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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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" Macht Hitler kalt," it said, "dann wird die Stube wieder warm!"-make Hitler cold-i.e. kill him-then the room will soon be warm again.

 

Copyright Sefton Delmer August 1962 The Valley Farm, Lamarsh, near Bures, Suffolk.