Nigeria’s Festac’77 and Gander’s generosity during 9/11

28:04Although Hitler promises moderation, the law he proposes will end parliamentary democracy.

28:14The Social Democratic Party's Otto Wels is the only voice that dares to say no. He stands before the Reichstag. Freedom and life can be taken away from us, but not honour.

28:42After the persecutions that the Social Democratic Party has recently experienced, no one will be able to reasonably demand and expect it to vote for the enabling law introduced here. Velt speaks with courage and warns of the consequences of the Enabling Act. Never before since there was a German Reichstag has the control of public affairs by the elected representatives of the people been switched off to the extent that is happening now and is supposed to happen even more through the new Enabling Act.

29:27Such omnipotence of the government must have all the more serious repercussions inasmuch as the press, too, lacks any freedom of expression.

29:42The recording of Welz's speech cuts out, but the following words are taken from the stenographic report from the session. Welz criticises Hitler's Nazi party. If the gentlemen of the National Socialist Party wanted to carry out socialist deeds, they would not need an enabling act. you would be certain of the overwhelming majority in the House. Nevertheless, you want to shut down the Reichstag for the time being in order to continue your revolution. He talks about the achievements of his own party. We helped to create a Germany in which not only princes and barons, but also men from the working class had the opportunity to lead the state.

30:27you cannot go back on that without giving up on your own leader. As Weltz speaks, he is frequently heckled by Nazi party members. But he continues. The attempt to turn back the wheel of history will remain futile. We see the power political reality of your current rule, but the people's sense of justice is also a political power and we will not stop appealing to this sense of justice. And a pledge from Wels. In this historic hour, we German social democrats solemnly pledge ourselves to the principles of humanity and justice, of freedom and socialism. No enabling act gives you the power to destroy ideas that are eternal and indestructible.

31:20His final words are not just for the chamber, but for the people, for those already suffering under Nazi rule, a message of solidarity, of hope. We greet the persecuted and the oppressed. We greet our friends in the Reich. Your steadfastness and loyalty deserve admiration. The courage of your convictions and your unbroken optimism guarantee a brighter future. Hitler mocks Vels and the Social Democrats. You are no longer needed.

32:12The star of Germany will rise and yours will sink.

32:28Goring, the Reichstag president, announces the vote. Meine Damen und Herren, wir kommen jetzt zur Schlussabstimmung.

32:40The vote proceeds.

32:47There are 444 votes for, 94 votes against. The Enabling Act passes. Otto Welsz's Social Democrats stand alone. Hitler has unrestricted powers

33:09The voice of Otto Weltz was the last to speak freely in the Reichstag His speech did not stop the Enabling Act but is now viewed as heroic Weltz fled the country He died in Paris in 1939 two weeks after the start of World War II He has been described as Germany's bravest man in the fight against Hitler. Jill Kersley with the story of the Enabling Act. Five years later and the Second World War was about to get underway. It would send shockwaves around the globe, including in Southeast Asia, which became a haven for more than a thousand Jews fleeing Nazi Germany. Here's Megan Jones. It's 1938, and in Manila, the capital of the Philippines, it's hot and humid.

34:06Arriving into the harbour, on board a ship is a seven-year-old Jewish girl called Lottie Hirschfeld. When we left Germany, we felt, well, it's going to be so hot there. We're going to wear the tropical helmets, and we're going to wear knee socks, and we're going to wear white shorts. Four weeks earlier, she was in Breslau, then part of Germany, now known as Rothschild in Poland. It was exceedingly warm, but there were coconut trees, banana trees, and being a child and not having to wear heavy clothing and so forth, it was quite good for us. The journey was long. This place is unfamiliar. I was asked by someone, what made you go to Manila in the Philippines?

34:56and a very simple answer. We needed to get away from Hitler and we needed to get into a city or to a country that let us in. By 1935, life in Nazi Germany had become impossible for Jewish families. The Jews were systematically excluded from German life. The 1935 Nuremberg Laws outlawed marriage between Jews and other Germans and declared that Jews were not German citizens. When my cousin and I would go to the park, we would see a bench. We'd take our little doll carriages, but we couldn't sit on the benches because the bench had dogs and Jews not allowed. By 1937, when Lottie's father was fired from his job at a liquor company, the family started looking for a way out.

35:51My dad was wise enough to know no sense going to anywhere in Europe because Hitler will get there. Thousands of Jews emigrated from Germany during the 1930s, realising that there could never be a fair or safe place for them in German society for as long as the Nazis ruled. But as it became more difficult to find a safe haven, more than 10 ,000 kilometres away, one nation was willing to help. It was a friend of my dad's who had been in the Philippines, done some electrical work. He had come back to Germany and he said, you know, we have to get out. The Philippines are all right. The president has left the door open for us to come there.

36:39They are willing to let 10 ,000 come in. President Manuel Cason's policy would give Lottie's family and many others a lifeline in the Philippines. Although, little did they know, the sanctuary would only be temporary. After auctioning off their possessions, Lottie, her brother and parents fled to the city of Marseille in the south of France. I could not understand why my mother was perennially crying. This was a little beyond me. They went on trains, ships and used horse and carts, travelling through around 10 countries, including Italy, Egypt and Sri Lanka, which was formerly known as Ceylon.

37:21Their final stop on the long journey was a guest house in Manila in the Philippines. What seemed strange was mosquito nets had never seen that. We decided, oh, well, who needs that? But in the morning, I had 46 mosquito bites. So at that point, mosquito nets became very important. Adapting to a new life wasn't always easy. Having kept kosher, this became a problem. But someone knew, a man, a shokhet, who slaughtered chickens in Shanghai. The community brought the man over to the Philippines and Mr Han, who was the shoget, began killing kosher chickens. We had Filipino friends. We began to learn Tagalog, which is the Philippine language, and our parents learned English.

38:25Then came a surprise attack on Pearl Harbour, the US naval base in Hawaii, leading to this declaration by US President Franklin Roosevelt. I ask that the Congress declare that since the unprovoked and dastardly attack by Japan on Sunday, December 7th, 1941, a state of war has existed between the United States and the Japanese Empire. Hours after Pearl Harbour was targeted, Japan turned its sights to the Philippines, where the US had colonial power. We were being bombed by the Japanese and it was generally 12 planes that came every noontime and they bombed. Lottie's sanctuary suffered widespread destruction and blackouts were enforced.

39:22My mother had nothing in black cover the windows, So she took an umbrella that she had, she ripped it open, and she covered the dining room chandelier. However, that night was a Japanese air raid, and because the cloth and the bulbs were hot, the whole thing began to light up. The Americans came in, and they claimed that we were sending signals to the Japanese. Not long after, Japan seized control of the Philippines. We were very unhappy with the Japanese occupation. The natives were starving. It was a very difficult time. We had hoped to get away from one oligarch and here we came right into the smack in the middle of another.

40:16By 1945, the US had taken back the Philippines, a key step towards the end of World War II. The American flag went up and we were beside ourselves. My dad had kept two or three bottles of liquor, of whiskey, and we all went out on the street and there was a whole group of Texas Rangers, I believe they were. They were marching in, they had come into Manila and we were passing out liquor to them. Around eight years after arriving in Manila and with the city left in ruins, Lottie's father decided it was time for the family to leave. Those of us who had no citizenship, we had to have relatives in the United States.

41:07And we were lucky to find a cousin in Baltimore, Maryland. and these people were kind enough not knowing us and we not knowing them to give us the visas and to give us the papers to come to the United States. Once again, they packed their lives into bags and stepped into the unknown. We did not know anything about winter at that point. We didn't know anything about winter clothes. and we did not know English that well. Lottie eventually settled in Connecticut where she worked in a library. Decades later, Manila has stayed close to her heart. As I'm getting old now and I'm beginning to look at Manila again, the other day I got really homesick.

42:01Somehow I remembered a good many things. I don't believe that President Quezon of the Philippines and that whole period of 1 ,300 families being saved has been given enough credit. We are still more than Schindler saved. I am here today because of Filipinos. The voice of Lottie Hirschfeld, now aged 94, speaking to Megan Jones. Her story and that of the Enabling Act in Germany will be added to our Second World War collection on the website. Go to bbc.com slash witness history to find it. Now, this week's sporting witness. And this is the story of the Indian long-distance swimmer, Bula Chowdhury, who in 2004 became the first woman to complete the challenge of crossing straits, connecting or separating the world's seven seas.

43:02In 2020, she spoke to Maya Mitter about her career.

43:10I dream about it, especially seven seas.

43:18Bula Chaudhry has created history with epic long-distance sea swims around the world, which began in the chilly waters of the English Channel when she was just 19. When I threw myself into the English water for the first time, I never thought I could cross it because it was unbearable clone. As a girl, Bula was enchanted by a fairy tale about a prince crossing the seven seas to find her. But as an adult, it was Bula, not the prince who was crossing the waters. When I started, it was my dream to cross the seven seas. By crossing one by one, I realized that I have already become the first woman in the world.

44:01By the end of her extraordinary quest, Bula had swum seven different sea crossings on five different continents. She was the first woman in the world to achieve this.

44:17Bula grew up in a small town called Hind Motor in West Bengal. She loved the water from the very start. I was not interested in going to school and other kinds of stuff. I played with water wherever the water was there. I mean, in the bucket or anywhere, I used to play with that. And in my house, there is a pond nearby. My father used to take me there and he used to teach me swimming. So when I was two years old, I learned from that age. Her parents could see that Bula was special and decided to enroll her in a swimming club near the river Ganges. It was then when the coach told my parents that I am a born swimmer.

44:59He promised them that he will make me a champion one day. It was not long before her coach's words came true. Bhoola first became India's junior national champion when she was only nine years old and started representing India internationally aged just 12. At the 1991 South Asian Federation Games, Bula won six gold medals for her country. How did it feel to be representing your country and winning at such a young age? I cannot verbalize the feeling on the winning podium as the national anthem was being played. When I saw my national flag on the top, I felt like I am on cloud nine while I was standing on the podium.

45:47In the middle of all her success in the pool, Bula overheard a conversation that would change her life. They were talking about long-distance swimmers, and the stories of their exploits stirred something deep inside of Bula, taking her back to when she was a little girl playing with the water. I used to dream during my childhood that a prince will come by crossing seven seas and marry me. In Bengali, I say that... This is a story in Bengali. So it was in my mind and dream that one day that story, it will come in reality. Gula was determined to try to go from the swimming pool to the high seas.

46:29But despite all of her successes over short distances, many people told her that she couldn't swim long distances simply because she was a woman. In my small village where I grew up, people used to judge based on gender. A girl has boundaries. People always say, no, you can't do it. Why not? Why not? So my challenge was there that why not? I will definitely, I will going to do this. For her first sea crossing, Bula had set her sights on one of the most infamous stretches of water in the world, the English Channel, the sea between England and France. I went to London at the age of 19 with hardly any knowledge about the English Channel.

47:16There is a big difference between the weather of India and England. The water around Mumbai is warm all year round. The water in the English Channel is cold at the best of times and a lot colder than the water Bula had been training in.

47:37I will say one thing, that when I went to the first day, I remember, I could not stay there for 15 minutes. It was so cold.

47:49Back on dry land, Bula gave herself a talking to as she shivered with the cold. You came, Bula, all the way from India to England. You cannot go back like that. You have to do something. You have to cross the English Channel. So I bear all the pain, all the cold, and from 15 minutes, I went up to 12 hours. As well as the cold, Bula's body was becoming covered in painful rashes, a reaction to something that had bitten her in the water. And it had unbearable pain, and it is so much painful that I could not sleep full night. Despite it all, on September 12th, 1989, Bula set out to cross the channel from the beach at Dover across 21 miles of cold, choppy water to the coast of France.

48:45Ten hours and 55 minutes later, she arrived. So I continued the cold and crossed the English Channel. As for the first time, I set my feet in France. I could breathe the fragrance of France with happiness as tears of joy came pouring out of my eyes while I said to myself, yes, I did it. So after that first long-distance swim, at only 19, you went back to competing in the pool. And it was many years before you next took the waves, right? And you know, after my son born, I motivated myself, my believing that a mother can take bigger challenges than anyone else. Ten years after Bula first crossed the English Channel, she returned to cross it again, becoming the first Asian woman to cross it twice.

49:40From that point on, there was no stopping Bula. She began to take on epic sea swims across the world, from Gibraltar to New Zealand. In 2000, I crossed Gibraltar State in Spain. I broke the world record over there. I crossed the New Zealand Cook State. I have made Asian record there. Then Robben Island to the mainland of South Africa, the Turinian Gulf in Greece and the Catalina Channel off the coast of California. I had encountered many difficulties during those things. You know, while crossing the Catalina Channel, I heard some shout telling me, look down, Bula, look down. So while I looked down, I saw two big eyes under the water.

50:24And I still didn't know what was that. Later on, I realized that was a big sunfish. On August the 20th, 2004, Bula completed the last of her seven sea crossings, the Polk Strait between India and Sri Lanka. After nearly 14 hours of swimming, a crowd waited for her on the beach to cheer her home. She had become the first woman in the world to cross seven sea channels on five different continents. Becoming the first woman in the world, it's not an easy thing. And coming from the Middlecast family, it's a great thing and great feelings.

51:13You can do anything you want and you can inspire others, other women too that if you're getting married, if you're getting a child that's not the life end and I'll say that is the starting you can start again and do whatever you want Buna Chowdhury was speaking to Maya Mitter in 2020 for Sporting Witness it was a Made in Manchester production we're going back to 1969 and the publication of The Peter Principle which put forward the suggestion that promotion leads to incompetence. Alex Lass tells the story of its conception with the help of archive interviews. When I was a boy, I used to believe my parents and believe my teachers and that you should have respect for your elders and betters and that the men upstairs knew what they were doing.

51:58And I was taught that the more I would know, the further I would go. So I stayed in school, I got a degree, eventually got a teaching certificate, I went out to teach. and the first school I taught in, the principal was primarily concerned that the children did not step on the rose beds and education seemed to be the furthest thing from his mind. I saw teachers and administrators that seemed incompetent and I started to question some of these ideas I had. In the early 1960s, the Canadian teacher, academic and psychologist, Dr Lawrence J. Peter was fascinated by a funny, if rather weighty question.

52:34why, he pondered, were so many people clearly incompetent at their jobs. As evidence, he later told the BBC, was not exactly hard to find. As I looked around me, I saw a sign on the door that said, Emergency Exit, Authorised Personnel Only. I wondered who'd written that. But then later I saw another sign that said, Emergency Exit, Not to be Used Under Any Circumstances. He started to develop a theory to explain the rampant incompetence he witnessed would become known as the Peter Principle. The Peter Principle states very simply that in any hierarchy, an employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence.

53:19That's where he stays. You see, in any organisation where competence is essentially eligibility for promotion and incompetence is a bar to promotion, wherever those rules apply, people will rise to the level of incompetence and tend to stay there. Incompetence, he observed, was everywhere in hierarchies as people climbed the promotion ladder. As he put it, the cream rises until it sours. A competent salesman, a man who was just terrific at dealing with people. His sales were so good that they made him sales manager. And in this position, he'd found his level of incompetence because he was atrocious at the paperwork, atrocious at designing territories for a salesman.

54:06In other words, he was not good at dealing through other people or organizing other people. I saw competent engineers getting promoted to supervisory positions. They were great at dealing with things and incompetent at dealing with people. And the competent teacher may be incompetent as a department head. At the top of this hierarchy, I saw the headmaster, who frequently was a very competent teacher. When he came to this position of manager of this school, he'd found his level of incompetence. And there he'll remain until he retires or death or something removes him from this position. And so the system promoted them from what they could do to something they couldn't do.

54:51then in 1963 dr peter met an ally the playwright raymond hull he became a convert to the incompetence theory after the pair watched a calamitous amateur theater production by an actor who mistakenly thought he could also direct so together the pair wrote a book titled the peter principle why things always go wrong it was a satire and parody of management theory and so it was chock full of wonderful made-up jargon. Reaching your level of incompetence would induce final placement syndrome. Among the symptoms were rigor cartis, an obsession with organization and charts, or perhaps tabulatory gigantism, an incompetent boss's insistence on a bigger desk.

55:35And then, of course, there were the classic symptoms of blaming subordinates, stress and self-pity. The individual often will be successful, feel happy, and then he gets to a position, which I call his level of incompetence, in which he's frustrated. He's no longer getting the satisfaction. He knows somehow that he isn't doing the job too well. This is where the person starts to develop tension, become bad-tempered, start blaming other people. So the individual may suffer all kinds of syndromes. All this incompetence, Dr. Peter insisted, had consequences, not just for the individual, but for society at large.

56:14The social implications are very significant. When a person reaches his level of incompetence, he bungles his job, frustrates his co-workers, and erodes the efficiency of the organisation. After many rejections, the book was published in 1969 and became a bestseller. By the time of Dr. Peter's death in 1990, it had sold more than 8 million copies, and it's still in print. The Peter Principle entered pop culture, a kind of funny shorthand to explain incompetent bosses, perhaps because to many its satirical core idea also had a ring of truth. But could it actually be real? Well, to investigate, a recent study did look at what happened to sales teams in hundreds of companies across the US.

57:01The economist Professor Kelly Hsu from Yale was one of the study's authors. We first found that being a top sales performer leads to a very large probability in that that person will be promoted. We also find being twice as good at sales as someone else actually corresponds to the manager being about six percent worse in that the manager lowers the performance of all of his or her subordinates by about 6%. So what to do? The thing is, there's a problem. Studies also found that if you don't promote the people who are doing well or bring in a manager who lacks their staff's technical know-how, well, the workers don't like that either.

57:42Firms are struggling with this because they feel pressure to promote based upon current performance for at least two reasons. The first is this type of promotion policy does really work at incentivising workers to work harder and exert more effort. And the second reason is we found evidence of pretty strong discouragement effects. So if firms were to deviate from this policy, and let's say they promote a lower performing sales worker because they believe that person actually has more management potential, higher ranked sales workers appear to be discouraged. They lower their performance and are much more likely to leave the firm afterwards.

58:24So there's a retention problem that occurs if firms deviate from this policy of promoting based upon current performance. So what's the solution? To avoid the Peter principle, Kelly Hsu suggests companies could create an alternative career path where skilled workers are properly rewarded in their existing field with more money or status instead of forcing them to seek promotion to a managerial role. And if that's too logical, well interestingly another study suggested simply promoting people at random would also achieve better results. There is, of course, another way out. According to Dr. Peter's theory, all good work is done by those who haven't yet been promoted to their level of incompetence.

59:07So if you want to escape the promotion trap, the Peter Principle suggests one intriguing solution, creative incompetence. deliberately pretend to be bad at a small irrelevant aspect of the job you're good at and that way you'll never be offered promotion. And remember, says Dr Lawrence J. Peter, being promoted may not necessarily be good for you. And this is where the big question about the Peter Principle arises. Should we go throughout life being conditioned to keep on accepting that next reward? To keep on running like a squirrel in a cage? Or should we use our ability to be rational and think about, where am I going?

59:51What is the purpose of my life? Is reward through promotion the reward for me? This is where the Peter Principle, written as satire, to help people laugh at the problem, can actually help people make some of these very important decisions in their own lives. Alex Last used archive interviews of Dr Lawrence J. Peter in 2021 to tell the story of the Peter Principle. Well, our purpose is to continue to provide an ever-growing archive of first-hand testimony from the past, and to that end, not exactly like squirrels in a cage, we'll be back with another History Hour for you next week. But that's it for now.

1:00:31This is Max Pearson. From all of us here, thanks for listening. Goodbye. Imagine being here. Scientists have made the atomic bomb. The first one was dropped on a Japanese city this morning. Here. During the meeting, Mr. Mandela was informed of the government's decision regarding his release. And here. Witnesses have spoken of a wall of water that swept coastlines in Sri Lanka, Indonesia, Thailand. Hear from the people who were there. He heard me praying while he was shooting and he just stopped. He said, I'm not going to. I'm going to leave you here to tell the story. Knowing that you have a spy and that you're following a spy, it doesn't get any cooler than that.

1:01:08Witness History brings you first-hand accounts. Merkel gets up and says, I'm going, and Tusk says, I'm locking the door, nobody's leaving, you're reaching a compromise or you're not leaving this room. Was it shopping carts that made you rich? Well, they didn't make me poor. Listen now. Search for Witness History wherever you get your BBC podcasts.

1:01:54The Mysteries of Homer

1:02:00and again. For everything you need to know about the Odyssey, check out Dan Snow's history hit wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Simon Jack. I'm Zing Zing. And on Good Bad Billionaire, we're exploring the life and fortune of music megastar Sir Paul McCartney. Macca. As one of the primary songwriters in The Beatles, and with an extensive solo career, his work generates vast and continuous royalty streams. But were song royalties alone enough to break the billion? And earn him the title of the first British billionaire rock star. Find out in Good Bad Billionaire from the BBC World Service. Listen now, search for Good Bad Billionaire wherever you get your BBC podcasts.