A Monumental Find: 1930s German TV on Film!

“Achtung! Achtung! Fernsehsender Paul Nipkow!”
From 1935 to 1943, that commanding cry signaled “Attention!” to people gathered in public viewing parlors throughout Berlin, and around private sets in the homes of Nazi big shots - the viewers of the world’s first full-scale television program service.

Television under the Swastika, an hour-long documentary produced by Germany’s Spiegel TV, tells the story through newly discovered film, produced for broadcast before and during WW2, and then lost track of for 60+ years amid the archives of the East German Communist state.

Previously, so little film was known to exist from pre-1948 telecasts that the origins of TV programming were as good as lost. Now, it’s evident that even in that early day, the language of the visual medium was developing fast under the Goebbels propaganda machine, helped along by German technological know-how.

Among the broadcasts were entertainment, documentaries (themselves mostly propaganda), sports including the 1936 Olympics, and public spectacles like the Party Congresses at Nuremberg. Inn a time when live cameras did not yet work outdoors, a film truck with high-speed processor and transmitter link aired remote pickups with only a minute’s delay, complete with announcer commentary.

With the start of war, the Deutscher Fernseh gave its facilities over to the fighting forces, installing TVs in barracks and hospitals. In Paris, where the French Post Office had had its own TV station, this too was used to entertain the troops and for French-language propaganda. The Berlin station was bombed off the air in 1943, but the Paris operation continued until the liberation in August 1944.

Anyone at all interested in media history should run, not walk, to smashing telly! and view this incredible discovery.

Ok, not “newly” rediscovered - the docu came out in 1999, but the English-language version is new this summer.

I’ve ripped some stills and put them on my Flickr stream here.

Presumably, this was a mechanical system based on a Nipkow disk. What was the resolution? Greater than the British or American systems? A friend has a US pre-War Nipkow receiver, and it was only 30 lines.

There were several co-existing systems in Germany in the early 30s, much as in the US. They had various resolutions. Especially after the Nazis came to power, there was a real impetus to keep up with the US and Britain in the state of the art. Sometimes they were a little behind, sometimes a little ahead.

The Post Office experimented on 30 lines, mechanical, starting about 1930 (same resolution as the Baird system). By 1932 there were 90-line mechanical broadcasts (about equivalent to Fisher-Price Pixelvision). I think that is what you see briefly in the exhibition hall clips about 07:50 into the film.

Experiments with electronic TV were mostly on the receiving end until 1935, when German Radio took over. At the start they used 180 lines, with live mechanical scanning in studio. Premade films from the studio, or on one-minute delay from the film truck, were scanned electronically with Farnsworth’s image dissector technology.

By 1937 they had upgraded the system to 375 lines, and by 1938 to 441 lines (the same definition used in the US as an informal standard before NTSC). By now all pickup was electronic - Telefunken was supplying cameras and tubes made under RCA Iconoscope patents.

All that said, German military projects were working on 700+ line TV applications for aircraft use early in WW2, so the industry was most assuredly pushing the envelope.

Anybody know where I can get that old “Indian Chief” test pattern? i haven’t seen it in years!

You gotta be kidding.

Of course, at first he was just an Indian, without a test pattern.

Hey, thanks, Doug! I’ve bookmarked this thread because I’m fascinated by early TV and I want to be sure to find my way back to it and your link. Too bad so much of what I’ve seen is the 35mm they shot to be broadcast, not a Kinescope of the actual broadcasts. There’s just something special about seeing what people actually saw that puts you right there. Hmm, a Yank with some Jewish ancestry? I’m probably better off watching it on TV. :eek:

Hey Doug

You know that final segment of the German soldier amputees dancing and jumping one legged through those obstacle courses?

Did anyone besides me think of Monty Python when they saw that???:smiley:

Quasi