In Europe

- Season 2

(2008)

Before the fall of Hitler, Stalin and the Allied leaders already divided Europe. Poland and Czechoslovakia would fell under Russian control. The people who lived there didn't know that at the time.

1945: the Nazi's were defeated but what to do with the German people? Were they all guilty of the atrocities committed by the Nazi's? If so, do they deserve to be punished?

In Bleiburg, a small Austrian town, Tito's partisans massacred tens of thousands unarmed opponents. The victims were Ustashas, Croatian fascists who sided with Hitler and who were responsible for the death of hundreds of thousands.

How long would it take for Europe could live with the shame of their part in the persecution of the Jews? For a long time some European countries supplanted the memory of their role in the Holocaust.

In 1948 the communists seized control of the glass factory of the father of Jirzi Horak. After 1991 he gets it back, but not all of it.

The European Union started as a small group of idealists in Luxembourg. Their goal? Never again war.

After the failed Hungarian Revolt of 1956 many Hungarians fled their country. Many Dutch people were eager to help the refugees, including the parents of Geert Mak.

Many European colonies reclaim their independence after WWII ended. However, in a famous speech French president De Gaulle says: "L'Algerie, c'est la France".

Hagen Koch, a former Stasi agent, shows the spot where he painted a thick white line on the street. The line marked the spot where the famous Berlin Wall was to be built.

Geert Mak himself is the ideal main character to tell something about the 60's. In 1965 he moved from the rural Dutch province Friesland to the restless and cheerful capital: Amsterdam.

The Portuguese dictatorship was brought to an end in 1974 through a military coup. Young soldiers, who fought in the wars in the Portuguese colonies, laid the ground works for the Carnation Revolution.

On the 18th of October, there came an end to a period that shook West-Germany for 10 years.

1984 was a crucial year for the British miners and the British Prime Minister: Margaret Thatcher. In that year it would be decided who was ruling Britain: the unions or the Prime Minister.

In 1986 the disaster at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant occurred, Large radioactive clouds scattered over Europe.

In 1989, on Christmas Day, the Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu and his wife Elena were brutally executed. Romania was not at all prepared for the free market system that followed after the death of the dictator.

Stanislav Shuskevitsj was a professor at the Unitversity of Minsk in Belarus. On a drunken night his friends persuaded him to run for office. He kept his word, and to his surprise he was elected Supreme Soviet of Belarus.

Goran Trkulja, a Bosnian Serb, fled his country in 1992 during the Bosnian War. He was a journalist but this line of work was becoming perilous in his country. Goran went to the Netherlands.