Radio recordings of the Reichstag sessions 1930–1942

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Indexing text to a recording of the Reichstag from March 5, 1931

The radio recordings of the Reichstag sessions began in the Weimar Republic in 1930 and ended in the Third Reich with a speech by Adolf Hitler on the course of the war in 1942.

Microphone and leased line

German broadcasting started in 1923. As early as the mid-1920s, a dedicated line was laid between the Reichstag building and the studio of Berliner Funkstunde (the Berlin broadcaster). The radio technicians were able to hear what was being said in parliament through the microphone installed on the lectern. The editorial team quickly wished to broadcast debates. Although the President of the Reichstag, Paul Löbe, was expressly in favor of this, the Council of Elders of the Reichstag rejected it several times for reasons of balance in the broadcast. If you send excerpts, one party would always be preferred, so the argument goes. The debate on the Enabling Act on March 23, 1933, with which Hitler abolished Weimar democracy, was the first to be broadcast “live” on the Reich broadcasters.

Wax sheets

Typical wax plate with storage container

At the end of the 1920s, a recording technique matured that was adapted by radio, namely electromechanical recording using a sapphire needle on wax sheets. The approximately 5 cm thick discs with a diameter of around 40 cm and a weight of over 2 kg were heated beforehand and could then be written on from the inside out for a good 4 minutes. To preserve the image, the grooves were copied onto copper matrices using an electrochemical ( galvanic ) process . In order to get past the time limit of 4 minutes, the Reichs-Rundfunk-Gesellschaft introduced a kind of workbench in 1929, which consisted of two wax record players. After extensive calibration and synchronization, the first record recorded the first four minutes, and as it neared the end, the second record continued to record. The copper foil was immediately pulled from the first wax plate, the wax layer smoothed, and four minutes later the process continued with this medium. In some cases, the radio had shellac records pressed from the copper matrices, which had a much longer shelf life.

The Reichs-Rundfunk-Gesellschaft immediately approached parliament after the successful tests. The council of elders called a specially arranged wiretapping session. The parliamentarians were enthusiastic about the sound quality and encouraged the radio colleagues to make further recordings, none of which were broadcast. The first longer recording was made during the 7th session of the 5th electoral term on December 3, 1930. At the core was the catastrophic Reich budget, with speeches by KPD MP Ernst Torgler and Reich Finance Minister Hermann Dietrich .

On June 12, 1930, the SPD member and parliamentary president Paul Löbe gave a radio address in which he declared the objections to the broadcasting of debates in the Reichstag to be invalid, given the audio recording option. He advocated a delayed "occasional transmission of particularly important meetings", at which all parliamentary group speakers should appear for about the same length of time. The council of elders also rejected this approach by a majority.

With the 8th session of the 4th electoral period of the Greater German Reichstag on April 26, 1942, the sound documents of parliamentary debates on shellac records ended. Hitler put the theme of the extermination of “World Jewry” and England at the center of his speech, framed by Reichstag President Göring : “The new war will end with a catastrophe for the British empire.” He said of the Russian campaign that “the struggle will continue in the East ] until the Bolshevik colossus is smashed. ”And he concluded the speech with“ The loss of the war would be our end. ”After that, there were no more Reichstag sessions.

Fragmented tradition

Both the Reichstag registry and all files from the Berliner Funkstunde in the Haus des Rundfunks have been lost. It is therefore impossible to understand how the decisions were made on the radio, what should be recorded, nor what role Parliament played in the selection. It is also completely unclear how many records have gone missing.

Towards the end of the Second World War, the Propaganda Ministry under Joseph Goebbels decided to remove large quantities of foils and shellac records from hard-fought Berlin . The Allies found thousands in a salt mine near Grasleben in 1945 . The British brought the shellac records to the BBC in London , where the Reichstag recordings by German prisoners of war were indexed and cataloged.

With the establishment of the German Broadcasting Archive, copies on studio tape came to Frankfurt in the second half of the 1950s, where they were further indexed and digitized much later. The original records are no longer with the BBC, but in the British Library Sound Archive .

In March 2018, the complete recording of almost all the sessions received up to Hitler's seizure of power was broadcast for the first time on the SWR 2 archive radio .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. https://www.swr.de/swr2/wissen/archivradio/reichstagdebatten-parlamentsdebatten-im-rundfunk-paul-loebe/-/id=2847740/did=23308454/nid=2847740/1vn1qam/index.html
  2. Not to be confused with the wax roller, i.e. a cylinder instead of a disk.
  3. ^ Jeanpaul Goergen: A documentation about the sound archive of the Reichsrundfunk-Gesellschaft. Sender Free Berlin, February 18, 1991. Manuscript at the German Broadcasting Archive
  4. ^ Parliamentary debates 1931 to 1933: The Reichstag before Hitler | Home | Archive radio | Knowledge | SWR2 . In: swr.online . ( swr.de [accessed on March 3, 2018]).