BBC’s German Service: When dissent dies, so does the voice

The situation was very different on September 27, 1938, when the Nazi propaganda machine made it impossible for Germans to get an unbiased view of what was happening in the world. That was the day the BBC began German-language programming to Europe with an interpreter telling listeners in Germany what Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain had saidthat day in a speech to the nation about his hopes for peace.

With the outbreak of World War II a year later, the Nazis declared the BBC a “feindsender” (enemy radio station), and anyone caught listening to it faced death by firing squad or hanging.

Nevertheless, an estimated 15 million Germans still tuned in daily, albeit with the volume turned down low, to hear the familiar opening bars of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony pounded out by a lone tympani drum – tah tah tah tum.

It was the only way people in Nazi Germany could hear radio plays, poems and commentaries by prominent German authors, playwrights and artists who had fled the Nazis and were working for the allied cause in Britain. Among those who spoke into the BBC microphones to address their countrymen back home in those dark hours were Sigmund Freud, Albert Einstein and Thomas Mann.

It was via the BBC German service that Germans learned of the persecution and internment of Jews in concentration camps as early as December 1942. Then in April1945 listeners were riveted by bbc correspondent Patrick Gordon Walker’s German language report from Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, with his graphic details of the horrors he saw there.

In the years of the Cold War the BBC bureau in West Berlin took on a new role, providing objective reporting on world events for listeners in Communist East Germany. In the early days, before the Berlin Wall went up, East Berliners would stop by the studios to express their gratitude or would send anonymous letters to the BBC’s post office box in West Berlin.

There are still a number of staffers manning the Berlin BBC bureau, though the BBC German service is headquartered in London. In all, 30 native-German speakers are involved in the operation, which broadcasts round the clock from Bush House in London.

The BBC is the last European broadcaster to run a foreign-language service for European listeners. The German service still has an estimated 2.1 million listeners, particularly in now-unified Berlin, where ratingshave doubled in recent years.

Its loyal listeners, many of them older people with memories of the Nazi and Cold War eras, say they cannot envision a day without their old radio friend, the BBC German service.

But the fact that everybody likes it, and nobody is jamming it or threatening its listeners with death, means ironically that the BBC German service has outlived its usefulness and will soon go off the air.