Hitler's Radio War

This book tells the story of Nazi international?broadcasting during and before the Second World War. At its peak German radio stations broadcast in 54 languages to a worldwide audience. For the first time in an international conflict, citizens of the warring nations could hear enemy propaganda in their own living rooms. Many of the voices that they heard belonged to a new type of criminal, the radio traitor. The nickname Lord Haw-Haw is still famous internationally, but there were numerous other radio renegades speaking on behalf of the Nazis. The Nazis' propaganda was sinister enough, but they also ran a series of secret stations that spoke to enemy audiences in the name of "patriotic" dissidents who claimed to be broadcasting from clandestine transmitters in their own countries. Using archival material, Hitler’s Radio War dissects the message that Germany’s overt and covert propaganda stations broadcast to their audiences, as well as the lives and motivations of the broadcasters.

Roger Tidy has been interested in the use of international radio as an instrument of propaganda all his adult life. He has worked for many years in the broadcast-monitoring business and has contributed, as a freelance writer and reporter, to numerous publications and radio programs in the UK and abroad. In the 1980s, during the Cold War, he published a weekly newsletter for radio enthusiasts, charting the latest developments in the ongoing struggle of the airwaves between Western, Eastern, and "non-aligned" ideologies.