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Feindsender ("enemy radio station") was a term used in Nazi Germany to describe radio stations broadcasting from countries that were enemies of the German Reich before and during World War II, such as the United Kingdom or the United States. [1] It also referred to radio stations in Germany which broadcast anti-Nazi material. The term has not been in general use since the downfall of the Third Reich.
As early as 1929, Soviet Radio Moscow broadcast German-language radio programs, mainly to support the agitation by the Communist Party of Germany against the Weimar government. After the Nazi Machtergreifung in 1933, anyone caught by the Gestapo listening to Radio Moscow could be sent to a concentration camp. The Nazis attempted to jam the broadcasts, this however also affected their own Deutschlandsender transmissions. In 1936 the Reich Ministry of Justice decreed that anyone listening to Radio Moscow could be prosecuted for treason. Secret Gestapo reports attested to the popularity of German-language programs aired by foreign radio stations.
Various new laws and prohibitions were put in place following the start of the second world war. One of the new laws, introduced on 1 September 1939 (the first day of the German Invasion of Poland), was the "regulation on extraordinary measures for radio-broadcasting" (German : Verordnung über außerordentliche Rundfunkmaßnahmen). The law prohibited deliberate listening to any foreign radio station under threat of a prison sentence. Likewise all non-governmental radio transmissions were banned and the two-way radios used by German amateur radio operators were seized by the Reichspost.
The BBC came to be regarded as the main Feindsender, and listening to the German-language longwave program from London was punishable with imprisonment. Broadcasts like Thomas Mann's Listen, Germany! were still widely heard. Radio Moscow, Voice of America, Vatican Radio and the Swiss Beromünster radio station were other widely known Feindsender. Black propaganda broadcasters disguised as German armed forces stations like British Soldatensender Calais or Gustav Siegfried Eins and German pirate radio stations were also popular.
German citizens ( Reichsbürger ) denounced for violating the prohibition could expect to get off with warning for a first offence, or an arrest for a repeat offence, if they were listening to something relatively innocuous like comedy or jazz. However, spreading information considered demoralising was punished with incarceration or even with the death penalty. Death sentences were seldom based solely on radio listening but — in the cases of Helmuth Hübener and Walter Klingenbeck — rested on convictions for high treason or Wehrkraftzersetzung .
Estimates vary of how many listeners the Feindsender had. According to Sicherheitsdienst reports, a large-scale campaign in 1941, charging Nazi Blockleiter to visit the households in their area and attach warning paper tags to receiving sets, met widespread discontent. The author of Berlin Embassy, a bilingual American who traveled widely in Germany in 1939-40, estimated that 60 percent of Germans secretly listened to foreign broadcasts at low volume. Listening to foreign radio stations has been dubbed "the little man's resistance" because, together with being friendly to forced laborers (also a crime, and punished even more harshly), and taking detours to avoid passing a Nazi memorial where one would be forced to salute (the Viscardi Way or "Shirkers' Way" in Munich) it was very common and, later, could allow individuals to claim they had never really been a Nazi.[ citation needed ]
Sicherheitsdienst, full title Sicherheitsdienst des Reichsführers-SS, or SD, was the intelligence agency of the SS and the Nazi Party in Nazi Germany. Established in 1931, the SD was the first Nazi intelligence organization and the Gestapo was considered its sister organization through the integration of SS members and operational procedures. The SD was administered as an independent SS office between 1933 and 1939. That year, the SD was transferred over to the Reich Security Main Office, as one of its seven departments. Its first director, Reinhard Heydrich, intended for the SD to bring every single individual within the Third Reich's reach under "continuous supervision".
International broadcasting consists of radio and television transmissions that purposefully cross international boundaries, often with then intent of allowing expatriates to remain in touch with their countries of origin as well as educate, inform, and influence residents of foreign countries. Content can range from overt propaganda and counterpropaganda to cultural content to news reports that reflect the point of view and concerns of the originating country or that seek to provide alternative information to that otherwise available as well as promote tourism and trade. In the first half of the twentieth century, international broadcasting was used by colonial empires as a means of connecting colonies with the metropole. When operated by governments or entities close to a government, international broadcasting can be a form of soft power. Less frequently, international broadcasting has been undertaken for commercial purposes by private broadcasters.
Pirate radio is a radio station that broadcasts without a valid license. In some cases, radio stations are considered legal where the signal is transmitted, but illegal where the signals are received—especially when the signals cross a national boundary. In other cases, a broadcast may be considered "pirate" due to the nature of its content, its transmission format, or the transmit power (wattage) of the station, even if the transmission is not technically illegal. Pirate radio is sometimes called bootleg radio, clandestine radio or free radio.
Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL) is an American government-funded media organization broadcasting news and analyses in 27 languages to 23 countries across Eastern Europe, Central Asia, the Caucasus, and the Middle East. Headquartered in Prague since 1995, RFE/RL operates 21 local bureaus with over 500 core staff, 1,300 freelancers, and 680 employees at its corporate offices in Washington, D.C. Nicola Careem serves as the editor-in-chief.
Österreichischer Rundfunk is an Austrian national public broadcaster. Funded from a combination of television licence fee revenue and limited on-air advertising, ORF is the dominant player in the Austrian broadcast media. Austria was the last country in continental Europe after Albania to allow nationwide private television broadcasting, although commercial TV channels from neighbouring Germany have been present in Austria on pay-TV and via terrestrial overspill since the 1980s.
Radio Moscow, also known as Radio Moscow World Service, was the official international broadcasting station of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics until 1993, when it was reorganized into Voice of Russia, which was subsequently reorganized and renamed into Radio Sputnik in 2014. At its peak, Radio Moscow broadcast in over 70 languages using transmitters in the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, and Cuba.
Freedom Radio is a 1941 British propaganda film directed by Anthony Asquith and starring Clive Brook, Diana Wynyard, Raymond Huntley and Derek Farr. It is set in Nazi Germany during the Second World War and concerns an underground German resistance group who run a radio station broadcasting against the totalitarian Third Reich.
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.
Rassenschande or Blutschande was an anti-miscegenation concept in Nazi German racial policy, pertaining to sexual relations between Aryans and non-Aryans. It was put into practice by policies like the Aryan certificate requirement, and later by anti-miscegenation laws such as the Nuremberg Laws, adopted unanimously by the Reichstag on 15 September 1935. Initially, these laws referred predominantly to relations between ethnic Germans and non-Aryans, regardless of citizenship. In the early stages the culprits were targeted informally; later, they were punished systematically and legally.
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The Volksempfänger was a range of low-cost radio receivers produced in Nazi Germany, developed by engineer Otto Griessing at the request of Joseph Goebbels, the Reich Minister of Propaganda.
Radio Nacional de España is the national state-owned public service radio broadcaster in Spain.
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Radio jamming on the Korean Peninsula makes the border region one of the world's busiest places for radio signals. Medium wave jamming is dominant in the area including Seoul and the Korean Demilitarized Zone (DMZ). South Korea jams all radio and television broadcasts from North Korea, and until 2013 jammed all foreign broadcasts, which was ended during the Park Geun-hye administration.
A Vierergruppe was a small German resistance group that fought the National Socialists. There were three "groups of four" working simultaneously and independently of each other in Hamburg, Munich and Vienna.
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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.
Censorship in the Czech Republic had been highly active until 17 November 1989 and the fall of Communism in the former Czechoslovakia. Czech Republic was ranked as the 13th most free country in the World Press Freedom Index in 2014.
Heinrich Hermann Fehrentz was a German truck driver and sportsman, who was critical of the Nazi regime and listened to foreign radio stations, so called Feindsender. He was arrested, sentenced and executed at age 35.
Susan Dorothea Mary Therese Hilton was a British radio broadcaster for the Nazi regime in Germany during the Second World War.