Chapter Twenty

ONE EVENING in April 1962 four of us were sitting around the fire in my club sipping the Hine I904. and reminiscing about the war. Suddenly a question was shot at me. " Which single operation of your `black' work during the war do you yourself consider to have been the most ingenious and most effective?"

The veteran war historian who had put the question sat back in his chair and quizzed me through his glasses, waiting for an answer. I turned to Donald McLachlan who was with me. But he, too, was at a loss for the kind of answer the old man wanted. For the truth was that there never was any one `black' operation that had been spectacularly effective all by itself. They were not designed that way. We never staged anything which could compare, for ingenuity and individual effectiveness, with deception operations such as, for instance, Commander Montagu's `Man who never was'. This was the operation by which the corpse of an unknown British officer carrying bogus plans for the invasion of North Africa was washed up on the Atlantic shore ofSpain, so that German Intelligence should receive his plans and be deceived by them.

We never attempted to concentrate on individual coups. Our task as I saw it was to corrode and erode with a steady drip of subversive news and `evidence' the iron system of control in which Hitler's Police State had locked the body and soul of the German people. No one single campaign could be as effective on its own as `the man who never was' had been. All, however, from Gustav Siegfried to the Soldatensender and operations like Tuckbox, Braddock and Periwig, worked together to secure a dividend which in the opinion of the Services Intelligence men watching the fall of the shot, was indeed helping to hasten the collapse of Hitler's military and social apparatus.

My American colleagues however had a different approach when they started up `black' on their own towards the end of the war. Not for them the concerted system of `black' campaigns which we had adopted. They were more ambitious-and perhaps also more sanguine than I ever was concerning the credulity of the German public. They launched several `black' operations which were intended to stand on their own just as the `Man who never was' had stood on his own.

Two American operations in particular remain in my memory as typical of these American propaganda coups. Howard Becker, a tall, slow-spoken, Garry Cooperish professor of Sociology who was running `black' for O.S.S., was responsible for the first. Becker called on me one day at MB together with a writer of film scripts named Polonski and asked me whether I would let him borrow `Aspidistra' for a one-shot broadcast which he and Polonski had worked out.

" Just one shot!" wheedled Howard Becker, "we're not trying to steal her from you, Tom ... !" Needless to say I immediately agreed. It would have been churlish to refuse, specially in view of all the help Howard, and O.S.S. as a whole, had been giving me with intelligence, recordings of hit music, personnel, and so much else.

As a result `Aspidistra' unhooked herself from the Soldatensender for a couple of hours one evening in September Igqq. to put out over a temporarily vacant German frequency what must have been one of the most fantastic broadcasts of the war. Nothing less than a speech by a man whom Hitler, the German army, the German public, and all the rest of the world presumed to be dead-killed by his own hand and with his own pistol on the night of July the 2oth, 1944 when his Putsch against Hitler had collapsed. -

" I am Colonel-General Ludwig Beck," intoned a deep resonant voice, coming seemingly from the bottom of the ocean. "I am not dead as has been lyingly and all too prematurely reported by the spokesmen of our traitor rulers. When on the night of July the 2oth I was compelled to go through the act of shooting myself, I did not die-I was only wounded. Friends carried me away, pretending I was a corpse. They took me to a secret place where I was nursed back to health. I would have remained in hiding there until the end of the war. But the plight of my fatherland compels me to come forward and speak." There followed an appeal to the army to rise against Hitler in order to save Germany from total destruction, and remove, by this gesture, the heavy burden of guilt resting collectively on the German people for its complicity in the Fuhrer's crimes.

It was a beautifully written piece and beautifully spoken. Though I had never heard Beck when he was alive, I was quite prepared to believe that this was a more than fair imitation of his voice. None the less I tried to propose some alterations in the script before the recording was put out.

" Why don't you change it just a little," I suggested to Howard, "so that we could claim that this is the speech that Beck had wanted to put out if the Putsch had been successful. He had secretly prepared this recording. It was to be broadcast from the Deutschlandsender. Somehow the Nazis and the Gestapo never found it. Now we have got hold of it. We could put it out over the Soldatensender, if you like."

But Howard and Polonski understandably did not like. They wanted to bring Beck back to life as a symbol of defiance and resistance. They wanted to stage a spectacular propaganda coup.

The other operation was put over under the auspices of Colonel Powell who headed the `Sykewar' team in General Omar Bradley's 12th Army Group. Over one of the transmitters of Radio Luxemburg his men broadcast for a period of about a fortnight what was to all intents a `black' soap operathe drama of a Rhineland town which had revolted against Hitler and the SS and was now appealing over an army radio to the Americans to come in and rescue them. The Burgomaster of the town was the chief speaker. Every evening he went on the air to tell his fellow citizens what they should do and give them his daily progress report of the town's desperate battle against the Nazis. The whole show was staged complete with dialogue, sound effects, and messengers dramatically interrupting with bits of late news. It was a drama as exciting as any instalment of `Emergency Ward Io' or `Mrs. Dale's Diary'. Finally the city was liberated and in a moving final scene the Burgomaster thanked his GI rescuers. A blemish of this spectacular operation, in my eyes, was that the name of the city was never revealed. It was such a big story, this revolt of a German city against Hitler, that it should have been carried as news by radio networks everywhere. Listeners would have expected to find references to the town's ordeal and triumph on Radio Luxemburg and the B.B.C. But Luxemburg and the B.B.C. did not mention it.

I did my best to support my American `black' brothers by putting out a report on the Soldatensender that the OKH had ordered the army to take special precautions against allowing Burgomasters and other civilians access to their radio equipment. Especially officials of towns in the immediate vicinity of the allied advance.

" There must be no repetition of the recent incident at a Rhineland town where the Burgomaster, in order to save his town from destruction, broadcast his capitulation to the advancing enemy."

That was the best we could do, lacking the name of the town. It was not much, but it was something.

At MB we never attempted to scale these American heights. Right up to the Soldatensender's last broadcast we remained a soldiers' radio, putting out news, speaking in the name of the ordinary browned off fighting soldier, venting his hate of the party profiteers who were sacrificing the fatherland to their selfish desire to hang on to power to the last possible minute. We voiced the tragic resignation and bitterness of a nation and an army that had been betrayed.

" Wer weiterkampft, kampft gegen seine Kinder," we saidwho fights on fights against his children. But as the allies swept deeper and deeper into disintegrating Germany I felt the Soldatensender was becoming an anachronism. It seemed to be almost the last unit of the Third Reich functioning with cohesion and coherence. I decided that it was time for us too to disband and go underground, as we reported everyone else was doing.

Both Robert Bruce Lockhart and Dallas Brooks had already retired from their posts in the department-Dallas Brooks to rejoin his Royal Marines and register his claim to become their Commandant General, Bruce Lockhart to nurse his failing health.

I therefore approached the new Director General, Major General Alec Bishop, and suggested to him that the time had come for us to close the innings. He agreed. And accordingly at 5-59 a.m. on April the 14th, 1945, Soldatensender West-as it had been called since the fall of Calais-faded from the ether, never to be heard again. Almost at the same time the .Nachrichten team put out their last news sheet. We made no announcement that we were closing. We just disappeared.

This great moment, however, was not allowed to pass unsung and uncelebrated in our own units. Harold Keeble gave a fancydress party in the printing shop at Marylands. I gave another in the canteen at MB. And for the first time security restrictions were relaxed sufficiently to allow the Marylands and MB teams to mix and visit each other's compounds. Charles Lambe, who had just been made an acting Rear Admiral, came down from the Admiralty with Ian Fleming to join in the festivities. Leonard Ingrams too, dropped in with his pretty driver, a demure young woman called Peggy Black. John Gibbs, the publisher who had rolled Off 159,898,973 copies of Nachrichten from his printing presses at the Luton News during the paper's life, romped into the Marylands party in a suit made up of Xachrichten front pages printed on calico.

At MB I interrupted the Soldatensender swan song of dance music to make a special announcement-the only time I ever spoke over one of my `black' stations myself, and the only time I permitted a private joke.

" The Fuhrer," I said in my best Berlinese, "has just radioed a message from his command post in the F'uhrer-bunker in Berlin to Grand Admiral Doenitz in Flensburg, authorising him to promote the Bootsmaat Karl Lamm to Oberboots-maat."

There followed a fanfare in the old Nazi victory announceInent style. Charles Lambe listened attentively and was duly gratified when the announcement was translated for him.

In the solitude of my bathroom at R.A.G. the next morning I performed another ritual ceremony to symbolise the end of `black'. I removed my beard. For I had to go to Germany on a special reconnaissance for the new job I had taken on. And this time I could not wear civilian clothes as on my last visit there in March. This time I had to wear uniform. And beards were not allowed with an officer's service dress. As my razor shaved the soap sodden whiskers from my face I gazed into the mirror with all the horror of Dorian Grey, confronting his tell-tale portrait. There, staring at me, was the pallid, flabby-mouthed face of a crook. Was this, I asked myself, what four years of `black' had done to Denis Sefton Delmer?

Beardless, I faced my team a few hours later that day to give them my farewell address as `Director of Special Operations' and tell them about what now lay ahead of them.

I had called them all together in the canteen. And here they stood before me now-German and Austrian prisoners of war, German anti-Nazi exiles, British and American executives, and editors, British girl secretaries and research workers.

By rights this should have been a solemn and emotional moment. But my team had never been brought up to be solemn and emotional. From somewhere at the back of the room came the Bremen voice of the Sergeant, Frankie Lynder.

" Der Bart ist ab! Der Krieg ist aus!"-the beard is off, the war is over.

Everyone laughed, and they all took up the cry--`Der Bart ist ab !' which in German is the equivalent of `the cat is out of the bag'.

They laughed some more when I told them of my Dorian Grey ordeal that morning in front of the bathroom mirror. It was as good an introduction as any to what I had to tell them about the new task which had been assigned to me, and to such of them as wished to stay with me. My main purpose, however, in calling this meeting, was to issue a caution and a warning.

" Our security has been excellent up to now," I said. "You have not talked about our work with outsiders and nothing much is known about us or our technique. People may have their suspicions, but they don't know. I want you to keep it that way. Don't be misled into boasting about the jobs we have done, the tricks we have played on the enemy.

" Certainly we have done a good job. A necessary job. We have worked hard and done our best, and we have, within our limits, contributed our bit to the defeat of Hitler. But please, please, make no mistake: the share of psychological warfare in the defeat of Hitler is only a very small one indeed. The defeat of Hitler is the work of the fighting services. Our role has been purely subsidiary.

" I know there will be a great temptation for Psychological Warriors to come forward and take a bow. They will want to tell the world of the great things they have done. We `black' men of MB must resist that temptation, whatever our colleagues of the B.B.C., and PWD SHAEF, or i zth Army Group may do.

" Why do I ask this? Well, just remember what happened after the 1914-18 war. After that war, Lord Northcliffe, who had charge of our propaganda then, was unable to resist the temptation. He was hungry for public glory. He wanted headlines about himself, histories, and biographies praising his greatness. He was not content with the private satisfaction a man feels over a job well done. He needed public acclaim, and so he fell for the post-war propaganda of the Germans.

" In their propaganda the Germans told the world what a great and wonderful victory had been won by the superpropagandist Northcliffe. It was he, they said, who by his propaganda of tricks and lies had brought the Americans into the war against the Kaiser, and then with more tricks and lies and false promises, he had deceived the Germans into surrender. `We were beaten not by the armies in the field,' the German generals now declared, `but by NorthclifTe's propaganda.'

" Not only was that factually untrue, it was also dangerously untrue. It prepared the way for Hitler and this present war. It fostered the illusion in the illusion-hungry Germans that they could have won if they had not fallen victims to Northcliffe. It made them anxious to have a second go.

" If we start boasting of the clever things we did, who knows what the result of that will be. So mum's the word. Propaganda is something one keeps quiet about. Are you einaerstanden ?"

The team knew that `einverstanden' phrase, and many ironic quips had been made about it. But once more, with a great bellow of laughter they roared back Einverstanden!

It was this same desire not to make any claims for our propaganda-combined with the journalist's innate desire to forget about yesterday's paper and get on with today's-that had impelled me to turn down the suggestion made to me a few days earlier by the new Director General, Major General Alec (`call me Bish, old boy') Bishop. He had proposed that I should send a team to Germany to check up on on the effectiveness of our work.

"It is over now and what's done is done," I told him. "While we were doing our stuff I was most anxious to find out whether we were having any effect, and what. That was useful. But with these other jobs you want us to take on I just cannot spare anyone for an enquiry which is now of purely academic interest."

Looking back on this decision today, I think that I was wrong. I should have asked Clifton Child to go to Germany with a small team of interrogators and researchers to find out what could be found out. For what I had not expected was that PWD SHAEF would include our `black' operations in its Official History and that as a result our work would be dragged into the controversy between the two American `Sykewar' agencies-O.W.I. (Office of War Information), who were responsible for American 'white' output, and O.S.S. (Office of Strategic Services), who were responsible for American `black'.

`Sykewar' historian Daniel Lerner of the O.W.L (who announces somewhat astonishingly that his father's account of pogroms in Tsarist Russia was his first lesson in psychological warfare-I would have preferred to call it a lesson in history )suggests that the `black' operations were not only useless but harmful because they were `blatant fakes' and undermined the reputation of allied propaganda for truthfulness.

He cites his British colleague, the poet Norman Cameron, as a witness for the prosecution and quotes his opinion that had our `black' stations been any good the Luftwaffe would have bombed the transmitters! Lerner further implies that `black' and `grey' by conducting campaigns with such objectives as stimulating hostility between the army and the Nazi Party were duplicating a white campaign, and were at best superfluous. What he overlooks is that `black' and `grey' spoke much more convincingly on these internal German themes than `white' could ever do, and that these campaigns had been first developed by `black' and `grey' and had then been taken over by `white'.

Lerner even goes so far as to claim as `white' certain campaigns which were exclusively conducted on `black'. As for instance the Soldatensender operation intended to undermine the efficiency of the German air force by leading the LuftwafFe Command to believe that German flying personnel were deserting in their aircraft to the allied side. Not the `white' broadcasts as Lerner says, but the Soldatensender and Nachrichten carried the news items intended to make the German authorities believe they must tighten up their security watch to prevent their men deserting-a tightening up which (as in the case of the U-boat sabotage campaign) would, we hoped, have a deleterious effect on Luftwaffe morale.

This Luftwaffe `desertion' campaign, incidentally, was repeated by the Americans eight years later during the Korean war. In `Operation Moolah' they offered a reward of 50,000 dollars plus asylum and freedom to any Communist pilot who would deliver a MIG fighter to the United Nations forces.

Unfortunately, however, the American Psychological Warriors of 1953, in their hunger for public recognition, announced to their own press that the object of this offer was not so much to induce Communists to surrender with their MIGs as to make the Chinese highups take morale-destroying measures against their flyers. That, alas, ruined what was otherwise an ingenious revamp of our operation.

I do not at this late stage intend to enter the dreary controversy between American `white' and American `black'. Nor would I dream of countering the claim of Dick Crossman, that our psychological warfare would have been more effective if no talent had been wasted on `black' with a similarly totalitarian claim that British propaganda would have been better if left exclusively to `black' and `grey'. In my view, all three colours were needed, and all three colours did well. Between them, their voices constituted an effective, if somewhat cacophonous choir.

Nor am I in any way disparaging Carleton Greene and his men when I say that the spinsterish insistence of the B.B.C. on its freedom from government control made it inevitable that the Services would look around for an alternative medium without these virginal complexes. The whole of our `white' radio output suffered under the system of divided responsibility by which the B.B.C., an independent corporation, controlled what was broadcast to Germany in the name of Britain, while the government's planners and policy makers, sitting in my department, were merely consulted by the B.B.C. as advisers. This meant that it was never possible to gear B.B.C. output to operational requirements as perfectly as could be done with a unit where policy making, planning, intelligence, and production were all under one hat. That alone made `black' and `grey' a necessity.

I will also say this to our post-war detractors. In their perfectionist attention to detail and their operational application of intelligence in co-operation with military planning, our `black' and `grey' provided a stimulating example to the B.B.C. Had they not done so I fear the B.B.C. might well have continued to plod along in the dreariness and the pious unrealism which had so irritated Duff Cooper in 1940. Secondly, `black' and `grey' by their ability to speak from the German point of view took on much of the task of internal agitation which the Russians performed with their `Free German Committee', a form of propaganda denied to us Westerners because of the refusal of our masters with their unconditional surrender complex to tolerate even a `Free Austrian Committee' let alone a `Free German' one. That complex I should add, made subversive propaganda by `white' virtually impossible.

Thirdly, we were able to help the allied intelligence and deception agencies. The intelligence men we assisted by suggesting to Germans at all levels that nothing was secret from allied intelligence and that they were therefore justified in speaking freely to their allied interrogators when captured. The deception men we helped by our treatment of U-boat movements and the army order of battle, to mention but two categories of information we disseminated.

All these were tasks which were legitimate, and valuable psychological warfare operations and which, because of the quite proper restriction of the official voices to truthfulness, could not be carried out by the B.B.C. or the other overt allied media. `Black' and `grey' were a necessity, not a useless luxury. I cannot however give any verdict, favourable or otherwise, on the success of our efforts to stimulate civil and military disobedience. In the aftermath of the war nearly every German I met put forward some example of his disobedience as evidence of his `resistance' to the Nazis. To vary the old Soldatensender refrain about police inability to check up on missing persons, it was impossible in 1945 and 1946 to check how far this disobedience had in fact, taken place, and how far it was caused by propaganda and how far by bombs. Nor would I be prepared to claim that the German deserters who had made their way to Sweden and Switzerland by May 1945 were all clients of ours -even though in the last ten months of the war we had been distributing neat envelopes containing leave passes, travel vouchers, and furlough ration cards-all produced by Armin Hull.

But I will concede this to Daniel Lerner. I, too, was distressed to find the `Let's do it all ourselves' ambitions of General Omar Bradley's i 2th Army Group leading their psychological warriors into such second-rate duplications of Nachrichten and the Soldatensender as Frontpost, a daily soldier's newspaper, and Radio 1212.

I suppose I ought to have felt flattered. '1212' however just filled me with gloom. It was a caricature of the Soldatensender. Bradley's men had neither the resources nor the technique of' my staff at MB. By unnecessarily multiplying the `black' effort they weakened it.

Did my team do as I asked, and keep silent about our work after the war?

By and large I believe they did. The exception was our little SS man who, as I have related, thought it right to try and redeem himself in the eyes of Germany's new Right Wing rulers by informing against the `traitors' of MB. Nevertheless a great deal has been printed in Germany about the mysterious Soldatensender and the men that produced it. It has appeared mostly in those illustrated magazines of which there has been such a flourishing crop in the new post-war Germany. Much of what has been published has been highly imaginative and wrong. But there have been layers of accuracy in this sugar cake baked up by the German `I am able to reveal' brigade.

One aspect that has interested me in particular is the change that the character of Delmer, the big, fat boss of MB has undergone in this Soldatensender fiction. From being a hero of light, a new Siegfried, fighting to free Germany from the yoke of an unrighteous despot-that is how I appeared in the Frankfurter Illustrierte version of 1949 - I have now become an obese Fagin exploiting the idealism of young German anti Nazi patriots, suborning them to foul misdeeds against their own kin and country. I have accepted the metamorphosis with resignation. For I regard it as an inevitable by-product of Germany's regained sense of national power and national grievance. And believe me, it is not to correct that picture of myself that I have written the foregoing chapters!

My decision to break my self-imposed silence about our work is due to my belated realisation that far from having prevented the evolution of a propaganda myth, we have, by our silence, contributed to the development of an equally dangerous legend in the new Germany. The legend of the good Generals and the good Wehrmacht who were always against Hitler. By showing here one of the sources from which this legend sprang I hope I shall have done something towards banishing it. For it will be a sad day for Germany and for Europe if, disguised as AntiNazis, the men who sponsored Hitler and Hitler's svar are restored to power once more to undermine by their presence in our ranks the moral unity of the West in its resistance to Eastern aggression. Alas, it looks as if exactly that has been happening.

End Of Part One

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