“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.