The Battle of Britain Five Months That Changed History, May—October 1940 by James Holland (z-lib.org).epub

In 1933, the Volksempfänger (‘people’s receiver’) had been put into mass
production, and this was later followed by the DKE (Deutscher
Kleinempfänger – ‘German little receiver’), which was even more
affordable. While across Germany some 70 per cent of the population
owned radios by 1940, this was still not considered enough, so communal
listening points were set up: all restaurants, cafés and bars had radios, while
many were installed in blocks of flats, factories and other workplaces.
There were radios at the Siemens factory where Hilda Müller was being
trained, for example. Loudspeakers were also erected on pillars in towns
and cities. The density of radio coverage was greater in the Third Reich
than in any other country in the world. Radio wardens coaxed people into
listening to key speeches and programmes, while propaganda broadcasts
were broadcast between a heavy diet of light music and popular
entertainment to ensure people kept tuned in.
Goebbels also went to great lengths to develop his foreign-language
radio. By May 1940 his propaganda broadcasts were going out in twentytwo
different languages. English-language broadcasts targeted the British
working classes, while the broadcasts of the Irish national, William Joyce –
or Lord Haw-Haw, as he was known – had millions of regular listeners.
French broadcasts equally aimed to undermine morale – ‘Why die for
Danzig?’ was an oft-repeated refrain. It was also up to Goebbels to release
newsreel footage to foreign press and media organizations. Again, repeated
film of panzers, burning villages, waves of bombers and, of course, the
appropriate sound effects of Stukas dive-bombing, their ‘Jericho trumpet’
sirens wailing, ensured that most in the west duly believed Germany to be
the military power-house it liked to make out. Goebbels had a simple
dictum that he always stuck to: ‘Propaganda means repetition and still more
repetition!’ And on the whole, it seemed to work.
One of Goebbels’s most repeated messages was that Britain was the
‘Number One’ enemy. On 10 May, at his daily conference, he told his team
that any gain of ground should be presented merely as ‘getting nearer to the
“principal enemy”, the British’. Earlier, at the outbreak of war, he had
issued very clear press directives to this effect. ‘Britain is the true aggressor
in the world,’ he wrote on 1 September. A few weeks later he sent out a
directive to all Party leaders making broadcasts with guidelines about tone
and emphasis. ‘Make clear that we are engaged in the fateful struggle of the