Red-letter day: September 12, 1938

[bpatrick]

Adolf Hitler addresses the Nazi Party Congress at
Nuremberg, and radio gets a new news star.

Hitler made his first declaration of his intent to
annex the largely-German-populated Sudetenland
portion of Czechoslovakia. For the rest of the month,
the western world (including the U.S.) is on pins and
needles, thinking he will go to war to get it. Finally,
British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain and French
President Edouard Daladier let him have the area when
he lies that it is his last territorial demand.

CBS and NBC carry the speech, and a new news star
emerges on CBS: H.V. Kaltenborn. Of German birth,
he can follow Hitler's speech and afterwards presents
a lucid analysis of it. For the next eighteen days he
stays in CBS Studio 9, eating and sleeping there, and
breaking into regular programming as developments warrant
(a new idea that Orson Welles would exploit a few weeks
later with his "War Of The Worlds" broadcast). One of the
European correspondents with whom Kaltenborn frequently
talks is another up-and-coming news star who in the coming
war will set the standards for broadcast journalism: Edward
R. Murrow.

 

[drt]

Very interesting post.

Hitler sure knew how to manipulate and use the relatively new medium of radio.

Any one intested in radio news broadcast from this era that has XM, might want to tune into XM channel 4 at either 3am, 8am, 12 noon, 4pm, 8pm or 11pmEastern Time for their simulated News broadcast from the era; often they contain clips of the actual news broadcast by Hilter, Roosevelt, Chamberlain etc.

They have newscasts from 1937 through and including 1949; all very interesting for history buffs.

All of this was before I was around, but I find it very interesting, especially listening to broadcast from around 1939 - Pearl Harbor, it's intersting to see the "storm clouds" gathering and Hitler starting his march to overtake the world.

Today's broadcast is from October 6, 1941 and the top headline is about the Germany military marching toward Moscow.

DRT
St. Petersburg.FL

 

[bpatrick]

Are those the "Ed Baxter Reporting" this day,
usually in the '40s? I listen to those and, like
you, find them very interesting.

 

[drt]

Are those the "Ed Baxter Reporting" this day,
usually in the '40s? I listen to those and, like
you, find them very interesting.

Yes, these are the Ed Baxter reports.

Sorry for the very belated response.

drt
27.75 latitude north

 

[landtuna]

....it's intersting to see the "storm clouds" gathering and Hitler starting his march to overtake the world.

Hitler planning on "taking over the world" is a common misconception. Hitler was in awe of the military prowess of England, particularly the Royal Navy, and knew his navy could not match hers. He would become blockaded as in WWI. His desire was to acquire as much as he could through bluff. Confidential military communications from the period show his military leaders were very much afraid France would attack after the invasion of Alsace-Lorraine. When they didn't it emboldened him to invade Poland which was the event that triggered England's declaration of war upon Germany. Hitler was astounded that England would go to war for Poland. It was perhaps, second only to the invasion of the USSR, his greatest misunderstanding.

 

[bpatrick]

Hitler seems to have assumed that Chamberlain and Daladier would hand over Poland as easily as they did the Sudetenland. But after he annexed the rest of Czechoslovakia in early 1939, the British and French leaders decided that enough was enough and agreed to go to war if Der Fuhrer made any more attempts to acquire territory. The surprise had to have been that they were as good as their word.

But after Hitler broke out of the "sitzkrieg" of the winter of 1939-40 and began overrunning the Continent, basically leaving Britain out on its own, Parliament, in June 1940, decided Chamberlain had to go. Winston Churchill, of course, became Prime Minister and inspired the British people through the blitz that fall. What wasn't known until later is that the British Spitfires won a number of battles against the Germans over the English Channel, a fact which may have convinced Hitler that he couldn't conquer the world (assuming he'd thought about it, and I think there are a couple of lines in "Mein Kampf" that suggest he had). Definitely the fact that the Germans bogged down in Russia, combined with American power once we got going, would have killed that idea.

I have always had the impression, though, that Americans who understood German (FDR was one) realized that a lot of Hitler's ranting was for his audience (William L. Shirer, who worked with Murrow in Europe for CBS and later wrote "The Rise And Fall Of The Third Reich," once said that a lot of what Hitler said was "nonsense"), but those who didn't probably thought they were listening to a certified basket case. That is not to underestimate Hitler by any means, but I wonder how much of his guttural screaming was for effect?

Speaking of Shirer, I recommend his 1980s book "The Nightmare Years" over "Rise And Fall Of The Third Reich." The latter book is more than 1000 pages and tends to be dry and boring. The former book is basically a cutdown, about half as long, with tighter writing, and it loses nothing in the editing.