The new Radio Free Europe medium-wave transmitter was dedicated to Munich's Bayerische Hof Hotel on May 1, 1951, at 10 a.m. Ferdinand Peroutka, a Czech journalist, who had been imprisoned in the Nazi prison camps Dachau and Buchenwald, fled Czechoslovakia in 1948 to the United States. Peroutka, who helped found the Council of Free Czechoslovakia. He read the following message to those in attendance:
The Communist government in our country is the biggest attempt that has ever been undertaken to turn things upside down to deprive words of their meaning. Jailers sing songs of freedom, and officials of the secret police lecture on humanity. The loss of freedom is officially called independence in our country, aggression is called peace action, plunder of the country 'benefits', forced exports to Russia 'building up of Czechoslovakia', and enslavement of women in heavy industry is called their liberation.
We know how much effort the Communists stake on reforming your souls .., But we also know that in the evening, when you return home from the daily drudgery ... between your four walls, you say to yourself: They are telling lies.
Radio Free Europe began broadcasting to Czechoslovakia, as the Voice of Free Czechoslovakia, on medium wave (am band) frequencies on that day, from the newly constructed transmitter station, nicknamed “Carola” at Holzkirchen – less than 20 miles south of Munich, Germany. Before this, programs were prepared in RFE's New York studios and flown to Germany for broadcasting.
The new transmitter station had four antenna towers, which reached a height of 400 feet, and, at that time with 135,000 watts of power, was almost three times more powerful than any commercial radio transmitter in the United States. The broadcast schedule was then increased to 12 hours a day to Czechoslovakia. After Holzkirchen, transmitter stations were constructed in Biblis, Germany, and in the town of Gloria, Portugal.
The first broadcast from Munich actually began at 5 a.m. on May 1, 1951, and was just music until the first program, read by Czech exile Pavel Tigrid, aired at 11 a.m. from a studio in the RFE building. He said, in part,
Dear Listeners:
Today, a terrible enemy rises against all communist informers, agents provocateurs, and stool pigeons, all inhuman guards in prisons and work-camps, all judges and members of communist jurisdiction, all propagandists of communist ideology: Radio Free Europe, who will reveal their names, one by one; all of them will be blacklisted by the democratic world and will be dumped on the rubbish heap of contempt by the Czech and Slovak people.
Pavel Tigrid would become the Czech Republic’s first Minister of Culture, after the 1989 Velvet Revolution.
C.D. Jackson, publisher of Fortune magazine, as president of the National Committee for a Free Europe (NCFE), gave a speech in front of the new RFE headquarters building under construction. A plaque was unveiled to the invited guests:
