Witness

Outraged by the Christmas bombings of Hanoi in 1972 by the USA during the Vietnam War, the Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme made a critical speech. He compared the US’s actions to several massacres from history, including the killing of hundreds of thousands of Jews at the Treblinka Concentration Camp by the Nazis. President Richard Nixon and National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger reacted by recalling their ambassador and refusing to accept the Swedish counterpart. Jan Ellisson was the first person to see the speech in the Swedish embassy in Washington and spent the next 15 months working to re-establish relations.He has been speaking to Tim O’Callaghan. Eye-witness accounts brought to life by archive. Witness History is for those fascinated by and curious about the past. We take you to the events that have shaped our world through the eyes of the people who were there. For nine minutes every day, we take you back in time and all over the world, to examine wars, coups, scientific discoveries, cultural m