[Milsurplus] More POW radio

[Hue Miller]

A couple more tidbits came to mind as this thread winds down.
I have a book, "somewhere", published in the D.D.R. (former
East Germany ), about secret radios - both receiver AND
transmitter - built by prisoners at Auschwitz concentration
camp. The factory part of the camp, not the extermination
sub-camp. I'm not sure what the purpose of the equipment
was thought to be, maybe to try to signal the world, if the
Nazis tried an wholesale extermination of all the inmates.
The book account is no fantasy, it actually described the
equipment and showed schematics!

I also recall reading many years ago, about a rebellion
in a U.S.S.R. Soviet-era labor camp. This of course, would
be in the wake of the death of the supreme madman, 
with the feeling that something new could be in the air.
No one would have dared this during his reign. The 
inmates seized the camp, held off the guards, and 
actually modified a diathermy machine into a transmitter
and tried to send an SOS to the world. If this SOS 
was ever heard in the West, it was never reported
by anyone, not even our CIA or MI5. It may have simply
been that hurrying to build this transmitter just did
not allow enough time for an effective antenna, or
to insure that it was on some reasonable effective
and noticeable frequency. ( This account was, if
I recall, published in one of the "Samizdat" 
compilations published in the West. In this case
"Samizdat" was the actual title of the book
compilations, not only the generic term for
resistance literature.
-Hue Miller