This weekís documentaries by Martin Bright writing in the Observer tv.

Television in the Third Reich

Secret History: Television of the Third Reich is one of those archive - based films that leaves you open ‚ mouthed at the novelty of the images. Like Britain at War in Colour, (italics) this Secret History (italics) documentary forces you to look at familiar images with new eyes. For half a century, the surviving output of the Deutscher Fernseh Rundfunk, the Nazisí pioneering television station, lay in the vaults of the East German film archive.

Now it has finally been restored and can be shown for the first time. Intended initially for the handful of party employees and German post office workers who had access to television sets, the mixture of light entertainment shows, news, sport and chilling propaganda gives a raw insight into everyday German life under the Nazis that the newsreels and highly choreographed movies of Leni Riefenstahl do not provide. Hitlerís propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels was not convinced that TV would ever become the medium of the masses and this made it something of a back room operation.

But the results are all the more fascinating for that. One mainstay of the German output was the variety show Roof Garden (italics), which featured kitsch Nazi classics such as "The brown marching columns of the SA, the black ones of the SS" and "Strength Through Joy: Thatís the Way to Get Your Boy". Despite Goebbelsí reservations, by 1939 the Nazis were ready for mass production of televisions, and planned to produce 10,000 sets in time for Christmas. But by then, the tide of the War had turned and allied bombing finally destroyed the fledging Nazi TV industry.