World War 2 Black Propaganda
This World War 2 Book has been out of print and unavailable for far
to long. For very similar reasons as to why my father wrote this book
in 1962, I feel it is important that this infomation is available
on the world wide web.
In this the web version of the story, I have been able to include
many previously unpublished photographs, including photographs that
I myself took on visits made to The Milton Bryan Studios
( before it was cleaned up, and the departure of the "Ghosts of
Soldatensender Calais"). I have also included
many photographs I took at various stages of the sad destruction of
the Art Deco secret transmitter "Aspidistra" located
at Kings Standing, Ashdown Forest.
At the present time I have only managed to OCR part one of the volume
Black Boomerang it is my intention in the very near future to publish
part two, followed by Trail Sinister his autobiographical story of
the events in Europe leading
up to World War 2.
DEDICATION
Below is the original dedication from the English edition of this
book Black Boomerang published by Martin Seker & Warburg Limited.
I dedicate to my fellow 'Black Men' -- British, German and American
--- this account of our operations against the common enemy. And I
thank all of them for the help they have given me in compiling it.
This web edition of this amazing story of the World
War 2 Black Propaganda operation, I should like to dedicate to the memory of my
Father, Denis Sefton Delmer.
My
hope is that those of you who are a part of this - the most important
publishing
revolution since the invention of the printing press enjoy this true
tale about the manipulation of media. Just imagine what they would
have done with this the internet.....I would also like
to extend my thanks to Lee Richards and Rod Oakland for allowing
me to use some of the Black Leaflets from
their vast collection.
This site has been created using OCR software and will have typos
etc .I shall be working my way through the site to correct these,
also a number of footnotes have been deleted these I shall reinstate
as I
undertake
the corrections.
IMPORTANT COPYRIGHT NOTICE
All materials contained in this Website are protected by copyright
laws, and may not be reproduced, republished, distributed, transmitted,
displayed, broadcast or otherwise exploited in any manner without the
express prior written permission of Felix Sefton Delmer. You may download
material from this Website for your personal and
non-commercial use only, without altering or removing any copyright
or other notice from such material.
15. 11. 04. F.S.D.
"H.M.G.'s secret pornographer" Article
by Sefton Delmer
IAN FLEMING - 007 - JAMES BOND Article
by Sefton Delmer
" This is the Chef that Jack Built "
...........................................................................................................................................................................................
ATTACK ON MORALE
OF GERMAN FORCES IN NORWAY - Secret Memo -
............................................................................................................................................................................................
Aspistdistra Photos
...................................
Milton Bryan Photos
.......................................................
Page Headings in sequential order:
(Foreword) ON MAY 23, 1941, a
few German civilians and soldiers, twisting the knobs of their radios,
suddenly
heard in German ,"Here is Gustav Siegfried Eins" repeated
several times, followed by "Calling Gustav Siegfried Eighteen."
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(1) THIS is Frankfort on the Main,
November 1960. I am taking a look at the 9 p.m. performance in a little
suburban
cinema.The seats are hard and uncomfortable.
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(2) 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.
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(3) 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.
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(3a) ON JULY the 16th, three days
before his `peace offer', Hitler had given orders for the invasion
of this
island to be prepared. The Battle of Britain was the result. I reported
that battle in my new dual capacity as a War Correspondent and a Psychological
Warrior.
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(3b) Not that I felt as gay and cheerful
as the Battle of Britain ended and the Blitz began as I tried to convey
to the Germans in these talks on the B.B.C.
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(4) LEONARD INGRAMS was among the select
few of my friends whom I knew to have something to do with the Cloak-and-Dagger
side of the War, and he looked the part of the mysterious Mr. X to
perfection.
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(5) The real irony of this security
bar against me was that while one branch of M.I5 was telling Leonard
Ingrams
and his friends that it would be unwise to have me join the Psychological
Warfare Department.
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(6) There was nothing, however, that
I could do about it. Hitler and Franco had just met at Hendaye and
reports
were coming through which spoke of German and Spanish preparations
for an assault on Gibraltar.
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(7) DURING THE first few days after
my arrival in Lisbon I had been like some hopeful debutante at a ball,
as I waited for Christopher's `they'll get in touch with you' to be
made good.
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(8) I never heard another word from
him until the war was over. Lord Beaverbrook however so much resented
what
he regarded as my `patronising arrogance' that he told the story of
my outrageous reply not just once, but as was many years later disclosed
to me, at least a score of times.
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(9) THAT was the beginning of it, the
beginning of the trail , that was to see the building up of a powerful
new weapon
of Psychological Warfare, the legend of which I would find reverberating
in Germany long after the war was over.
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(10) GUSTAV SIEGFRIED EINS went on
the air for the first time on the evening of May the 23rd, 1941 - It
was
a rough and by no means ready performance.
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(11) As I listened to the playback-the
whole performance had been recorded-the bit I liked best was the denunciation
of Churchill as a "flat-footed bastard of a drunken old Jew".
Here, with one phrase, which cost no one any broken bones, we had won
credibility as a genuinely German Station.
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(12) WHAT BAFFLED me about the whole
Hess episode was the astonishing reluctance of our authorities to handle
his case with the realism and practicality the British normally show
when faced with an opportunity of this kind.
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(13) But on this day of May the 16th,
1941 we had to confess defeat. Ultimately the item was printed in English
in a London newspaper-Hess's English being quite up to reading English
newspapers.
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(14) THURSDAY, JUNE the 6th, 1941,
was a fresh, sunny day in the little village of Aspley Guise, and despite
the bad news from Crete, I was feeling good. For, on my personal front
of the war, things were beginning to look up. Johannes Reinholz had
joined the Gustav Siegfried team the previous day with his wife, and
his very first script had shown that he was going to be able to write
the kind of thing I wanted `The Chief' to put over.
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(15) In one of his transmissions for
instance, `Der Chef' denounced by name the wives of a number of high
party officials
in the Schleswig-Holstein area who, he said, had rushed to the clothing
stores (also named) and bought up all the woollen goods and textiles
to which they were entitled by their clothing coupons.
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(16) I can well imagine the fury and
anguish of Party Comrade Winkelkampner as he listened to `The Chief'
describing
the magnificent sugar cake baked in the shape of Cologne Cathedral
with which Herr Winkelkampner regaled his guests at a party just after
the sugar ration had been drastically cut for ordinary folkcomrades.
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(16a) Gustav Siegfried's left-wing
stable companion, the `Sender der Europaischen Revolution', had produced
little
or no reaction in Germany. Nor had its right-wing predecessor. German
prisoners seemed never to have heard of either. `Der Chef', however,
after only a few weeks produced a crop of startling `comebacks',
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(17) The conception of the counterfeit
radios Deutscher Kurzwellensender Atlantik and Soldatensender Calais.
- FRASCATi's WAS my favourite restaurant in war-time London. Its gilded
Edwardian cherubs, its plush chairs and elderly waiters held a nostalgic
echo of my Paris eating places.
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(17a) Robert Bruce Lockhart, who
had become Director General when Rex Leeper departed to be Ambassador
to
the King
of Greece, was a cautious Scot, and circumspect almost to a fault.
But when I put our revolutionary project to him, he accepted it with
an alacrity amounting to enthusiasm.
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(18) The first
line of the new U-boat version went: "Ich war in St. Nazaire
in einem Puff . . ." which means, "I was in a brothel in
St. Nazaire . . ." Fortunately the bandmaster colonel conducting
the Marines did not ask me to translate the rest of the words.
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(19) It was
amazing however, how many Germans were genuinely taken in, and did
in fact
believe the station to be a German Forces Radio. Quite early on we
received indisputable evidence from a prisoner that for several days
on end the sergeant at the Wehrmacht equivalent of a NAAFI station
in Tunis had piped the Atlantiksender into the recreation huts `because
the music was so marvellous-so fabelhaft'.
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(20) " The Seventh U-Flotilla
St. Nazaire," announced the Atlantiksender, "this afternoon
beat the Second Flotilla by three goals to two in their football match
at
Lorient. The two teams are now celebrating at the Cafe Reunion.
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(21) AT THREE minutes to six on the
evening of October the 24th, 1943 Johnnie Kisch* was sitting, as usual,
in
front A of the battery of grey Painted receiving sets in his low ceilinged
cabin at the B.B.C. monitoring station in Caversham. Johnnie was bored.
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(22) The team, emigres, P.O.W.s and
all agreed with enthusiasm. They were grand fellows with tremendous
esprit
de corps and a truly German pride in their work.
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(23) FOR SEVERAL weeks now, I had
been carrying in my wallet a precious card marked with the cryptic
word
`Overlord' and under it my name and the Security Officer's signature.
`Overlord' as all the world knows today, was the code name for the
invasion of Normandy, and the card meant that I was one of the select
few taking part at this early stage in the planning of these decisive
operations.
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(24) The Soldatensender Calais used
the Russian front not only as a bogey to frighten Hitler's soldiers
in
France out of showing too much keenness and efficiency, and as a pretext
for feeling `written off', `deserted' and `second class'. We also used
it as a stage on which to present mysterious new American `miracle
weapons' against which resistance was useless.
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(25) 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.
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(25a) 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.
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(26) 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.
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(27) 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.
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(28) 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.
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(29) 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.
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(30) 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.
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(32) 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.
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(33) 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.
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(34) As OUR fame spread in the world
of the Secret Service, more and more visitors, both British and American,
asked to be shown over MB with its studios, record library, intelligence
files, and newspaper and radio news rooms. Some of them, like General
`Wild Bill' Donovan of O.S.S., even sat in on our morning conference
and listened as Clifton Child and his intelligence officers produced
their suggestions for news items and I directed how each item should
be written and angled.
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(35) Undeterred by this gossip, however,
I continued to do my best to keep up the morale of the team and give
`birthday parties' on each anniversary of Gustav Siegfried Eins and
the Atlantiksender.
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(36) RIGHT UP to the departure of
the first waves of the invasion force the propaganda batteries under
my
command
kept up their softening-up barrage. And by and large they did so on
the lines we had agreed at the start.
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(37) "The increase in acts of
sabotage committed by French guerrillas disguised in Wafpen SS uniforms
has
led to the, issue of a new order by the chief of the military government
in France, Dr. Michel.
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(38) IN NEUTRAL newspapers from Istanbul
to Stockholm it was one of the minor sensations of D-Day : the first
news of the allied landing in Normandy, so they reported, had been
given to the world by the German Soldiers Radio Calais. At 4-5o a.m.
on June the 6th, 1944 a Calais announcer had interrupted the station's
dance music to flash a report that the invasion had begun.
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(39) We certainly did our best for
the customers. As a result of Donald McLachlan's work-during those
first
weeks he was almost permanently at SHAEF headquarters getting us the
latest and fullest operational information-our reports were far more
up to the minute and far more detailed than any published elsewhere
at that time.
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(40) AT TEN minutes past eight on
the evening of July the 2oth, 1944, the DNB Hell-schreiber in the MB
newsroom
began
clicking out with tantalising deliberation the first news of what,
for all of us, was to become the greatest news story of the war.
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(41) What we did not however know
or even suspect at this time was that in our own immediate target area
of the
Western Command the revolt had been carried far further than anywhere
else.
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(42) And that is how I first came
to meet Dr. Otto John, that tragic victim of post-war Germany's vendetta
against
the `traitors and collaborators' and of Whitehall's eternal readiness
to sacrifice the friends of Britain.
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(43) " Mr. Delmer," he said, "My
friends have given their lives in the attempt to rid Germany of Hitler.
They believed that we Germans must ourselves liberate the world from
this Satan.
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(44) As a first document I got Armin
Hull to produce for us an exact replica of the printed forms of the
`Oath
of Loyalty to the Fuhrer' sworn by German soldiers on joining the Wehrmacht.
We had found a number of copies of this print among the documents captured
at German staff headquarters in France and the counterfeiting presented
no difficulty. But I made one change. For the name of Adolf Hitler
I substituted that of Heinrich Himmler.
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(45) For my purposes it did not matter
over much whether Nansen's claims were false or true, so long as he
made his clandestine SS station sound convincing and the message his
broadcasts conveyed worthwhile. I think he succeeded in both. For his
main theme was the favourite saga of all true German soldier patriots-"We
have been betrayed. We must rid ourselves of those who have betrayed
us . . ."
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(45a) " Send your questions to `Scorpion FPN 00020' " he
invited the comrades on each sheet. "If they are questions of particular
importance which seriously concern the soldier then the `Scorpion' will
reply. He will always tell the unvarnished truth." It was a very
tempting invitation and it was not Nansen's fault that our first `Scorpion'
nearly caused havoc on our own side.
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(46) ASPIDISTRA' OUR powerful 600
kilowatt medium-wave transmitter was not only the biggest and loudest
radio
in Europe at that time, it was also the nippiest. It had been specially
designed for us by the Radio Corporation of America so as to be able
to make lightning changes of frequency. As Goebbels had noted in his
Diary,* it hopped all over the waveband.
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(47) The fun was about to begin. We
did not have long to wait for an opportunity to try out Big Bertha.
Winston
Churchill saw to that..
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(48) THE early autumn of 1944 my friends
in S.O.E. began toying with the idea of a Skorzeny type commando raid
on Ithe Fuhrer-headquarters. They thought it would be a neat way of
shortening the war if they could bump off Hitler and Himmler.
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(49) Then on March the I I th, the
Soldatensender and its twin brother the short-wave Atlantiksender made
our announcement.
And here is the Minute taken at the Fiihrer conference on the following
day.
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(50) 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?"
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(51) 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.
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