Contemporary

This BBC six-episode documentary film series presents the story of Auschwitz and the Holocaust through interviews with former inmates and guards and re-enactments. The first episode explores the beginnings of Auschwitz, and how the camp was originally intended for a purpose very different from that of the genocide of the Jews.

Moscow, 31 December 1991: the Red Flag of the Kremlin is pulled down and replaced by the three-coloured banner of Russia, marking the end of the Soviet Union and of its ideologies. Illustrated with testimonies of top protagonists and Mikhail Gorbachev himself, the documentary recounts, day by day, the critical last two years that led to the fall of the largest and one of the most totalitarian empires of the 20th century.

The story of America's most notorious gangster, Al Capone, starts on the streets of Brooklyn. In 1913, at the age of 14, Capone starts running errands for local gangsters - just one of many immigrants struggling to survive. One day, young Al Capone gets caught in a police raid. He quickly grabs what money he can, evades police, and runs to the headquarters of mob boss Johnny Torrio. Torrio rewards Capone for his quick-thinking. When Torrio recognizes Capone's intelligence and drive, he takes him under his wing.

How did Hitler decide he was a messiah and persuade a whole nation to follow him to damnation? This is a subject that has been mined many times in fiction - Raiders Of The Lost Ark, Constantine, Hellboy, Bulletproof Monk and English horror writer James Herbert's book The Spear - as well as documentary. Based on Ken Anderson's 1995 book of the same name, this aims to show how the Nazi party was originally made up of several occult groups that believed a messiah was on the way to save Germany.

Last in series about the Nazi concentration camp looks at the fate of the remaining prisoners and their guards. Uncovers how many survivors faced appalling treatment in their home countries and how many guards escaped justice.

Between 1850 and 1950, three cataclysmic revolutions shook China to the core, but out of them, today's China emerged. The film begins in Canton with the meeting of a US missionary and a Chinese student. Inspired by the Christian story and calling himself God's second son, Hong unleashed the bloodiest war of the 19th century, the Taiping Rebellion.
As imperial China weakened, foreign influence grew. Treaty ports expanded, bringing growth and wealth, trams, railways and western sensibilities. But this provoked another surge of violence, the Boxer Rebellion, an attack against the foreigners, which was crushed by those same foreigners, who extorted a huge indemnity - $60 billion in today's money.
Then in 1912, the empire fell, and many groups contested China's future. In World War I, China sent 100,000 men to the western front, only to be humiliated at Versailles when German colonies in China were handed to Japan. Between the two world wars, the disparity between rich and poor, city and countryside increased. We visit Hong Kong's Peninsular Hotel in the jazz age and then follow Mao on the Long March to Yan'an, the heartland of revolution.
World War II came to China two years earlier than it did in the west. Wood talks to a survivor of the Japanese massacre of Nanjing in 1937 and then charts the triumph of the communists, before ending the story with Mao's death and the boom time of the last 30 years. The series ends with the warmth of the Chinese family and, at Beijing's Altar of Heaven, a final haunting glimpse of eternal China.