17th July 1942, midday
Radio control in Russia
—Goebbels fails.
In the neighbourhood of our “Werwolf” Headquarters we found that almost every house was provided with a wired-wireless.
This shows that the Russians had realised in good time the dangers of a wireless receiving set. For one thing, the wired-wireless has the great advantage that it eliminates all interference, and for another, it permits the State to choose the broadcasts which it considers suitable. In Russia, the Commissar chooses the programmes, and the listeners are therefore completely cut off from the influence of foreign propaganda.
Before the war I myself directed the Minister for Propaganda to introduce wired-wireless in Germany. In this way German listeners would have been able to receive only our own national stations and such foreign broadcasts as we decided to retransmit.
I am very sorry that we were not able to apply these measures before the conflict started. It was a bad piece of work on the part of the Ministry of Propaganda, for although Dr. Goebbels has tried to put the blame on to other services, it is he who is responsible for the failure. When the execution of an order demands the cooperation of several services, he who receives the original order must assume the responsibility for the execution of the whole.
The desirability of introducing wired-wireless is indisputable. No Government can permit its population to be poisoned by enemy propaganda; otherwise one might as well invite a thousand enemy propagandists to come over and do their work openly.
All measures of this nature should be examined in peacetime with an eye to their probable effects in time of war. For war is a life-and-death struggle, which has its own rules and ignores the normalities of peace. A people which is prepared to accept compulsory military service of three or four years as a preparation for a possible war will not mind the slight inconvenience of a change over from wireless to wired-wireless.