Radio Free Europe
Witness History
BBC
4.5 • 1.6K Ratings
🗓️ 30 December 2025
⏱️ 10 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Seventy-five years ago, Radio Free Europe started broadcasting news to audiences behind the Iron Curtain.
It initially broadcast to Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland and Romania and programmes were produced in Munich, Germany.
It now reaches nearly 50 million people a week, in 27 languages in 23 countries.
Rachel Naylor speaks to former deputy director, Arch Puddington.
Eye-witness accounts brought to life by archive. Witness History is for those fascinated by the past. We take you to the events that have shaped our world through the eyes of the people who were there. For nine minutes every day, we take you back in time and all over the world, to examine wars, coups, scientific discoveries, cultural moments and much more. Recent episodes explore everything from the death of Adolf Hitler, the first spacewalk and the making of the movie Jaws, to celebrity tortoise Lonesome George, the Kobe earthquake and the invention of superglue. We look at the lives of some of the most famous leaders, artists, scientists and personalities in history, including: Eva Peron – Argentina’s Evita; President Ronald Reagan and his famous ‘tear down this wall’ speech; Thomas Keneally on why he wrote Schindler’s List; and Jacques Derrida, France’s ‘rock star’ philosopher. You can learn all about fascinating and surprising stories, such as the civil rights swimming protest; the disastrous D-Day rehearsal; and the death of one of the world’s oldest languages.
(Photo: An engineer at Radio Free Europe in 1960. Credit: Bettmann)
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | BBC Sounds, Music, Radio, podcasts. |
| 0:09.7 | Hi, this is the Witness History podcast from the BBC World Service. I'm Rachel Naylor. |
| 0:14.7 | If you're not new to us, you know the drill. You can skip the next 20 seconds. |
| 0:18.4 | If not, we're the podcast that takes you back to moments that have shaped our world. |
| 0:22.2 | We speak to the people who were there. |
| 0:23.8 | Episodes are just nine minutes long and they come out every weekday. |
| 0:26.8 | If you like the sound of that, please make sure you hit subscribe and turn your push notifications on. |
| 0:31.9 | The amazing story I've got for you today were going back 75 years to the birth of another international radio station. |
| 0:38.8 | Radio Free Europe. |
| 0:40.3 | It was created to broadcast the audiences in communist Eastern Europe from the West. |
| 0:45.0 | It now reaches nearly 50 million people a week in 27 languages in 23 countries. |
| 0:50.2 | I've been speaking to a former deputy director. |
| 0:53.0 | In Munich, a giant radio station, nearly three times as powerful as any in the United States. |
| 0:58.8 | The 135,000-watt radio-free Europe station was built with donations to the crusade for freedom by 16 million Americans. |
| 1:07.6 | It's 1950, and we're in Munich in Germany, or the radio capital of Europe, as the BBC reports. |
| 1:13.2 | This radio station here doesn't beam its signal at the people of Western Germany, |
| 1:17.4 | but at people living behind the Iron Curtain. |
| 1:20.2 | It's just part of the Western armament engaged in the Battle of the Ether. |
| 1:25.0 | In that Western armament, by far the biggest and most powerful weapon |
| 1:28.3 | is called Radio Free Europe. |
| 1:31.1 | That battle was the Cold War, |
| 1:33.2 | and the US was concerned about the rise of communism. |
... |
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