20 episodes · 15th January 1992
In October 1834 the Houses of Parliament burned down. Which architectural style would best express Victorian values? Architects, politicians, and the general public took sides in a fierce debate between the Classic and the Gothic, echoed in today's battle between Classicists and Modernists.
Tells the full story of the "Death Railway", made famous by the 1957 film The Bridge on the River Kwai. In just 15 months, 26,000 allied PoWs who were forced to labour on the project died from ill treatment, malnutrition and disease. A quarter of a million Asian labourers were conscripted by the Japanese to work alongside the PoWs. As many as 100,000 of them may have died.
In late 1943 Winston Churchill made what he would later describe as one of the biggest mistakes of the war. On the advice of his special envoy to Yugoslavia, he transferred British weapons and support from the anti-communist resistance under General Draja Mihailovich to the communist partisans led by Marshal Josip Broz Tito. That decision effectively condemned Yugoslavia to 40 years of communist rule and destroyed the reputation of General Mihailovich, who ever since has been portrayed as a Nazi collaborator. Part 1 of 2.
When Marshal Tito imposed a communist dictatorship on Yugoslavia in 1945, the western allies regretted their support for the wartime resistance leader. But when, three years later, Tito fell out with Stalin, the west backed him once again. Timewatch examines how Tito was able to play east against west to his own advantage and leave behind him a legacy which haunts Yugoslavia to this day. Part 2 of 2.
Until now, the three-man Argentine junta which led the invasion of the Falkland Islands has kept its secrets. Tonight, for the first time, a junta member, Air Force General Basilio Lami Dozo, speaks out. His Exocet missiles were the most deadly threat to the British Task Force. And an in-depth look at the US Secretary of State Alexander Haig's attempt to avert a war - and save his own job. He promised President Reagan, "We'll walk this kitty back". Shuttling between General Galtieri and Margaret Thatcher - who dubbed him "Woolly AI" - Haig's moments of elation and disappointment, revealed here for the first time, became increasingly desperate as the Task Force steamed steadily southwards - to war.
In Paraguay the blond, blue-eyed people of New Germany speak the same Saxon as their ancestors did when they arrived there more than 100 years ago. They are the result of a bizarre racial experiment carried out by Elisabeth Nietzsche, sister of Germany's great philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, the man Hitler and Mussolini claimed was their inspiration. Nietzsche founded the colony with Bernard Forster, a racist, Jew-baiting schoolteacher. Her relationship with Forster had led her brother to break off contact with her. But when Friedrich Nietzsche was declared insane, it was Elisabeth who returned to Germany to take control of his affairs. Tonight's film visits Paraguay to meet the descendants of the people she chose for their "purity of blood" to form a new Fatherland. Part 1 of 2.
In 1889, when her Aryan colony in Paraguay began to fail, Elisabeth Nietzsche returned to Germany to look after her dying brother. Over the next 40 years, she so distorted his ideas that even now Nietzsche's name is still directly associated with European fascism. Tonight's film uses material from the Nietzsche Archive (opened following the collapse of the communist state in East Germany) to reveal how Elisabeth Nietzsche was wooed by both Mussolini and Hitler, and how she became one of the most powerful women in the Third Reich. Part 2 of 2.
On Wednesday 27 May 1942, two assassins waited for a German staff car to round a hairpin bend in a suburb of Prague. Their target was SS Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich, the architect of the "final solution". Heydrich was considered the most dangerous man in Nazi Germany after Hitler himself, and the plot was masterminded in England. Fifty years on, Timewatch examines the planning of the daring operation and the terrible reprisals it provoked.
For 40 years the Gladio - a secret network of former Nazis originally tasked with resisting the communist threat in occupied territories at the end of the Second World War - has bombed and murdered scores of innocent civilians to keep control of Europe for their political masters. This documentary reveals the crucial role the CIA has played in manipulating the political affairs of post-war Europe through the Gladio. Part 1 of 3.
In August 1980, the left-wing Red Brigades were blamed for the bombing of a Bologna, Italy, railway station that resulted in 86 dead and scores injured. But the Red Brigades had long been penetrated by right-wing agents working for the State whose aim was to commit atrocities that would terrify civilians into pleading for greater state security, even at the cost of personal freedom. Part 2 of 3.
Examines whether Italian Special Forces were involved in the kidnapping and assassination of Italian prime minister Aldo Moro, who supported including the Italian Communist Party in national government. Also reconstructs a preceding series of unexplained killings in Belgian supermarkets. Part 3 of 3.
At the dawn of the Cold War, both communists and anti-communists in America thought the world was on the brink. This special three-part series uses archive film and stories of ordinary Americans to paint a picture of suspicion and repression of "the enemy within" on a huge scale. Part 1 of 3.
Mention McCarthyism and most people think of the Hollywood blacklist. In fact, tens of thousands of ordinary people's lives were destroyed by what amounted to an American Inquisition. Paul was an electrician who couldn't work for 20 years because of one joke. Frank was followed for 38 years by up to eight FBI agents a day despite admitting he was not a security risk. Now that the Cold War is over, they and others can tell their full stories for the first time. Part 2 of 3.
Contrasts the fame and fortune of HUAC witness Harvey Matusow, whose lies went unquestioned, with the experiences of those who refused to co-operate and "name names". In destroying some but trusting others, did America lose faith in its most basic values? Part 3 of 3.
A documentary drama based on the memoirs of English diplomat Ernest Satow. Arriving in Japan at a time of political upheaval in the 1860s, Satow quickly got to know the radical young samurai determined to overthrow the corrupt government of the Shogun and lead Japan into a new age. Part 1 of 2.
Satow's unique understanding of the forces struggling for supremacy in Japan enabled him to have a direct influence on the events leading to the Civil War of 1868, and the restoration of the Mikado. Part 2 of 2.
30 years ago, American reaction against the Cuban Revolution led the world to the brink of nuclear war. Recounting the various US-inspired attacks against Cuba and the life of its leader Fidel Castro, who gives his account of events for the first time on television. When Soviet premier Khrushchev decided to protect Cuba with nuclear missiles and President Kennedy demanded their removal, the world held its breath. Part 1 of 2.
October 1962: The US naval blockade, the shooting down of a US spy plane, and the Soviet preparations for a nuclear response to a US invasion of Cuba are told by insiders from both the Kremlin and the White House, and by Fidel Castro himself.
When white men fell out in 1861, Black Americans gained a measure of freedom. But by 1915, 50 years after the end of the Civil War, blacks in the Southern States could neither vote nor sit on juries. They were segregated and locked into a system of sharecropping that differed little, in practice, from slavery. This of white supremacy could not have happened without the North's tacit approval, but how did it happen and why?
A personal account by actor Kenneth Griffith of the rise and fall of Irish nationalist hero Roger Casement. Knighted by the British for his humanitarian work in Africa and South America, in 1913 Casement switched his efforts to the cause of Irish Home Rule. During the First World War he went to Germany, seeking help from the Kaiser. On the eve of the Easter Rising in 1916, as he returned to Ireland with a shipment of German arms, he was arrested, tried and hanged for treason.
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