Television Under The Swastika - The History Of Nazi Television

[Ichingcarpenter]

Recently uncovered footage long buried in East German archives confirms that televisions first revolution occurred under the Third Reich. From 1935 to 1944 Berlin studios churned out the worlds first regular TV programming replete with the evening news street interviews sports coverage racial programs and interviews with Nazi officials"

Legend has it that the triumphal march of television began in the United States in the 'fifties. But in reality its origins hark back much further. As early as the 'thirties, a bitter rivalry raged for the world's first television broadcast. Nazi Germany wanted to beat the competition from Great Britain and the U.S. - at all costs. Reich Broadcast Director Hadamovsky christened the new-born "Greater German Television" in March 1935. And it was only in September 1944 that the last program flickered across the TV screens.


For a long time the belief persisted that only very few Nazi programs had survived, but SPIEGEL TV has now succeeded in tracking down a stock of television films and reports which have remained intact since the end of the Third Reich.


These include extensive coverage of the 1936 National Socialist Party Convention in Nuremberg which recalls today's live broadcasts, and of a 1937 visit Benito Mussolini paid to Berlin. Interviews with high-ranking Nazis such as Albert Speer, Robert Ley and the actor Heinrich George are among the finds, along with numerous special reports (i.e. on the Reich Labor Service), a cooking show and the lottery drawing.


Television anchorwomen greet their tiny audiences in specially installed television parlors in Berlin, Munich and Hamburg with "Heil Hitler." The entertainment programs are particularly curious. Cabaret artists are featured - alongside singers extolling the virtues of the "brown columns of the SA and SS."


This documentary by Michael Kloft will reveal a rare and intriguing view of the Third Reich, one far removed from the propagandistic presentations of Leni Riefenstahl & Co. and the weekly cinema newsreel, yet no less ideologically slanted. This is Nazi Germany expressed in an aesthetic medium that we ourselves have only really known since the 'fifties.



http://www.spiegeltvdistribution.com/SPTVDistribution/home.nsf/RefProgrammeKat/E4AE2ED76F1BE272C125711000603995

[Cooley Hurd]

1. I thought Fox News was the first Fascist TV.

[Pholus]

2. Naw. They ain't that original.

It actually makes sense that the Nazis did it first and Murdoch just copied it...

[Bosso 63]

3. Wow and creepy!

Check out the little ditty about the SA and the SS around 9 min and 30 seconds.

[DeSwiss]

4. K&R

- Well, now we know why scantily-clad women shaking their money-makers were introduced onto the teevee. Teevee executives who were using the troops to try to save their jobs. Which, coincidentally, is also the Fox Network's business model......

[KurtNYC]

5. Bookmarking for later.

Television is now used throughout the world to control populations. It validates some viewpoints while ignoring others altogether. It presents an alternate version of reality with a very narrow range of choices and exhaults vapid personalities. In the 70 years since the nazis, they have perfected the hypnotic effect of television, most recently introducing the news crawl which over stimulates the viewer by delivering a stream of conclusions about various news stories while simultaneously showing and talking about something else on the top 90% of the screen.

Here is another disturbing documentary on a more recent chapter of television. It looks at the last 30 to 40 years of changes in the way TV is used to pacify, distract and indoctrinate.

[Ichingcarpenter]

6. See my other post 'Ok you can admit it''

in General discussion.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/10024187954

[MADem]

7. That was incredible! I knew that TV had a long history, in fact,

my ancestors had a friend who had one of the first US TVs, but I never realized that the Germans had gotten quite that far with it.

Great program, well worth the hour spent!

[Ace Acme]

8. When TV news first started in the 1960s

Last edited Wed Dec 18, 2013, 11:22 AM - Edit history (1)

... the broadcasters presented it as a public service, for the prestige. They wanted to demonstrate that they could be trusted to report as reliably as the newspapers, and they did not expect to make a profit.

Once the credibility of the TV news was established, the beancounters took control of the networks, and wanted to "rationalize" the news programs to make them more "efficient" as profit centers. Investigative journalism is expensive, and most TV viewers are satisfied with cheaply produced celebrity gossip and waterskiing squirrels. Once the TV news was corrupted, the newspapers had to follow suit.

One of the things that struck me about TV news advertisements was how prominent the automobile commercials were. And then I recognized that the function of TV news was not just to deliver the eyeballs to the ads, but also to deliver confident upscale consumer eyeballs. After all, the ads had to convince people who already had perfectly good cars that they should go into debt to buy a brand new car just because it would make them feel good. That means you have to present a worldview in the news that makes those potential purchasers feel that everything on the news front is pretty much under control. No news about stolen elections, war crimes, defective government investigations, the power of the 1%.

[MADem]

9. This is the television my family's (wealthy) friend had.

NYC, late thirties.

FWIW, news programs started much earlier than the 1960s--one pioneer in this regard was Edward R. Murrow, who transitioned from radio.

Here's an early news program from Chicago, 1949--a lot about cars in this broadcast, and the newsreader gets very personal, too:

Of course, ERM was doing "See It Now" in the very early years of commercial tv--here's one report he did about TV in the early fifties (it's two parts, this is just part one but you can get the 2nd section at YT):

And this is arguably his most famous one (part one, two more parts at YT):

Presented as a public service of Alcoa Aluminum!