Memes

To be honest, when I first saw the claim about the Minsk radio station I immediately wondered if it was real, but The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, pg. 621 does briefly discuss it and the author cited the ‘German Foreign Office papers, […] p. 480’. Strangely, though, not that many sources discuss it, and the few that I did find had surprisingly little to say about it; finding in depth English information on this radio station is frustratingly uneasy. A couple sources (The Fate of Poles in the USSR and The Polish Review) specifically claim that this station helped the Luftwaffe bomb towns, villages, and cities: a serious accusation that has attracted suspiciously little attention and reeks of Cold War sensationalism. Now I’m starting to wonder: did the Soviets even make good on their presumable promise to help the Luftwaffe?

Here is what pg. 480 of the German Foreign Office papers says:

“The Chief of the General Staff of the Luftwaffe² would be very much obliged to the People’s Commissariat for Telecommunications if—for urgent navigational tests—the Minsk Broadcasting Station could, until further notice and commencing immediately, send out a continuous dash with intermittent call-sign ‘Richard Wilhelm 1.0.’ in the intervals between its programmes, and introduce the name ‘Minsk’ as often as possible in the course of its programme.”

I don’t know if it’s because of my limited expertise in this particular subject or if there is some context that I am overlooking, but judging from this report alone, it really doesn’t sound that scandalous. It sounds downright boring, actually. What do you think: is sending out a continuous dash and repeatedly introducing a name in navigational tests a cause for concern…? Can you feel yourself sweating at all…? Do you think that you’ll lose any sleep tonight…? Even just a little bit…? Be honest.

A funny thing, though:

“One eve­ning a soldier came to the place where I lived and told us he’d heard on the radio that every­body who didn’t want to be under German occupation was welcome in the USSR: the borders ­were open for every­body.”²¹ As she has heard about the Nazi treatment of Jews in Germany, she says to herself: “Maybe ­there is a way. Maybe the USSR ­will save my life.” So together with some friends and her brother, she decides, as she puts it, to take up the “Rus­sian offer.”²² They leave Warsaw on foot on 28 September. She writes: “The next day we ­were refugees in the care of the Rus­sian Army in Bialystok. […] ​We were well treated and got some food and shelter.”²³

(Source.)