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Several scenes in Masters of the Air, the new series about the 100th Bomb Group, features radios secretly used by American "kriegies" (prisoners of war, from the German expression Kriegsgefangener) to listen to the BBC and other stations. In the last scene of Episode 8, we see Major Gale Cleven listen to a broadcast while the rest of the barrack inhabitants sit nearby or lie on their bunks, listening to the news. This, however, seems to be an embellishment for the sake of dramatization, as listening to the radio would have been much more secretive.
Usually, very few POWs were allowed by the X Committee, the group of officers responsible for escape plans and attempts, to listen to the radio directly. The listener would lie in his bunk with a sheet pulled over his head while using the radio. The news was then written down and actually censored by the X Committee before distribution to the general kriegie population, as it was shared on a need-to-know basis. The written, censored version was taken to each block, read out loud, and finally swallowed by the reader to prevent discovery by the Germans.
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