Rudolf Formis
December 25, 1894 - January 23, 1935Rudolf Formis was born in Stuttgart in 1894 and completed commercial training in Hamburg. He took part in the First World War as a radio operator for the German Asia Corps and experienced the end of the war in Constantinople. A radio pioneer, he helped set up the first broadcasting facilities for Süddeutscher Rundfunk in Stuttgart in 1923 and worked as a technician there for over ten years. When the Stuttgart radio building was occupied and taken over by the SA on March 7, 1933, witnesses stated he held an “incendiary speech” in SA uniform. For unclear reasons, Formis fled the German Reich in April 1934 and joined Otto Strasser’s Black Front in Prague, which had originated from the social revolutionary wing of the NSDAP during the 1920s and was strictly opposed to the party.
He became the distribution manager for Otto Strasser’s journal Die Deutsche Revolution, but his main work was setting up a secret Black Front transmitter in a hotel in Slapy nad Vltavou south of Prague. In November 1934, this “Rural Broadcaster Berlin” began transmitting commentated news from foreign newspapers to the Reich every day of the week. After the German foreign office unsuccessfully ordered the Czech government to ban the illegal broadcaster, in January 1935 the chief of the SS security service Reinhard Heydrich tasked SS-Scharführer Alfred Naujocks with destroying the transmitter and abducting Formis. In the process, Rudolf Formis was hit by a bullet in an exchange of fire and died on January 23, 1935.
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