The agency was founded in 1914 in response to Britain’s cutting of transatlantic cables to Germany during the World War I.
The news agency became active in the United States in August 1938 with the arrival of Dr. Manfred Zapp and Günther Tonn, Transocean's U.S. managers from Germany.
In the summer of 1941, before the attack on Pearl Harbor, the United States Government ordered the closure of Transocean and the withdrawal of the German nationals connected with it after a trial in which it was found guilty of having failed to register with the State Department as the agent of a foreign government.
[1] Transocean's most famous dispatch was early on June 6, 1944, when its German language broadcast announced the landing of Allied parachute troops on the French coast.
This was the first news of the landing code-named Operation Overlord, the Allied invasion of Nazi-occupied Europe.