The Documentary Podcast Folgen

When the Russian Orthodox Church set up its own outpost in Africa in late 2021, just months before the invasion of Ukraine, it was considered a blatant challenge to the historic authority of the Patriarch of Alexandria and All Africa. It sparked a major split in the global Orthodox community. Moscow’s move was in response to Alexandria’s support for the newly independent Orthodox Church of Ukraine. But it was also an opportunity for Russia to try to extend its influence across the African continent. Lucy Ash hears how priests in Kenya have been lured into joining the Russian Orthodox Church and asks whether President Vladimir Putin’s crusade for hearts and minds will succeed.

Migration is high on the political agenda in countries across Europe, as the number of asylum seekers rises once more. As well as those who risk life and limb on flimsy boats in the Mediterranean, thousands more come via the Balkans, many of them through Turkey and across the border into Bulgaria. They don’t stay there long. Their preferred destinations are further west, Germany perhaps or Britain. And while the migrants’ stories have become well-known in recent years, we hear relatively little from the people who enable their journeys, the people smugglers.For Assignment, Nick Thorpe has been to the north-west of Bulgaria, where it meets Serbia to the west and Romania across the Danube to the north. There he meets two men who worked as drivers for a smuggling organisation, shuttling migrants from Sofia, the capital, to the border.

Jo Glanville meets Berliners who have researched the stories of the Jewish families who once lived in their homes. Marie, Hugh, Anke and Matthias all became fascinated by the history of the families who lived in their flats before them when the Nazis were in power and wanted to find out what happened to them. Their discoveries are an intimate portrait of how lives were turned upside down and offer a new way of honouring the memory of Berliners who lost everything in the Holocaust. Jo visits one of the surviving residents - 95-year-old Ruth, now living in the UK, who vividly remembers what it was like to grow up in Nazi Germany. She tracks down the house in Berlin where her own mother spent part of her childhood. It is a journey that uncovers the past through forgotten family stories, revealing how the Nazis deprived Jews of the right to live in their homes.