While science education and popularization by means of print media developed in quite similar forms in many nations, the advent of radio resulted in initiatives to bring science on the air that were rather heterogeneous from country to country. The German case stands out with respect to quantity, variety and ambition, and also for its special mechanism of planning and controlling educational programs on science and technology. Hence it is argued that a closer look at how the chances of the new medium were discussed and implemented in Weimar Germany can provide a scale of reference for the development of science communication on the radio in other countries. For this reason a brief summary of the the respective developments in the United States and Europe is presented, before discussing in some detail Germany's particular institutional organization, program structures, combination of radio broadcasts and print material into a kind of multimedia, and various formats and genres.