Nazi eugenics and the year of the vuvuzela

The History Hour

BBC

History, Society & Culture, Personal Journals

4.4 • 879 Ratings

🗓️ 22 September 2023

⏱️ 52 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Max Pearson presents a collection of this week’s Witness History episodes from the BBC World Service.

We hear about the people with disabilities who were sterilised in Germany following an order in 1933, passed by the then Chancellor Adolf Hitler.

Also, we find out about the first man to descend into the “Gates of Hell”, the Darvaza Crater, in Turkmenistan.

Plus the story behind the vuvuzela which was dubbed the “world’s most annoying instrument”.

Contributors: Helga Gross who was sterilised in Germany as part of the Nazis’ eugenics order. This is an archive interview from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Dr Susanne Klausen, Julia Gregg Brill Professor of Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies at the Pennsylvania State University. Campaigner Emma Bonino who fought for legal abortion in Italy. Explorer George Kourounis who was the first person to descend into the Darvaza Crater, in Turkmenistan. Paramedic Daniel Ouma who helped people injured in the Westgate Mall terror attack, in Nairobi, in Kenya, in 2013. Freddie 'Saddam' Maake who claims to have invented the vuvuzela.

(Photo: Adolf Hitler. Credit: Gamma-Keystone via Getty Images)

Transcript

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0:00.0	Lives Less Ordinary is the podcast from the BBC World Service bringing you extraordinary personal stories from around the globe.
0:08.0	Search for Lives Less Ordinary wherever you get your BBC Podcasts. Hello and welcome to the History Hour Podcast from the BBC World Service with me Max Pearson
0:26.7	the past brought to life by those who were there.
0:29.9	This week the first person to descend into the fiery pit of the Darvasa crater in Tukmenistan.
0:35.6	This is pressurized gas, so it sounds more like a jet engine, like a roaring demon
0:41.2	inside this pit.
0:42.6	And it totally makes sense that it has this nickname as the doorway to hell
0:46.1	because it looks like the devil himself is about to come springing out
0:50.4	with his pitchfork and horns and tail and the whole nine yards.
0:53.2	Also the fight for legal abortion in Italy.
0:56.2	We wanted to create a scandal.
0:59.6	Plus how the Vuvuzella became the sound of the 2010 Football World Cup and the terror attack at the
1:05.4	Westgate shopping mall in Nairobi.
1:07.8	All that coming up later in the podcast.
1:09.8	But we're going to begin by focusing on one of the more disturbing aspects of Nazi Germany in the run
1:15.1	up to the Second World War.
1:17.1	In July 1933, the then new German Chancellor Adolf Hitler, passed the law for the prevention of offspring with hereditary diseases.
1:26.0	It required the sterilization of Germans with physical and mental disabilities. Helga Gross
1:31.6	was one of those sterilized. Ben Henderson has been listening to archive interviews
1:36.1	from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum recorded in 2003. three. I grew up at my parents home. I was a happy home. I was happy. I was a very
1:51.0	happy child. Hitler changed everything and he changed my life.
1:58.0	This is Helga Gross, a deaf woman who grew up in Hamburg. She was 11 years old at the time.
	...

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