Qualla: Nauen Transmitter Station

Nauen Transmitter Station: Introduction

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Fraxinus2, CC BY-SA 4.0. For ten years the most advanced long-range radio station Germany ever built was a potato cellar. The Soviets had stripped it in 1945 — every transmitter carted east, every mast dynamited, the equipment vanishing so completely that nobody afterwards could say where any of it went — and the great hall Hermann Muthesius had designed in 1920 was scheduled for demolition too. Somebody talked them out of it. So from 1945 to 1955 the cathedral of German wireless, the building whose facade once read Drahtloser Übersee-Verkehr, wireless overseas traffic, sat on the flat land north of Nauen with root vegetables stacked inside it. That building is still standing, and still working, which is the whole reason the place matters.

Image: Fraxinus2 | CC BY-SA 4.0

Nauen Transmitter Station: A Steam Tractor for a Power Plant

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit C. C. F. Monckton, Public domain. Telefunken founded the station on 1 April 1906, when its engineer R. Hirsch leased forty hectares of Havelland farmland from a landowner named Fritz Stotze. Trials began on 9 August and regular service on the 16th. Everything about that first installation sounds improvised and wa...

Image: C. C. F. Monckton | Public domain

Nauen Transmitter Station: The Voice Left When the Cables Were Cut

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Unknown, CC BY-SA 3.0 de. Submarine telegraph cables were Britain's, and in both world wars Britain cut Germany's. That single fact made Nauen strategic. Its high-frequency alternator could hold a daylight transatlantic circuit with its sister station at Sayville on Long Island, making it for a time by a ...

Image: Unknown | CC BY-SA 3.0 de

Nauen Transmitter Station: Muthesius Builds a Nave

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit War Department. 1789-9/18/1947, Public domain. The 1920 building is the reason people photograph this place. Hermann Muthesius, one of the most influential German architects of the era, gave the station a hall on the scale of a nave, all mass and rhythm, its facade carrying relief sculpture above that inscription, to house th...

Image: War Department. 1789-9/18/1947 | Public domain

Nauen Transmitter Station: How Old Is Oldest

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit X-Weinzar, CC BY 2.5. English-language sources routinely call Nauen the oldest continuously operating radio transmitting installation in the world, and the claim deserves the qualification German sources give it. Die älteste noch bestehende Sendeanlage der Welt is the careful formulation: the oldest t...

Image: X-Weinzar | CC BY 2.5

Nauen Transmitter Station: Propaganda, and What Came After

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Vincent Schriel, CC BY-SA 3.0. East Germany brought the site back to life in 1955 and turned it outward in 1959, when it became the GDR's international shortwave service, broadcasting as Radio Berlin International. Between 1959 and 1989 the station accumulated twenty-one transmitters and forty-five antenna sys...

Image: Vincent Schriel | CC BY-SA 3.0