Pink triangles and political assassinations

The History Hour

BBC

History, Society & Culture, Personal Journals

4.4 • 879 Ratings

🗓️ 4 March 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. Our guest is Dr Uta Rautenberg from the University of Warwick in the UK, an expert on homophobia in Nazi camps.

Rudolf Brazda recounts his experience of being a gay man in a Nazi concentration camp, symbolised by the pink triangle he was forced to wear on his uniform.

Then, we hear first-hand accounts of the Indigenous American protest at Wounded Knee 50 years ago, and the assassination of Serbia's Prime Minister, Zoran Djindjic, in 2003.

We finish with two lighter stories: the world's most remote museum on the island of South Georgia and the first ever underwater sculpture park in the Caribbean.

Contributors: Dr Uta Rautenberg - University of Warwick. Rudolf Brazda - Nazi concentration camp survivor. Russell Means - former National Director of the American Indian Movement. Gordana Matkovic - former Serbian cabinet minister. Jan Cheek - South Georgia Museum trustee. Jason deCaires Taylor - creator of Grenadian underwater sculpture park.

(Photo: Marchers carry a pink triangle at a Gay Pride event in London. Credit: Steve Eason/Hulton Archive via Getty Images)

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hi Namalanta combo here and I'm excited to tell you that my award-winning
0:05.5	podcast, Dear Daughter, is back for his second season and it's available now.
0:10.9	Find out more at the end of this podcast.
0:14.0	Hello and welcome to the History Hour podcast from the BBC World Service with me
0:23.5	Max Pearson the past brought to life by those who were there this week refighting
0:28.2	battles of the past with Native Americans in the 1970s we We just stood there looking east.
0:34.0	I said, we're going to get out here alive
0:38.0	and see what Young Bear said,
0:40.0	just like our ancestors.
0:42.0	Plus life in the 1950s at the remote whaling station on South Georgia.
0:47.0	My mother, who was a very stoical character, managed to keep us fed and clothed in spite of their not being a shop within 800 miles.
0:57.0	And Serbia's JFK moment.
0:59.0	Today when you ask ordinary people, everyone knows exactly where they were and what they were doing when they heard the news.
1:06.8	That's all coming up later in the podcast, but first a truly remarkable piece of oral history.
1:11.6	In 2009, one of the last known survivors of the Pink
1:15.3	Triangles returned to the former site of the Buchenwald concentration camp
1:19.4	where he'd been imprisoned during the Second World War. His crime in the eyes of Nazi Germany? He was gay.
1:26.5	Rina Stanton Sharma has been listening to rare tape recordings which tell the story and a
1:30.8	warning, inevitably some of these recollections are disturbing.
1:35.7	So I saw it in the distance how they shot the Russians how they carried the bodies outside
1:47.8	and piled them up all that's Rudolf Brazda. He was sent to Bucken World Concentration Camp in 19.
2:00.0	That's Rudolf Brazda. He was sent to Booken World Concentration Camp in 1942,
	...

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