Chapter Two

THE AGED P. & O. Liner Madura, that had picked us up in Bordeaux after the fall of France, took five days to zigzag home to England across the grey, U-boat haunted Atlantic seas.

On her decks camped the refugees. Indian Army colonels and their wives, scared out of their retreats on the Riviera, swapped escape stories with business men who had also been forced to flee. Long-legged girl dancers from the night spots bewailed the loss of their make-up kits to mannish, uniformed women from the Volunteer Welfare services. Brooding disapprovingly over them all sat the original passengers of the Madura, bitterly resenting our intrusion.

" Disgusting rabble," said one matron from Mombasa as she stumbled over my feet. Next to my deck chair-I had managed to secure a pair of them in the first assault for my wife and myself-sat an elderly man with a wooden leg who talked of the rabbit skin business and the felt factory he had left behind in France." How many skins a year do you think I used to buy? It ran into millions. Made them into felt in my own works and exported it to Britain-for the hat-making industry you know. Never see my factory or my home again, I don't suppose. The Germans'll get it all."

Anna McLaren, a bewilderingly beautiful blue-eyed Irish girl from a volunteer Transport Corps called the S.S.A.`Sans Sex Appeal' she said the letters meant teased him with more and more questions about rabbits and hats. But I hardly listened to them. I listened to the talk of my war correspondent colleagues. Throughout the five days they talked of little else but how they were going to join the fighting services as soon as they landed. George Millar, the ablest writer of us all and the youngest, had a commission waiting for him in the Rifle Brigade. Geoffrey Cox, a bright and energetic little New Zealander, was going to join the New Zealand Army.

I envied them. For I had no plans to reveal. Sitting there on the deck in my nest of sleeping bags and luggage, with Isabel, my artist wife, chattering away beside me, I felt miserable and useless. What I had seen during those weeks that had followed the German breakthrough, had made me fiercely determined to abandon my work as a reporter and get myself a job more directly connected with the conduct of the war than writing articles about it. But what was I going to do? At the age of thirty-six and with a weight of seventeen and a half stone to drag around, I did not feel that I would be much use as a soldier.

Of course, with my special qualifications and experience there ought to be something I could do in the field of intelligence work-if the powers that be would have me. Perhaps I could become a spy? After all, I did speak German like a German. Or I might be able to help with the interpretation and evaluation of intelligence. I knew something of the mentality of Germans at war from having been at school as a lone English boy in starving Berlin during the first war. I had travelled around Germany with Hitler and his retinue during the Nazi struggle for power. I was personally acquainted with Goring, Goebbels, Hess, Himmler and many other Nazi leaders. I knew the way their minds worked. Also I had spent much time in the Balkans since the war began and watched German agents at work there. Surely there must be some job in the secret side of the war, in which all this would come in useful. But would the mysterious `THEY' give me the chance to do a secret job?

Ever since the war had begun, I had been suggesting to those of my friends whom I knew to be connected with the secret departments that they should find me some work in which my experience would be of service. But although my friends did their best to get me in, every time they were close to succeeding the shadow of suspicion had intervened to baulk me. The very fact of my having been born in Berlin militated against me. My acquaintance with the Nazis was held to be not a qualification, but a ground for distrust. Stool-pigeons had been sent to test me. I remembered how on my return to London from Poland in October 1939 a young stranger had contacted me and sounded me out on the best way of getting in touch with the Fascists. Colleagues had been instigated to watch and report on my `secret Nazi activities'. M.I.5 officers got into oh so casual conversation with me on leave trains and tried to catch me out as a German agent.

The whole thing had been as idiotic and as wounding to my pride as the same suspicions had been to that of my father twenty-three years earlier, when he and we, his family, much to our and everyone else's surprise had been allowed to leave Germany and return to Britain in May 1917. But I had welcomed the investigations, stupid as they were, because I believed that sooner or later I would be cleared, and that then I would at last be able to play the part for which I was fitted.

All through those five days on the Atlantic I kept asking myself, was I clear now? Would `THEY' be ready to make use of me at last? And then, shortly after reaching England, on a drizzly July afternoon of 1940, a message reached me in our flat in London's ancient Lincoln's Inn, which suggested to me that the answer was going to be 'Yes!'The message was from Duff Cooper, the new Minister of Information. Duff wanted me to help `improve' the B.B.C. German broadcasts, as he flatteringly put it, by doing one or two talks a week myself. " Don't drop your reporting for the Daily Express," he said, "that is valuable war work. But if you could fit in the occasional German broadcast on the B.B.C. we shall all be most grateful."

I could not have felt more exhilarated, if I had been given a knighthood. Here at last, I believed, was a first auspicious raising of the barrier-even if it was only by an inch. I immediately rushed to the office to secure the permission of Arthur Christiansen, my editor. Chris, I think, must have guessed a bit of what it meant to me. He looked almost as pleased as I did.

" Go ahead, Tom," he beamed. "It is a fine idea, I'll print some of your talks. Some of them may even be news." And news they were too. Though not in the sense he or I had intended. For, without meaning to do so, I stumbled into the headlines with my very first talk. In my inexperience I got my-self into trouble with the pacifist critics of Churchill in the House of Commons.

The German-speaking news commentators of the B.B.C. of whom I was now one, had worked out a rota for themselves. Lindley Frazer, the fuzzy-haired Aberdeen professor who had been a contemporary of mine at Oxford, spoke one day, R. H. S. Crossman, the future Socialist M.P. the next, F. A. Voigt, the former Berlin correspondent of the Manchester Guardian the day after that, and so on.

I was assigned the Friday evening pitch. And on my very first Friday-I had never spoken over the radio before, not even in English, let alone in German-I had the task of replying to Hitler himself. For Hitler had chosen my first Friday-Friday July the 19th, I940-to make his triumphal Reichstag oration in celebration of his victory over France. More important still, he had chosen it as the occasion for his `final peace appeal' to Britain." It almost causes me pain," I heard him piously intone as I listened in on the radio in the B.B.C. studio, "to think that I should have been selected by Providence to deal the final blow to the edifice which these men have already set tottering ... Mr. Churchill ought for once to believe me, when I prophesy , that a great empire will be destroyed which it was never my intention to destroy or even to harm ... In this hour I feel it my duty before my conscience to appeal once more to reason and common sense in Britain ... I CAN SEE NO REASON WHY THIS WAR MUST GO ON!"

As it was to turn out he was not to be so far out with his prophecy about the destruction of the Empire. Our 'anticolonialist allies' and our own `Little Englanders'-Tory and Socialist-were to see to that. But even if I had known this, it would have made no difference to me or any other Englishman at this moment. , Within an hour of Hitler having spoken I was on the air with my reply. And without a moment's hesitation I turned his peace offer down. My colleagues at the B.B.C. had approved of what I meant to say. That was enough authority for me.

" HERR HITLER," I said in my smoothest and most deferential , German, "you have on occasion in the past consulted me as to the mood of the British public. So permit me to render your excellency this little service once again tonight. Let me tell you what we here in Britain think of this appeal of yours to what you are pleased to call our reason and common sense. Herr Fuhrer and Reichskanzler, we hurl it right back at you, right in your evil smelling teeth . . ."It was not diplomatic language or very elegant. But I reckoned a little earthy vulgarity in answer to the Fuhrer's cant would be just the thing to shock my German listeners out of their complacency. Especially as I then followed it up with some orthodox moralising about British reason permitting no compromise with murder and aggression. I even ventured to make a prophecy. I told Hitler that though things might look quite bright for him at the moment, the tide would inevitably turn, and he, like the Kaiser before him would find that he had been `conquering himself to death'. It was a phrase I well remembered from my first-war school days in Berlin and it soon became a stock slogan of the second-war B.B.C.

My quick reply to Hitler had resonant reverberations. Everywhere in the non-Hitler world newspapers printed long excerpts from it right alongside Hitler's speech. In Germany too it had its echo. William Shirer, the American radio reporter, who was in Berlin at the time, describes in his book, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich,* the consternation among the officials at the German radio when my broadcast came through. " I drove directly to the Rundfunk to make a broadcast report of (Hitler's) speech to the United States," he says. "I had hardly arrived at Broadcasting House when I picked up a B.B.C. broadcast in German from London. It was giving the British answer to Hitler already-within the hour. It was a determined No! " Junior Officers from the High Command and Officials from various ministries were sitting around with rapt attention. Their faces fell. They could not believe their ears. `Can you make it out?' one of them shouted to me. He seemed dazed. `Can you understand those British fools?' he continued to bellow. `To turn down peace now? They're crazy!'."

Mussolini's son-in-law Count Ciano was also in Berlin forthe speech. He too describes the effect of the B.B.C. turn-down in his diary. " Late in the evening when the first British reactions to the speech arrived," he wrote, "a sense of ill-concealed disappointment spread among the Germans." This however, was exactly where I got in trouble. My offthe-cuff rejection-Churchill in his book Their Finest Hour says with characteristic understatement that this immediate and brusque rejection of Hitler's peace offer was made by the B.B.C. "without any prompting from H.M. Government"!aroused the anger of the Socialist pacifists, who would have liked to take it up.

But my most outspoken critic, was certainly no pacifist.

This was Richard Stokes, the Socialist M.P. for Ipswich. He now attacked me in the House of Commons for my presumption in turning Hitler down without first obtaining the authority of Parliament.

Bitterly Stokes demanded of the Government how they had come to allow Sefton Delmer, "a person of no importance" (flattering cries of "OH!" from the Tory benches) "to deliver an answer to Hitler less than two hours after the Chancellor had spoken. "

I think it entirely wrong," he said, "that a speech broadcast in Germany at six o'clock should not first have had better consideration from responsible people.

Surely the responsible authority in this country to make a reply to a speech of that kind is the Prime Minister, or the Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, if possible after consultation with this House."

Duff Cooper rallied to my support with all his suave authority. He assured the House that my talk had the Cabinet's full approval. And when the Foreign Secretary Lord Halifax replied to Hitler a couple of days after me the sense of what he said was the same, although he used rather more restrained language.But there was still another sequel to my unauthorised rejection of Hitler's offer. At least I like to think of it as a sequel. In these days of July 1940 the special commando of Himmler's Security Service, which was intended to take charge of occupied Britain in the wake of the Wehrmacht's invasion, was putting the finishing touches to a list of personalities who were to be immediately arrested and handed over to the Gestapo.

This list-`Sonderfahndungsliste G.B.'* was its official title-was among the many secret documents captured by the Allies in Germany in 1945. Number 33 on the list was a certain Sefton Delmer, Paris representative of the Daily Express. He was to be handed over, said the list, to Dept. IV B.4 of the Central Reich Security Office. Maybe I would have been on that list in any case, for other well-known journalists were also included. But, as I have said, I like to think it was my maiden broadcast that put me there.

* The only copy of the list now in existence is in the possession of The Hoover Institution, Stanford University, Stanford, California, who most obligingly let me have a photostat of page 42 on which No. 33 appears.

 

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