August 18: The people's radio that became the eighth great power

On August 18, 1933, Joseph Goebbels presented the Volksempfänger at the Berlin Radio Show and called radio the eighth great power. Tonight's film: Videodrome (1983).

There is a kind of date that always stops me when I work on this almanac. The day a state does not just speak to its people, but puts a physical object on their shelf so its voice can walk into the living room. August 18, 1933 is one of those days. Joseph Goebbels, propaganda minister of Nazi Germany, opened the 10th International Radio Exhibition in Berlin, and in his speech called radio the eighth great power. The phrase was not his invention. Napoleon had called the press the seventh. Goebbels only added one number.

That was the stage on which the Volksempfänger VE 301, the People’s Radio, was presented. Engineer Otto Griessing developed it at Goebbels’ directive, 28 German factories built it, to strict government specifications. It cost 76 Reichsmarks, about half a conventional set, and roughly two weeks of average wages. The Bakelite box tuned to long-wave and medium-wave bands. Not shortwave. That was not an accident: shortwave would have let foreign broadcasts in, and the regime did not want that.

The model number was its own message. VE stood for Volksempfänger, and 301 stood for January 30, the day Hitler took power. More than 100,000 units sold in the first two days of the show. By 1941, roughly 65 percent of German households owned a Volksempfänger or its cheaper successor, the Kleinempfänger, which people on the street called Goebbels-Schnauze, Goebbels’ snout. The mandatory monthly license fee was 2 Reichsmarks. If you were Jewish, you could not own a radio at all after January 1939. Goebbels said he wanted a radio that reaches the people, an intermediary between the government and the nation. That is exactly what he got.