Seehaus special service
The special service Seehaus was a service for news acquisition and evaluation by listening to foreign broadcasters in the German Reich in Berlin-Wannsee , comparable to the monitoring service of the BBC or the Foreign Broadcast Monitoring Service in the USA.
At the beginning of the Second World War , the tasks of a radio listening service were performed by various departments ( research office , special service country house ). In 1940 these were summarized in the “Sonderdienst Seehaus” , which was housed in the former Swedish pavilion , Am Großen Wannsee 28-30. From 1941 the service was handed over to the "Deutsche Auslandsrundfunkgesellschaft Interradio AG" and initially only to the Foreign Office , from October 22, 1941 also to the Reich Ministry for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda with the branch offices in Paris, Bucharest, Marseille, Monte Carlo, Shanghai (at Radio XGRS ) and temporarily subordinated to Rome.
From 1941 to 1945 broadcasts were listened to around the clock in 36 languages, insofar as their word programs could be of importance for political, military and propaganda purposes . Around 500 employees (“monitors”), officers and translators were employed in the “Sonderdienst Seehaus”, which has been strictly shielded since 1942. They delivered a daily report similar to the BBC's Daily Digest of Foreign Broadcasts to a decreasing number of eligible recipients as the war progressed. In mid-April 1945, during the Battle of Berlin , the monitoring center was evacuated in omnibuses to southwest Germany. The service was a nuisance for the Nazis because it was apparently consciously given space to events that were suppressed in German propaganda. In 1942 Goebbels commissioned Admiral Canaris to investigate the Seehaus on suspicion of defeatism and urged that its use in the military and the administration be restricted. In fact, most of the people working there were known as anti-Nazis among the initiates of the German resistance movement and were called the "Sabotage Club".
In the winter of 1946/47 Daniel Lerner from Berlin brought eight tons of documents to the USA for the Library of Congress . Today these are stored in the Hoover Library , Stanford (California) . Others can be found in the Hoppegarten Federal Archives .
Web links
- Sample document from January 25, 1945 (PDF; 102 kB) Management report from Moscow to CBS , New York
- Housing complex today
Individual evidence
- ^ The Goebbels Diaries, 1942-1943 , pages 43, 48 and 50, translated into English and edited by Louis P. Lochner . First published by Doubleday in 1948. Reprinted by Greenwood Press 1970 ( ISBN 0-837-13815-9 )
- ↑ Ralf Georg Reuth (Ed.): Joseph Goebbels. Diaries 1924–1945, Volume 4 , Page 1744, Piper Munich / Zurich 2003 ( ISBN 3-492-21411-8 )
- ↑ Lerner, Crossman : Sykewar . New York. Stewart Pub. 1949