Many more Germans were displaced in 1945 than Indians during partition

What Radio 3 needs is a musical version of Neil MacGregor. The director of the British Museum and now a stalwart of Radio 4 is an intellectual powerhouse but his talks on radio are so clear, so crisp, so deceptively easy to follow that he draws you in and makes you feel that you too can understand the world in the way he does, with his enormously broad vision and his deep understanding of the way things connect.

His latest series, Germany: Memories of a Nation, has for five weeks now been giving us these wonderful bite-sized insights into the history of that still-young country, taking a particular object and then using the image, with all the different meanings it might contain, to examine an aspect of German history, sometimes in a national, political sense but just as often from the point of view of the individual and their human story. Last week for instance one episode was devoted to the words blazoned across the entrance to the Buchenwald concentration camp from 1937 until 1945, using them as a jumping-off point to discuss the extermination policies of the Nazis.

‘Jedem das Seine’ (or ‘To each what they are due’) could only be read by those who were inside the camp and had watched the gates being closed behind them, MacGregor explains, as he walks through the gates on a sunny day filled with birdsong, closing them with an audible clunk and looking back. ‘What began here in cruelty and injustice in 1937 led to the destruction of cities …and the killing of millions.’ The dissonance between this now-peaceful setting and the reality of the blood that lies beneath the earth was palpable. ‘No words can carry adequately such brutality and such suffering,’ says MacGregor.