Chapter Twelve

FOR SEVERAL weeks now, I had been carrying in my wallet a precious card marked with the cryptic word `Overlord' and under it my name and the Security Officer's signature. `Overlord' as all the world knows today, was the code name for the invasion of Normandy, and the card meant that I was one of the select few taking part at this early stage in the planning of these decisive operations.

In fact, as far as I was concerned, my operations had already begun. To my unit had been assigned the task of `softening up' the German forces in the West. We were to try and produce in them a frame of mind in which they would show the least amount of resistance to the allied armies, when at last the attack was launched. It was for this that Dallas Brooks had prised the giant transmitter from the B.B.C. and handed it to me. And we were already going ahead full blast. Now the general had gone one step further. He had ordered me to make a softening up plan for the B.B.C.'s operations as well, and to see that they fitted in with ours.

I knew what I wanted to do with `Calais'. I was already doing it. I knew too, what I considered the role of the B.B.C. should be at this stage. But were my friends at the B.B.C. going to like it, when I told them? Were they going to accept it? Or was I going to have another fight on my hands, like that with Kirkpatrick over 'Aspidistra'? I was far from sure.

tion with their creature comforts which I had seen the German propagandists induce in the French during the long phoney war that preceded the German invasion of 1940 On `Calais' we were already doing all we could to suggest to the Germans that the war in the West was no war at all, just a `Sitzkrieg' in which all military effort was futile and ludicrous. Worse than that, military efficiency was positively dangerous.

" Units which show themselves smart and efficient," said Calais, "are drafted to the Eastern front. Promotion in France is a sure way to death in Russia."

The defeatist pun of Herr Schlicke, my Friedrichs Werdersches Gymnasium schoolmaster of the first war, `Lieber ein heiles Kreuz als ein eisernes'* was embroidered by us in scores of variations. News item after news item illustrated the general theme that France was regarded by the OKW (High Command of the Wehrmacht) as a theatre of inferior importance and that in quality of manpower and armament the troops in France were far inferior to those on the Eastern Front, which was the operations area where Germany's fate was being decided.

The idea behind this stress of the Eastern Front's priority was, that when the allies attacked, we would be able to tell the German units in France that they had been written off by the High Command, that no reinforcements would be sent to them, no supplies. Their front did not matter.

I could not allow the B.B.C. men to come in on this campaign. For if I did, they would be certain to show our hand in no time at all. They would want to put the campaign over in big lumbering talks and commentaries, not in subtly dispersed news items as we did. Much better therefore, for the B.B.C. to stay right out of it for the time being.

Their best contribution to the softening-up campaign, I argued, would be a stoic unawareness of any change in the West. All I would ask them to do was to emphasise still further the rigours of the war in Russia and the immense resources of the Red Armies with their supplies of American materiel. Under no circumstances should either the B.B.C. or their allies of the Voice of America be allowed to indulge in any threats of the "We are going to crush you with the power of our invincible armada" variety. There would be plenty of time for that after D-Day.

I put all this to Dallas Brooks, and he agreed and approved. But he too, thought we might have a tough job in persuading my British and American colleagues in charge of `white' to practise abstinence and self-restraint-particularly when theyheard `black' campaigning away at the top of `Aspidistra's' overloud voice. I decided I had best find myself some influential allies in addition to Dallas Brooks.

So, together with Donald McLachlan, who had now been attached to the staff of Britain's Admiral Ramsay, the naval commander for Overlord, in order that he might give us still better inside news, I set out to call on the Services planners concerned with the forthcoming operation, and explain our ideas to them. At the Combined Operations Headquarters in Norfolk House we talked with Brigadier Arthur Head and Johnnie Vass. They were enthusiastic. I visited the newly arrived American General Robert McClure, who was to have charge of Psychological Warfare at SHAEF-the Supreme Headquarters of the Allied Expeditionary Forces. He promised his support. I dined with General Spaatz, the American Air Force Commander. And in his hospital room I consulted the British psychological warrior who carried the most weight with the Americans-Dick Crossman.

Dick had left London soon after he had been appointed `Director of Political Warfare to the Enemy and Satellites (white)' to go out to North Africa. There he had been masterminding the highly successful Anglo-American psychological warfare effort under McClure during the campaigns in Algeria, Tunis, and Sicily. But now he was back in London, and in hospital with a dangerous embolism which threatened his life -the result, not of enemy action, but of a ferocious wasp sting.

Dick, lying there in his hospital ward, with phlebitis still creeping up his leg and threatening his heart, was all charm and enthusiasm. He had been listening to Calais as he lay in bed, he said, and it was the slickest thing ever.

" Of course," he insisted, "it is not `black'."" No," I said, "it is something new. Donald and I call it `grey'. It is between `Black' and `White'. No doubt many of our German listeners realise we can't really be German. Nevertheless they accept us gratefully, because we don't make that `Boom, boom, boom' V-noise of the B.B.C. which betrays them to the Gestapo and because we sound like ordinary Germans, not a lot of emigres."

" Charming, charming," laughed Dick Crossman, "really charming! Wait till I tell the B.B.C.!" But he did not, of course, betray my treasonable views about their announcers' voices to the B.B.C. and the Voice of America. Instead, when they too called on him in the hospital, he persuaded them that my plan was right, and quite properly had the support of the Services planners.

With the result that when a few days later, Donald, Dallas Brooks, and I faced my `White' colleagues and Carleton Greene, everything went off smoothly and the B.B.C. accepted the role I had assigned to it without objection. So, too, under instructions from MeClure, did the Voice of America.

And I am happy to report that by February 1944 Dick was sufficiently restored to hobble out on a stick and bring his influence to bear on the `white' planning at Supreme headquarters.

The Soldatensender Calais used the Russian front not only as a bogey to frighten Hitler's soldiers in France out of showing too much keenness and efficiency, and as a pretext for feeling `written off', `deserted' and `second class'. We also used it as a stage on which to present mysterious new American `miracle weapons' against which resistance was useless.

The Americans, reported the Soldatensender, had been supplying the Russians with these ultra-modern 'superweapons'. One of them was a phosphorous shell of unprecedented penetrative power which burst through the thickest armour and concrete and burned up everything inside it. It was this new weapon and others like it, we said, that were responsible for the latest German defeats in Russia. To my gratification in one instance at least this propaganda had its effect, as we learned soon after D-day. Through amplifiers an appeal had been made to Lieutenant General von Schlieben who commanded the Fort du Roule blocking the American advance in the Cherbourg perimeter.

" You and your men have put up a gallant fight," said the voice through the amplifier, "but your position is hopeless. The only thing for you is to surrender while there is still time. Otherwise you and your men will be destroyed."

For a few minutes all was silence, and the team of psychological warriors feared they would be forced to admit failure. But suddenly a voice could be heard calling from the German position. It was General von Schlieben himself.

" I cannot surrender," said the General, "my orders are to fight to the last man and the last cartridge. It would be different if you could prove to me that our position is hopeless. If you could, for instance, fire one of those phosphorous shells . . ."

The Americans complied with alacrity. The nearest battery fired an ordinary common or garden shell at the Fort. Up went the white flag, the great steel and concrete gate of the turret swung open, and out trooped the general with his men. In his huge greatcoat and steel helmet, the knight's cross gleaming under his heavy jowl, the General was the picture of gloom. But his honour had been salved, Fort du Roule was ours, and the way into Cherbourg clear. The procedure was repeated with success on several further occasions by the Americans and ourselves at Concarneau and elsewhere.

But we had yet another motive for stressing the theme that `the true defence of the German fatherland is on the Eastern front". I hoped that this Calais campaign might have a political impact on leaders of the German officers' corps.

We knew that the generals were becoming increasingly restive about the consequences of Hitler's interference with them and their strategy. `Peace feelers' were being noted with increasing frequency, and they were coming from men who claimed they had the support of the generals.

For some time already we had not only been attempting to speak in the name of this `army opposition'. We had also been trying to give its leaders the kind of encouragement `white', as the official voice of the allies, was unable to give them. We had been seeking to suggest to them that all they had to do was to overthrow Hitler for us to be ready to start peace negotiations. For instance when the Frankfurter Zeitung was closed down by Hitler and I produced a counterfeit of a `free' Frankfurter Zeitung, edited ostensibly by the German Resistance, I included in it a leading article on the need for the overthrow of Hitler and the establishment of a German peace government.

" Are the Western powers ready for peace talks?" asked the article. "We believe that in the light of first cautious contacts of German military circles in the West with the enemy we can answer this question in the affirmative. Only we must act at last!" And there had been other similar gestures.

It seemed to me just possible that the generals might regard this Calais campaign as encouragement for their dream of revolt against the Fuhrer followed by a separate peace with the West. Such a separate peace was, of course, out of the question. But if Calais by its repetition of the priority for the Eastern Front theme could trick the generals into action against the Supreme war-lord, I was going to have no regrets. A coup by the generals, whether successful or not, even so much as the suspicion of an anti-Hitler conspiracy among them would all help to hasten Hitler's defeat. And as it turned out we were to be rewarded here too.

When, in September 1944 I interviewed Otto John, the only survivor of the Generals' conspiracy to get away abroad, I learned that our broadcasts had indeed been heard by the conspirators, and interpreted in precisely the sense I had hoped. I am sorry the generals ended their lives on Hitler's meat hooks. But I cannot say that I have any compunction about having raised false hopes in them. For these men and their caste were the original patrons and sponsors of Hitler's movement. They were the profiteers of his Reich. And they only rose against him when it was clear that he and his war of conquest were doomed.

Critical readers may well object that I paid too little attention to the German conscience as an ally in the struggle against Hitler. "What about the Church opposition to Hitler?" they might say, "What about Pastor Niemoller and Archbishop von Galen, what about the Scholls? What did you do to support and encourage them?"

I agree that on the Soldatensender I made little attempt to appeal to anything but instincts of self-interest and selfpreservation in our German listeners, both personal and national. When we suggested methods of sabotage to U-boat men we did not approach them as pacifists or even as antiNazis. We told them in news items how other crews had successfully delayed the departure of their ship by unattributable acts of sabotage which we carefully described.

To launch into a denunciation of the war as such at this pre-invasion stage would have been out of character for a `Soldiers Radio' of the type we purported to be. Demands for an end to the war we did not begin to make until after the `peace generals', as we were to call them, had given us the green light with their rebellion of ,July the 20th, 1944.

None the less we did make our `black' appeal to the humanitarian conscience of the Germans. We made it through a Roman Catholic priest. Father Andreas was a young Austrian of Styrian peasant stock, who had received special permission from his Order to speak on a clandestine radio under my direction. `Christ the King' was the name of this `black' station -`G.8' to the engineers.

What I had been looking for when I first decided to add a religious broadcast to my battery of `black' radios was someone like Father Muckermann, the intellectual German cleric who used to write brilliantly argued religious articles on social and political subjects for the Ullstein newspapers before Hitler came to power. Instead, I found this simple peasant priest, whose broadcasts, because of the earthy directness of their language, and the beaming sincerity and goodness of the speaker, were among the most moving radio talks I have ever listened to.

Father Andreas usually opened by playing a few minutes of recorded music-Beethoven, Haydn, Bach, or some of Nadia Boulanger's Monteverdi disks. That put his listeners into the right contemplative mood. Then, having announced the name of the station, he would conduct a very brief service with some more music-sacred this time-before launching into his talk. In these talks Father Andreas revealed to the Germans the infamous things that were being done in their name to the Jews, and to the Slav peoples of the East. He described the horrors of Auschwitz, Natzweiler, and Mauthausen concerning all of which Clifton Child was able to brief him from our extensive intelligence reports.

He told of the monstrous `T.-4,'* action by which tens of thousands of sick persons were being removed from hospitals and concentration camps under the orders of a committee of Nazi doctors and sent to a `mercy death' in the gas chambers.

He denounced the sadistic medical experiments of the SS doctors with live prisoners, the no less cynical experiments in eugenics of the SS Lebensborn group which mated SS men with unmarried girls in order to produce a Germanic master race. He denounced the Nazi attack on the German sense of family,the party's contempt for all human and moral law. His material for these talks was factual and accurate. It contained no inventions, no rumours. And his indictment of the `godless rulers' was delivered with a simple Styrian eloquence, which made it a hundred times more telling than had it been a religious rodomontade of the Abraham a Santa Clara style which I originally had in mind for him.

So efective were his broadcasts that I seriously considered putting some of them out on the Soldatensender. We could have done so by pretending that we had recorded them from one of his transmissions. But in the end I decided against it. I did not wish to ruin another operation in which I had involved Father Andreas--without, I confess, taking him into the secret. For soon after he had begun his broadcasts, I asked my friends in S.O.E. and O.S.S. to have their rumour agents in the neutral capitals spread it around that this 'Christ the King' radio was a `black' station secretly operated by the Vatican radio! That rumour caught on remarkably well, and very soon it was travelling from mouth to mouth, not only in Switzerland, where the Father had a great following, but in Germany and Austria as well. It was superb `evidence' of the Pope's condemnation of the Nazi regime, and far too valuable to hazard by identifying Father Andreas even remotely with the `grey' broadcasts of `Calais-Atlantik'.

Yet another `black' radio which played its part during this `softening up' period was a workers' station. The underlying idea was that the speakers were anti-Nazi electronic engineers working in some large concern like Siemens which was building radio transmitters. They used the transmitters for their broadcasts on pretence of testing them. The call sign of the station was the Lili Marlene song. A Lili Marlene record would be played through once, then put on again and at a point about a quarter or halfway through it would be roughly cut off and the voice of a proletarian anti-Hitler fighter would come on the air.

Like some shop-steward reporting to his committee he gave news concerning conditions and grievances in various factories. He transmitted detailed instructions on factory sabotage, go slow techniques, and methods of malingering.

He also dictated short leaflets and stickers with slogans. Just to make sure that the stickers did, in fact make their appearance in Germany, we manufactured some of them ourselves. Agents of S.O.E. and O.S.S. took them to Germany and surreptitiously pasted them on lavatory walls and hoardings. I found one of them myself on the wall of a factory ruin in Essen when I got there soon after its capture in I945.

" Macht Hitler kalt," it said, "dann wird die Stube wieder warm!"-make Hitler cold-i.e. kill him-then the room will soon be warm again. Chapter's 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20

Aspistdistra Photos - Milton Bryan Photos - Contents

The Soul of Hitler : Series of articles published in July 1939 in the Daily Express "H.M.G.'s secret pornographer" : Article by Sefton Delmer Ian Fleming : Secret Memo Sefton Delmer Attack on Morale of German Forces in Norway : Article by Sefton Delmer on Lord Haw Haw