To German-speaking listeners Philadelphia’s station WTEL brought news this week: U.S. technical research, declared WTEL in impeccable German, is superior to the Reich’s, will help win the war. The speaker was Biochemist Dr. Otto Meyerhof, refugee Nobel Prizewinner (1922). He was only one of numerous authorities on a new program now telling Philadelphia’s 200,000 German-Americans why the Nazis are not invincible.
Hitherto WTEL’s German-language broadcasts (even those of the Rev. Kurt E. B. Molzahn, convicted last month of espionage) have been largely nonpolitical. For real political dope, many Philadelphia German-Americans listened to Dr. Goebbels by short wave. The man who pioneered WTEL’s political counter-broadcasts is Dr. Robert M. W. Kempner, exiled Prussian Minister of Justice, now at the University of Pennsylvania.
His new 15-minute weekly series has featured such German refugees and German-Americans as: Wilhelm Sollman, onetime Minister of the Interior in Stresemann’s Cabinet; Dr. Eric Stoetzner, ex-managing editor of the Frankfurter Zeitung; Chemist Dr. Werner Leszynski; Dr. William Dickman, former German magistrate; Dr. A. E. Zucker, professor of modern languages at the University of Maryland.
Dr. Kempner believes that some Philadelphia Germans still listen to Nazi shortwave broadcasts, but they “no longer swallow” Goebbels whole. Last week he declared: “They now say: ‘We heard a German tell us it was not true.’ “
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