans used all sorts of methods to escape from communism across the Berlin Wall

  5. The building of the Berlin Wall

    In August 1961, East Germany began building the wall that symbolised Cold War Europe

  6. Gay activism in 1990s India

    Pawan Dhall helped form the Counsel Club, one of India's first gay support groups

  7. Afghanistan's battle of the airwaves

    When the Taliban fell in 2001 Afghans could listen to music and news again

  8. Escaping Nigeria’s Civil War

    Patti Boulaye recalls frightening times as a 13-year-old girl in the Biafran War in 1967.

  9. Chipko: India’s tree-hugging women

    How a grassroots environmental movement won its fight against deforestation in India

  10. Dorothy Butler Gilliam: American news pioneer

    The first African American woman to be hired as a reporter by the Washington Post

  11. The Tsunami and Fukushima

    How an earthquake and tsunami devastated Japan and triggered a nuclear emergency in 2011

  12. Fighting for the pill in Japan

    Why did it take so long for the oral contraceptive pill to be legalised in Japan?

  13. The soldier who never surrendered

    A Japanese soldier hid in the jungle in Guam for nearly 30 years after World War Two

  14. The birth of Karaoke

    The man who invented the Karaoke machine speaks to Witness History

  15. Japan's Bullet Train

    Japanese railways launched the fastest train the world had ever seen in October 1964

  16. The paintings of Vincent Van Gogh

    Vincent Van Gogh's great-great nephew recalls growing up among his paintings

  17. When war came to Darfur

    How a 13-year-old boy's life was changed by the war in Darfur in Sudan

  18. Surviving Norway's day of terror

    Lisa Husby recalls running for her life from far-right extremist Anders Breivik

  19. The Battle of Gondar

    In 1941, Italian colonial rule in Africa ended after a last stand by Mussolini's soldiers

  20. Domestic violence in Brazil

    In 2006 Brazil passed the ground-breaking 'Maria da Penha law' to tackle domestic abuse

  21. England's summer of riots

    How six weeks of race riots gripped towns in northern England in 2001

  22. When the Taliban took Kabul

    Taliban fighters first took control of Afghanistan's capital city Kabul in 1996

  23. Jane Goodall and chimpanzees

    Chimpanzee expert Jane Goodall has died aged 91. This is a programme from our archive

  24. Prisoner of the Cultural Revolution

    Kim Gordon and his parents were locked up for two years in a hotel in China in the 1960s

  25. The race for the jet engine

    Inspiration, rejection and war - a personal account of the invention of the jet engine

  26. The bombing of the Rainbow Warrior

    In July 1985 the Greenpeace boat was bombed in New Zealand by French secret agents

  27. The first World Romani Congress

    Roma people from all around Europe met up in England in 1971

  28. The famine in North Korea

    After the fall of the Soviet Union communist North Korea suffered a famine in the 1990s

  29. Britain's wartime gold

    When Britain went to war with Germany in 1939 it had to find somewhere to keep its wealth

  30. Cuba's blindness epidemic

    Up to 50,000 Cubans were inexplicably struck down with sight loss in the early 1990s

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