Radio: Hostilities

>The time: 1919. The place: a Bierstube in Munich. The characters: Nazi Poet Dietrich Eckart and Sturmer Ernst Roehm; another man, at a table apart from them, moody, alone. Eckart speaks: “We must have a fellow at the head who won’t wince at the rattle of a machine gun. The rabble must be given a good fright. He mustn’t be brainy. . . . I would rather have a stupid, vain jackass who can give the Reds a juicy answer . . . than a dozen learned professors sitting trembling on the wet trouser leg of facts. . . . Oh—and he must be a bachelor. Then we shall get the women. . . .” They study the man at the other table, then call out to him: “HITLER! HITLER! . . .” Such was the opening this week of a new propaganda serial staged by British Broadcasting Corp. Its name: The Shadow of the Swastika. Its story: the careers of the Nazi bully boys from beer hall to the rape of Poland.

>Heard last week over many a British loudspeaker: “You people are so safe, you imagine. We know where your ARP stations are, but our bombers could get you before you got there!” The wave length was Hamburg’s but Britons had a vile suspicion that the broadcasts came from “somewhere in England,” were perhaps a belated Nazi-planted reply to the irrepressible German Freedom Radio (TIME, Oct. 23).