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Throughout the 1950s, the American propaganda radio station RIAS Berlin transformed women’s radio into an anti-communist medium designed to enlist German housewives into the Cold War. Based in West Berlin, RIAS—Radio in the American Sector—broadcast a full array of shows deep inside East Germany as part of the U.S. psychological war against communism. One of its key target audiences was German homemakers. Drawing upon scripts held in the German Radio Archives in Potsdam, Germany, this article analyzes the program Can You Spare 5 Minutes? (Haben Sie 5 Minuten Zeit?). It explores how RIAS inscribed the international contest between democracy and communism onto the domestic lives of women. The show built a sense of solidarity by treating typical “female” topics such as cosmetics, childcare, and recipes. In this way it forged a bond between its listeners that provided an opening for political messaging. Programs contrasted access to food, marriage rights, and educational policy in the rival Germanies to demonstrate the benefits of democracy and the need to resist the East German state. Women’s radio on RIAS, far from offering mere fluff, provided its female audience a political education.

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formed the background for the Verschuer-Mengele collaboration. This interpretation is untenable: Fischer articulated the "phenogenetics" program in 1931 and used it to justify the establishment of a "Department of Hereditary Psychology" at the KWIA as early as 1935. Of course it would have been good to have more detailed accounts of actual basic research in human genetics during this period, and a separate chapter on the fates of the actors after 1945. In the effort to make the text more widely readable, the writing gets a bit awkward in some places. But none of this detracts from the overall assessment: this is a fine overview of human genetics in Nazi Germany that should circulate widely.

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