Radio Netherlands to recreate Radio Oranje's liberation programme
 

On Thursday 5 May, which is the 60th anniversary of liberation at the end of
World War II, the Dutch service of Radio Netherlands will be recreating the
historic broadcast of Radio Oranje that announced the end of German
occupation. The programme will be broadcast at 1415 UTC on shortwave in
Europe, and worldwide via satellite and Internet.

Radio Oranje was set up in London shortly after the German occupation of the
Netherlands, and broadcast daily until shortly after liberation. The
broadcasts were designed as a counter to the censored Dutch press, and to
give Dutch people hope.

On 5 May 1945 at 8.15 pm Dutch time, Radio Oranje broadcast a special
30-minute freedom programme which included an address by Prime Minister
Gerbrandy. The audio of 19 minutes of this historic broadcast remain in the
archive. The other 11 minutes have been lost. But Peter Veenendaal, head of
the Dutch service of Radio Netherlands, explains that "since we have the
full transcripts of all the Radio Oranje broadcasts we're in a position to
make an accurate reconstruction of the original transmission. Sixty years of
freedom seemed an appropriate occasion to do that."

The news summary will be read in the style that was normal in 1945. Breaks
in musical fragments will be replaced by original recordings from that time.
The famous poem De Achttien Dooden [The Eighteen Dead] that was read by a
Radio Oranje announcer in the original transmission, will be played from a
later recording made in 1946. By using specialised production techniques,
the substitute pieces are seamlessly mixed with the original material.

(Andy Sennitt, MediaNetwork http://medianetwork.blogspot.com/ )