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. This week...

The scientist at the centre of the horrors faced by those involved in the 1944 Warsaw Uprising.

And there was this enormous crowd of people.

And then the smell of gas, gas, gas, and there was a panic.

And during the night Iraq invaded Kuwait and over through the government.

Iraqi troops and tanks crossed the border.

That's Saddam Hussein's invasion of its southern neighbor in 1990. We'll meet a Kuwaiti resistance fighter later in the podcast.

But we begin in Germany during the 1980s and a crucial moment in the debate over nuclear energy in Western Europe.

At the start of the decade, the Bavarian government announced plans to build a nuclear reprocessing plant in Vakasdorf in the south of the country.

Eight years later, the construction on the plant was

halted after a sustained protest campaign which saw tens of thousands of demonstrators

taking part and sometimes violent clashes with the police.

Lucy Burns has been speaking to the local district administrator Hans Schwira,

who became a figurehead for the protests.

In West Germany, Riot Police used water cannon to hold back anti-nuclear protesters

at the site of the country's first nuclear reprocessing plant. Demonstrators ringed the

construction site at Vakasdorf in Bavaria.

As missiles were thrown, the police replied with water cannon and tear gas.

Sometimes it was 10, 20,000. The biggest demonstrations were 50, 60,000 people.

The whole community was there.

This is Hans Schwerra. He was the head of the district authority in Schwandorf, the area where the nuclear plant was being proposed.

...