European revolution transmitter

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The broadcaster of the European revolution (SER) was an independent socialist radio broadcaster in London , which propagated from October 7, 1940 to April 30, 1942 a council socialist reorganization.

The station was opened with the following words:

This is the broadcaster of the European Revolution!
We speak for all who are condemned to silence!
We call the masses to political and social revolution!
We fight for a Europe of peace!

history

The fight for the ether waves

In addition to news, comments, reports and analyzes of the political, military and social situation in the Third Reich, calls for resistance with detailed instructions on acts of sabotage were also broadcast. The programs not only propagated the overthrow of Hitler, they also campaigned for a united Europe under the leadership of the working class.

He was one of the stations that not only heard from the groups of four , but whose texts were also distributed by them with the help of leaflets due to the notated content.

prehistory

Since September 27, 1938, the Political Intelligence Department (PID), a secret division of the Foreign Ministry, broadcast programs in German for the first time in the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC).

Since the British government did not have a central propaganda authority at the beginning of the war, the Department of Propaganda in Enemy Countries was founded alongside the PID as a secret organization and, after its former accommodation in the Electra House on the Thames bank, was only called EH.

Due to disputes over competencies, the EH changed its assignment three times between the information and foreign ministries between February 1939 and the summer of 1940.

There were strong rivalries and disputes over competence between the BBC and the EH.

In March and April 1939, proposals drawn up by the International Transport Workers' Federation (ITF) by Walter Auerbach were submitted to relevant bodies in Great Britain. The proposal to set up “committees for class propaganda” and the first to set up a committee for planning and preparing special “Labor propaganda notes” was accepted.

The Gillies Committee

William Gillies , head of the International Department of the Labor Party, had, in cooperation with the Political Intelligence Department (PID), considered the creation of a propaganda committee made up of German Social Democrats to act as an “Advisory Committee” to the Labor Party .

The members of the committee were appointed by Gillies himself and were supposed to have advisory functions only.

The committee was chaired by labor lawyer Otto Kahn-Freund and sociologist Charlotte Lütkens . The two representatives of the Sopade , Karl Höltermann and Wilhelm Sander, withdrew from the preparations after the appointment of Karl Borromäus Frank , the representative of Neu Beginnen , so that this body only appointed left-wing socialists and independent socialists like the one at the beginning of 1940 to the committee Trade unionist Walter Auerbach and the journalists Fritz Eberhard and Hilde Meisel belonged.

In December 1939, the Gillies Committee began its work with the establishment of an archive of journals and the collection and preparation of statements on war propaganda.

Workers' broadcasts on the BBC from 1940

In the BBC's workers' broadcasts, German listeners were never called upon to take part in concrete resistance actions. The German BBC programs consisted for the most part of news supplemented by special reports and commentaries. In a deliberate demarcation from National Socialist propaganda, the BBC programs were committed to the “Strategy of Truth”; Purposeful lies and half-truths only occurred in exceptional cases.

The Gillies Committee worked against both calls for resistance actions and against the appearance of German emigrants by name on BBC programs.

Walter Auerbach commented:

BBC broadcasts are broadcasts by an English government institution that only allows England's allies a certain broadcasting autonomy. As long as the internal German anti-Nazi movement is not recognized as an ally, German-language workers' programs from London are English propaganda programs and are perceived as such by the listeners. All of the emigrants who speak of their membership in trade union organizations via the BBC today incriminate the overall movement with the vast majority of the BBC listeners.

Instead, plans had been developed in this group for the establishment of a so-called black channel that was to concentrate domestically on “instructions on sabotage and passive resistance” and, in terms of foreign policy, to “Hitler's world domination plans for the sake of power and war, and to refer to his community of interests with capital as well as the fact that, despite all fundamental criticism, Great Britain was the ally of the German revolutionaries for its military war goal.

The Union Freedom League against the swastika

As the organizational backbone of the planned station, an institution was needed that could act as a representative of all German employees in Great Britain and the former German trade unionists.

That is why in May 1940 an action group called the Trade Union Freedom Association against the Swastika (GFgH) was founded.

In February 1941 this resulted in the National Group of German Trade Unionists (LDG) in Great Britain, which set itself the task of organizing all German workers in Great Britain and the former German trade unionists.

Richard Crossman

In May 1940, Labor politician Richard Crossman came to the EH department to help monitor the BBC's German broadcasts.

Crossman, since 1938 co-editor of the weekly New Statesman and Nation , a left-independent, labor-oriented magazine that has existed since 1931, had attracted attention weeks before with his German-language broadcasts on the BBC.

Dieter Nelles, author of Resistance and International Solidarity, on Crossman:

For the activist German emigrants around the GFgH, there could have been no better partner on the British side than the rhetorically and intellectually brilliant Crossman, who was not only known for his spirit of contradiction to superiors, but actually feared.

The Labor Broadcasting Committee (LBC)

At the end of June 1940, the British Ministry of Information officially formed a Labor Broadcasting Committee (LBC), chaired by trade union official HW Adamson of the Transport and General Workers Union (TGWU). Initially, only Auerbach, Eberhard and Waldemar von Knoeringen were to belong to the German advisory board of the committee .

The committee was supposed to coordinate all “Labor broadcasts” in the BBC's “Home, Empire and Overseas' Service”. In addition to the German advisory board, there were special committees for the German-occupied countries in which ITF members held an outstanding position.

On their advocacy, German emigrants were released from the British internment camps and a list of emigrants in France to be brought to Great Britain for propaganda purposes was drawn up.

The Special Operations Executive (SOE)

After the tasks of the newly established Special Operations Executive (SOE) had been laid down in the British War Cabinet in the SOE Charter on July 22, 1940 , Winston Churchill was supposed to make the statement to then Minister for Economic Warfare Hugh Dalton: “Now you are setting Europe on fire ! ”Have given.

Dalton, who was called “Dr. Dynamo ”, dubbed“ Dirty Digger ”by his enemies, was an energetic and ambitious Labor Party politician. The lawyer and finance expert, who taught as a professor at the London School of Economics, became a Labor MP for the first time in 1924 and was a cabinet member in various Labor governments.

The SOE, under Dalton's Ministry, was supposed to coordinate all measures related to espionage and sabotage against the enemy overseas.

In the summer of 1940, British government circles largely believed that instead of the direct confrontation with the German armies that had led to the slaughter in and around the trenches of World War I, the war would be won with subversion, acts of sabotage, a blockade and strategic bombing could. The SOE was supposed to take on the role of a fourth arm . Dalton assumed that Europe was in a stage of “permanent revolution” and that the population would be ready at any time to rise up against the German occupiers through strikes, uprisings, boycotts and assassinations.

This assumption was soon to prove unrealistic. Most of the population in occupied Europe was far from resisting the German occupiers, and most socialist parties and trade unions also came to terms with the situation.

The SOE was divided into two departments. The SO2 department was supposed to deal with sabotage and subversion in the enemy-occupied areas and was officially disbanded in 1946.

The SO1 department was supposed to deal with propaganda and took over the hidden and “black” propaganda from EH. The “white” propaganda was officially continued by the BBC.

Against fierce opposition from the State Department, Dalton pushed through the appointment of Richard Crossman as head of the German division of SO1. This created the prerequisites for setting up a secret transmitter in the German language, which was supposed to carry out European revolutionary propaganda. With the transmitter of the European revolution, this project was realized a few months later.

At the end of May 1940, the first black channel “Here speaks Germany” was set up on British soil, aimed primarily at the nationally and conservatively-minded German bourgeoisie. The concept of this station had been developed by the German central politician Carl Spieker and the British journalist Frederic Amandus Voigt , who was appointed by EH as director.

After the SOE had signaled the general willingness to install a worker transmitter, the planning quickly entered a concrete stage. The propagandistic and ideological concept of the planned station was developed in long discussions between Crossman, Eberhard and Waldemar von Knoerrigen and Paul Anderson .

Other members of Neu Beginnen as well as Walter Auerbach, Otto Kahn-Freund and Hilde Meisel were called in to the deliberations.

The broadcast team

The broadcast team lived and worked in a remote country house complex north of London. The broadcast team was initially made up of Paul and Evelyn Anderson , Knoerigen and Eberhard, and Richard Löwenthal and Karl Anders joined the team in autumn 1941 when the Andersons left the team. With the exception of Eberhard, all permanent employees belonged to New Beginning.

Close contacts existed with the circle around Auerbach, Kahn-Freund and Meisel, who had met with Crossman every week since October 1940. "Crossman attaches great importance to seeing you and some others every Wednesday," wrote Eberhard on October 14, 1940 to Auerbach. The station's staff had astonishing journalistic freedom. There was no censorship. Crossman was not seen by his German employees as a “watchdog or censor, but on the contrary as a friend, advisor and patron”. The SER editorial team also had privileges at the level of information access that were not later given to any secret broadcaster or the German BBC staff.

Not only did they have regular access to all available German newspapers and magazines, but they also got to see the daily edition of the BBC Monitoring Service, and Crossman also gave them access to intelligence reports.

literature

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