The History Podcast

In the concluding chapter of How Houdini Made Magic, Derren Brown explores how even in death, Houdini knew how to ensure his legend would endure. The legendary death-defier would eventually fall, not to a locked water cell or an icy river, but to a ruptured appendix after a fateful backstage punch in Montreal. Worn out by relentless spiritualist crusades, heavy lawsuits, and mounting mortality, a...

World War I and the Spanish Flu caused devastation. Estimates are that up to 120 million people died as a result of both in 6 years - many of them relatively young. It led to the revival of an already popular new religion: Spiritualism. Spiritualists believe that human souls survive bodily death and can communicate with the living. Harry Houdini, the great mystifier, had some experience with the r...

During the filming of the 1919 film, The Grim Game, there was a real-life mid-air plane crash. The star of the movie was the greatest escape artist of all time: Harry Houdini. So how did the producers capitalise on the crash? By telling the press that Houdini was on that plane and survived near certain death. He was not on the plane; it was a stunt double (who did survive). But the public didn’t n...

“It was the making of Houdini”. That’s how one magician described Houdini’s dramatic “Mirror Handcuff escape”. In London’s Hippodrome, in 1904, Houdini wowed the 4000 gripped audience members as he broke free from handcuffs designed by the Daily Illustrated Mirror to be impossible to escape. The resulting international media coverage was seismic for Houdini’s career. But was it a masterful escape?...

Documentary evidence shows that when Harry Houdini first arrived in the UK, he struck up a friendship, of sorts, with a man who would go on to pioneer British espionage. A man who would go on to be the inspiration for the character “M” in Ian Fleming’s James Bond. It begs the question: Beyond the handcuffs and the stage, did the world's most famous mystifier, Houdini, lead a double life as an inte...

When an authoritarian empire threatens to brand you a fraud and destroy your legacy, how do you fight back? Derren Brown explores the high-stakes legal battles that helped cement Houdini’s European triumph. Arriving in a hostile Berlin where the Imperial police aggressively censored entertainment, Houdini accepted the ultimate challenge, stripping naked before 300 officers to free himself from Ger...

Houdini had made it big in America. At the very start of the 20th century, however, the pinnacle for performers was not the fledgling States, but Europe. So Houdini boarded a ship to London, where he learned how to make noise. Derren Brown explores the brilliant promotional playbook that set Houdini miles ahead of his contemporaries. Stepping off the boat in London and charming the sceptics at Sco...

Houdini almost gave up on the act that would make him a star: the handcuff escape. But with his wife’s encouragement, he persisted. And it paid off. Join Derren Brown as we learn how Houdini went from a sideshow hustler to the big time. In 1899, Martin Beck, a Vaudeville booker, stumbled into a beer hall in St Paul, Minnesota, and changed Houdini’s life. He thought Houdini’s handcuff escape act wa...

In the late 19th Century, a young Hungarian immigrant called Eric Weisz chose magic as the means to provide for his ageing mother. He found inspiration in the form of a memoir, and his identity morphed: young Eric became Harry Houdini, and a legend was born. But legendary status only came later. And it required persistence to achieve it. Because cutting through the cutthroat magic scene of the tim...

One hundred years after his death, how did an ordinary immigrant child transform himself into the most famous magician in history? In episode one of How Houdini Made Magic, psychological illusionist Derren Brown traces the early life of Eric Weisz. In 1878, Eric’s family voyaged from Budapest to the American promised land of Appleton, Wisconsin. What awaited him was the unforgiving Gilded Age Amer...

For a century, Harry Houdini has been safely filed away in the public imagination as a nostalgic variety act: a man in monochrome film escaping handcuffs, water tanks, and straightjackets. This series smashes that myth. Hosted by “psychological illusionist” Derren Brown, How Houdini Made Magic reframes a penniless immigrant refugee named Erik Weisz as a prophetic, hyper-modern visionary. Long befo...

Andrew Hunter Murray tracks down Hitler’s faked diaries to the Bundesarchiv – the Federal Archive – in Koblenz. How did these slim A4 notebooks cause such enormous trouble? But the archivists have one more surprise in store. After all these years, are we any closer to understanding the motivation behind this forgery? Was it purely financial, or was it - as some say - a deliberate effort to rehabil...

It’s May 1983, and everything is falling apart for Gerd Heidemann. Now the heat is on forger Konrad Kujau too. How long can he stay incognito? Millions of Deutschmarks are unaccounted for, reputations lie in tatters. Who will take the blame? Who will fall? And why does the world of Nazi memorabilia hold such fascination for collectors inside Germany and across the world? Writer and broadcaster And...

Stern’s editorial and management team dig in, sticking by their story and their journalist Gerd Heidemann. Hugh Trevor-Roper returns to Cambridge shaken, hiding away in the master’s lodge at Peterhouse. Meanwhile, Dr Josef Henke of the Federal archives gets to work – finally with whole volumes of diaries. At last he can run the proper checks and read the text. What kind of Hitler emerges from the...

It’s Monday, 25 April 1983, the day of the big press conference at Stern’s offices in Hamburg. The world’s media is assembled, awaiting the ‘scoop of the century’. The room is packed and Stern’s team, along with British historian Hugh Trevor-Roper, are ready to reveal the diaries. History looks set to be rewritten. But not everyone is convinced. In fact, the key authenticator is having doubts and...

It’s April 1983 and in Hamburg, Stern is just putting the final touches to its coverage and its promotional film. But for TV producer Barbara Dickmann, something seems very off with her final interviewee – the journalist behind the scoop, Gerd Heidemann. Over in the Sunday Times offices in London, features editor Magnus Linklater is getting pulled onto the biggest story of his life. In Koblenz, We...

It’s spring 1983 and Stern magazine’s inner circle is making frenzied preparations to launch its scoop of the century. Deals are being cut in media empires from London to Paris to New York. The Times and Sunday Times, newly acquired by Rupert Murdoch, are keen. Murdoch wants a quick authentication and calls in Britain’s foremost historian, Hugh Trevor-Roper. He accepts the mission and flies out to...

It’s early 1981 and the forger Konrad Kujau and the journalist Gerd Heidemann are about to come face to face. Everything’s in motion - Stern management and a small team of editorial staff are on board, sworn to secrecy from colleagues and the outside world. In the next few months, millions of Deutschmarks will travel in suitcases in exchange for diaries, which are – so Kujau says – being smuggled...

Andrew Hunter Murray travels to the scene of the crime, just outside Stuttgart, from where the forger Konrad Kujau ran his cottage industry. Who was this man, prone to splash the cash in local bars and have a good time while knocking out forgeries? Curator of the Konrad Kujau museum, Marc Oliver Boger, reveals more. Our story takes us to 1980 in Hamburg, where the Stern journalist Gerd Heidemann i...

It’s 1976, Hamburg, and star reporter for Stern magazine, Gerd Heidemann, is entertaining old Nazis on board his boat – formerly Herman Göring’s yacht, the Carin II. Known for his dogged pursuit of a scoop, Heidemann’s patch is slowly but surely shifting from war reporting to gathering old Nazi tales. He’s getting obsessed. One of his contacts links him up with a memorabilia collector in the south...

On 21 April, 1945, in the hamlet of Börnersdorf, Eastern Germany, a Junkers plane plummets from the sky. It crashes and bursts into flames. A few iron boxes are salvaged from the wreckage. Rumour spreads that Hitler’s personal effects are in those boxes. Could there have been diaries? In the decades that follow, a trade in Nazi memorabilia springs up where genuine documents and fakes cross hands,...

Writer and broadcaster Andrew Hunter Murray uncovers last century’s biggest ever publishing scandal, a forgery which rocked the world and destroyed reputations. When Germany’s biggest magazine Stern announced in 1983 that they’d found the long-lost diaries of Adolf Hitler, authenticated by the eminent British historian Hugh Trevor-Roper, the world was poised to rewrite history. Salvaged from the w...

It’s 1991 in New Hampshire and a cheerfully pugnacious TV pundit and political insider is announcing his campaign for the Republican nomination. His name is Pat Buchanan and what he is about to say will shock the room. Not only does he challenge sitting President George H W Bush, but the entire post-war order, the vision of America that has persisted for the past half century - America at the head...

A man sits in the Pentagon terrified. The building is shaking. He thinks it’s an Earthquake. In fact it’s 9/11 and this man senses an opportunity. To drag America out of its post Vietnam stupor and re-assert itself on the world stage. The man’s name is Paul Wolfowitz. He’s an academic and political advisor. And he is obsessed with one idea. One idea he thinks will help America become great again....

March 1965 Vietnam. American fighter jets are taking off to bomb munitions depot in the North. A few days later, American ground troops arrive in the jungle. They would stay there for almost a decade, dropping more bombs on Vietnam than in all theatres of World War Two. How did this happen? The answer lies with someone who has evaded the glare of the spotlight. A liberal development theorist calle...