Third Reich Television

The historiography of the Third Reich has long been dominated by the twin pillars of mass media that defined the era: the radio and the cinema. The ubiquity of the Volksempfänger (People's Receiver), bringing the voice of the Führer into the domestic sanctity of the German home, and the monumental visual grammar of Leni Riefenstahl’s films have obscured a third, more nascent, yet technologically superior medium cultivated by the Nazi regime: television. Between the years 1935 and 1944, Nazi Germany operated the world's first regular public television service, a project of immense ambition that sought to collapse the distance between the regime and the populace through the miracle of electronic sight.