“In January 1937, a KPD shortwave broadcasting station was heard throughout the Third Reich. It was designated by its wavelength: 29.8. Its broadcasts denounced the degradation of the working class, corruption, warmongering, anti-Semitism and intervention in Spain, denounced by name the Gestapo snitches, reported on the struggles and broadcast the declarations of prestigious antifascists. This station acquired a level of popularity that was reported by a Norwegian government newspaper correspondent: All over Germany—in workshops, stores, liquor stores and large buildings—the mysterious figure of 29.8 is now being talked about. This figure can be read on walls and fences. On the walls of houses it is written in chalk, and people look at each other when they find this curious decimal fraction. You blink your eyes and you understand each other.... Although it is the Communist Party’s position, it deliberately avoids everything that comes out of narrow party politics. Thus the post becomes the mouthpiece of the German opposition. Thus, priests in Cologne shorthanded Heinrich Mann’s speech on 29.8 and distributed it to their parishioners. The content of a 29.8 program about Thälmann was reproduced in the form of leaflets in Berlin factories. The Gestapo undertook an audit of listeners, identifying the owners of radios capable of receiving shortwave, and the press announced several arrests for listening to 29.8. The Nazis installed a powerful transmitter in East Prussia to jam the broadcasts, but the radio started broadcasting slightly below or above 29.8, and it was still possible to hear it. Eventually, the Nazis had to install three more transmitters to jam the KPD’s clandestine broadcasts”
- T. Derbent, The German Communist Resistance, 1933-1945. Foreign Languages Press, 2021, p. 44-45)
