Werner’s Radio Transceiver

Werner’s Radio Transceiver is both a piece of military equipment and a means of translating distant voices into actionable locations. Designed by Werner Pfennig with Dr. Hauptmann, it serves in a mobile search operation against suspected partisan radio traffic. Its story depends on material particulars—damaged fuses, a missing plug, aerials, headsets, and the placement of receivers—and on the consequences of making a signal legible to those hunting it.

Design and material form

The transceivers appear in a three-ton Opel Blitz converted into a radio truck. Inside its wooden rear compartment are two grimy listening decks, a folding radio-frequency aerial that can be raised or lowered from within, three headsets, maps, compasses, wax pencils, and storage lockers. Among this equipment sit two transceivers Werner designed with Dr. Hauptmann. The machine is therefore not an isolated instrument: it belongs to a working arrangement of receivers, aerial, transport, tools, and personnel.

When Werner examines one unit, its condition interrupts any illusion of effortless technological power. The meter is cracked, several fuses have blown, and the transmitter plug is missing. He takes out tools and copper wire and studies the damage beneath a lantern, with the silent camp and a star-filled sky beyond the truck. He recognizes the task as a problem of pattern and repair, recalling Rudolf Siedler’s walnut Philco radio. The equipment’s usefulness rests not only on its design but on Werner’s ability to diagnose and restore it.

The transceiver also belongs to a longer history of Werner’s attraction to radio. At eight, he and Jutta Pfennig find a crude device behind a storage shed: a wire-wrapped cylinder between two pinewood discs, with frayed electrical leads and an earphone. That childhood discovery is not the military transceiver itself, but it establishes the material beginning of Werner’s interest. Later, his expertise is incorporated into equipment designed with Dr. Hauptmann and used by the armed forces.

Tracking broadcasts in the field

The truck’s crew includes Frank Volkheimer, the sergeant; Walter Bernd, an engineer; and two drivers known as Neumann One and Neumann Two. Volkheimer explains that partisans are attacking trains and that the command believes radio is helping coordinate those attacks. Werner is told that the previous technician failed to find anything; he answers that he expects to have both units functioning within an hour. The equipment’s purpose is not general communication but the detection of transmissions the military has not authorized.

The crew moves along rough roads, stopping at intervals to set up a transceiver on a rise or ridge. Bernd and Neumann Two remain with a unit while the truck travels a few hundred yards away, establishing the base of a triangle. Werner calculates the distance, switches on the primary receiver, raises the truck’s aerial, and scans the spectrum through his headset. The arrangement makes location a matter of repeated measurements: the equipment must be placed at separated points, and the signal must be detected and interpreted before the team can act on it.

Most of the voices Werner hears are German, and few emerge clearly from the static. The search nevertheless carries an explicit political purpose: the crew listens for voices that are not sanctioned. In this setting, reception is inseparable from surveillance. The receiver gathers information, while the military operation determines which voices count as threats and what will be done with their location.

Signals found—and the danger of finding them

During one operation, Werner hears a Russian transmission while Neumann One waits beside him. The shots first reach Werner through the air and, a fraction of a second later, through his headphones. Then the static disappears, leaving silence in the receiver. The sequence makes the machine’s limits palpable: it delivers a signal, but it cannot shield its operator from the violence surrounding the search or guarantee what will happen when a transmission is located.

In Vienna’s Augarten, Werner detects a brief broadcast in Swiss German. He does not understand all of it, but he tunes the second transceiver himself and takes another reading when the signal returns. He enters the figures into an equation and then sees what appears to be a wire aerial running down the side of an apartment building beside the square. The transceiver has converted an indistinct voice into a likely physical source; Volkheimer responds as if the scent of a target has become clear. The instrument’s achievement is also an escalation: information acquired through listening enables pursuit.

Radio under restriction and improvised repair

The transceiver’s military use sits within a broader world of control over radio. In occupied Saint-Malo, residents are ordered to surrender all radio receivers, with arrest threatened for anyone who disobeys. The order concerns receivers generally, not Werner’s specific field equipment, but it shows how radio listening has become a matter of coercive authority as well as communication.

Elsewhere, Werner constructs a rudimentary radio while trapped with Volkheimer beneath rubble. He crimps wire around a pipe, coils it to make a tuning coil, runs another length toward the wreckage above, and completes a circuit using a diode and battery. With a flashlight held in his teeth, he strips the earphone leads and touches them to the diode. This improvised receiver is distinct from the transceivers in the truck, yet it sharpens the contrast between their forms: one is a military system designed for mobile detection; the other is assembled from available parts under confinement.

Marie-Laure LeBlanc’s transmitter offers another distinct use of radio. She raises its antenna from the chimney, hoping someone—the fire brigade, the Resistance, the Americans, the Germans, or Etienne LeBlanc—might hear her. Her device sends a message outward, whereas Werner’s field apparatus is deployed to locate transmissions. Across these different scenes, radio is neither merely a machine nor a neutral channel: its physical construction and placement determine who can be heard, who can listen, and what action a signal makes possible.