Soldatensender Calais (G.9) was a British black propaganda broadcaster during the Second World War operated by the Political Warfare Executive. It pretended to be a station of the German military broadcasting network. The station was in operation between 14 November 1943 and 30 April 1945, when it ceased operations.
The Sportpalast speech or Total War speech was a speech delivered by German Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels at the Berlin Sportpalast to a large, carefully selected audience on 18 February 1943, as the tide of World War II was turning against Nazi Germany and its Axis allies. The speech is particularly notable as Goebbels almost mentions the Holocaust, when he begins saying "Ausrotten", but quickly changes it to "Ausschaltung". This was the same word Heinrich Himmler used on 18 December 1941, when he recorded the outcome of his discussion with Adolf Hitler on the Final Solution, wherein he wrote "als Partisanen auszurotten".
Denis Sefton Delmer was a British journalist of Australian heritage and propagandist for the British government during the Second World War.
Shortwave listening, or SWLing, is the hobby of listening to shortwave radio broadcasts located on frequencies between 1700 kHz and 30 MHz (30 000 kHz). Listeners range from casual users seeking international news and entertainment programming, to hobbyists immersed in the technical aspects of long-distance radio reception and sending and collecting official confirmations that document their reception of remote broadcasts (DXing). In some developing countries, shortwave listening enables remote communities to obtain regional programming traditionally provided by local medium wave AM broadcasters. In 2002, the number of households that were capable of shortwave listening was estimated to be in the hundreds of millions.
The propaganda used by the German Nazi Party in the years leading up to and during Adolf Hitler's dictatorship of Germany from 1933 to 1945 was a crucial instrument for acquiring and maintaining power, and for the implementation of Nazi policies.
"Bei Mir Bistu Shein" is a popular Yiddish song written by lyricist Jacob Jacobs and composer Sholom Secunda for a 1932 Yiddish language comedy musical, I Would If I Could, which closed after one season at the Parkway Theatre in Brooklyn, New York City. The score for the song transcribed the Yiddish title as "Bay Mir Bistu Sheyn". The original Yiddish version of the song is a dialogue between two lovers. Five years after its 1932 composition, English lyrics were written for the tune by Sammy Cahn and Saul Chaplin, and the English version of the song became a worldwide hit when recorded by The Andrews Sisters under a Germanized spelling of the title, "Bei mir bist du schön", in November 1937.
World War II was the first conflict to take place in the age of electronically distributed music.
Das Reich was a weekly newspaper founded by Joseph Goebbels, the propaganda minister of Nazi Germany, in May 1940. It was published by Deutscher Verlag.
Dutch jazz refers to the jazz music of the Netherlands. The Dutch traditionally have a vibrant jazz scene as shown by the North Sea Jazz Festival as well as other venues.
Germany Calling was an English language propaganda radio programme, broadcast by Nazi German radio to audiences in the British Isles and North America during the Second World War. Every broadcast began with the station announcement: "Germany calling! Here are the Reichssender Hamburg, station Bremen". Today, it is best known for its employment of several radio presenters jointly known as Lord Haw-Haw — most notably, William Joyce, who was German radio's most prominent English language speaker and to whom the name gradually came to be exclusively applied.
An overview of the evolution of Jazz music in Germany reveals that the development of jazz in Germany and its public notice differ from the "motherland" of jazz, the US, in several respects.
The Reich Chamber of Music was a government agency which operated as a statutory corporation controlled by the Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda that regulated the music industry in Nazi Germany between 1933 and 1945. It promoted "good German music" which was composed by Aryans and seen as consistent with Nazi ideals, while suppressing other, "degenerate" music, which included atonal music, jazz, and, especially, music by Jewish composers. The Chamber was founded in 1933 by Joseph Goebbels as part of the Reich Chamber of Culture, and it operated until the fall of the Nazi Germany in 1945.
Karl Emil Heinrich Schwedler, also known as Charlie Schwedler was a singer and leader of the Nazi propaganda jazz band Charlie and His Orchestra during World War II. He was born in Duisburg, Germany.
Negermusik was a derogatory term used by the Nazi Party during the Third Reich to demonize musical styles that had been invented by black people such as blues and jazz. The Nazi Party viewed these musical styles as degenerate works created by an "inferior" race and they were therefore prohibited. The term, at that same time, was also applied to indigenous music styles of black Africans.
Helene Sensburg (born 1914, by Canadian and other Allied troops nicknamed Mary of Arnhem was a radio propagandist in the German-occupied Netherlands noteworthy for making Nazi broadcasts primarily aimed at Canadian and American soldiers stalled south of the Rhine in the final year of World War II. Born in Germany, she worked for an oil company in England for ten years and returned when WWII broke out in 1939. Speaking excellent English, she found a job with the Deutscher Rundfunk. In October 1944 she was transferred to the German military propaganda section, which operated a propaganda program identified as "Radio Arnhem," but in fact broadcast from Hilversum, The Netherlands. Sensburg's husband was a German war captain who was captured by Russian troops. Created a radio star by Nazi-German propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels, as a successor to Lilli Marlene, and endowed with a "silvery voice," she provided disinformation and tried to lure soldiers away from the fights. As noted in a British newspaper in late 1944: "When the BBC broadcasts its news bulletin the Arnhem station swings into its news in English without advising its listeners that they were getting the Nazi product." Her radio propaganda stand-in was Gerda Markov, who had lived in the United States.
Music in Nazi Germany, like all cultural activities in the regime, was controlled and "co-ordinated" (Gleichschaltung) by various entities of the state and the Nazi Party, with Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels and the prominent Nazi theorist Alfred Rosenberg playing leading – and competing – roles. The primary concerns of these organizations was to exclude Jewish composers and musicians from publishing and performing music, and to prevent the public exhibition of music considered to be "Jewish", "anti-German", or otherwise "degenerate", while at the same time promoting the work of favored "Germanic" composers, such as Richard Wagner and Anton Bruckner. These works were believed to be positive contributions to the Volksgemeinschaft, or German folk community.
Fritz "Freddie" Brocksieper was a German jazz-musician, drummer, and bandleader.
Ludwig "Lutz" Templin was a German jazz bandleader.
Lord Haw-Haw was a nickname applied to William Joyce and several other people who broadcast Nazi propaganda to the United Kingdom from Germany during the Second World War. The broadcasts opened with "Germany calling, Germany calling," spoken in an affected upper-class English accent. The same nickname was also applied to some other broadcasters of English-language propaganda from Germany, but it is Joyce with whom the name is overwhelmingly identified.
Dick Abraham Willebrandts was a Dutch pianist, composer and bandleader in the swing era.
