Chile’s Penguin Revolution and the 5,000-year-old frozen mummy

26:06When we first entered the camp, I didn't see the prisoners. They started to come out of the barracks when our soldiers had completely cleared Auschwitz of German soldiers and no more shots were being fired. Then the prisoners started to come out of their barracks. They saw the soldiers, hugged and kissed them and thanked them joyously for rescuing them.

26:43This is Vasily Petrenko speaking to the BBC's Russian service in 2001 about the moment he and his soldiers liberated Auschwitz. In January 1945, Vasily Petrenko was the youngest general in the Soviet Union's Red Army. As he and the other troops advanced on the town of Oświeńczym in southern Poland, he told the Associated Press in 1995 liberating an extermination camp was not their intended mission. Neither Stalin nor the top military commanders mentioned the camp. I did not know anything about any camp. Instead, the soldiers' aim was to take Katowice, an industrial city about 25 miles to the northwest of Auschwitz.

27:35It was only after capturing retreating German soldiers, General Petrenko says, that they learned of Hitler's most ruthless and efficient death factory. I was holding her hands all the time in Auschwitz. that matter. If it wouldn't be for her, I wouldn't last it that day. This is Auschwitz survivor René Saltbem, speaking to BBC TV for the 80th anniversary of the liberation. From the moment he came to power in 1933, Hitler had fuelled hatred against Jews, blaming them for Germany's economic problems. Bit by bit, their rights were stripped away, laying the groundwork for the so-called final solution, the plan to mass murder millions of Jewish people.

28:25They took everything, all the silver, all the best china, all the linens, everything was taken. We didn't have a change of underwear. By 1942, Auschwitz, a complex of camps in occupied Poland, had been turned into the Nazis' biggest killing centre. Trains from across Europe brought Jews to Birkenau, the part of Auschwitz where most of the killings took place. The train slowed down and came to a stop. Immediately we heard dogs barking. They unlocked the doors, opened the map, and they're screaming and bellowing, Get off the train, be quick, get a move on. My father jumped off first. I jumped after him.

29:23When I jumped off, I didn't see him anymore. He disappeared like into thin air. They took him away. We didn't know where to. Without a kiss, without a goodbye, he disappeared like into thin air. I never saw him again. Most arrivals were sent directly to the gas chambers, where up to 2 ,000 people could be murdered at once. Guards were walking around and they said, you are here now in Auschwitz-Birkenau. We didn't know what Auschwitz-Birkenau meant. They said, here, they take you straight to the gas chambers. We were so frightened.

30:16Two artillery battalions were sent across a thin layer of ice on the river Vistola and attacked the enemy in the rear. The enemy collapsed in the face of our attack and scrambled to retreat. Our battalions pursued them and got behind the German divisions which were guarding the concentration camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau. With the combined forces, we managed to drive the Germans out and put an end to the bloodthirsty activities of the Nazi camp.

30:54In the weeks leading up to the liberation, the Nazis had tried to hide the evidence of their atrocities, blowing up crematoria and burning documents. They also forced around 56 ,000 prisoners to leave on foot to other camps in the West. During these death marches, thousands of prisoners died from fatigue, exposure, starvation, or were shot by guards for not keeping pace. When our troops moved in, the Nazis saw they did not have time to gas the remaining prisoners. So they started shooting them, spraying the barracks with machine gun fire. When I came there, I saw thousands of dead bodies. The barracks were flooded with blood.

31:42Despite Hitler's order that no prisoner should fall into enemy hands alive, around 7 ,000 prisoners lived, witnesses to the Nazis' war crimes. I had seen a lot of terrible scenes while fighting on the front lines. I saw my comrades dying. I saw signs of German atrocities in the territories we freed. Dozens of people hanged by the Germans, women and children shot to death. What I saw in the camp was beyond any comparison. I saw women and children who resembled skeletons, who couldn't even smile in a human manner. They had tears in their eyes, but they couldn't even sob.

32:29There were 29 warehouses and two were preserved. This is where they kept the executed prisoners' possessions. I was struck by the children's shoes, the children's spectacles and such things. Beside them there were some open boxes and I could see they were filled with different shades of women's hair, blonde and brunette. I said, the Nazis tore so much hair from the heads of the victims. No, they said, this is only a tiny bit of the hair they shaved from the victims' heads to send to Germany to stuff mattresses. What horrors. What monstrous things the fascists did. It was here to see. They showed me a collection of gold teeth, crowns which were kept under guard so no one would tool for them.

33:21All these things bore witness to the cruelty, to the inhumanity of German fascists in the way they punished their unarmed and innocent victims.

33:36General Petrenko never came to terms with the horrors he saw in occupied Poland. In January 1995, he travelled to Israel for a reunion of survivors. As one of the few remaining participants alive, I want to establish an international day for those who became victims of Nazi prison camps. Vicky Farncom told that story using an interview with General Vasily Petrenko recorded by the BBC in 2001. The general died two years later. In 2005, the UN General Assembly established the International Day of Commemoration in Memory of the Victims of the Holocaust. It's held annually on the 27th of January, the anniversary of the day the camp was liberated.

34:23It's estimated that 1.1 million people died there. Almost one million of those were Jewish. Next, it's 100 years since a technological breakthrough that would change the world. Television. A century on, the moving image transmitted to a screen has played a part in the lives of almost everyone on the planet. Clare Bowes has the story. It's January 1926. Men and women in evening dress are gathered in a small attic room in central London. They've been invited by a young Scottish engineer named John Logie Baird. The guests are from the Royal Institution, a highly respected body of scientists established in the late 18th century, and they are about to see the first demonstration of television.

35:11In his memoirs, John Logie Baird recalled... Over 40 members of the institution turned up, mostly distinguished scientists but with a sprinkling of ladies. This gorgeous gathering found they were expected to climb three flights of narrow stone stairs and then to stand in a narrow, drafty passage, while batches of six at a time were brought into two tiny attic rooms which formed my laboratory. In one room was a large whirling disc, a most dangerous device, had they known it, liable to burst at any minute and hop around the room with showers of broken glass. However, all went well, except for one small incident.

35:55One of the visitors who was being transmitted had a long white beard, part of which blew into the wheel. Fortunately, he escaped with the loss of a certain amount of hair. He was a thorough sportsman and took the accident in good part and insisted on continuing the experiment and having his face transmitted. The gathering watched as the bearded guest sat in front of a large spinning disc edged with about 30 lenses, each the size of a bullseye. He was illuminated by a single beam of light projected through the disc. The reflected light was converted by a photoelectric device into a series of electrical signals and transmitted through the air to the room next door, where the image of the bearded man was converted into a picture and could be seen on a glass screen.

36:46Two days later, the London Times reported the successful test of the televisor. The image as transmitted was faint and often blurred but substantiated a claim that through the televisor as Mr Baird has named his apparatus it is possible to transmit and reproduce instantly the details of movement and such things as the play of expression on the face He was quite pleased with the account that the reporter had done in the Times that was accurate to what had been demonstrated so this was excellent But as Logie Baird's grandson Ian explains, this was not to be the last demonstration. The job of convincing the scientists was far tougher than he had imagined.

37:31He said he had to fight, he had to kick, he had to scream, because there were a lot of people who didn't believe that it worked. And so they were trying to manage the perception of the television medium at that time, both Hutchinson, his business manager, and himself, by killing it with repeated demonstrations. And that was their strategy, just to demonstrate as much as possible. But he thought that sometimes he was too much of a fighter, and this wasn't seen as something that was correct for someone in the scientific community. Logie Baird wasn't like most scientists. He had an entrepreneurial spirit, and as well as inventing the technology, he also hoped to manufacture the television receivers or sets.

38:14But he even had trouble convincing technology companies of the value of television. He went to the Marconi company to try and get his system financed because they tried to get money to do more experimentation and they were having a lot of difficulty. So the reason he approached Marconi was basically to develop some kind of arrangement or deal where he could get financing from them. And he sat in their office for quite a while. They kept him waiting and eventually he was brought in to see a Mr. Grey and sat down at the table and he said, do you have any interest in television? And he replied, no, no, I have no interest in it whatsoever.

38:52And that was pretty much the attitude towards television in 1925 was that there was just people who weren't interested in it. And he wrote in his autobiography that it was as if he'd asked Mr. Grey if he was interested in brothels. In the end, it seemed that many people just found the whole idea of being able to broadcast live moving images completely unfathomable. Ian Logie-Baird remembers being told about one encounter his grandfather had with one particularly wary journalist. A very large person came out and asked him all about it and then he left and he found out later that the person who had originally been there to interview him had thought he was a crazy person or a weirdo or something and had gotten the biggest reporter that they had working at the newspaper out there just in case he had a knife on him or something and that was how shocking the story was to people at that time that you could actually do this and send these images.

39:54The idea of transmitting live images may have seemed curious to most people at the time but Logie Baird wasn't the only scientist experimenting with television in the 1920s. So for him, the successful demonstration in front of members of the Royal Institution in January 1926 marked a real turning point. One of the scientists who had come in there, who was actually someone who'd done experiments with television himself, had tried to develop a television system, said, Barrett has got it, and now it's just a matter of pounds, shillings and pence. And for him, this was one of the most positive comments from the whole evening, if not the most positive, because it gave him the confidence to know that he'd gotten the basics of the system working.

40:41It was now just a matter of development. And so the point of invention was passed. What was to come was development. Because on the 26th, before that date, most scientists were saying that you could not send television by breaking the picture down into sections of dark and light and then sending it as a radio signal. the majority opinion had been that you needed separate radio frequencies to transmit each pixel and the entire picture would be sent simultaneously rather than through scanning. And this was a way of him realising that the method that he'd been discouraged from was actually the correct way to produce a television image.

41:20And since then, virtually all television systems have been based on scanning and breaking the image down into light and shade. Logie Baird continued to improve the technology, but despite viewing several demonstrations, the founder of the BBC, John Reith, was still not interested in television. In fact, he thought... It's a potential social menace of the first magnitude. But in 1934, the British government had decided that Britain should have a television service, the first that the world had ever seen. The vision and sound are on. The station goes on the air. This is direct television from the studios at Alexander Palace.

42:02By now, Baird had competition. Marconi EMI, who'd been so unenthusiastic about his concept ten years before, had also developed a television system. It was electronic and used cathode rays. Both produced similar pictures, so in 1936 the BBC began broadcasting using both systems. Marconi EMI, one week from Studio A, the Baird mechanical system the next week from Studio B. Conjured up in sound and sight by the magic rays of light that bring television to you.

42:52It soon became clear that the Marconi EMI pictures were better, and after only three months, the final Baird transmission went out at the end of January 1937. Disappointed but not defeated, John Logie Baird continued his research, and in 1944, he demonstrated the first electronic colour television receiver. John Logie Baird died in 1946. His grandson Ian was speaking to Claire Bowes back in 2010. A moment of sporting history next, and this is the inspiring story of how rugby union came to thrive in Syria despite violent government crackdowns during 2011. Tim O 'Callaghan explains. Emotions was going high like a hell, and we were celebrating even before the last 30 seconds.

43:45And we knew that the game is ours and we will win. That's Mohamed Jaku, and we'll find out what he was celebrating in just a moment. He was the first Syrian to start playing rugby union in the country. And it started when he got an email whilst working for the United Nations, asking for... Interested persons to play rugby for a team. I have no idea who are they and I have no idea what rugby is. That was in 2004. So I said, OK, so why not? Then I found myself in the middle between 12 internationals, most of them working in the British embassy and a few of them French working for the Total Petroleum Company.

44:27That team formed in Damascus in 2004 was called the Zenobians, named after a Syrian queen who ruled the country in the third century. Before their formation, the sport had no real presence in Syria and Mohamed wasn't really sure what to expect when he started playing. I was watching the rugby and see the hacker of the All Blacks and see what game is this? It looks like a violent game but then when I started playing the whole my mind changed completely through the discipline respect to the referee and the way that they have do at the end of the game when they just gathered and shaking hands saying a good regards to the next team who just lost I said this is the game that I would love to continue on playing.

45:10The Zenobians played a version of rugby union called Sevens, a smaller and quicker format than the usual 15-a-side game. Each year they would make an annual pilgrimage to the Dubai Sevens tournament, playing in the Gulfmen's Open division. Dubai Sevens is one of the major tournaments of Sevens in the world. It's a festival of rugby with competitions ranging from international level to amateur. The crowd is completely full. They have like seven stadiums or eight stadiums running around and playing rugby for all the sections. In 2008, Mohamed's team reached the final of the tournament, a feat which grew the awareness of the game in Syria and encouraged more Syrians to take part in the sport.

45:54But in 2011, it looked as though it might become impossible to play rugby or do anything normal in Syria.

46:05Hello, a very good evening and welcome to BBC News. At least 70 people have been killed and many more injured in a day of violent protests against the government in Syria. Opposition activists and human rights groups say it's the highest death toll there in a single day since the demonstrations began five weeks ago. Forces loyal to President Assad are said to have opened fire on protesters in the capital of Damascus and in the cities of Homs and Hama when crowds gathered after Friday prayers. As protests against the Assad government were met with violent crackdowns by the authorities, the international players on the Zenobians began to make their plans to leave Syria.

46:41Well, actually the situation was completely, you know, difficult to understand. What is going on? What is the future? First, the internationals, they haven't left the country at once. they just told us and informed us that this is going to be happening like end of May or end of June and we started to gather and speak loudly and see what is the best scenario for the team to continue. All of us we agreed to participate in Dubai Sevens. So for the first time since their formation in 2004 the Damascus Zenobians sent a team of all Syrians to the Dubai Sevens tournament and Mohamed wasn't just going there to have a good time.

47:27He wanted to win. If we get a chance to be at the final of our, you know, Gelfman Open, which is our section, then we'll have an opportunity to change and comfort the whole situation for us to be having the game and have the stability of the game. Mohamed and his teammates made it through the group stage, then the quarterfinals, the semifinals and... Then the final. The final was against Muscat from Oman. The game was completely stressed for us in the beginning. We couldn't control the game in the first. They scored us first because they were using the key players to score the tries. The big body, actually, the props, they were playing in good positions.

48:13And then when we just understood how would we go, where's the gaps, and we used the gaps very, very well. in the first half we scored the draw and then we scored the second and the second half we go through to score the third and the fourth and then the whole, you know, the business of our emotions was going high like a hell and we were celebrating even before the last 30 seconds and we knew that the game is ours and we will win And with so much turmoil back at home they were going to enjoy it Each player was given a small crystal trophy to celebrate their victory. I remember one of the players was showing the crystal to every single person.

48:57Even at the airplane in the way back he was showing the ladies, see I'm a champion and this is ours, we are the champions. It was a lot of fun in that days. Mohamed was sent a letter by World Rugby, the sports governing body, congratulating the team on their achievements. He used this to convince the Syrian Sports Federation to recognise rugby as an official sport in the country, which led to the formation of the Syrian High Rugby Committee. But as the protests in Syria developed into a full-blown civil war in 2012, trying to play the game became a massive challenge. It was so tough, very difficult.

49:36In order to run a training session, just a training session in bad days, was very, very difficult. because first you have to check the Facebook pages who were just spreading the news more trusted than the media news to understand what is the situation. Is there any bombing into our field that we are planning to go through? That's the first. Secondly, I have to make sure that all the players are in safe before we go ahead and give the final green light. That was so difficult. I remember those days. Mohamed, however, wasn't deterred. At the end of 2014, he reached out to Asia Rugby to get recognition for Syria.

50:20And in May 2015, they were given membership of the organisation. My plan was to participate in international tournament on Asia Rugby Cup. And then once we just finished, return back in Syria and make these players like a good example to follow. I just tried to format a team, a Syrian national team, who participated in India and Chennai in 2016. This team, we have had mostly of them from universities. So once we just returned back, I asked those players to be representing Syria rugby in their universities and start to establish their teams. Within two months, five universities had formed teams and the first sevens tournament was played in Damascus in 2016.

51:06Since then, the game has continued to grow, despite the civil war in Syria not ending until the fall of the Assad regime in December 2024. By 2018, four clubs had a full 15-a-side rugby union team, and women's teams had also been formed, and the country now competes in sevens tournaments in Asia and the Middle East. How proud are you to see how the game of rugby has grown in Syria, especially in such difficult circumstances? I don't know if I can say that I'm proud, but I understand that I have to do my best and keep doing my best up to the end. I dreamed when I was just starting to play rugby in the beginning to wear the Syrian national team jersey and play for the Syrian rugby team.

51:54And I have done this dream now. Rugby in a time of conflict. Mohamed Jaku was speaking to Timo Calhan, this week's sporting witness. and I'll just draw your attention to our ever-growing collection of first-hand sports stories. We've a bit of history from pretty much every sport you can think of. Just search for Sporting Witness wherever you get your BBC podcasts. Finally this week, we're going to hear how, in 1991, a discovery from the past gave us a new insight into human evolution. This is the remarkable story of a 5 ,000-year-old mummy found frozen and perfectly preserved by hikers in Europe's Ötzaal Alps.

52:36Here's Hunter Charlton explaining why the Iceman first proved to be a complete mystery.

52:54That's Dr. Rainer Henn, a forensic pathologist kneeling down to examine the corpse's open mouth. I can only say he's definitely dead. He has been lying here for a long time, probably in the water and a very long time in the ice. Since the body was spotted, rumours began to swirl around its identity. Could it be a missing climber or a soldier from the Second World War? We can only make further determinations once we are in sight. That is, in forensic medicine, was necessary tools and instruments to determine the age, gender, and if we're lucky, also the identity. However, keeping his thoughts private, it began to dawn on Reiner that the body was different from others he'd previously encountered.

53:46Speaking to the BBC the following year, he explained what caught his eye. When I first saw this body, this body was a little bit strange for me because it was not a typical body from the glacier. Usually it's changed in adiposea and this body was completely mummified. That means the body was dried and when it was completely dried then it was covered with snow and ice. In most cases when a body decomposes, The flesh turns into a white waxy substance called adiposea. But when this person died, their flesh had dried out and then frozen. It had mummified. And Rainer was about to get another big clue.

54:29There was something strange about it. Later on, we found a knife which was made of wood and stone. And so I got the idea this body must be very, very old.

54:45As Rayner and the mountain rescue team began excavating the body, they found artefacts littered around the gravesite including a copper axe, arrowheads, clothes and an ornamental marble bead. Rayner's primary concern was to get the body back to his institute for examination. It was flown off the glacier and taken 150 kilometres to Innsbruck, where the archaeologist Konrad Spindler was summoned to examine the remains. After spending just a few minutes with the body and artefacts, he called a press briefing.

55:22When I first saw the body, along with the accompanying artefacts at 8 o 'clock this morning, it was immediately clear that it was a prehistoric find. These items are so typical of the early Bronze Age that there can be no doubt about the age being 2000 BC, 4000 years ago. Amid flashing cameras and the stunned silence of reporters, Konrad composed himself and then continued. The combination of metal tools and stone tools indicates that we are in a transitional phase from the Stone Age to the Bronze Age. During this time, humans still use stone artefacts such as this small delicate dagger blade, as well as the stone tool he possesses in his sheaf.

56:16However, the first metal objects also began to appear. This axe here is an excellent representative of its kind and poses no dating problems for the archaeologist. That is what makes this find so extraordinary. There are finds of human bodies that have been mummified in dry desert sand, but a corpse from an alpine glacier from this period has not yet been recovered. If it were just the human alone, it would already be of great scientific significance. In this case, however, thanks to the meticulous findings of Professor Henn, there is equipment that is unique in its kind.

57:06But the journalist's question soon turned to why and how the person had died where they did. So there's a certain possibility that he was hunting. A second possibility is that he was working as a prospector. With rich deposits of copper across the Alps, Conrad thought they might be searching for an ore outcrop. But he had other theories too. Of course, one can also think of more mundane possibilities, such as him simply crossing the mountain to visit his girlfriend in the neighbouring valley. Whether he was hunting, prospecting or simply looking for his girlfriend, what they could all agree on was the exceptional nature of the find.

57:52You know, scientists don't like to use words like a momentous discovery or find of the century or other such terms. Using superlatives, however, in this case, it truly seems justified that even the dry scientist gets a little excited and allows himself to be carried away by words that aren't normally part of his vocabulary. But there was no time to celebrate. Conrad had a problem. The body had thawed, fungal spores had developed on its surface, It was decomposing rapidly. We will probably have to seek advice from our Soviet colleagues who have already gained some experience in preserving frozen bodies from Siberia.

58:42The second step will be the scientific analysis. A programme will need to be designed for this as well. Part of the scientific investigation will concern the body itself. This means that all anatomical, forensic, histological, serological, cytological, bacteriological and other examinations, including the determination of stomach contents, will need to be conducted.

59:17With all the excitement and avenues of research, Conrad was also getting swept up in the frenzy of it all. In the 1997 BBC documentary, Ice Mummies, he reflected... It was only later, when I had a few minutes of quiet, that the thought came to me that this perhaps is what my colleague Howard Carter experienced when he opened the sarcophagus of Tutankhamun and looked into the face of the pharaoh. Perhaps what I experienced was similar to what he felt at the time. Placing the corpse in a sub-zero environment, scientists halted its decomposition. They examined the pelvic bones and determined his gender was male.

1:00:00They nicknamed him Ötzi, after the Ötztel region he was found in. And carbon dating would later confirm he was 5 ,300 years old, making Ötzi the world's oldest frozen person. But, as Spindler explained, countless mysteries remained. In my opinion, research on the man in ice will never end because science is developing new methods. There are new research approaches and colleagues in 10, 20 or 50 years will still have plenty to research on the Iceman.

1:00:39And indeed, ten years later, in 2001, they did make an enormous discovery. The true cause of Ötzi's death was blood loss. He'd been struck by an arrow in his left shoulder. The archaeologist Conrad Spindler and forensic pathologist Rainer Henn were talking to the BBC and to Austria's national broadcaster, Österreichische Rundfunk. Hunter Charlton told their story in that Embra production for the BBC World Service. And that's it for this edition of the History Hour. We'll have more for you next week. So until then, this is Max Pearson from all of us here. Thanks for listening. Goodbye. Sporting Witness takes you to the events that have shaped the sports world through the eyes of the people who were there.

1:01:24We weren't going to ask permission. We're just going to do it. It was such an amazing feeling. It was incredible. He started to write a story about how he came up with the idea for the red and yellow cars. I got to go. We cried a bit. We laughed a bit. It was wonderful. There's a magic during those moments that carries your soul. We were truly blessed to be a part of history. Sporting Witness. Subscribe wherever you get your BBC podcasts.

1:01:51True crime meets history with a twist in a new series of Lady Killers. Join me as we travel back in time to investigate the most astonishing lady killers of the 19th and 20th centuries. We visit the scene of the crime and we delve deep into their lives to ask, how did they do it? Why did they do it? What drove them to it? Watch Lady Killers with Lucy Worsley on BBC.com. It all starts with a subscription to BBC.com. Find out more at BBC.com slash unlimited.