NAZIS FEAR BRITISH BROADCASTS

Southland Times, Issue 24439, 20 May 1941, Page 2

NAZIS FEAR BRITISH BROADCASTS

RUGBY, May 15.

The enemy is finding it increasingly necessary, in addressing his own listeners, to attack the British broadcasts. The director-general of the British Broadcasting Corporation, Mr F. W. Ogilvie, emphasized this point in a talk in the Indian service in Hindustani. “The enemy obviously follows our broadcasts closely, and he attacks them day by day, although his own listeners have nominally been prohibited all along from listening to foreign broadcasts at all—a crime which in Germany is called spiritual self-mutilation,” Mr Ogilivie said. Listening in entails a heavy penalty. In the occupied countries —Poland, Czechoslovakia, Norway, Holland,' Belgium, France and the Balkans—there is evidence not merely that the people listen, and listen intently, but that their courage is upheld by their listening, and their minds are kept alert for victory in due course. Even now the countryside and towns are being covered in response to our broadcasts with the letter V( the initial letter and proud symbol m many languages of the words victory or freedom. To see those V’s carved on tree-trunks, stencilled on walls, or scrawled on the dusty mudguards of German army lorries, brings hope and comfort to the oppressed. Tlie oppressors, seeing them know and are afraid. “Greece, the cradle of our western civilization, has fallen—for the moment. A few days ago a little ceremony took place here in one of our British Broadcasting Corporation studios. The Greek Minister’ in London (M. Charalambos Simopoulos) handed over to us the signal of Athens radio station for safe keeping. He said. ‘The voice of Greece is no longer heard from the holy rock of the Acropolis. The present announcer of Athens radio may be speaking but he is acting under the immediate orders of the invader. I now entrust to the safe keeping of the London radio station —the station of that other great island from which the fight for freedom is being carried out — the signal of the Athens free station until the dawn of that happy day when the ether will reverberate again with the voice of Free Greece.’ ”