Radio Orange
Radio Oranje , " De stem van strijdend Nederland " ("The voice of the fighting Netherlands") was a Dutch radio station during the time of the German occupation of the Netherlands 1940-1945 and the official station of the Dutch government in exile , which fled to London in 1940.
The program was broadcast daily at 9 p.m. from Stratton House in London and lasted 15 minutes and later 30 minutes. The first broadcast took place on July 28, 1940 and included a speech by Queen Wilhelmina . In the course of time she addressed a total of 34 speeches to the Dutch people about this.
Emergence
After Foreign Minister Eelco van Kleffens and Colonial Minister Charles Welter fled the imminent surrender of the Dutch armed forces to London on May 10, 1940 , and the royal family, Prime Minister Pieter Sjoerds Gerbrandy and other members of the government followed suit on May 13, 1940 , the plan to create a radio station arose to enable the royal family and the government-in-exile to have contact with their home country.
Radio had become a mass medium since the 1930s, and radio reception was possible even on the islands and in the very rural areas of the Netherlands during World War II . The German occupiers immediately brought the Dutch media system into line. Before all the channels were closed in March 1941, the “Nederlandsche Omroep” had long since become the occupiers' propaganda tool and the second mass medium, the newspaper market (120 titles in a total circulation of over 2 million copies, many with a morning and evening edition! ) reduced to a handful of heavily censored sheets.
The importance of having one's own radio station for disseminating information was correspondingly high.
The diplomat Adriaan Pelt was taken care of with the negotiations with the BBC , where he initially encountered resistance, since the BBC itself had broadcast a daily radio program in the Netherlands since April 1, 1940. But an agreement was soon reached. The transmitter was set up in Stratton House, originally a hotel that housed the Dutch government in exile. Loe de Jong was appointed director of the station .
Radio Oranje went on air for the first time on July 28, 1940. Queen Wilhelmina opened the program with an address to the people of the occupied Netherlands. She tended to be explicit; her saying "Slaat the Mof op zijn kop" ( Beat the Mof upside is) the Dutch still remembered.
program
The broadcaster was initially allowed to broadcast for a quarter of an hour a day and then for half an hour later. The theme song was the Geusen song In naam van Oranje doe open de poort ("In the name of Oranje: Open the gates"). In addition to Loe de Jong, Jan de Hartog also wrote speeches and speeches.
The sound recordings of the programs were made on wax plates when the speeches were broadcast and were largely preserved until after the end of the war. In the 1950s, the recordings were transferred to tape and finally digitized. Today the originals are in the audio archive of the Dutch Institute for Sound and Vision . The original manuscripts of the Queen's speeches, typed on a typewriter in London and censored in some places by the English with a red pen, were published after the end of the war.
Encrypted messages were also sent to Dutch resistance fighters via the transmitter .
Radio Brandaris
On May 6, 1941, Radio Brandaris , named after the famous lighthouse on the Dutch island of Terschelling, took up the broadcast on the initiative of the BBC. The station was originally aimed at Dutch seafarers traveling around the world and was supported by the Dutch government, which commissioned journalist Hendrik van den Broek and author and editor A. den Doolaard to design the program. Radio Brandaris quickly became more popular than Radio Oranje because music and entertainment programs were also broadcast and the listeners also rated the political contributions as more committed. On November 2, 1941, the stations merged under the leadership of van den Broek. On September 1, 1943 he was succeeded by A. den Doolaard when van den Broek took over Radio Herrijzend Nederland .
The most famous broadcast from that time was the cabaret program de Watergeusen with Jetty Paerl , soon known nationwide as Jetje van Radio Oranje . Her father, the film producer Jo Paer , wrote the lyrics. Despite its great popularity, the program was discontinued in 1943 at the request of the government-in-exile, and there were repeated interventions in the content of the broadcasts.
Anne Frank
Anne Frank mentions Radio Oranje several times in her diary . The station played an important role for them and their fellow sufferers, as they learned about important events through this station. On March 28, 1943, Anne Frank also followed the speech by the Minister of Education, Gerrit Bolkestein, of the Dutch government in exile, who called for the occupation period to be documented in personal diaries. She then decided to revise her diary and publish it later. In her entry of June 15, 1943, she also mentions that since May 1943 the German occupiers had tried to prevent foreign broadcasters from listening to foreign broadcasters by confiscating radio receivers.
reception
As part of the Radio Oranje Project - a concept in collaboration between the Human Media Interaction groep of the University of Twente , the Dutch Institute for War Documentation ( Nederlands Instituut voor Oorlogsdocumentatie , NIOD) and “Beeld en Geluid” - the speeches broadcast on Radio Oranje were given by Queen Wilhelmina processed and made researchable and accessible online. There are 37 sound recordings with accompanying texts.
Radio Oranje today
There are several radio stations of the same name that have nothing to do with the historical station, including a South African and Spanish station. Radio Oranje NL is a web radio and Radio Oranje ES is a Dutch-British-German holiday broadcaster on the Spanish Costa Blanca founded in 2009 by the former radio pirate Lammert de Man , which has been available via the Internet as well as local broadcasts since November 2009.
literature
- Magdalena G. Schenk, JB Th. Spaan: De Koningin sprak. Proclamaties en radio-toespraken van HM Koningin Wilhelmina gedurende de oorlogsjaren 1940–1945. Ons Vrije Nederland, 1945. / 2nd expanded edition, Christelijk Lektuurkontakt et al., Driebergen 1985, ISBN 90-6135-397-1 .
- HJ van den Broek: Here Radio Oranje. Vifj jaar radio in oorlogstijd. Vrij Nederland, Amsterdam 1948.
- Dick Verkijk: Radio Hilversum 1940-1945. De omropep in de oorlog. De Arbeiderspers, Amsterdam 1974, ISBN 90-295-5141-0 .
- Jo Bardoel, Ben van Reenen: Media in the Netherlands. In: Hans Bredow Institute for Media Research (Ed.): Internationales Handbuch Medien 2004/2005. 27th edition, Nomos, Baden-Baden 2004, ISBN 3-8329-0603-7 , pp. 475-492.
- Onno Sinke: Verzet vanuit de Verte. De Behoedzame Koers van Radio Oranje. Dissertation, University of Groningen, Groningen 2009.
Web links
Individual evidence
- ^ Dossier Media System of the University of Münster
- ↑ Excerpt from an original manuscript from 1943 about Hartog's escape from the occupied territory
- ↑ Letter of A. the Doolaard at war minister Gerbrandy of 3 March 1945 in which he confirmed that the words verzet (resistance / underground) verzetsbeweging (resistance movement) and stoottroepen (shock troops) with immediate effect in the radio broadcasts no longer used as desired would.
- ↑ http://hmi.ewi.utwente.nl/choral/radiooranje.html
- ↑ www.radiooranje.nl