GLENN MILLER’S GERMAN LANGUAGE BROADASTS
“THE OWI AIMS AT FRITZ”
“LONDON – The German Army, target of the “German Wehrmacht Hour” beamed out by ABSIE (American Broadcasting Station in Europe) is getting its first taste of OWI-supplied live popular music according to the New York office of the OWI’s Overseas Branch. Beginning last Wednesday (Nov. 1) ABSIE is offering German listeners a weekly half-hour of music by Maj. Glenn Miller, leader of the American Band of the Supreme Command.”
ABSIE – THE VOICE OF AMERICA
The headline from the November 6, 1944, issue of “Broadcasting” magazine described the ABSIE program Music for the Wehrmacht which was part of the one-hour program, the German Wehrmacht Hour. The program included both music and news. Firstly, ABSIE, the American Broadcasting Station in Europe, was the wartime European Service for the Voice of America. ABSIE broadcast in six languages in addition to English. Furthermore, its target audiences were the people of Europe in allied and Nazi-occupied nations, the exhausted German armed forces, and the war-weary German people. Moreover, its most popular programs unsurprisingly included American popular music. Likewise, you can hear the original Music for the Wehrmacht programs on the Glenn Miller Archives’ Star-Spangled Radio Hour podcasts and one of the programs is posted online at Inside Glenn Miller Declassified.
Therefore, the strategy of ABSIE was simple: play it straight and present straightforward American popular culture without overt propaganda. In addition to Major Glenn Miller and the American Band of the Allied Expeditionary Forces, “Der Bingle” Bing Crosby, Dinah Shore, Marlene Dietrich, Morton Downey and even Spike Jones appeared on Music for the Wehrmacht. The scripts used by ABSIE for Americans not familiar with the German langauage were produced in “phonetic” style allowing the celebrities to converse with a fluent German-language announcer. Therefore, using the pseudonym “Ilse,” ABSIE’s Gloria Wagner hosted the programs. However, the irrepressible and native German speaker Marlene Dietrich had no such difficulty! The comprehensive histories Glenn Miller Declassified and America Ascendant document ABSIE and Music for the Wehrmacht in detail. Learn more about Music for the Wehrmacht:
There was a studio in the basement of a building in London on the corner of Wardour and Hollen Street where Miller cut some of his scripts for broadcasting.
I often went there during the late nineteen nineties when the basement was converted into editing suites and there was evidence that not only did GM record there, but that the Royal Family used a small cinema in the basement for private screenings.