Chapter Thirteen

As THOUGH to symbolise the TOP top secrecy of my work for `Overlord' I had been assigned an office on the topmost floor of my department's new headquarters in Bush House. It was a pleasant little white-walled room right under the roof of what then was still one of the tallest buildings in London. From its windows, Betty Colbourne, my blonde curly-headed young Personal Assistant, could gaze across the grey tesselated desert of London roof-tops beneath us all the way to the Dome of St. Paul's.

And here, in this eyrie, high up over London, Betty and I now received our hush-hush callers-Poles, Danes, Norwegians, Frenchmen, Hollanders, Americans, and British. They were officers of the Underground Resistance groups in the German occupied territories. Aircraft sent out by S.O.E. and O.S.S. had picked them up from secret air strips right under the noses of Hitler's allegedly all-seeing SS guards. Then they had been flown to London for briefing in the role they and their groups were to play in the coming liberation of Europe. As part of that briefing they were now calling on me, so that I could learn from them what my unit could do to help theirs, and explain in what way they could help us.

As I listened to the gay, slim-waisted young Polish aristocrats, who seemed to know the latest and most fashionable London night spots so much better than I did, it seemed incredible to me that only a few days earlier they had been in uracow helping to publish a German language newspaper with items monitored from the Atlantiksender. Or that the tall young English colonel earnestly urging me to lay on a new clandestine radio for the Slovenes had blown up the key signal box of the railway junction of Laibach only the day before yesterday.I felt quite embarrassed by the deference with which these experts in physical disintegration listened to my exposition of the `black' possibilities of their work.

I had one major request for them: whenever they killed a German I wanted them to do their best to make it look as if he had been killed by Germans.

" We want Hitler and the Gestapo to believe that they are faced, not only with a Polish or a French underground, but with a German anti-Nazi resistance as well." To my great relief they all saw the point and promised me they would do what they could to make the Germans believe in the existence of an active and powerful German Resistance. And soon I had them as enthusiastic too about planting evidence designed to trick the Germans into thoughts and actions inimical to Hitler's war effort as we were in manufacturing them.

I had plenty of samples to show them. One designed to stimulate desertion to Sweden and Switzerland was a leaflet got up to look exactly like a propaganda handout issued to officers by the OKW under the title of `Mitteilungen fiir die Truppe'-information for the troops. I produced a genuine German original so that my visitors could assure themselves that our forgery had the same format, the same kind of paper, the same print and the same style of language. Our leaflet discussed the problem of the increasing number of desertions to neutral countries and called on officers to instruct their men not to leave the hunt for deserters to the overburdened and by no means numerous Field Police, but to watch out themselves for these treacherous cowards and prevent them from giving neutral countries a poor impression of Wehrmacht fighting spirit. The idea, I explained, was for members of the underground to leave this leaflet somewhere where a German officer , might have dropped it and where it could be picked up by a German soldier.

" A leaflet like this," I pontificated, "will be a hundred times more effective in stimulating desertion than any propaganda of manifestly allied origin." Another sample was a poster purporting to have been issued by the German Field Police.* It showed a poorly printed * picture of a German soldier who was `Wanted' by the German authorities for murder. The description of the man in the `Steckbrief', like the portrait it went with, could fit almost any German soldier or officer in uniform. "Erwin Bauer," said the Police notice, "was last seen in Oslo in the uniform of an SS Obersturmfuhrer, but is known also to have used the uniforms of a LuftwafFe Flight Captain, an Army Captain and even of a Party Sonderfiihrer." The pay-off of the police notice svas that the man was such a dangerous criminal that the Field Police asked for him to be delivered to them alive or dead. It was an open invitation to shoot German soldiers. And the invitation by implication included the Norwegians as well. For the notice was printed in both German and Norwegian.

" We have had some highly satisfactory results with this piece of `evidence' in Norway," I told my guests. "The Haugesund underground managed to provide it with the correct rubber stamps of their local Kommandantur and post it up in quite a number of places, including the notice board of the German officers' mess in one of the hotels. They had a lot of fun before the Germans discovered what was up. Now, of course, if you would like to use it, we could probably fix you up with the correct rubber stamps, if you don't have them yourselves."

But nearly always my visitors already had all the German rubber stamps they required. I was amazed how well equipped these guerrillas were with the tools for forging German passes. So, too, were we. For we had come a long way since that time in May 1941, when we could not forge a page of the Volkischer Boevbachter for lack of suitable German type faces and newsprint. We now had our own special printing unit capable of producing counterfeits of any German document from army orders to postage stamps and ration cards.

The genius responsible for the change was Armin Hull, who had come to us from a balloon barrage unit. He was a printer who had made a special study of German typography and printing techniques.

Even before the war he regularly visited Germany and made a point of collecting specimens of German printing. He carried them all back with him in his baggage newspapers, tram tickets, commercial and private stationery, business forms, police `wanted' posters, and anything else he could lay his hands on. His greatest asset, however, from my point ofview, was that he had an unrivalled knowledge of where to look in Britain for the printing types we needed in our operations. Before the war, the British printing trade had imported a good deal of type from Germany. But it was scattered all over the country. Bit by bit Hull managed to hunt it down until he had assembled a fantastic mass of founts in our secret composing room. I recall that on one occasion before this type collection was formed he visited six printing firms during two days or so to collect the lines of type we required for counterfeiting the letterhead of the Reichsbank. The final result was absolutely identical with the original and probably only Hull could have achieved it.

He also had a first-class knowledge of the papermaking industry and arranged for British mills to counterfeit German papers and watermarks. Nor was he at a loss if it became necessary for us to forge signatures and handwriting. Once we needed to forge a letter written by K. E. Kraf£t, one of Goebbels's tame astrologers. Hull produced the perfect forgery within three days.

" How on earth did you do this one?" I asked him, fascinated as I always was by his technique." Oh," said Armin at his most off-hand, "I looked up a friend of mine at Scotland Yard and asked him whether he knew a good forger who would like to serve his King and Country in this way. He put me on to an artist doing time for forgery in Wormwood Scrubs, and there you are!"

Armin Hull was a great hand too at producing printing that looked exactly as if it had been produced by `underground' amateurs in a cellar. He had installed a tiny printing press in his office and often spent his evenings printing short runs of `sabotage' leaflets. He said that he could never find a professional printer capable of doing such work badly enough!

The fact of the matter was that Hull was a perfectionist. Not for him the near-perfect work which our opposite numbers working for Goebbels and SD chief Walter Schellenberg occasionally smuggled into Britain. I once showed him a little octavo sized anti-Jewish leaflet which had been picked up in a Soho pub. To me it looked genuine. It had a London imprint. The type in which it was set was type we use in Britain. The format was a British format. But Hull took only one look at it, and immediately pulled a small folding type scale out of his pocket." Made in Germany," he laughed when he had finished measuring. "This is set in Linotype Bodoni such as we also use in this country. But this lot has been cast on a German type body with a so-called Didot mould, which is fractionally larger than that for the English body and leaves a little more space between the lines. That, my dear Watson, gives it away."

" Humph," I pondered, and then a bright idea occured to me. "And do you use the Didot body for our fakes?"" Of course I do," Hull snorted indignantly. "The first thing that I did when we started this work was to get all the necessary type-casting moulds converted from English to Didot standard." One could not catch him out. He really was a champion counterfeiter.

Although our radio output had enjoyed the top priority, my team and I had worked hard during 1941, 1942 and most of 1943 on producing what I may call `black literature'. And there were quite a few bits of `evidence' Betty and I were able to spread on the plain deal table of my office before our clients from the underground. We called them `evidence' because they often backed up in documentary or other form the stories and campaigns we were putting over on the radio.

There was a round saucer-size sticker for instance headed `Six weeks in dock' with instructions for German U-boat men an how to sabotage a submarine diesel engine. We had `sold' this originally to the Norwegian Underground who had put it up all round the U-boat pens at Bergen and Trondjhem. Now I hoped to persuade the Poles to do the same for me at Gdynia and the French at Lorient and St. Nazaire.

The purpose of these stickers, as I explained to my clients, was not so much to get the crews to sabotage their boats, though it would be pleasant if they did, but to worry the German Security Service. If we could get the Gestapo flat-foots snooping around the boats, showing the U-boat men that they were suspect, that would help to undermine their pride and selfconfidence, and weaken their fighting morale.

Similar thinking underlay another exhibit-our handbook teaching Germans how to malinger and trick their doctors into granting them a spell of sick leave. We had got this up in a number of di$'erent disguises-as a German Navy handbook on Physical Training, as a Hymn book, as a railway time-table, as an almanac and even as a straightforward paper back of the Reclam Series with the title "Krankheit rettet . . . von Dr. med. Wilhelm Wohltat" ("Sickness Saves you by William Benefactor, M.D.").

One disguise which appealed to me-as a non-smoker- was a wafer-paper version which was packed inside a well-known German make of cigarette papers for smokers who `rolled their own'. In the P.T. handbook, as in the Hymn book and the time-tables, the first few pages were identical copies of the German original. In the cigarette packets too, the first papers were genuine cigarette papers. It was only when you got further inside all of these `covers' that our `health instructions' made their appearance.

The techniques for malingering which we recommended had been specially devised by MB's own `witch doctor', the late Dr. J. T. McCurdy of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, a wise old one-eyed Canadian. McCurdy's peace-time job was to practise and teach the healing of mental illness. Now he revelled in applying his expertise against Hitler's Germans in the reverse.

Dr. McCurdy laid down two fundamental rules for malingerers. Firstly "the malingerer must give the physician the impression that here is a patriotic citizen, dedicated to his duty, who has the misfortune to be ill, despite himself". Secondly the would-be malingerer must never tell the doctor that he is ill, that he is suffering from some specific disease, or volunteer symptoms.

" One single symptom," said the handbook, "which the doctor has discovered by his own questions, is worth ten which the patient has volunteered." Then the booklet proceeded to enumerate the symptoms the patient should allow the doctor to discover in examination. It classified these symptoms not by illness, but by what kind of a leave was desired by the patient, whether he wanted a short respite from duty, a longer one, or whether he wanted to be exempt for the duration of the war.

" Our purpose in preparing this little booklet," I explained to the officers "is twofold---as in the case of the sabotage stickers. On the one hand I hope it will stimulate malingering among the Germans, on the other hand I hope it will cause German doctors who are warned about the handbook-as they are bound to be-to suspect malingering where there is in fact no malingering. I have high hopes that right now they are sending genuinely sick men and women back to duty, possibly even to spread infection, because they believe their symptoms have been faked up with the aid of this unspeakable fellow Dr. med. Wohltat."

My underground clients loved it. Alas, things did not turn out altogether as I had intended. For the German authorities were so impressed with the potentialities of Dr. McCurdy's handbook that they had it translated into English and shot it into the British and American lines. This German-made English version of our opus even outlasted hostilities. Copies of it were fetching a good price in London's Soho right up to 1952. For Britain's new Welfare State had put a premium on the wisdom it purveyed.

In the ordinary way we did not distribute our counterfeit literature in Germany by R.A.F. bombers. That was a method I was glad to leave reserved for the official `white' leaflets. Not only would it have revealed the enemy origin of material we wanted to be mistaken for German, had we used the R.A.F. but our `evidence' could not have been placed in spots where Germans discovering it would find it convincing.

The perfect `plant' could only be accomplished by the human hand. We. therefore depended on agents of the underground for our normal distribution. But there were three counterfeits which we did drop from R.A.F. aircraft. The first of these were our forgeries of the German ration cards. The second was a rough leaflet multigraphed on sheets of Luftwaffe signals paper which we hoped would be accepted as having been dropped by Luftwaffe comrades of the ace fighter pilot Werner Molders.

Armin Hull had been counterfeiting German ration cards for some time before I became aware of it. He was doing so for our friends in S.O.E. who required German ration cards for `travellers' operating in Germany. When I found some specimens of German ration cards lying on Armin's work-table I thought they were the genuine article. "Could you counterfeit these?" I asked him, and I explained that if we could persuade the R.A.F. to drop them on Germany, we would be striking a powerful blow at Hitler's rationing system.

" Afraid you can't have them though," said Armin." Why ever not? I know we are not allowed to forge bank notes. But these? Surely . . ."" It isn't that. These belong to S.O.E. They are forgeries and they want them for their agents."

I could hardly believe it. " Show me the originals," I demanded. Armin produced them. They were indistinguishable. The colours, the perforation, texture of the paper, the watermark, everything appeared to me to be identical. It was a miracle. I decided to put up my plan to S.O.E. for I felt sure they would help when they heard it. And so indeed it turned out. The S.O.E. chief's only stipulation was that we should not drop the latest issues on Germany. " We need these for our chaps working there," explained the colonel who was my liaison with the Cloak-and-Dagger men. "Besides we don't want the Germans to know that we receive their ration cards here almost as soon as they are issued."

Instead of the latest issue he offered me some Travellers' Coupons which were valid throughout Germany. They had only one defect, they were due to expire fairly soon. I accepted them with enthusiasm. Armin printed vast quantities of these Travellers ration cards and very soon the R.A.F. were dropping them on Germany. "A little balm," I called it, "to take the hurt out of the bombs." The howl of protest at this British iniquity from Goebbels was so encouraging that we printed millions more ration cards and kept dropping them. And soon S.O.E. relented, and let us use the latest coupons and not only those about to expire.

Armin developed a splendid technique of mass forgery. As soon as he had heard from S.O.E. that a fresh consignment of German ration cards was on its way to him, he would call up his printers and the paper-maker and have them ready, waiting in his office. While the printers made their offset plates the paper-maker would be making the special watermarked paper, in the event that the Germans should have changed the pattern and a new batch was needed. The whole operation was completed at top speed. So expert did Hull's team become at the job that the R.A.F. would be distributing our forgeries within days of the new issue coming from the German Food Offices.

The German C.I.D. circularised their offices to be on the lookout for our forgeries. In a special warning of January the 14th, 1944*- we picked it up later among the captured documents-they issued a most painstaking analysis of the few points of difference they could establish between our forgeries and the genuine German coupons. But while these differences might be detectable by police equipped with special instruments I cannot imagine a grocer, or a baker, or an inn-keeper being able to detect them in the rush of business. Considering the speed at which these counterfeits had been prepared the police circular was a remarkable tribute to Hull and his team.

But Goebbels had a more imaginative counter-measure up his sleeve. When he found that the German printers and paper-makers could not beat Hull by altering the pattern of the coupons, Goebbels, brilliant artist that he was, counterattacked with a stratagem which I rank among the most ingenious of the war. To back up his propaganda blast that the `R.A.F. forgeries' were `clumsy and easily detected' and `certain to land those who use them in the death cell', he got his own printers to fabricate some monumentally clumsy forgeries of ration cards. These he then displayed at Party meetings all over Germany as samples of `stupid British work by which no intelligent German could possibly be deceived'. He followed this up with nation-wide publicity for the trials of `Volksschadlinge' (enemies of the people) who had been caught by shopkeepers trying to pass off the R.A.F. forgeries.

I was full of admiration for the little doctor's ingenuity at the time, and I still am. This was `black' against `black' at its most brilliant. But it did not deter the many thousands of Germans, who used the ration cards we had dropped, to provide themselves with a valuable addition to their calories.

When Armin Hull went to Germany in the summer of 1945 his German driver told him how he had lived for six weeks on our Cheese coupons, while he was on the run from the Gestapo. He had no idea that he was talking to the forger in person. But the legend of the `clumsy' British forgeries spread by Goebbels has persisted in Germany to this day.

" Tell me, Herr Delmer," a young German recently asked me in Hamburg, "when the British dropped those counterfeit ration tickets why did they not make a better job of it? Why did they drop cards that were so poorly faked that no one could use them?" I told him. I must confess that the success of the other R.A.F. job, the Werner Molders letter undertaken early in 1942 came as a surprise to me. For before launching it I had the greatest misgivings about entrusting any `black' job to the R.A.F.

Colonel Molders, one of the most publicised fighter aces of the Luftwaffe, had been shot down by German flak near Breslau in the last days of 1941 - It was almost certainly an accident. But of course we did not leave it that way when we learned of the peculiar circumstances of his end from a captured Luftwaffe officer.

Werner Molders, said the officer, was a devout Catholic. He had become outspokenly critical of the anti-Christian Nazi regime after a British air raid on Miinster, when the Nazis had insisted on taking over a convent there and expelling the nuns from it, among them his sister. Himmler's SD had just begun to investigate Molders' `treasonable outbursts' when he was shot down and killed as he was coming in to land on the airfield at Breslau.

Clearly this ambiguous death of one of the most popular heroes of the Third Reich was bound to be much discussed in Germany and I determined to exploit it with every means at our disposal. On `Gustav Siegfried Eins' `The Chief' delivered himself of a thundering denunciation of Himmler's Bolshevik canaille who had so treacherously murdered this shining light of German manhood.

Next I decided to fake a letter allegedly written by Molders expatiating on the doubts he and his comrades felt about fighting for the atheist Hitler. I conceived it as a piece of `evidence' with which to back up the Gustav Siegfried campaign. But in this instance, the typed word was to have a greater resonance than the broadcast of `Der Chef'.

As the addressee for the letter, supposedly written by Molders, we selected the Roman Catholic Provost of Stettin, with whom, so the opening sentence of the letter was made to suggest, Molders had been corresponding for some time. The `Molders' letter', as it came to be known throughout Germany, was defeatist. Sadly Molders told the Provost how more and more of his comrades were being killed. The letter was rebellious. Rebellious against the Party, whom Molders referred to not as `the Party' or `the Nazis' but as the `godless ones'. And it informed the Provost that more and more of Molders' Luftwaffe comrades were turning away from the `godless ones' and seeking religion.

" There is nothing more beautiful for a man than to have struggled successfully through all this slime of lies, injustice and perversion in order to find his way to knowledge, to light, to the true faith." The letter suggested that Molders knew he was being hunted by `the godless ones' and that his days might be numbered.

" If on my last journey no priest can be present," he concluded, "then I leave this earth in the knowledge that in God I shall find a merciful judge. Write again soon, my dear fatherly friend, and pray for your Werner Molders." It was urgent to have this moving document distributed in Germany before the Molders story had lost its actuality. If we waited for a normal S.O.E. delivery, it might be months before it got through. So with considerable qualms I decided that for this once we would risk dropping a `black' job by the R.A.F. To make an air dropping plausible, I added a short introduction from an anonymous Luftwaffe man and had the whole thing roneoed on a copy Hull had made of some Luftwaffe signal sheets we had found among a haul of captured documents. To any German picking up the sheets it would look, I hoped, as though they had been dropped by one of the night fighters sent up to chase off the R.A.F. bombers.

The R.A.F. men must have made a wonderfully lucky shot with their drop. In no time at all the `Molders letter' was all over Germany. Courageous priests read it from their pulpits. The aged Field Marshal von Mackensen, shocked by the antiChristian contempt for religion shown by the Nazi regime, had it copied out and sent to his friends. The B.B.C. and the Soviet Radio picked it up.

Goebbels denounced the letter as a forgery. He made Molders's mother denounce it too. But no one would believe them. For it was in keeping with the character of young Molders to have written such a letter. He alone could have denounced it convincingly, and he was dead-murdered, so everyone believed, by the Nazis themselves.

The Molders letter was such a success that about a year later I asked the R.A.F. to drop another leaflet for me which purported to come from German fighter pilots. But this time, although the R.A.F. dropped several thousands of it `white' leaflets, of course, were dropped by the million-I got no reaction at all. The Goebbels' propaganda took no notice of it and I could find no prisoner who had ever come across it or heard of it. And yet it seemed to me an excellent job. The only difference from the Molders letter was that this time we had not multigraphed our text on Luftwaffe signals paper but had printed it on ordinary newsprint.

I did not mind our failure too much. For I transferred the operation to our radio and there it soon harvested its full measure of `comebacks'. The leaflet-I give its full text in the appendix*-was an appeal by German fighter pilots to the public and their comrades of the army against their Commander-in-Chief Major General Adolf Galland who had complained of their lack of fighting spirit.

I did not commit another `black' job to the Air Force for dropping until very much later in the war, when the Germans themselves were having to supply their troops from the air and were dropping leaflets to them. I shall tell about that when I come to it.

Certain firms in neutral countries such as Switzerland and Portugal, among them the German Hamburg Amerika Line, were advertising at this time that they could deliver food parcels to recipients in blockaded Germany. Germans with friends abroad who could pay in Swiss francs, Portuguese cscudos, or in dollars, could arrange to have hampers containing coffee, sugar, butter, tinned milk and other scarce delicacies released to them from special depots in Germany.
We had been exploiting these shipments on the Soldatensender as a new angle for our `inequality of sacrifice' campaign against the `Party privilegentsia' who, we said, were the chief beneficiaries of this system. And then suddenly an idea occurred to me. For some time the Soldatensender had been putting out news items about the high wages in dollars that German prisoners in Canada and the U.S. were earning for the work they were doing over there as lumbermen, farmhands, lorry drivers, and the like. Would it not be the most natural thing in the world for these German prisoners to want their folks in Germany to share in their good fortune? Why should they not send some of their dollars to Switzerland or Portugal in order to buy food parcels for the families in the Fatherland? Well, if they would not, or could not do it themselves, we would do it for them through our S.O.E. agents in Switzerland and Portugal.
Frank Lynder compiled a list of relatives of U-boat P.o.W.s and their addresses. My friends in S.O.E. and the British taxpayer did the rest. As the food parcels began to arrive (we read the thank-you letters the families sent to the putative donors in Canada) the news soon got around among the German fighting men of the splendid opportunities that awaited them in Canadian captivity. Enemy propaganda? Nonsense, look at the splendid parcel young Scholler had just sent his parents!

Some of the grateful parents became our best propagandists. One old baronial Lord of the Manor in Pomerania was so moved by our little gift to him, that he placed it on a table in front of his house and made the whole of his village march past the parcel to inspect what his dear son Siegismund-Sizzo had sent his old father from `over there'.

To lighten my conscience a little-and help on our desertion campaign at the same time-I also arranged for food parcels to be sent to those relatives of dead soldiers whom we had hoaxed so cruelly with our `Red Circle' letters. To reinforce their belief that the dead man was not dead at all but a deserter earning good money in a safe refuge abroad we gave the alleged sender of the food parcel the dead man's Christian name. His surname however was new just as it would have been had he started a new life abroad. I felt sorrier than ever for the wives and parents and sisters in whom we were stimulating these false hopes. But this time at least they were getting something out of it. Something to eat.

A rather less charitable operation was one called `Braddock' which we laid on a little later in the year. We were indebted for this one to Winston Churchill himself and the American novelist John Steinbeck. In his novel about occupied Norway Steinbeck had told how Norwegian Resistance men set fire to German stores. Churchill read the book late one night at Chequers and decided that here was an excellent idea. He gave orders for an incendiary device to be perfected for the use of resistance fighters throughout Hitler Europe.

A neat little thing it was too, a tube about three inches long of which you could safely carry several around in your pocket. Winston gave it the cover name `Braddock'. All you had to do to get the `Braddock' working was to pinch in the pointed end, push it into the Peasantfiihrer's haystack, the Gauleiter's sofa, or whatever else you thought would make a good starting point for a fire, and get out of sight. Fifteen minutes after you had squeezed the end the tube would burst noiselessly into flame.

Winston Churchill wanted the R.A.F. to drop this little infernal machine during its raids on Germany I was told by my friends in Air Intelligence. But Sir Arthur `Bomber' Harris, a tough and hard-headed man, refused to let the R.A.F. carry any` Braddocks'. He indignantly maintained-and with all my admiration for Churchill I think he was right-that a load of bombs did more damage than an equivalent load of the `Braddocks' would.

" I am not going to have my air crews risking their lives," said Harris, "for some damn novelist's fancy toys." Churchill gave way and so `Braddock' had been abandoned and forgotten." But who has the Braddocks now?" I asked, when I heard the story, "they sound to me like an ideal weapon of psychological warfare."

It turned out that they were with S.O.E., and my opposite numbers there were only too happy to let me have them. I explained the plan I had for `Braddock'. We would have twenty or thirty thousand of them dropped every night by the American squadron of Flying Fortresses which were carrying leaflets to Germany. They would do this for me I was sure.

We would also print an appeal to the foreign workers in Germany in their various languages, instructing them to use this incendiary weapon against their Nazi oppressors, the aim of the operation being to make the Gestapo and the German public believe that many of the fires they saw raging around them were caused, not by allied incendiaries, but by foreign workers using the `Braddocks'.

Not that I had any illusions that the foreign workers would in fact use them or that the `Braddocks' would cause vast fires. I had no hopes of the foreign workers because-contrary to the propaganda put out by my own department-I did not believe that the majority of foreign workers were 'press-ganged into slave labour'. I looked on them rather as willing collaborators attracted to Germany by the good pay and good rations the astute Munitions Minister Speer was giving them-a view in which I was confirmed after the war by Speer's right-hand man Willy Schlieker, the ship-building tycoon of today. As for the `Braddocks' themselves, S.O.E. had warned me they might be `a little stale', and when I tried one out on my lawn it stubbornly refused to burst into flame. It did not even burn when I put it on the fire!

But that did not worry me. All I hoped for was that the `Braddocks' would turn the police and the public against the foreign workers and thereby reduce very considerably the value and efficiency of this hitherto loyal and devoted labour force. And to judge by the reactions of the Goebbels Ministry and the German police when the operation was carried out, it achieved all that and more.

The Germans were mobilised against the foreign workers who, from being friends and helpers, were suddenly treated as the `Trojan Horse' within the citadel, an enemy to be feared. German newspapers published warnings to folk-comrades to be on the lookout for foreigners using the `cowardly incendiary packets' (Brandpackchen). Schoolchildren were sent out to try and collect them.

The official police gazette, the Deutsche Yriminal polizeiblatt' on November the 3rd, igq.q., put out a special edition warning police authorities. It was headlined "Enemy Sabotage in the Reich by use of foreign workers and incendiary packs thrown from aircraft. Particularly important for posts of the Geheime Staatspolizei !"

And, of course, we did our best to help the `Braddock' campaign along with the other devices available to us. Our friends of the Polish underground and the other S.O.E. agents in Germany plastered the passenger compartments and lavatories of the German railways with notices issued in the name of the Reich Railways Administration-but prepared and printed by us-which called on folk-comrades to search under the seats for Brandpackchen and if necessary to rip out any part of the fittings which they suspected might be harbouring one. The Soldatensender put out news items attributing fires we knew about from R.A.F. reconnaissance pictures to the foreign workers and their incendiaries.

`Tom Brown' Stevens too, by typically ingenious research contributed examples of alleged foreign worker sabotage. For instance, when he noticed a number of identically worded death notices in a Leipzig newspaper which appeared to have been inserted by families all living in the same district, he guessed there must have been some kind of factory explosion there. From M.E.W. he discovered there were two factories in the area: one making munitions, the other a chemical works. As most of the dead were young women he plumped for the chemical works. It belonged to a firm called Rudel and Fiedler. And, as we discovered later, he was quite right. There had been a great blow-up at Rudel and Fiedler's, only it had nothing to do with foreign workers and Brandpackchen as we alleged. But who was to know that?

There was nothing occult or mystic about my confidence that I could persuade the U.S. Fortress Squadron to do the job for me which `Bomber' Harris had refused to do for Churchill.

The American pilots of the Special Leaflet Squadron had been working with us since the last week of April 1944. This Squadron had come to Europe in 1942 as a regular Bomber Squadron-422 (H) of the 305th Group. In October 1943much to the disappointment of the crews-it was assigned exclusively to leaflet carrying. The leaflets were dropped in a special `leaflet bomb', designed by the squadron's inventive young armaments officer, Captain James Monroe. This was a cylinder of laminated wax paper sixty inches long and eighteen inches in diameter. At an altitude of i,ooo feet a fuse destroyed the container and released the leaflets. Instead of drifting for hundreds of miles, as in the early days of R.A.F. leaflet raids, when the leaflets were dropped any old how from doors and bomb bays, the leaflets-8o,o0o to each bomb-scattered over an area of about one square mile.

Night after night, these courageous young men flew in aircraft armed only with machine-guns on what they called their `milk round' over the German lines in France and Belgium, and far into the German hinterland, distributing our latest instrument of subversion, a daily newspaper which I had named, .Nachrichten far die Truppe, giving it a deliberately flat and neutral title, inspired by the OKW's Mitteilungen fiir die Truppe which we had so frequently counterfeited in the past.

Of all the enterprises I launched during the war, this `News for the Troops' is the one of which I am proudest. For this was a joint British-American venture and the readiness with which my American friends at O.S.S. and SHAEF's American Psychological Warfare boss General Bob McClure placed a team of first class editors and news writers under my orders, I still consider to have been the greatest compliment paid me at any time in my war-time career.

The newspaper team worked in yet another prefabricated barrack which had to be erected in all haste in the MB compound. Every night, for 345 consecutive nights, they put the paper together from the news and talks of the Soldatensender, which they sub-edited and rewrote for print. For, of course, many changes were necessary to adapt our material written for radio to the style of a newspaper. John Elliot, whom I knew from my Berlin days as a painstaking and well-informed correspondent of the New York Herald-Tribune, headed the American team. Dennis Clarke, who had been the Express correspondent in Vienna, took charge of its British counterpart. Dennis, as a gunner officer, had lost an arm and won an M. C. in the same North African battle in which young Virchow had been taken prisoner. But that did not stop the two of them from being the best of friends.

Dennis Clarke and John Elliot took it in turns to edit the paper-and submit the page proofs to me or Karl Robson for final approval. Harold Keeble, today features editor of the Daily Mirror Group, supervised the lay-out in his printing shop at what had once been the Duchess of Bedford's model clinic and nursing home. To print such vast quantities of a daily news sheet we needed a rotary press. John Mills, the General Manager of the Home Counties Newspapers at Luton, provided it. In printing shops and on presses that were already fully occupied putting out the seven provincial weeklies* belonging to the group he and his men night after night turned out an average of two million copies of Nachrichten. Those Luton printers were as proud of Nachrichten as we were. They looked on it as their special contribution to the annihilation of Hitler and they worked smoothly and punctually without ever a hitch.

If the Soldatensender was what Donald and I called `grey' Nachrichten was a dirty off-white. Unlike other allied leaflets it did not proclaim that it was issued by command of General Eisenhower or SHAEF. Nor did it, like `black' leaflets, claim to have some German or non-allied source. Nachrichten just dropped from the heavens, as an offering of the sublime objective truth. Unlike the Soldatensender it did not refer to the allies as the enemy. They were the Anglo-American forces or the Russians. The Germans were `Die Deutschen Truppen'. * The Luton News, The Beds. & Herts. Pictorial, The Herts. Pictorial (Letchworth), The Herts. Pictorial (Hitchen). The West Herts. Post (Watford), The Dunstable Borough Gazette and The Beds. & Herts. Saturday Telegraph.

k;ut whenever possible Nachrichten identified the German unit concerned-'Infantry Regiment g 19', `the 2 i St Panzer Division', or `the 356th Infantry Division', and so on. The talks which on the Soldatensender were delivered by a variety of voices always had the same signatory when used as articles in Nachrichten.

`Oblt. J.v.0' were the initials of the mysterious figure who was our great authority on everything from the struggles between Doenitz and Schniewind in the naval hierarchy, to the impossibility of fighting an air war without fuel or the `impossible' political interference with the army leaders' tactical decisions. Not that the mysterious Captain J, von 0(I always imagined our readers puzzling: "Can that be young Joachim von Ortzen ? or is it perhaps that fellow Johann von Ofterding?")-was at all bashful about writing with expertise on some subject of home politics. Such as, for example, the continued exemption from military service of members of Goebbels's Propaganda Ministry under the terms of an orderreproduced in facsimile-dating back to July the 4th, 1940

Needless to say we had no illusions that JVachrichten would be accepted as a German production-even though the Oberleutnant always wrote from the standpoint of a patriotic German officer. Nachrichten made no attempt to fool anyone. We merely refrained from underlining its allied origin. For two excellent reasons. Firstly because it would not have helped its effectiveness with our German readers for us to have added a by-line `Published by General Eisenhower'. Secondly because to have done so would have meant that the Soldatensender, source of all the news and articles in the sheet, would no longer have been disavowable. To turn Nachrichten into a `white' news sheet-as some of the post-war critics of `black' suggested we should have done-would only have been possible if the B.B.G. German service could have been used as its basis. This, for a variety of reasons, was impossible.

Bruce Lockhart, Dallas Brooks, and I had considered all these points most carefully before launching Nachrichten.

Now with the Flying Fortresses dropping our news sheet on the Germans night after night I felt we were at last ready to play our part in support of the invasion. All that remained was to plan what our role should be on D-Day.

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