Original subtitles

The 20th century was a time

of incredible change, (engines roaring)

(speaking in foreign language)

unspeakable horrors, (soldiers shouting)

and amazing leaps of scientific discovery.

It was a century marked by events

that united and divided us.

From great feats to great wars,

(shells booming)

with advancements and setbacks

that showed us the power of many,

the power of one. (crowd cheering)

I have a dream--

A century of revolutions,

evolutions and retributions. He's been shot!

A century made by conflicts and crimes,

inventions and entertainment,

politics,

protests,

discoveries and disasters.

Oh, the humanity!

We will count down the 101 events

of the 20th century.

Their stories formed the tapestry of our history

and shaped the world in which we live.

(solemn percussion music)

(suspenseful music) The question naturally arose

of what would happen to any Nazi leaders who were captured.

Well, this was one of the darkest chapter

in the UN's history. (people chanting)

Someone had to take that brave step.

(ominous music)

16 minutes, two teenage boys,

a massacre that would rock America,

fueling pleas for gun control

that would rage for years to come.

On the 20th of April, 1999, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold,

two students of Columbine Hish School

in Littleton, Colorado,

set off fire bombs to distract attention

while they stormed the school with assault weapons.

(sirens blaring) 12 students and teacher,

William David Sanders, were killed in the attack,

most in the school library,

to which they had fled for safety.

Jefferson County 911.

Yes, I am a teacher at Columbine High School.

There is a student here with a gun.

Over 20 more students were injured.

Everybody knows about them walking in with the guns

and shooting lots of their classmates.

They also had a series of bombs planted around the school.

Had they gone off,

they would have killed hundreds of people,

so their main motivation was mayhem and terror.

And then they like started blowing up

and shooting everyone in the cafeteria.

At the end of their rampage,

Harris and Klebold turned the guns on themselves,

committing suicide in the school hallway.

In the full glare of the world's press,

the town faced its loss and horror,

and around the world, people asked the question, "Why?"

initially described as loners and misfits,

some of the answers seemed to lie

in the boys' social status at the school as outsiders.

Through journals left behind by Harris and Klebold,

investigators discovered they had been planning

for more than a year to bomb the school

in an attack similar to the 1995 Oklahoma City bombings.

The police investigation also looked

at how they had come into possession of the firearms.

Within weeks, Mark Manes and Philip Duran were found guilty

of selling firearms to minors

and sentenced to five years in prison.

Although not the first mass shooting

in the U.S. that decade, or even that year,

the Columbine tragedy reopened the debate

on U.S. gun control. (crowd chants)

The Million Mom March, held in Washington D.C.

and 60 other U.S. cities,

urged American Congress to act on the issue.

The mothers who are marching

and countless millions of mothers like us

around our country, have a very simple Mother's Day message,

we don't want flowers or jewelry,

we don't want a nice card or a fancy meal,

as much as we want our Congress to do the right thing

to protect our children! (crowd applauds)

The connection of the Columbine school massacre

to broader gun culture in the U.S. is one of access.

There are more guns than people in the United States,

there are over 70 million semiautomatic weapons,

than there is language in the Constitution

that makes reference,

in what ever way you want to interpret it,

to the citizens being armed.

From my cold, dead hands! (crowd cheers)

The massacre was the worst school shooting

in U.S. history to that time,

a record that will be overtaken in the coming decade.

The overall impact of Columbine is a very sad one

in the sense that this is now something that happens.

So now when shootings in schools occur,

there is outrage, but it dies down very quickly.

It has become like almost kind of a normal part

of American society that children will die in schools

because of guns.

(upbeat electronic music)

An item of clothing praised as liberator

and condemned as oppressor.

It has been an icon of the fashion world

and a symbol for protesters.

But through it all,

an invention used by millions of women around the world.

(lively music)

Many women started the 20th century laced in tight corsets

that restricted their bodies and movements.

Poor Great-Grandmama,

how she suffers to please Great-Grandpapa!

In 1910, Mary Phelps Jacob,

a 19-year-old Manhattan socialite,

was unhappy with how her cumbersome corset poked

out of the gown in which she intended to wow society.

Desperation inspired ingenuity.

One of the stories, the origins of the bra,

is one young debutante had a beautiful dress

but she had all this corset underneath, hated it.

So what she did was use two hankies to cover her breasts,

tie it 'round with a ribbon and voila, there's the bra!

Jacob's patented her Backless Brassiere

on the 3rd of November, 1914.

But the bra owed its big boost to an international conflict.

It is really World War I,

where women have to give up using metal, metal stays,

metal things that support their undergarments,

that is given to the war effort

and the undergarments become simpler.

Each change of fashion

through the decades brought new improvements to the bra.

Then, in the 1930s,

where you have not only uplift but outlift,

because they're enabled to have conical bras,

then fashion can accentuate that.

Like the Sweater Girl,

sweaters were seen as something just utilitarian,

but once this bra comes along that points the breasts out

and she's photographed in such a sexual way,

then the fashion for that type of clothing takes off.

However, in the 1960s,

what had once given women freedom to move,

was now seen as a sign of oppression.

The feminists talk about bras as being a construction,

"We're gonna burn them," or metaphorically,

"I'll burn them, get rid of them, we don't need these bras,"

that constructs women as they were.

Although mass bra burnings were a myth,

the idea of bra-burning feminists remained an iconic,

but imagined, image in the public mind,

morphing into a criticism and stereotype

that dogged the feminist movement.

It was a cold day for a demonstration,

but the women stuck it out, while presumably,

their husbands stayed at home cooking for the kids.

(upbeat music)

Rarely has an item of clothing been so linked

to women's role in society.

And by the end of the 20th century,

an estimated 95% of Western women were fastening themselves

into bras each morning.

The bra, over the 20th century,

gives women far more independence.

So we're moving from a restrictive set of undergarments,

through to still quite highly constructed

in the mid-century,

to the end of the century,

again comes back to that strong construction,

but the way its marketed, the way its perceived,

it's helped women give themselves a lot more confidence.

(audience applauding)

(solemn music)

The coup that overturned the

democratically-elected government,

made possible by interference from the United States,

an act that would lead

to one of Latin America's darkest chapters.

(fire crackling)

(crowd shouting)

At the start of the 1970s, fear of a Red Scare spreading

through Central and South America gripped Washington.

Fidel Castro's victory in Cuba had put the United States

on high alert.

In 1970, presidential elections in Chile swept

the left-wing candidate to power.

(audience applauding)

In September,

Dr. Salvador Allende was elected President of Chile,

the first Marxist head of state on the continent

to achieve power by democratic means.

A portent, perhaps, of things to come.

Salvador Allende was, if nothing else,

an absolute, committed Democrat.

In many ways, a lot of people would argue

that this was his undoing.

The americans basically decided they would not allow him

his full term because they were afraid

of a second Castro in Chile.

Allende's social reforms included

nationalizing natural resources, building homes for the poor

and improving access to health and education.

But due to U.S. interference, which affected the price

of Chile's most valuable export, copper,

by 1973, the Chilean economy was in disarray

and violence between the right

and left had become a daily occurrence.

(suspenseful music) (crowds shouting)

Allende had the support of workers,

but opposition to him was growing.

On September 11, 1973,

the Chilean Armed Forces launched an attack

against Allende's government.

The coup was led by the Army Chief Augusto Pinochet.

Tanks and troops surrounded La Moneda,

the presidential palace,

and Allende and his supporters were ordered to surrender

or face attack by the Chilean Air Force.

Allende refused.

He died because of his idealism.

The Mexican government basically offered him a safe conduit

out of the bombarded national palace,

he could have got out and he said,

"No, I am going nowhere, I am staying here."

Jet fighter attacks set the palace alight.

There are two bombers pilots

and they fly around the building.

They flew around our apartment building

and then they bombed La Moneda

and then they'd go around, they went around about 10 times.

Soon after, there are shots

and Salvador Allende is found dead in his sofa.

Close to him is a rifle that Fidel Castro had given him,

that develops this cloud

over what happened to Salvador Allende.

Did he kill himself?

Was he killed by some of the stray bullets

that were flying around the palace?

In the aftermath of the coup,

Pinochet became Dictator of Chile.

Over the next 17 years,

more than 3,000 of PInochet's political opponents, critics

and dissidents were assassinated or disappeared.

Tens of thousands of Chileans now live

in exile rather than under Pinochet.

In 1988, Pinochet's opponents took their chance

to oust him when a referendum was held,

removing him from power.

And Salvador Allende was posing the

absolute civilized concept of what a true revolution

of the people could look like,

not through bloodshed, but through the ballot box.

And I think that's remained,

we no longer have military coups,

we have people who are trying to make a difference,

radical difference, through the ballot box.

(suspenseful music)

In the wake of the Second World War,

the Allies would take an unprecedented approach

to holding their enemies' actions to account,

an international tribunal

and a new legal concept, war crimes.

(ominous music)

As the Second World War came

to its horribly violent conclusion

in Europe in the spring of 1945,

the question naturally arose of what would happen

to any Nazi leaders who were captured.

The sure, swift course

of retribution faces them all.

There was an enormous sense among all of the Allies

that some form of punishment, of retribution,

would have be undertaken.

It was the Americans, very largely, who said,

"No, we have a larger, historic commission here,

"which is these terrible,

"terrible crimes will not go unpunished,

"but that punishment will be reached

"after a fair and proper legal process."

The trials of the leading Nazis were held

at Nuremberg from November 1945.

(crowd chants)

The location was a symbolic choice

as it evoked memories of past Nazi rallies.

It was also big enough for the purpose

and largely undamaged after the war.

A special enclosed passage has been built

between the jail and the courtroom.

Pretty well all the big (speaking in foreign language)

of Hitler's Reich, except Hitler himself of course

and Bormann, are to be tried.

Two judges, each from England, France,

America and the Soviet Union presided.

It was decided that the tribunal should be made up

of representatives of the four major allied powers

and this inevitably meant that, in the eyes of critics,

this appeared as victors' justice.

Over four years, 13 separate trials were held,

organized according to the type of offense

of which those on trial stood accused.

When the chart

of the Nazi organization was displayed

in court, for example,

it evoked great interest from everybody present.

It was decided to establish new legal charges

against the defendants,

these are the charges with which we are now very familiar,

in terms of crimes against peace, crimes against humanity.

The proceedings led

to the United Nations Genocide Convention

and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights,

which both occurred in 1948. (audience applauding)

24 men were accused in the first trial.

Each of them pleaded not guilty.

(speaking in foreign language)

That will be entered as a plea of not guilty.

But only three escaped conviction.

12 were sentenced to death.

Perhaps the most significant effect of Nuremberg

and at the equivalent trials in Japan,

is that they make clear and public

and establish the criminality of the unprecedented events

of the Second World War.

The other lasting legacy of Nuremberg,

in setting a template for that machinery

of international justice to prosecute war criminals.

That machinery may still be flawed,

we know there are significant countries around the world

which will not take part in it,

but it's all we've got at the moment.

(solemn music)

(audience applauding)

The modern Olympic movement was built

on the notion of athletes from around the world competing

together in a spirit of friendship and fair play,

an ideal that will be shattered one day in 1972.

In the lead up to the 1972 Games in Munich,

the German organizers had been determined

to counter the image that clung to Germany post-war.

After 36 years, the Olympic Games will take place

again in Germany, in the Federal Republic.

Well for West Germany, these games were a

really important way to erase the horrible images

of the Nazi Olympic Games.

What the West Germans wanted to do was

to present a new Germany.

To present a new image of Germany in the minds of the world

through this very popular spectacle

as being a modern, progressive, democratic,

culturally and economically-dynamic nation.

Guards were to be unarmed and approachable.

The Olympic Village was not protected,

it's fences were low and its security limited,

although the global political climate was very different.

There was plenty of evidence

that terrorism was on the rise, hijackings

and other terrorist incidents were occurring

around the world.

On the other hand,

there wasn't anything specific targeting the Olympic Games.

That is probably

because the Palestinian Black September group

that was doing it was very good at keeping information

very limited, within its specific terrorist cells.

(audience applauding)

The Games opened on August 26th

and continued without mishap

until the early morning of September 5.

At 4:30 a.m.,

members of the Palestinian Black September group had

no trouble gaining access to the Olympic Village apartments.

They took two members of the Israeli team hostage

and killed another two.

They've given ultimatums that until 12 o'clock today,

some of the Arabic terrorists

who are held in prison in Israel must be released

otherwise they are going to kill some of the sportsmen

who are staying there in their hands.

Israel refused the demand.

The Germans responded ineptly, with total incompetence,

this is pretty much the universal assessment.

They didn't know what to do, they dithered.

There was a point where they tried a rescue mission,

not quite realizing that there were television crews

all around the building

where the hostages were at that time,

and the terrorists in this building were watching

what was happening to the building on television.

The stalemate continued

until the group demanded to be taken, with the hostages,

to the airport.

When the terrorists reached the airport,

German snipers shot at the group, starting a gunfight.

The hostages were killed, along with five of the terrorists

and a German policeman.

Inside the airfield,

the scene was described by one eyewitness as,

"The most horrible thing I've ever seen."

The surviving three members

of the group were arrested,

but they were released within weeks

when Black September hijacked a plane

and demanded their freedom.

Now it's true

that we haven't seen a major terrorist attack

at the Olympics since then.

It does seem that terrorists are deterred

by the increased security at the Olympics now.

The events of September 1972

were a tragic failure,

which encouraged countries to learn from the mistakes

and train specialist, anti-terror units.

(solemn music)

It started as a shipping accident

and became an environmental disaster.

1,000 miles of coastland, contaminated by an oil spill

that left enduring devastation in it's wake.

(somber violin music)

On the 24th of March, 1989,

the oil tanker, Exxon Valdez,

hit the Bligh Reef in Alaska's Prince William Sound.

This was a ship

that was carrying nearly 53 million U.S. gallons of oil

and when it struck the reef,

it released almost 10.8 to 11 million U.S. gallons of oil

over a few days.

The oil washed up on the beach

and spread during the storm, defying the containment effort.

This was a manmade disaster in which nature came in

to finish the job.

Oil spread to several islands off the Alaskan coast

and affected the wildlife there.

Here, we are looking at pooled oil, which is made up

of many different hydrocarbon organic compounds

and some of these organic compounds could be

extremely toxic.

So in the short term, when you look at the impact,

it was massive.

That virtually every American is familiar

with the tragic environmental disaster in Alaskan waters.

We all share the sorrow and concern of Alaskans

and a determination to mount a sustained cleanup effort.

It was not the first oil spill

and it would not be the last,

yet the effects were devastating.

Thousands of sea animals died.

The defining image of the disaster was birds covered

so thickly in oil they could no longer breathe.

Other images showed holes dug into the ground,

barely a meter, before they met oil.

Our ultimate goal must be the complete restoration

of the ecology and the economy of Prince William Sound,

including all of its fish, marine mammals, birds

and other wildlife.

The cleanup was massive and immediate,

but despite the collaborative effort,

the oil was not completely cleaned away.

Animals contaminated with oil were sent

to a rehabilitation center.

The herring-based fishing industry in the area collapsed.

Seals and wild pack numbers dwindled.

Scientists have learned a lot about the effects left

from the spill,

including the environment's limited ability to recover.

Years on, the damage is still extensive

and bird populations have not come back to pre-spill levels.

This was a manmade disaster

in the relatively pristine Alaskan Sound and its proximity

to an untouched wilderness caught a strong,

negative media reaction.

Exxon, as the company operating the tanker,

was tied up in court cases related to the event

beyond the end of the 20th century.

Finally succeeding in having

the original punitive damages awarded, at $5 billion,

reduced to half a billion.

I think on a positive front,

and not many people look at it that way,

there are some new controls that have been put in place now.

For instance, whenever they have ships, they have tugboats.

They guide them as to how they can come out of the place,

for instance.

There are new techniques of monitoring,

there are new techniques of remediation,

which basically means that on the one hand,

you prevent this from happening and if it does happen,

there are processes that are put in place

where people can immediately respond to these incidents.

(water splashed) (bird calls)

(suspenseful music)

Escalating conflict

in Afghanistan became the catalyst

for the rise of new non-state groups.

(men shouting)

They will be the country's only hope

for opposing one of the world's great superpowers.

At the end of the 1970s,

the Communist People's Democratic Party

of Afghanistan took control of the country,

ousting the secular government of Daoud Khan.

When the PDPA came into power,

they started implementing reform programs

that reflected a communist agenda

and these were highly unpopular programs,

not so much in terms of the substance,

but the way in which the Communist PDPA was going

about implementing them.

A rebel movement, the mujahideen,

formed from local militias,

began to strike against the central government.

(guns bang)

On the 24th of December, 1979,

the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan,

fearing its communist ally would be defeated

by the mujahideen. (tanks rattling)

It was important for the Soviet Union to see

that the experiment of social and political engineering

that was happening in Afghanistan would be a success.

And as Afghanistan itself started to destabilize,

following the PDPA coup,

it became a threat to the Soviet Union's southern borders.

That impelled the Soviet Union to invade Afghanistan.

Over the next decade,

the Soviet Union was to pour billions of dollars

into the war, a burden that Mikhail Gorbachev considered

when he came to power in 1985.

And Afghan rebels have proved themselves

as much trouble to the Russians

as they were to the British 100 years ago.

(gun bangs)

But the question is why didn't the Soviets withdraw

in 1986 and waited until 1989?

For two reasons, one was to provide a safe-facing exit

for the Soviet withdrawal

and secondly, not to show that they're weak.

Based on these reasons, the Soviet Union waited

until 1989 to withdraw.

Soviet troops began to withdraw

on the 15th of May, 1988, (crowd cheers)

with the last pulling out on the 15th of February, 1989.

The toll of the war had been high.

In over a decade,

more than 15,000 Soviet troops had been killed

and more than one million Afghans had died,

with millions more made refugees.

600,000 Afghan refugees,

who have poured across the Khyber mountains,

now form the largest concentration of refugees in the world.

Without Russian backing,

Kabul fell to the rebels in 1992.

Those who now took power,

since they opposed the Soviet proxy, had American backing.

We support the Afghan efforts to fashion a stable,

broadly-based government,

responsive to the needs of the Afghan people.

The collapse of the Afghan government in 1992,

created a security and political vacuum

which allowed fundamentalist groups,

such as the Afghan Taliban, al-Qaeda, ETIM, amongst others,

to establish themselves within Afghanistan

and then to export their radicalist agenda overseas.

The fight for traditional values became a fight

against communism.

Now after 10 bloody years, the Soviets have gone.

The question is, what comes next?

People often forget that from 1929 until 1978,

Afghanistan was one of the most peaceful countries

in the world.

So the legacy of the Soviet intervention

in 1979 is very much responsible

for the disruption that Afghanistan faced,

from which Afghanistan has not been able to recover.

(light piano music)

At the close of the 19th century,

a cycling craze was peddling across the world.

A fascination that would spawn one

of the 20th century's greatest sporting events.

(crowd cheers)

Cycling enthusiasts were buying sporting magazines

to experience more about techniques and tactics.

In France, L'Auto Magazine first went to print in 1900,

but circulation was sluggish.

An editorial meeting was convened

to find answers to the circulation crisis and Geo Lefevre,

the magazine's 26-year-old cycling and rugby correspondent,

suggested a race around France.

And so the world's greatest endurance race,

over mountain terrain and through medieval towns, began

as a promotion to sell magazines.

(suspenseful violin music)

On the 1st of July, 1903, 60 cyclists set off from Paris

to cover the 2,428 kilometer track,

reaching an average speed of 25.7 kilometers per hour.

The cyclists returned to Paris nearly three weeks later,

on July 19th.

The first winner was a 32-year-old Frenchman, Maurice Garin.

The race grew in popularity each year

with competitors and spectators

as routes over the Pyrenees were added.

They're high in the Pyrenees now.

The air is rare and every breath is torture

and tragedy strikes with chilling swiftness.

Somebody went over the edge.

Apart from the two world wars,

no races were run between 1915 and 1918 or 1940 and 1946,

the Tour de France grew in popularity around the world.

By the 1960s, some stages were being held

in neighboring countries.

The Tour de France is held in different locations,

it hasn't got a fixed route,

it's changed over time to accommodate different cities.

And when it changes to a place it hasn't been before,

it's a fantastic celebration of cycling

and that can bring people together.

At Plymouth, the famous Tour de France comes

to Britain for the first time in all 71 years

of its existence. (crowd applauds)

(speaking in foreign language)

The enduring symbol of the race,

the yellow jersey, was first introduced in 1919,

to make the race leader stand out.

The effort to be a Tour cyclist was immense,

right from the start.

They got up a very good power-to-weight ratio

in order to get up the mountain stages.

They would be used to riding long duration events

over time, so they've done other tours,

and that ability to be able

to sustain a Tour is what makes it.

The race had changed dramatically

by the mid-90s.

Cyclists kept in constant radio communication

with their support vehicles,

huge cheering crowds lined the route,

motorbikes with television cameras broadcast live footage,

as did television helicopters hovering overhead.

Teams were also riding together.

The teams have come as part of the commercialization

and part of the tactics and a lot to do with the safety

of transporting a large number of riders.

So allowing them to go in a peloton, groups them together,

makes the management of the road much easier.

To viewers around the world,

the race is a reason to rearrange sleep schedules

to accommodate late-night viewing.

It brings people together.

It's the ultimate cycling event

and so in that sense, it is extremely important.

(somber music)

Located in the center of Beijing,

Tiananmen Square means, Heavenly Peace Square,

a name that belies the terrible events

that took place there in 1989.

Hu Yaobang, who, as chairman and general secretary,

had led the Chinese Communist Party

and the Government of the People's Republic from 1982-'87,

died on April 15, 1989.

There's the funeral motorcade,

made its way to the cemetery for revolutionaries.

An estimated one million people massed on the streets

to honor the man who symbolized their hopes

for political reform.

What happens very rapidly is that students begin

not only to go into the Tiananmen Square

and display their grief and frustration,

but in essence, begin to actually organize themselves.

Tiananmen Square, of course, was built

by the Chinese Communist Party as a means

to engender a sense of strong, mass mobilization

and now what we have is kind of inverted.

The students, for instance, taking over this political space

and using it to lay out their claims.

What we want is only the democracy,

only the freedom of the speech,

not overthrow the government.

We support our government to honor reform.

By May 19th,

crowds in Tiananmen Square had grown

and included several thousands taking part

in a hunger strike.

In response, Premier Li Peng declared martial law,

but the crowds did not disperse.

The government's response was brutal.

Around 1:00 a.m. on June the 4th,

tanks broke through the protest barricades.

This is a big thing because historically speaking,

the army under the Chinese Communist Party was an army

that was seen as being always siding with the people,

hence the name of the Army of the People's Liberation Army.

Troops fired on civilians and students.

Human rights groups estimating

that up to 1,000 people were killed.

The square was cleared, the demonstration ended

and in the days that followed,

the government arrested thousands of people

around the country on charges

of counter-revolutionary activity.

It is believed that about 1,000 people were executed.

(dramatic music)

The Soviet Union condemned the attacks,

while the United States and other nations imposed diplomatic

and economic sanctions against China.

The procession continued

as far as the eye could see.

It took fully half an hour

for them to file past the Chinese Embassy,

calling for the downfall of Deng Xiaoping.

(somber music)

The official Chinese response was and remains

that the People's Liberation Army had defended the country

against violent, counterrevolutionary elements.

After 1989, China is still open,

still open to foreign capital.

It is open, to a certain extent,

to ideas that might come in terms of

how we reform on both the political and economic arena.

But that becomes much more controlled, right,

than any ideas that perhaps were seen as going too far,

as it did in 1989, it very much disappeared from the scene.

And I think it's perhaps the legacy of Tiananmen,

laying the framework of how China was going to pursue

its pathway of development from the '90s onwards.

(suspenseful music)

The first crisis of the Cold War began

in the divided city of Berlin

with the crippling Soviet blockade designed

to bring the Allied-held sector to its knees.

After the Second World War,

Germany had been divided into four zones of occupation,

shared by the members of the victorious alliance.

The chief business to be done was

to agree the constitution of the Allied Control Commission,

with the fixing of zones to be occupied

by Britain, American, France and Russia.

Berlin, which was in the Soviet-controlled part

of the country, was, because of its status as the capital,

divided in the same way as the entire country.

Nothing could be more farcical

between allies, but the situation is obviously inflammable.

The Western Allies had more or less given up

on the collaborative government of Germany.

The aim after World War II was not

that Germany should be divided,

the aim was that it should be governed collaboratively

by the four allies and democratized

and completely demilitarized and denazified.

But there was no common policy

to achieve that aim.

By June 1948, the British, American

and French zones had combined into a single area.

But that collaborative government never worked

and by 1948, the Western Allies had given up,

above all, the United States had more or less given up.

So within their own zone of occupation,

and indeed in the British zone as well,

they proposed to introduce a new currency,

the Deutsche Mark,

which Stalin saw as the foundation of a West German state

and thus of the division of Germany,

which he wanted to prevent.

Germany cued all day to get the issue

of the new Allied money,

which has caused so much trouble with the Russians.

To disrupt the consolidation

of a West German state and to protest the exclusion

of Soviet influence from the West,

the Soviets began the Berlin blockade,

hoping to drive Western forces from the city.

What was blocked was access to Berlin.

So the Western Allies could not move anything

into Berlin by land,

when that meant, above all, food and energy.

Stalin's comment, of course, was,

"Let us see what Generals January and February can do.

"Let us see what a very bitter winter can do."

So they needed to fly huge quantities of food

and coal into Berlin, which is what they did.

(suspenseful music)

Two days after the blockades started,

British and American planes began landing

at Berlin's Tempelhof Airport with the supplies.

Within two months of the start of the blockade,

the airlift was operating close to 1,500 flights a day

and delivering a daily total

of more than 4,500 tons of cargo.

And it's been estimated

that 24 hours of the airlift is equivalent,

in organization and effort, to launching 1,000 bomber raids.

After 318 days, the Soviets ended the blockade.

It had failed, for as long as the air routes functioned,

it was going to fail.

So frankly, the Soviet Union could have cut the air routes,

but could only have cut them by declaring war.

It would have had to send its aircraft in

to engage American aircraft, British aircraft,

French aircraft, shoot them down

and that would have led to general war.

Strength, resourcefulness

and perseverance enabled the Western Powers

to beat the blackmail of the Russians

and keep Berlin supplied until the blockade was called off.

Air travel as an industry also benefited,

with the fast-paced air traffic control systems

that were developed to cope with the number of movements

later employed around the world.

(dramatic music)

The 1960s saw us achieve what had once seemed impossible

when we went to the moon.

But one of the greatest frontiers we crossed

in that decade happened in South Africa, in the human body.

Remains a trial of medical ingenuity.

Several doctors across the world were racing

against time and against each other

to be the first to perform a human heart transplant.

The successful kidney transplant of 1954 spurred them

to investigate the possibility in other parts of the body.

Norman Shumway, who was based at Stanford University,

he had conducted a successful heart transplant

on a dog in 1958

and it was actually his techniques of cooling down the heart

and the management of the transplant

that were used in South Africa by the first doctors

to actually do a human-to-human transplant.

Dr. Christiaan Barnard

of Cape Town, South Africa was the first

to complete the task.

On the 3rd of December, 1967,

he transplanted the heart of Denise Darvall

into the chest of Louis Washkansky.

Denise had been in a car crash earlier that day

and after suffering severe brain damage,

she had not been able to be revived.

And he said to me that Professor Barnard had offered

him a new heart.

Quite frankly, I thought he was delirious

from all the drugs that he'd had.

None of us realized that it would be true!

The operation lasted nine hours.

The new heart needed mechanical assistance

to continue beating until Louis' body could take over.

It's difficult to make predictions and prognosis

if you've not had previous experience,

but I would say that I'm sure that he's going to live longer

than he would have lived without the operation.

Louis survived after the operation,

deeming it a success.

Unfortunately, 18 days later he died

from a pneumonia infection, contracted while in hospital.

In the early days of successful transplants,

patients did not live much longer than Louis.

The first heart transplant was

an extraordinary achievement,

but what had not been got right yet was

how to stop the body rejecting the heart.

And that was going to take to the 1980s

for that to be achieved.

And his transplant operation was so successful

that the only real setback he's had is a bout

of pneumonia earlier this year.

(uplifting music)

Today, improvements in antirejection drugs

has led to a yearly rate of 5,000 transplants operations,

with close to 90% of patients surviving a year

and 75% surviving three years after the operation.

The legacy is someone had

to take that brave step

and once that was made,

then that whole world of medical science asserting itself

and saying, we can repair and rebuild the human body.

So I think in terms of just a vision for the future,

it was extraordinarily significant.

(suspenseful music)

For 100 days,

a chaotic brutal slaughter would convulse

through the African nation of Rwanda.

In its wake, close to one million people were dead

and the world was in shock at the brutality inflicted

by one group of humans on another.

In 1994, Rwanda comprised three main ethnic groups,

the majority Hutu, the minority Tutsi

and an even smaller population, the Twa.

Despite sharing a language, religion

and cultural traditions, racial tensions had existed

between the Hutu and Tutsi for decades.

The catalyst that converted those tensions

into awful violence occurred on the night

of the 6th of April, 1994.

Well that night, an airplane coming to land

at Kigali Airport, the capital of Rwanda,

was shot down by a missile.

To this very day, we don't know who did it,

both sides have implicated one another.

But the result was that within minutes or hours,

a genocide campaign was started by the Rwandan military,

assisted by the Rwandan militias

in rounding up and executing prominent Tutsis

and moderate Hutus based on hit lists

that were pre-prepared in advance.

(men chanting)

On the 7th of April,

the country's major media broadcaster called,

"For the Tutsi cockroach to be eliminated."

But these are the real faces of fear

in Rwanda, Tutsi civilians facing systematic massacre.

Neighbors killed neighbors

and some men killed their Tutsi wives.

Bodies were hacked to pieces in a vicious frenzy

and many were dumped into the Kagera River,

eventually floating into Uganda's Lake Victoria.

People like animals,

they've killed each other worse than animals.

I can't believe it.

I cannot believe God created people like that.

The United Nations was strongly criticized

for its stance during the 100 days of genocide,

evacuating only Western citizens,

while close to a million people were being slaughtered.

Well, this was one of the darkest chapter

in the UN's history.

Both the professional UN, the official UN

and the political UN,

which is the states that made up the UN,

have effectively stood by as hundreds of thousands of men,

women, children were massacred in the streets of Rwanda.

Coming after a failed military operation

in Somalia, there was little political will to intervene.

And in the case of Rwanda,

Rwanda was a small country

without a strong economic imprint.

Most of the countries were not at all interested in Rwanda

and the few who were had a stake in the existing government

rather than in overthrowing of the government.

A French-led UN mission was

eventually sent in on the 22nd of June in the southwest,

but the killings continued until the 4th of July,

when the Rwandan Defense Force took control of the country.

Two decades of unrest followed, costing the lives

of perhaps a further five million more people.

(people shouting)

Genocide trials started at the end of 1996.

Former Prime Minister Jean Kambanda pleaded guilty

and was sentenced to life in prison.

His conviction was welcomed,

but it could not erase the memory of what had happened,

nothing could.

(somber music)

The scale of conflict and destruction

on the Eastern Front in World War II was without equal.

It began when Axis forces invaded the Soviet Union

in June 1941.

For 18 months, they pushed eastwards

and then the tide turned.

(dramatic music)

(somber music)

When, after swift victory in Western Europe,

Hitler turned his forces east,

Joseph Stalin, the Soviet dictator,

who had ignored intelligence reports

of German troops building up at his borders,

was briefly paralyzed with shock.

The Germans initially invaded Russia

in the summer of 1941 and they had a lot of success,

they got within about 50 miles of Moscow

and there was very much a feeling

that next year's campaign would knock out

the Soviet armies entirely.

The Soviet, the United States

and Britain are fighting on 'til Hitler is beaten

into the ground.

Winter halted fighting,

but with the spring of 1942,

Hitler resumed what was intended

as the final offensive in the east.

The Stalingrad Operation was launched

as a two-pronged operation.

Half the army would head south to the Caucasus' oilfields

and would really take away Russia's ability

to drive its industry and to fuel its vehicles.

But they would also capture this very strategically

and symbolically-important city

on an important bend in the River Volga

and that was Stalingrad.

And there was a feeling, from Hitler in particular,

that they had to capture it to tarnish Stalin's image.

More than last year,

Hitler fears the mounting strength of the powers of freedom.

German forces assaulted

and moved into the city.

Stalin had a choice, resistance or surrender.

As bombs were dropped on the city,

he forbade any evacuation, even of children.

He commanded the city to fight to the end.

(suspenseful music) (shells booming)

Vicious hand-to-hand combat

from street to street characterized the savage battle.

(gun bangs)

Behind the Red Army was the vastness of the Soviet Union.

Behind the Axis troops was a long and uncertain supply line.

Hitler's 6th Army was surrounded

and is, even now, in process of liquidation.

They had a big problem, particularly after encirclement.

Goering had convinced Hitler,

as he often did during the Second World War,

that actually the air force could solve the problem alone

and then they would be able to deliver enough supplies

to keep the army fighting for as long as they wanted to,

at least until another German army could break through.

But that simply wasn't the case,

they couldn't get anything like the number of supplies

through to the German army fighting at Stalingrad

and so slowly but surely, the army was starved

of both ammunition, vital war material, but also food

and it of course, gradually lost the capacity to resist.

The carnage came to an end in February 1943,

when the German 6th Army Commander Frederich Paulus,

promoted to field marshal by Hitler

because the Fuhrer reminded him no German field marshal had

ever surrendered his command,

surrendered the remaining 90,000 troops of his army

to the Soviet forces.

The loss of Stalingrad and the loss of the 6th Army

at Stalingrad was the first major setback for German troops

during the Second World War.

It was very much the turning point

of the war on the Eastern Front and arguably,

the turning point of the whole Second World War.

From the point of Stalingrad,

it was really heading backwards all the way,

a slow, gradual retreat

with the odd counterattack along the way,

until the Russian armies

finally reached the gates of Berlin.

(tanks rattling)

(dramatic music)