Hello and welcome to the History Hour podcast from the BBC World Service with me Max Pearson

the past brought to life by those who were there.

Coming up this week racism, injustice and a child execution in the US.

They took George out of the house.

I never saw him again, until I saw him in that casket.

Broke my parents hard.

Also, we'll go inside the situation room in the White House as the killing of Osama bin Laden

unfolded.

They used the phrase Geronimo E.KIA.

Geronimo enemy killed in action.

There was an enormous sense of relief at that moment,

but it was also not the end of the story.

Plus the first female negotiated sign a peace deal.

Maybe you need somebody to sort of break that glass ceiling, but at the end of the day what we need to do

is to take away that ceiling in the first place. Why is it there?

And why British aristocrats eventually

had to open their houses to the public. I think it was taxation and the

inability to find serpents. Indeed. That's coming up later in the podcast, but we begin this week with

the Stasi, the feared and hated East German secret police. For decades during communist rule,

the Stasi kept tabs on civilians through a vast network of informers.

But in January 1990, 30 years ago, just weeks after the fall of the Berlin War, East Germans

found themselves able to walk into the Stasi headquarters in Berlin.

...