It’s the summer of 1953, and, across East Germany, angry people take to the streets.
This isn’t a polite street protest.
This is a furious, red flag ripping, police beating, office burning rampage.
The crowds demand:
- better living conditions;
- the reunification of Germany; and
- free elections.
Instead, they would get:
- Trabants;
- the Berlin Wall; and
- another 35 years of hardline Communist government.
Could the 17 June 1953 uprising have ever been successful at bringing down Soviet-dominated eastern Europe?
Or were the people’s protests doomed to fail before they even started?
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Music credits
The theme music is Newsroom by Riot.
The other music featured in this episode was Cylinder Seven and The Life and Death of a Certain K. Zabriskie, Patriarch, both by Chris Zabriskie and Sunset by Kai Engel. All tracks are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
AH 11 Operation Unthinkable - Churchill's plan to attack Russia and start a Third World War
AH 10 Louis of England - history’s forgotten King of England
AH 09 Princess Mary Tudor's flight to freedom
AH 08 Cancelling Christmas and the Plum Pudding Riots
AH 07 The Prince of Poyais - settling in the country that never was
AH 06 A wonderful paradise on the Isthmus of Panama
AH 05 Roosevelt's third term and the voice from the sewers
AH 04 The British Hindenberg disaster and the demise of Imperial Airships
AH 03 Hitler’s dreams to unify his empire with a monstrous railway
AH 02 Draining the swamp -Garibaldi's plan to diver Rome's river
AH 01 Achtung! Achtung! Dystopian adventures with Nazi TV
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