The Volksempfänger (, "people's receiver") was a range of German radio receivers developed by engineer Otto Griessing at the request of Joseph Goebbels, the Reich Minister of Propaganda of the Nazi regime. The purpose of the Volksempfänger program was to make radio reception technology affordable to the general public. Goebbels realized the great propaganda potential of this relatively new medium and thus considered widespread availability of receivers highly important. History The original Volksempfänger VE301 model was presented on August 18, 1933, at the 10. Große Deutsche Funkausstellung in Berlin. The VE301 was available at a readily affordable price of (equivalent to two weeks' average salary), and a cheaper model (only a little more than the average weekly wage of , available on an installment plan to bring it within the budget of all German families), the DKE38 (sometimes called Goebbels-Schnauze – "Goebbels' snout" – by the general public) fitted with a multisection vacuum tube, was also later produced, along with a series of other models under the Volksempfänger, Gemeinschaftsempfänger, KdF (Kraft durch Freude), DKE (Deutscher Kleinempfänger), and other brands. The Volksempfänger was designed to be produced as cheaply as possible; as a consequence they generally lacked shortwave bands and did not follow the practice, common at the time, of marking the approximate dial positions of major European stations on its tuning scale. Only German and (after the 1938 annexation) Austrian stations were marked, and cheaper models only listed arbitrary numbers. Sensitivity to receive weak signals was limited, to reduce production costs further; so long as the set could receive Deutschlandsender and the local Reichssender, it was considered sensitive enough. However, foreign stations could be received after dark with an external antenna, particularly as stations such as the BBC European service increased their transmission power over the course of the war. Listening to foreign stations became a criminal offence in Nazi Germany when the war began, while in some occupied territories, such as Poland, all radio listening by non-German citizens was outlawed (later in the war this prohibition was extended to a few other occupied countries coupled with mass seizures of radio sets). Penalties ranged from fines and confiscation of radios to, particularly later in the war, sentencing to a concentration camp or capital punishment. Nevertheless, such clandestine listening was widespread in many Nazi-occupied countries and (particularly later in the war) in Germany itself. The Germans also attempted radio jamming of