15th August 1955
This programme is part of the series Remembering the Second World War in the Netherlands: Historical Sound of the 1950's In 1945, the Second World War continued in the Pacific and Southeast …
5th February 1973
This programme is part of the series Pete Myers' interviewsBefore joining us at Radio Netherlands in 1976, Pete Myers hosted BBC programmes like “Late Night Extra” and “PM” …
18th April 1983
David Attenborough’s epic film biography of Mahatma Gandhi (1869-1948) presents a sweeping, masterful image of the life of India’s great pioneer of independence and 20th-century …
2nd September 1985
40 years after the the end of World War Two, Pete Myers presents a collage of studio-read recollections of the war years. There are also contributions from survivors themselves. The programmme is …
27th June 1988
This broadcast was timed to coincide with the 300th anniversary of the so-called Glorious Revolution, in which prince William of Orange, stadholder of the Dutch Republic, helped fellow Protestants in …
30th March 1990
In the 17th and 18th centuries, it was not uncommon for poor, young women to try and pass as a man. Some became soldiers. Others achieved fame and some even married other women. It was illegal to …
30th September 1991
This programme is part of the series In So Many WordsWithin the European Community, Greek has the unique distinction of being a language spoken uninterruptedly for four thousand years. It has …
1st June 1994
This is the story of two girls who kept diaries. One is Anne Frank, who lived in hiding in Amsterdam during the Nazi occupation. The other is Zlata Filipović, who was about ten years old when she …
5th June 1994
This programme marked the 50th anniversary of the Allied invasion of Normandy on June 6, 1944 — D-Day — the beginning of the end of Hitler’s Nazi Reich. Presenter Pete Myers was a child in …
13th September 1996
There are very good reasons for calling “the most excellent and great sovereign prince Pyotr Alekseyevich, leader of all the Russias” Czar Peter the Great. It is impossible to exaggerate …
27th September 1996
There are very good reasons for calling “the most excellent and great sovereign prince Pyotr Alekseyevich, leader of all the Russias” Czar Peter the Great. It is impossible to exaggerate …
3rd November 1996
In 1596, a Dutch ship under Willem Barentz got stuck in the ice of the Arctic Ocean near Nova Zembla, during an attempt to discover a Northeast Passage to Asia. They had to try and survive the Arctic …
14th November 1996
In Britain in the 18th and 19th centuries, the trade in human flesh was at its height. Surgeons studying anatomy needed corpses to practice on and the body snatchers provided them. Now people donate …
28th November 1996
The Battle of the Atlantic, a fierce five-year battle fought in the ocean during World War II, was one of the most intense and violent naval confrontations in history. It is the story of the ships …
20th December 1996
In Western Christian culture, the arrival of a millenium, a one-thousand-year milestone measuring the time since the birth of Jesus Christ, is a date of great psychological significance. This …
9th February 1997
To mark the 60th anniversary of the International Brigades’ fighting the fascists under Franco, a reunion was held. Dheera Sujan has put together a programme with an American veteran, now 84, …
24th March 1997
In 1947, U.S. President Harry Truman and his secretary of state, General George C. Marshall, launched the idea of a programme to rebuild war-torn Europe. The Old Continent’s proud states were …
6th March 1998
Shortly after Germany was reunited in 1990, it was decided to reinstate Berlin as the capital of the country once again. This ravaged and once divided city is now Europe’s biggest construction …
3rd April 1998
In 1997, a book appeared in German that provided more troubling insights into the dark reputation of the Nazi cult around the composer Richard Wagner. But this time the criticism came from the …
28th September 1998
New Netherland was a vast 17th century colony along the east coast of North America, ruled by the Dutch for sixty years. Part Three concerns its darkest hour. The charismatic, if tyrannical, governor …
1st October 1998
In 1648, the leading powers of war-torn Europe finally agreed on the terms of a treaty that would end 30 years of devastating military conflict between Catholic and Protestant forces. The Peace of …
11th November 1998
“The Last Kaiser”, the life of Kaiser Wilhelm II, grandson of Queen Victoria and emperor of the German Reich from 1888 until 1918. Wilhelm fled to the Netherlands in the last days of the …
1st January 1999
This programme is part of the series Stories of Our CenturyIn 1999, Radio Netherlands broadcast a series of 12 programmes telling the story of the 20th century through famous books. In each …
1st March 1999
This programme is part of the series Stories of Our CenturyIn 1999, Radio Netherlands broadcast a series of 12 programmes telling the story of the 20th century through famous books. In each …
30th March 1999
The Black Death or Great Plague was one of the most devastating waves of disease and death in human history. Modern historians of the Middle Ages estimate that up to 200 million people succumbed to …
23rd May 1999
In 1999 the German city of Weimar was honoured as the Cultural Capital of Europe. This title is awarded annually to cities with an especially rich cultural heritage. Weimar was not only home to some …
9th November 1999
Some of the earliest things children played with were stones, shells and bones. Children played games thousands of years ago. The original meaning of the word “toy” is trinket, trifle and …
26th April 2000
When the all-embracing communist system collapsed, and with it the state-run central economy, the new Russia lacked a body of laws to replace the rules of the state-run central economy. In drafting …
15th June 2000
Paragraph 175 of the German penal code, enacted in 1871, stated that “a male who indulges in criminally indecent activities with another male …will be punished with jail.” But as early as …
20th October 2000
Dheera Sujan features three women filmmakers who made movies on the Balkans conflict: a Norwegian filmmaker who spent months filming prisoners in a camp in Bosnia, a Canadian director who made a film …
29th December 2000
For well over a thousand years, the saints have been held up as examples for Catholics around the world. Though the Church sets the standards for sainthood, the choice of saints is often dependent on …
29th May 2001
In this new millennium, Amsterdam, like so many cities around the world, has been facing the challenge of building for an expanding population, a changing economy and new technologies. In these two …
23rd December 2001
Two people from two continents are brought together by a little girl’s suitcase found at Auschwitz after the war. The story of the search for Hana’s suitcase was produced by Karen Levine …
4th January 2002
In this programme, we look at three tales of witch hunting: McCarthyism – the wave of political witch hunts in 1950’s America. We hear about the persecution of those accused of …
14th April 2002
This programme focuses on the NIOD (Dutch Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies) report on the Dutch involvement in the fall of Srebrenica, the worst atrocity in Europe since the end of …
16th October 2002
Mennonites are a group of Christians founded by a former priest from Friesland, Menno Simons, in the 16th century. Despite centuries of persecution and discrimination because of their strong pacifist …
7th March 2003
In 1967, a huge outdoor event in Golden Gate Park, San Francisco marked the official beginning of the hippy movement. It was called the ‘Human Be In’. It attracted the focus of world media and …
23rd May 2003
This programme was broadcast to mark the 50th anniversary of the death of Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin (1878-1953). During 25 years of terror and tyranny, from 1927 until his death, Stalin reshaped …
26th September 2003
On July 14th, France celebrated Bastille Day, commemorating the beginning of the French Revolution and the ideas of equality and liberty for all. Popular history credits the start of the uprising as …
2nd May 2004
In Europe, the signs of remembrance of war can be found everywhere. Fields in France, Belgium and the Netherlands are still turning up traces of the untold numbers of war dead. In this programme, …
5th May 2004
The First World War came to an end one hundred years ago, but its impact is still felt in many points of friction to this day, and its lessons are never to be forgotten. This award-winning programme …
24th May 2004
The programme traces the story of the Volga boatmen in art, starting with Ilya Repin’s painting of the Barge-Haulers in the Russian Museum in Saint Petersburg, and an interview with art historian …
24th December 2004
It was a favourite of the Nazi Party; it was adopted by Communists to celebrate Marx’s ideals; it was played at the fall of the Berlin Wall to celebrate the collapse of Communism; and it’s currently …
3rd February 2005
To be a gay man in the 19th century was to live in the shadows. And to be openly homosexual meant almost certain alienation from family and friends. But how does this compare to the 20th century, a …
10th April 2005
When Nazi Germany invaded and occupied Norway in 1940, it expanded a system of selective breeding to its Nordic captives. “Lebensborn”, as it was called, was a project designed to …
10th April 2005
During the American war of independence from Britain, many years before he became the second American president, John Adams represented his country as the first American ambassador to the …
5th May 2005
This week marks the 60th anniversary of the end of the Second World War. One of the most pitiful sights to greet the liberators were the concentration camps. Eva Schloss tells her own story – one …
18th May 2005
For more than two years during World War II, Camp Westerbork served as a transit point in the northeast of the Netherlands for the deportation of Dutch Jews and Roma to Nazi extermination camps in …
7th June 2005
The Channel Islands were the only part of the British Isles to be occupied by German forces during World War Two. Hitler was proud of the conquest, which he saw as just the first part of his …
1st August 2005
On a sunny August morning in 1945, Keijiro Matsushima sat in his math class in Hiroshima. He looked out the window, saw two American bombers in the clear blue sky and suddenly his world was torn …
11th September 2005
New York author Jonathan Safran Foer’s novel “Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close” is part of a wave of what has been dubbed “post-9/11 fiction”. But some critics say not enough time has passed to …
9th September 2007
In 1944, at the height of the Second World War, high-ranking German officers and officials attempted to assassinate Adolf Hitler, the Führer of the Third Reich. On July 20, Count Claus Schenk von …
17th May 2008
Ever since the invention of printing, books have been banned, blacklisted, boycotted, burned and bowdlerized. Books can be dangerous, but the right to produce and distribute a book is essential to …