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How is it possible that North Korea, one of the poorest countries on earth finances a nuclear weapons program large enough to challenge the USA? The answer: Bureau 39, a legendary organization nestled deep inside the government apparatus. Its aim is to procure foreign exchange by any means possible to provide Kim Jong-un’s regime with money.

Football in the stadium: pure emotion and excitement. Thousands united in joy, anger and disappointment. Who gathers there peacefully, and where does passion cross borders?

Pop icon, film star, LGBTQ+ activist: Lady Gaga inspires her fans with much more than just her singing talent. But she is paying a high price for her rise to the top.

The “Chinese Dream”: a return to former greatness – that is Xi’s goal. He challenges Hong Kong’s special status just as he pushes for the reunification of Taiwan with the mainland. Military force and confrontation with the United States are not off the table.

An increasing number of people in Germany no longer want anything to do with their state. A mixture of idiosyncrats and anti-system activists are turning their backs on the Federal Republic. How did the "Reichsbürger" movement become radical? What are their motives? What emerges is a European community of anarchists, businessmen, esotericists and adventurers - between a self-declared fight for freedom and obstinacy.

Since the disappearance of the last male northern white rhino in 2018, only a mother and daughter remain as representatives of the species in a Kenyan reserve. Mammoths, which became extinct 4,000 years ago, are attracting the interest of the private American laboratory Colossal Biosciences. Its researchers are working to produce ex vivo (with artificial wombs) embryos from cells harvested from mammoths, liberated from the thawed soils of Siberia, and from Asian elephant oocytes, 99.6% of whose genome matches that of the ancient mastodon. They hope to have their first baby mammoth by 2028.

The rise of China’s billionaires tells the story of a nation that has transformed from a place of poverty in the 1980s into the world’s second-largest economy. Once known as the world’s cheap labor factory, China has now become a factory for billionaires—producing almost one a day. No other country without a democracy creates wealth at such speed. But that rise may soon come to a halt: China’s top entrepreneurs find themselves caught in a cold war with a suspicious United States—and President Xi is cracking down hard. Tycoons are being silenced and re-educated to align with the superpower’s new strategic goals.

NATO went to war in Afghanistan. This developed into a 20-year operation that ended in defeat. This senseless war cost thousands of lives.

The world of ultras is as fascinating as it is inaccessible: They create a colorful atmosphere in the stadiums and support their club unconditionally - even radically if necessary.

This documentary exposes the new geopolitical situation in one of the most remote regions of the planet: the Arctic. The arrival of China in this part of the world, thanks to the opening of new sea lanes, modifies the fragile balance between the superpowers that must deal with the new arrival.

One of the Bundeswehr's most dangerous missions is taking place in Mali. More than 1,000 soldiers are serving in the UN mission in Africa. They are supposed to create and secure peace.

The two-part documentary Crime in Post-War Germany shows how strained life was between 1945 and 1949 in the four occupied zones. Using the example of individual, particularly serious criminal cases, like in Dresden where a wood collector comes across the severed legs of a person or in Hamburg, where the so-called rubble murders terrify the whole city.

Ancient Apocalypse investigates six catastrophic stories of how the world’s greatest civilisations collapsed. Every continent has its ruins — places where only stones tell the tale of a fallen people. They might lay buried under the Earth, in the shade of jungle canopy or amidst the teeming industry of a modern city. However, they all raise the same questions: How could something so great all but vanish? Why do civilisations collapse? In this 6-part series, we uncover the scientific reasons why some of history’s most fascinating peoples have disappeared in the face of the natural world’s might. We investigate the end of The Akkadian Empire, The Lost City of Helike, Sodom and Gomorrha, The mystery of the Sea Peoples, The Maya Civilisation and Doggerland. Some of the world’s greatest natural disasters reduced these societies to nothing.

In 1970, near the Ukrainian village of Chernobyl, a utopia was born: the world's largest nuclear power plant. Its inhabitants, chosen for their talent and faith in the future, lived a dream that was shattered on April 26, 1986, when the technologically obsolete plant exploded, causing thousands of victims.

Nothing lets us look deeper into the dark abyss of a past epoch than the murders and misdeeds committed during it. But many crimes of the past remain unsolved today. The perpetrators were not identified or punished, and evidence hasn’t been presented against them — until now. This documentary series shows how science uses modern forensic methods to solve crimes that happened thousands of years ago.

What propelled the construction of higher and higher buildings? Which technologies made the discovery of the oceans possible? How are gravity defying bridges designed? What will the future of the aircraft industry be? Combining bluechip photography with innovative CGI, all set in spectacular locations across the world, this documentary series highlights the history of human ingenuity.

The opening of the Berlin Wall on the evening of November 9, 1989 came as a complete surprise to East and West Germans as it probably did to the whole world. How has this historic moment come about?

What happened in the last days before and after Hitler's suicide in 1945? The last surviving witnesses remember the dramatic events.