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United States. Office of the US High Commissioner for Germany. Information Services Division / RIAS, Berlin
([195-])
Despite the risks, people listen, pp. 14-15
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Page 15
- '4 - "Freihe-it, "Wittenbe, Ju_ 262 "195o: The Leaenburg, Schroeder and Beyrow families,. Falkstrasse 16, Wittenberg, apparently still do not understand what is at stake. If they did,, they would -not let RIAS blare its commentaries into their ears far into the night. Not only that, they force the other tenants to listen to RIAS news by turning up their set to Volume 12."1 "Neues Deutschland December 17, 1952: Reports indig.lnantly that RIAS was given free publicity at a radio and television exhibit sponsored by state, HO (commercial monopoly) in East Berlin: "When our reporter visited the exhibit, she really heard the warmongering RIASnevts coming out of a radio set. A HO salesman, who was playing around another set less than two paces saway, paid no attention. He even showed signs of annoyance when his at- tention was directed to this. The representative of the State Director for HO Industrial Goods, I1r. Stiller, assumed an almost unbelievable attitude when this wias pointed out to him. He claimed that the clients on their own tuned in to RIAS: "In testing a set they always want to listen to music." Another salesman displaying tape recording machines even stated: "WIe cut the best tapes by tuning in to RIAS or 7IVIDR 1 The laboring population of Berlin .... expects to be inforbed immediate- ly on what is being done to .... put an -end to those practises, and also what is done to those who are personally responsible for spreading RIAS war mongering.t, Although there is constant agitation in Soviet Zone universities and colleges against listening to RIAS broadcasts, students and teachers- tune in RIAS. Even at the so-called ttYorker and Peasant Faculties" (special colleges for children of the 'proletarian class"f) centers of Communist indoctrination, students listen to the "warmonger station." This weas acknowledged. by the Secretary General of the SD, Walter IUl- bricht, who declared in his guidance speech at the Second Party-Con- ference of the SBD in the summer of 1952. "Those students who, at the Worker and Peasant College in Rostock, organized collective listening to RIAS broadcasts, should have been enlightened by a delegation of workers of the Neptune Shipbuilding Plant; maybe they would then have recognized sooner what the tasks of the Worker and Peasant Colleges are!"' - 15 -
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