Thank you to Ray Robinson and Jeff White for sharing this interesting feature from Wavescan.
German Army Radio
Jeff: The central European nation of Germany was the first country in the world to produce special radio programming specifically for its armed forces. Germany also traces the beginning of its radio history back to this event, which marks the first occasion of regular wireless broadcasting in that country. Here’s Ray Robinson in Los Angeles to tell us more.
Ray: Thanks, Jeff. The credit for that new radio initiative went to Hans Bredov, who transmitted music and information to troops in the German army who were stationed on the Western Front during World War I. This historic endeavor took place in May 1917, and it ranks as one of the world's first regular broadcasting services.
Later, during the Second World War, actually in the summer of 1941, German personnel on duty in Yugoslavia re-activated the radio stations in the capital city, Belgrade, as Sender Belgrade. This station had been on the air previously as Radio Belgrade, with studios in the city and two transmitters out in the country.
The medium wave transmitter was rated at 2.5 kW, and it was on the air without callsign on 666 kHz. The 10 kW shortwave transmitter, with its two-mast antenna system, had been installed in a new building in an isolated area outside the city. The facility was inaugurated early in 1939, under the pre-war callsign YUA.
It was from Sender Belgrade that German service personnel first heard the nostalgic presentation of the very popular song, Lili Marlene by Marlene Dietrich, which was used as a theme tune to identify the station. Because of the low power of the medium wave transmitter, German forces in North Africa would have tuned in to the 10 kW shortwave unit, although we don’t have a record of the frequency that was used. Subsequently, several other German radio stations in the European and Mediterranean arena also began to play this recording of Lili Marlene, including some of the mobile stations in North Africa. Here's what they would have heard:
Marlene Dietrich was German, but she had moved with her husband from Berlin to the United States in 1930, in order to pursue an acting career.
Interestingly, the first radio station operated by BFBS, the British Forces Broadcasting Service, also played this same song, ‘Lili Marlene’, as part of their sign-on routine for each broadcast day. This first station was inaugurated on New Year's Day 1944, and it was located in Algiers in North Africa, using a German transmitter that had previously been on the air in Tunisia.
Of course, it would have been the English version of ‘Lili Marlene’ that was played by BFBS, and you can hear that as our closing music at the very end of this edition of Wavescan.
After the war was over an Australian soldier who saw service in North Africa brought back home a copy of the recording of Lili Marlene on an old 78 disc. Unfortunately, this record was broken. However, the two parts were carefully glued together, and this music was then first broadcast in Australia over station 5DN in Adelaide.
Getting back to German Army Radio, in 1942, a mobile radio station, housed in seven railway vans was taken to Rovianemi in northern Finland, north of the Baltic Sea, where it was placed on air from the German army barracks 10 km outside the town. This army entertainment station, known as the Laplandsender, was on the air for nearly three years.
The daily schedule from Laplandsender consisted of variety programming, news bulletins, and Finnish language lessons. The final broadcast from this unit was in November 1944.
When German forces withdrew from Finland to Norway, they took their mobile radio station with them. However, after a further withdrawal, the station was abandoned, and it’s now on display in the Radio Museum in Bergen, Norway.
Back to you, Jeff.
(Ray Robinson/Wavescan)
