Television Under The Swastika

[The Lawspeaker]

Television Under The Swastika

[GVIDEO]1992130789606468647[/GVIDEO]

Michael Kloft's documentary on the history of Nazi television. Legend has it that the triumphal march of television began in the United States in the 'fifties. But in reality its origins hark back much further. As early as the 'thirties, a bitter rivalry raged for the world's first television broadcast. Nazi Germany wanted to beat the competition from Great Britain and the U.S. - at all costs. Reich Broadcast Director Hadamovsky christened the new-born "Greater German Television" in March 1935. And it was only in September 1944 that the last program flickered across the TV screens. For a long time the belief persisted that only very few Nazi programs had survived, but SPIEGEL TV has now succeeded in tracking down a stock of television films and reports which have remained intact since the end of the Third Reich. These include extensive coverage of the 1936 National Socialist Party Convention in Nuremberg which recalls today's live broadcasts, and of a 1937 visit Benito Mussolini paid to Berlin. Interviews with high-ranking Nazis such as Albert Speer, Robert Ley and the actor Heinrich George are among the finds, along with numerous special reports (i.e. on the Reich Labor Service), a cooking show and the lottery drawing. Television anchorwomen greet their tiny audiences in specially installed television parlors in Berlin, Munich and Hamburg with "Heil Hitler." The entertainment programs are particularly curious. Cabaret artists are featured - alongside singers extolling the virtues of the "brown columns of the SA and SS." This documentary by Michael Kloft will reveal a rare and intriguing view of the Third Reich, one far removed from the propagandistic presentations of Leni Riefenstahl & Co. and the weekly cinema newsreel, yet no less ideologically slanted. This is Nazi Germany expressed in an aesthetic medium that we ourselves have only really known since the 'fifties.

[Wulfhere]

Television Under The Swastika

[GVIDEO]1992130789606468647[/GVIDEO]

"This is Nazi Germany expressed in an aesthetic medium that we ourselves have only really known since the 'fifties."

Presumably that last bit was written for a backward American audience. The BBC (founded in 1922 as a radio broadcaster) began transmitting regular TV from 1932, before the Nazis even came to power. It was shut down on the outbreak of WW2 in 1939 half way through a Mickey Mouse cartoon, and when broadcasts resumed (1946) began half way through the same cartoon, with an announcer saying something like, "Apologies for the interruption."

[Lulletje Rozewater]

"This is Nazi Germany expressed in an aesthetic medium that we ourselves have only really known since the 'fifties."

Presumably that last bit was written for a backward American audience. The BBC (founded in 1922 as a radio broadcaster) began transmitting regular TV from 1932, before the Nazis even came to power. It was shut down on the outbreak of WW2 in 1939 half way through a Mickey Mouse cartoon, and when broadcasts resumed (1946) began half way through the same cartoon, with an announcer saying something like, "Apologies for the interruption."

That was not Television,that was Vivisection of the British rat.

Germany

Electromechanical broadcasts began in Germany in 1929, but were without sound until 1934. Network electronic service started on March 22, 1935, on 180 lines using telecine transmission of film, intermediate film system, or cameras using the Nipkow Disk. Transmissions using cameras based on the iconoscope began on January 15, 1936. The Berlin Summer Olympic Games were televised, using both all-electronic iconoscope-based cameras and intermediate film cameras, to Berlin and Hamburg in August 1936. Twenty-eight public television rooms were opened for anybody who did not own a television set. The Germans had a 441-line system on the air in February 1937, and during World War II brought it to France, where they broadcast from the Eiffel Tower. The American Armed Forces Radio Network at the end of World War II, wishing to provide US TV programming to the occupation forces in Germany, used US TV receivers made to operate at 525 lines and 60 fields. US broadcast equipment was modified; they changed the vertical frequency to 50 Hz to avoid power line wiggles, changed the horizontal frequency from 15,750 Hz to 15,625 Hz a 0.5 microsecond change in the length of a line. With this signal, US TV receivers with only an adjustment to the vertical hold control had a 625 line, 50 field scan, which became the German standard.