Podcast on the 1st Frankfurt Auschwitz Trial
The six-part podcast from the Hessian State Archives doesn’t even have a real title. And you don’t get too close to the Wiesbaden archivist Johann Zilien if you call his speaking skills modest. In short: the presentation could be more professional. But: a crisp name and an eloquent lecture are irrelevant. The notable content is central. The principle of orality applies in German courts. But in the 1st Frankfurt Auschwitz Trial, in which former SS members were charged with murder from 1963, statements were recorded on tape. Since 2017, the more than 400 hours of recordings have been part of the world document heritage and are accessible online (auschwitz-prozess.de). Johann Zilien has now selected some exemplary audio documents that he contextualizes. And so, within an hour, he gives a clear impression of the atmosphere in court in this criminal case, which is so important for the Federal Republic of Germany. Stefan Fischer
How armed is Germany?
Do you know how armed your neighborhood is? Probably not. And so far it has been difficult to get an answer to. It is made easier by the enormous research work of the internet radio and podcast label detektor.fm in cooperation with students of the master’s degree in journalism at the University of Leipzig. They asked 541 weapons authorities and conducted interviews with police officers, politicians, shooters, weapons experts, scientists and officials. In four ten-minute episodes that tend to be too short, a special series within the podcast Back to the topic form, they describe the research process in a journalistically transparent and pointed manner and underpin the data with, in some cases, unsettling quotes. So much can be spoiled: It is easier to find out the number of registered convertibles with more than 150 hp than reliable information about who has which and how many weapons. You can now do this on the associated Website see broken down by district. Lina Wölfel
Welcome to your fantasy
The anecdotes alone are worth the podcast. How a group of strippers oiled with breast muscles met an exclusively female audience in Los Angeles in 1979, how they shouted “Take it off” and at some point also “We want meat”. Like founder Somen “Steve” Banerjee, a fan of Hugh Hefner, who conceived dancers as equivalent to the Playboy “Bunnies”. And how these strippers met the zeitgeist with their hair dryer waves, mustaches and terminator bodies. In eight episodes – in English – the historian and fitness trainer Natalia Petrzela tells the story of the Chippendales, the most famous male strip group in the world – and lets those who were there at the time also have their say. Not without correcting for the listener when one or the other memory was obscured by past fame. “On the first evening we put the number on, all the women in the front row passed out,” one thinks he remembers. Petrzela makes it clear: not true. Welcome to your fantasy is not a nostalgic podcast, but pure true crime. Because behind the glittering facade of sex, drugs and a lot of money hid corruption, racism, struggles for power and murder. Carolin Gasteiger
The Djatlow massacre
What do you do when a story is so gruesome, gruesome and enigmatic, in short: so big that it doesn’t really take anything more than reality to captivate listeners? You use as a rough frame? Just recap the facts? Even cut them down? At the end of February 1959, the bodies of nine young ski tourers were found at what would later become known as the Djatlow Pass in the northern Urals, with their skulls smashed, ribs broken, and burnt flesh. A victim lacks eyes and a tongue; the few items of clothing of the climbers who fled the tent barefoot and half-naked at minus 30 degrees contain radioactive substances. The disaster leads to an investigation that was discontinued in May 1959 and inspires fantasists. Was it the indigenous mansi, nuclear weapons tests, the yeti, aliens? Or is it just an avalanche? Robert Weber invented a character for his nine-part radio play podcast, which is characterized by leaps in time, the fictional son of the expedition leader Igor Djatlow, who travels to the scene as a journalist in 1989 to find out what happened. A decision that Djatlow jun. will soon regret. Dominik Prantl
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