Sefton Delmer

Denis Sefton Delmer OBE (24 May 1904, Berlin, Germany – 4 September 1979, Lamarsh, Essex) was a British journalist of Australian heritage and propagandist for the British government during the Second World War. Fluent in German, he became friendly with Ernst Röhm, who arranged for him to interview Adolf Hitler in 1931. During the war, he led a black propaganda campaign against Hitler by radio from England. It was so successful that Delmer was named in the Nazis' Black Book for immediate arrest after their planned invasion of Britain.

Sefton Delmer
Delmer at the Friedland Refugee Camp (1958)
Born
Denis Sefton Delmer

(1904-05-24)24 May 1904
Berlin, German Empire
Died4 September 1979(1979-09-04) (aged 75)
NationalityBritish
Education
Alma materLincoln College, Oxford
Known forPropaganda work for the British in Second World War
Spouse
​
​
(m. 1936; div. 1947)​

Early life

Denis Sefton Delmer, known familiarly as "Tom", was born in Berlin as a British subject, as a son of Australian parents living in Germany. His father, Frederick Sefton Delmer, was British of Australian heritage,[1] born in Hobart, Tasmania, who became Professor of English Literature at Berlin University and author of a standard textbook for German schools.[2][3] On the outbreak of the First World War his father was interned in Ruhleben internment camp, near Berlin, as an enemy alien. In 1917, the Delmer family was repatriated to England in a prisoner exchange between the British and German governments. He was brought up to speak only German until the age of five,[4] and as late as 1939 spoke English with a slight accent.[3]

Delmer was educated at the Friedrichswerdersches Gymnasium, Berlin, St Paul's School, London, and Lincoln College, Oxford, where he obtained a second-class degree in modern languages.

Early career
The Reichstag fire in Berlin, 1933

After leaving university, Delmer worked as a freelance journalist until he was recruited by the Daily Express to become head of its new Berlin Bureau. Whilst in Germany, he became friendly with Ernst Röhm, who arranged for him to become the first British journalist to interview Adolf Hitler, in April 1931.[5]

In the 1932 German federal election, Delmer travelled with Hitler aboard his private aircraft. He was "embedded with Nazi party activists" at this time, "taking copious notes on everything from the style of the would-be Führer's oratory to the group think that lay behind the bond he was forming with the German people."[6] He was also present in 1933 when Hitler inspected the aftermath of the Reichstag fire. During this period, Delmer was criticised for being a Nazi sympathiser, and for a time, the British government thought he was in the pay of the Nazis. At the same time, the Nazi leaders were convinced Delmer was a member of MI6; his denials of any involvement only served to strengthen their belief that he was not only a member, but an important one.

In 1933, Delmer was sent to France as head of the Daily Express Paris Bureau. In 1936, Delmer married the artist Isabel Nichols.[7] Delmer covered important events in Europe including the Spanish Civil War[8] and the invasion of Poland by the Wehrmacht in 1939. He also reported on the German western offensive in 1940.

Wartime

Delmer returned to Britain and worked for a time as an announcer for the German service of the BBC. After Hitler broadcast a speech from the Reichstag offering peace terms, Delmer responded immediately, stating that the British hurl the terms "right back at you, in your evil-smelling teeth".[9] Delmer's instant, and unauthorised rejection had a great impact on Germany, where Joseph Goebbels concluded it had to have come from the government.[10] That gave an impact any authorisation would have prevented and produced consternation in Whitehall. The effect was desirable, but it was unclear whether such a spokesman would again happen to say what the government wanted.[11]

Radio stations
The Aspidistra transmitter, Sussex, used for Delmer's Atlantiksender propaganda broadcasts

In September 1940, Delmer was recruited by the Political Warfare Executive (PWE) to organise black propaganda broadcasts to Nazi Germany as part of a psychological warfare campaign.[12] Leonard Ingrams of the PWE gained clearance for Delmer to work for the Political Intelligence Department of the Foreign Office. The operation joined a number of other "research units" operating propaganda broadcasts, based at Wavendon Tower (now in Milton Keynes), but in Spring 1941 Delmer was given his own base, a former private house in nearby Aspley Guise.[13][14] The concept was that the radio station would undermine Hitler by pretending to be a fervent Hitler-Nazi supporter. Under Delmer's leadership a number of notable people played a part: Muriel Spark,[15] Ellic Howe,[16] and Delmer's college friend, the cartoonist Osbert Lancaster. Some of Lancaster's Daily Express cartoons were reprinted into booklets aimed at civilians under German occupation and dropped by the RAF.[17]

Delmer's first, most notable success was a shortwave station: Gustav Siegfried Eins (Gustave Siegfried One), G3 in the Research units. It was "run" by the character "Der Chef", an unrepentant Nazi, who disparaged both Winston Churchill ("that flatfooted son of a drunken Jew") and the "Parteikommune", the "Party Commune" supporters who betrayed the Nazi revolution. The station name, "Gustav Siegfried Eins" (phonetic alphabet for "GS1") left a question in listeners' minds – did it mean Geheimsender 1: (Secret Transmitter 1) or Generalstab 1 (General Staff 1)? .

GS1 went on the air on the evening of 23 May 1941—earlier than intended, to exploit the capture of Hitler's deputy, Rudolf Hess, in Britain. Peter Seckelmann, a former German writer of detective stories who had fled Nazi Germany, was recruited from a Pioneer Corps bomb-disposal squad in London and he was the first member of the team to arrive at the discreet house known as "The Rookery" in Aspley Guise. He played "Der Chef". (In Delmer's autobiography Black Boomerang he acknowledges that "Some of the names of persons mentioned in this book have been camouflaged[ … ]" and Seckelmann was there named "Paul Sanders". ) A journalist, Johannes Reinholz, arrived soon after and played the adjutant to "Der Chef".[18][19][20] Both men assisted Delmer with the scripts.[21] The recordings were made on disc and taken by courier for transmission from a Foreign Office transmitter at nearby Signal Hill, Gawcott.[14]

When Stafford Cripps discovered what Delmer was involved with (through the intervention of Richard Crossman, who had sent him a transcript from the broadcast of one of Delmer's more salacious inventions), Cripps wrote to Anthony Eden, then Foreign Secretary: "If this is the sort of thing that is needed to win the war, why, I'd rather lose it."[22] Delmer was defended by Robert Bruce Lockhart, who pointed out the need to reach the sadist in the German nature. GS1 ran for 700 broadcasts before Delmer killed it off in late 1943 with gunfire heard over the radio intimating the authorities had caught up with "Der Chef". Owing to an error by a non-German-speaking transmitter engineer, the programme was accidentally repeated and "Der Chef's" dramatic on-air murder was broadcast twice.[23]

Delmer created several stations and was successful through a careful use of intelligence using gossip intercepted in German mail to neutral countries to create credible stories. Delmer's credit within the intelligence agencies was such that the Admiralty sought him out to target German submarine crews with demoralising news bulletins. For this, Delmer had access to Aspidistra, a 500 kW radio transmitter obtained from RCA in the US (their largest off-the-shelf-model), which Section VIII bought for £165,000. Use of Aspidistra, which began in 1942, was split between PWE, the BBC, and the RAF. Delmer's creation was Deutscher Kurzwellensender Atlantik (or popularly Atlantiksender). This station used US jazz (banned within Germany as decadent) and up-to-date dance music from Germany (extracted via Sweden and RAF courier), as well as an in-house German dance band. Important details on naval procedures came from anti-Nazis identified in POW camps, whose mail was sifted to create personalised announcements. Agnes Bernelle "played" the seductive "Vicki" and announced news bulletins.

Christ the King (G.8) broadcast an attack on the conscience of religious Germans, telling of the horrors of the labour and concentration camps, through a German priest.[24]

Soldatensender Calais
Purpose-built radio studio at Milton Bryan for "Soldatensender Calais"

Soldatensender Calais ("Calais Armed Forces Radio Station") was another clandestine radio station Delmer directed at the German armed forces. Based in Milton Bryan and connected by high-quality telephone lines for transmission from the Aspidistra transmitter at Crowborough,[25] Soldatensender Calais produced live broadcasts, a combination of popular music, "cover" support of the war, and "dirt" – items inserted to demoralise German forces. Delmer's black propaganda sought to propagate rumours that German soldiers' wives were sleeping with the many foreign workers in Germany at the time. The station also proved to be popular on the German home front.[26] The presenter was Agnes Bernelle, a refugee of part-Jewish origin from Berlin.[27]

Delmer also oversaw the production of a daily "grey" German-language newspaper titled Nachrichten für die Truppe ("News for the Troops"), which first appeared in May 1944, much of its text being based on the Soldatensender Calais broadcasts. Nachrichten für die Truppe was written by a team provided to Delmer by SHAEF, and disseminated over Germany, Belgium, and France each morning by the Special Leaflet Squadron of the US Eighth Air Force.[28]

When fighting entered Germany itself, black propaganda was used to create an impression of an anti-Nazi resistance movement.

At the end of the war in Europe, Delmer advised his colleagues not to publicise the work they had been involved in, lest unrepentant Nazis claim (as had been the case after the First World War), that they had been defeated by unconscionable methods, rather than on the battlefield.[29] Consequently, former Nazis were able to claim, without contradiction, that they had assisted the fictitious resistance movement; Delmer described this unintended consequence as a "black boomerang".[30][31]

In December 1945 Delmer was appointed an Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE), with the citation specifying merely that he was "Controller of a Division, Foreign Office".[32]

Later career and retirement
Delmer reporting from a German reception camp for refugees from the east, 1958

After the Second World War, Delmer returned to the Daily Express as chief foreign affairs reporter. Reinhard Gehlen stated it was Delmer's Daily Express article of 17 March 1952 which dragged the German intelligence chief into the daylight by unleashing a "flood of further publications".[33] Over the next fifteen years, he covered nearly every major foreign news story for the newspaper. However, he was sacked by Lord Beaverbrook in 1959 over an expenses issue,[34] and retired to Lamarsh in Essex, near Little Sampford, where his former wife Isabel lived with her third husband. He died at Lamarsh, after a long illness, on 4 September 1979.[3]

Delmer wrote two volumes of autobiography, Trail Sinister (1961) and Black Boomerang (1962), and several other books, including Weimar Germany (1972) and The Counterfeit Spy (1971). David Hare based his play Licking Hitler on Black Boomerang, and his plot included the faked, on-air discovery and shooting of the broadcaster, in the same way as Delmer had finished the career of "Der Chef".[35]

Delmer was the subject of a This Is Your Life broadcast in 1962, when he was surprised by Eamonn Andrews outside Le Caprice restaurant in London's Mayfair.

References
  1. Hitler's Black Book - information for Sefton Delmer, "Amtsgruppe IVB4 - The Office of Affairs", Forces War Records (1941), forces-war-records.co.uk
  2. Frederick Sefton Delmer (2001). English Literature from Beowulf to Bernard Shaw. Adamant Media Corporation. ISBN 978-0-543-90834-6.
  3. Richard Ingrams (2004). "Delmer, (Denis) Sefton". Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/31024. ISBN 978-0-19-861412-8. Retrieved 17 November 2022.
  4. Sefton Delmer: Trail Sinister Secker & Warburg, London, 1961, p. 19.
  5. Adolf Hitler by Sefton Delmer at psywar.org. Retrieved 1 August 2017.
  6. James Crossland: "Fake news is old news". History Today (November 2018), p. 19.
  7. "Out of the Cage: The Art of Isabel Rawsthorne | Francis Bacon". www.francis-bacon.com.
  8. Boadilla by Esmond Romilly, The Clapton Press, London, 2018 ISBN 978-1999654306
  9. Delmer, Sefton (1962). Black Boomerang. New York: Viking. p. 11. OCLC 377705.
  10. Balfour, Michael. Propaganda in War 1939–1945: Organisation, Policies and Publics in Britain and Germany, Routledge & Kegan Paul pp. 195–196.
  11. Balfour, p. 195.
  12. Twigge, Stephen & Edward Hampshire, & Graham Macklin. British Intelligence, (National Archives, 2008), pp. 72–73.
  13. Delmer (1962) p. 37
  14. "Political Warfare Executive Studio, Milton Bryan". English Heritage. Retrieved 29 March 2023.
  15. Smith, James (12 November 2018). "The Political Warfare Executive – what's in a (cover) name?". The Political Warfare Executive, Covert Propaganda, and British Culture. Durham University. Retrieved 1 January 2021.
  16. "PWE Ellic Howe". clutch.open.ac.uk. CLUTCH Club. Retrieved 1 January 2021.
  17. Woodward, Guy (28 January 2020). "Cartoons and propaganda: Osbert Lancaster at the PWE". The Political Warfare Executive, Covert Propaganda, and British Culture. Durham University. Retrieved 1 January 2021.
  18. Delmer 1962, page 1
  19. Lloyd, Mark (2003). "Second World War deceptions". The art of military deception. Barnsley: Pen & Sword. ISBN 9781844680108.
  20. Hirschfeld, Gerhard (1984). Exile in Great Britain: Refugees from Hitler's Germany. Leamington Spa, Warwickshire: Berg. p. 149. ISBN 9780907582212.
  21. Delmer (1962) pp 36–38, 44
  22. Lee Richards (2007). "Sir Stafford Cripps and the German Admiral's Orgy". PsyWar.Org. Archived from the original on 17 January 2007.
  23. Delmer (1962) p. 80
  24. Delmer (1962) pp. 139–141
  25. "P. W. E. Milton Bryan". kmi.open.ac.uk. Milton Keynes: Open University.
  26. Rankin, Nicholas (2011). A genius for deception : how cunning helped the British win two world wars. Oxford University Press. p. 310. ISBN 978-0-19-538704-9.
  27. David, Alexander (17 March 1999). "Obituary: Agnes Bernelle". The Independent. Retrieved 25 August 2023.
  28. The Psychological Warfare Division Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force: an Account of its Operations in the Western European Campaign 1944–1945 (2008 ed.). Bad Homburg, Germany: SHAEF. 1945. p. 170. OCLC 2511848.
  29. Rankin, Churchill's Wizards
  30. Lee, Loyd E., ed. (1998). "War in Science, Technology, Propaganda". World War II in Asia and the Pacific and the war's aftermath, with general themes : a handbook of literature and research. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press. ISBN 9780313293269.
  31. Plock, Vike Martina (2021). The BBC German Service during the Second World War : broadcasting to the enemy. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan. p. 186. ISBN 978-3-030-74091-7.
  32. "Additional Officers of the Civil Division". London Gazette. No. 37412. 9 January 1946. p. 277.
  33. Höhne, Heinz; Zolling, Hermann (1972). "Introduction". Network: The Truth About General Gehlen and his Spy Ring. London: Secker & Warburg. p. xi.
  34. See Chapter Two of Tail of a Tale by Sefton DelmerThe hiring and firing by Beaverbrook.
  35. Hare, David (1984). The history plays. London: Faber and Faber. pp. 11–15, 124–125. ISBN 0-571-13132-8.
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