cover image Hitler's Airwaves: The Inside Story of Nazi Radio Broadcasting and Propaganda Swing

Hitler's Airwaves: The Inside Story of Nazi Radio Broadcasting and Propaganda Swing

Horst J. P. Bergmeier, H. J. P. Bergmeier. Yale University Press, $55 (384pp) ISBN 978-0-300-06709-5

German jazz historians Bergmeier and Lotz had been researching a mysterious swing band known as Charlie and his Orchestra, rumored to have been a secret weapon of Nazi shortwave broadcasts to Britain and North America. They found dozens of ""Charlie"" sides, mostly heavy-handed parodies of jazz standards (""You're the top--/You're a German flyer/ You're the top--/You're machine gun fire"") commissioned by a regime for whom jazz was officially verboten. This Monty Pythonesque campaign is one of many ploys detailed in a well-researched but often unnecessarily plodding rundown of Nazi radio propaganda between 1933 and 1945. The inside view of Goebbels's Ministry of Propaganda describes a chillingly banal PR firm whose radio voices included a fascinating gallery of mercenaries, Mosleyites and naifs, among them the infamous William Joyce and Mildred Gillars, aka ""Lord Haw-Haw"" and ""Axis Sally""; Ezra Pound; P.G. Wodehouse; and a few too many others. Dealt with in equally overstuffed fashion are the infighting between Goebbels and Ribbentrop and the so-called black propaganda: German stations claiming to originate in target nations. This is a little-known history well worth discovering, despite the authors' tendency to sacrifice drama for a numbing recitation of biographical detail. An attached CD sampler of radio broadcasts was not heard by PW. Illustrated. (June)