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In September 1939, an unlikely assortment of journalists politicians, novelists and spies assembled in a Bedfordshire village and set about waging a covert propaganda war on Hitler's Germany.
Today on the History Extra podcast, Author and broadcaster Terry Stiastny tells Spencer Mizen how the political war executive deployed everything from fake news and pornography to bogus killings to spread fear and confusion in Nazi-occupied Europe.
So Terry, your new book tells the story of the political warfare executive, a top secret organization charged with disseminating propaganda and disinformation across Nazi-occupied Europe during the Second World War.
So who came up with the plan to form this shadowy entity?
And why did they think it was necessary?
Well, they were really playing catch up at the beginning of the Second World War.
There'd been an organisation during the First World War which did do propaganda to enemy countries.
But basically, they didn't have the technology then.
They were dropping leaflets over Western Europe via hot air balloon.
So they really had to catch up with a new world where Germany was far ahead in terms of using radio as a form of propaganda.
And it didn't really get underway until once you had Churchill in power as prime minister, once you had a new government in place from 1940.
And they suddenly realized that you know, we have to be trying to speak to people in occupied Europe.
And so the variety of people involved.
One of the main ones was Robert Bruce Lockhart, who'd been, of course, a spy during the First World War.
He'd been arrested by the communist government in Russia.
He was one of the people that was recruited to set up this organization.
And they started to draw in people from other places, people like Richard Crossman, for instance, who'd been an academic and a journalist and he'd broadcast on the BBC.
And they started to recruit people to come to Woburn Abbey.
They'd set that up at the beginning of the war, big country house outside of London where they started creating radio stations.
And they were radio stations that were trying to broadcast into France, into Germany, into Italy.
And it was, to be honest, all a bit chaotic at the beginning of the war, until you had some other big characters, like the Minister, Hugh Dalton, for instance, who was the Minister of Economic Warfare, and later Brendan Bracken, who was one of Churchill's close confidants, who realised that they They really needed to try and get their act together in terms of what Britain was saying to the rest of Europe, to its enemies, but to get beyond their leaders and speak to the actual people.
You mentioned the word technology there.
As you say, technology has come on leaps and bounds in the 20 years since the First World War.
How did members of the political warfare executive use this evolving technological toolkit to their advantage?
Yeah, it's really interesting when you think, for instance, how new the BBC was.
I mean, the BBC had been founded in 1922.
So, you know, it'd only been running for 17 years by the time the Second World War started.
And they'd only been doing foreign news for really about four or five years.
So, you know, this is very new.
Britain is really kind of rushing to try and catch up with this.
Actually what they did is they recruited quite a few people who had run radio stations inside Europe, who had some kind of experience of this.
People who had run, for instance, propaganda stations in Paris or during the Spanish Civil War.
And they started to use that technology.
But initially, they could only broadcast on shortwave.
A lot of the stations got jammed when they were trying to broadcast into Europe, and it wasn't until later on in the war when they built a huge transmitter called the aspidistra transmitter, which could only be used.
It was so strong it could only be used for a few minutes at a time, otherwise it would start guiding bombers essentially back towards london.
Uh, that they could broadcast to a bigger reach.
They could get as far as as north africa, they could get as far as germany.
But of course then one of the issues was getting people on the other side of the channel to be able to actually listen to it, because of course in most occupied places you were running a big risk by listening to a foreign propaganda station.
So one of the things they did was put them in heavy disguise as pretending that they were broadcasting from within Europe, from within France or within Germany or within the Balkans, for instance.
Now, a term that crops up repeatedly in the book is black propaganda.
Can you explain to our listeners what exactly black propaganda is?
Yes, black propaganda is really what we would call today fake news.
It is news that is pretending to be something else.
So a lot of the propaganda that the political warfare executive was doing was, at the very least, like grey or dark grey propaganda.
They weren't saying this is the voice of Britain.
They are saying we are a disgruntled German soldier sitting in a trench somewhere talking to you on a crackly microphone, or we are a French Catholic station with a priest broadcasting.
I mean, they did have real French priests actually broadcasting, so that wasn't untrue.
But what they would also do in black propaganda, and the man behind this was Sefton Delmer.
He'd been the Daily Express's correspondent in Berlin in the 30s.
He had a lot of firsthand experience of what was going on in Nazi Germany and in Europe.
And he believed that one thing you could do to help undermine enemy morale was to spread rumors about the kinds of things that the German leadership was up to.
You know, for instance, they would say that uh, senior german figures are abusing their rations, they're eating big cakes while you guys are going hungry.
Uh, they are living in luxury while soldiers out on the front are suffering from their resources.
And so he would say that if we do this, and it was leavened with quite a lot of music he loved using music because there was music that germans weren't allowed to listen to, for instance, you know, jazz and lots of popular song, and he'd use, you know um, A thing that always goes viral these days porn, basically.
They use both in audio and in leaflets to try and attract the attention of serving soldiers and thinking these are the things people are missing.
And it allows them then to spread rumours about all sorts of other things, like food and disease and all the kinds of things that people were and still are fascinated by.
I guess to some people in the British establishment this must have been seen as a new way of prosecuting a war.
And to some in the establishment, it may seem slightly ungentlemanly.
Was there any queasiness among those in power in Britain about deploying these tactics?
Oh, yes.
I mean, absolutely.
This was all supposed to be deniable.
It was supposed to be secret.
But certainly there were political opponents of the idea of using this.
And one of the biggest ones was Sir Stafford Cripps.
And there's an amazing letter, which you find in the archives, which Sir Stafford Cripps, who was a government minister, wrote to his colleague Anthony Eden.
And he said I have to write you this letter by hand Anthony, because I cannot allow my young lady secretary to be reading this sort of thing.
But he was disgusted.
He had heard that there was sort of pornographic radio broadcast supposedly involving a German admiral obviously wasn't a real German admiral that had gone out on German radio.
And he was disgusted.
And he told Sefton Delmer, he said, if this is the way we have to win the war, I'd rather lose it.
At least that was Delmer's sort of slightly exaggerated telling of it.
But he thought, you know, this is not how Britain should be behaving, that we shouldn't be using these kinds of techniques.
And there was a certain point to what Stafford Cripps had to say and also people within PWE as well.
People like Richard Crossman, who went to be on to be a Labour politician, said look, the danger of using lies, and big lies in particular, is that when we come, we hope to win the war.
We need people to trust us.
We need people to believe that Britain can tell the truth.
And if we find out that we've been telling them lies all the way through the war?
How do we then carry on?
So what's Churchill's attitude to this?
The subline of your book is the misfits who fought Churchill's secret propaganda war.
I mean, how aware was he of the work of the political warfare executive?
And was he a champion of his work?
And Churchill's attitude was quite interesting.
I mean, he was obviously certainly aware of it, because a lot of the discussions about what they were doing went right up to cabinet level.
Brendan Bracken, who was the minister of information, was very closely involved and he was a real close confidant of Churchill.
So they talked a lot about it.
But surprisingly for someone who was himself so really good at communicating to the public, Churchill didn't actually take all that much interest in propaganda, except at key points.
So, for instance, when they were building the Aspidistra transmitter and the parts of that had to come from the United States.
He would slap these sort of the Churchill's action this day, famous stickers on memos saying when is this going to be ready?
We need it to be ready in time for the invasion of North Africa.
You know, I want an update every three days on whether you've built this radio transmitter or not.
But also there were times when he was really reluctant to use propaganda.
So, for instance, in 1941, when Rudolf Hess landed in Britain, the propagandists of PWE were saying we're desperate to use this.
This is a fantastic propaganda. propaganda coup for Britain.
We need to be telling people that Rudolf Hess has just defected to Britain.
And Churchill was really reluctant.
And I'm still not quite sure why he didn't want this to be used.
He thought it was a trick.
He thought that perhaps it could be turned back against Britain somehow.
But there are other instances later on in the war as well, when Churchill and Roosevelt really directly have to consider should we use a big lie?
And one of the most notable examples of this is in 1943, during the invasion of Sicily.
When they are thinking, should we put out a fake broadcast that is claiming to be from the Italian king?
And one of the suggestions from the military is that if we put out a broadcast on propaganda radio saying that the Italian king has surrendered, All Italian soldiers should now follow.
Listen to him.
Mussolini's gone.
And you know Churchill's initially quite enthusiastic about this idea thinks well, this could work.
But then people close to him say well look, you know, don't mind a good bouncing lie, but this is one that could bounce in our own direction, in the words they use.
They say...
You know, if the king, if it doesn't surrender, if it all goes pear shaped in Italy, we're going to look like absolute idiots and nobody will believe us again.
And it's such a key point in the war.
Churchill does come around to the idea that OK, we better stick with the truth, because you know, at least then we will be believed.
And I guess there was a lot at stake here, wasn't there?
Because if people on continental Europe stopped believing things that the British authorities were saying, that would have long term consequences, wouldn't it?
Yes, absolutely.
And you can see this really clearly towards the end of the war.
So Richard Crossman ends up in occupied Europe as the British forces go in.
And there's one example where he really directly comes into conflict with Churchill.
And he's absolutely defying direct orders from the prime minister to to change the policy in terms of what they're saying in propaganda.
So as the British forces are starting to move into Germany in 1945 And Churchill says you know, he realizes that the German civilians are being told to stay away from where the troops are.
Stay off the roads, you know, don't go anywhere near, just leave the roads clear.
And Churchill says no no no, we should tell the German civilians to actually get out on the roads and evacuate.
And this will cause more chaos.
And the propagandists and some of the military as well say, no, we don't want them to do that.
We absolutely don't want civilians getting in the way.
But Churchill says, no, that's what I want you to do.
And Crossman directly defies Churchill says well, we might put that instruction out over the black propaganda radio that people probably aren't believing at this point in the war anyway.
And he's told by one of his American colleagues just do one thing to satisfy the old man and then we'll carry on from there.
So sometimes they are doing different things.
And, you know, the most Interesting.
One of the most moving things I found in researching this book is when Crossman then arrives at Dachau when the camps are being liberated.
And he's recording everything that people say.
He is planning to make a film about the camps.
And of course you know, he and everybody arrives in a huge state of shock at the scale of the horror there.
And when he's making a film, someone asks him, well, why are you taking down all these details?
And even this is on VE Day in 1945, he says, well, one day people will say that this never happened.
And I think he realises then that that's one of the huge dangers that if you have been shown to be telling untruths, you know, when it comes to talking about something as obviously important and true as the Holocaust, you can't allow any room for denial or for doubt there, for people to say that this never happened, when of course it did.
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So let's look in a bit more detail at some of the people who worked at Woburnie.
What qualities as a human being, did you sort of need to possess to excel in this line of work?
I think you needed to be up for a good argument, certainly.
I mean the arguments that they had.
I mean Richard Crossman.
You know he trained as a philosopher.
He was an Oxford philosopher.
He knew how to argue.
But all of his colleagues, they loved a debate.
And a lot of people had come from politics.
They had come from journalism.
They'd come from either diplomacy or the world of espionage.
So they needed to be good at making their point, because there are a lot of very outspoken and intelligent people there.
They need to be able to get a message across.
They were, you know, what we probably now call spin doctors, a lot of them.
They were people who You know, say, well, what are we really trying to say?
What's the message?
And you know honestly, I think it would have been fun to work at Woburn and in some of the villages around, because they had these what they called hush hush villages, which were full of refugees and exiles and people who had come native speakers from, from Germany and Italy and elsewhere, who were living in these houses in a very, very intense environment.
And they were criticised at the time for saying well, you're living in luxury relatively compared to some other people.
They had nice rations and there was a nice big bar in Woburn that you could go to.
So they also loved to talk and quite a lot of them quite loved to drink as well.
Yeah, you described them as misfits.
What do you mean by that?
Can you elaborate on that a little bit, please?
I think none of them.
The people who weren't there weren't generally conventional civil servants, for instance.
They were people who were certainly prepared to break the rules to a certain extent, particularly when it comes to to Delma, when it came to Brendan Bracken, the minister of information.
I mean, Brendan Bracken was just he was an amazing liar.
He was one of the biggest liars in British politics.
He made up everything about his own background.
He claimed that his parents had died in an Australian bushfire when he was actually from Ireland.
So they weren't conventional politicians.
Now someone was saying to me recently that if you'd had modern day vetting for a lot of these people who they were having affairs, had drink problems some of them they wouldn't have necessarily passed the vetting to get into a conventional job.
But they were certainly all really talented as well.
So they were clever.
They were interesting.
They were funny.
And a lot of them weren't very conventional politicians.
And you write that some of these people are not always very good at telling the truth about themselves in their own lives.
I mean, is that what you mean by that?
Yes.
A lot of them had personal secrets to keep.
I mean, you know people like Delma, for instance, when you read the memoirs that he wrote, he uses exactly the same techniques that he used in his propaganda.
He said where the title comes from is something that Muriel Spark said, and she worked there as well.
We used detailed truths with believable lies.
So they...
If you read Delmer's books, he sort of says I drank this absolutely perfect bottle of fine wine and then something else happened.
And the more he puts in the detail about the fine wine, the more you think he's probably making some of the rest of this up.
But so he is a tabloid journalist.
And, you know, he loved to tell a good story.
And sometimes he just didn't let the facts get in the way of his good story.
So if you read other people's accounts of what happened, for instance, you know his former wife's account differs from from what he said at other points.
But the fascinating thing about researching this book is that you could then go back to the documents and find you know, some things have been quite recently released.
What was there and what do people actually record at the time about what?
What Delma and others were saying?
That's a really interesting point.
I just wonder if you could explore that in a bit more detail.
So the book is called Believable Lies.
So were the best lies, the ones that were mainly contain truth, but with little lies sort of embedded in them.
Yes, absolutely.
And they had a whole sort of research section devoted to, in particular, finding out what was going on in terms of conditions in Germany.
So if the propaganda stations were talking about what it was like on a German submarine and trying to broadcast directly to submariners, or talking about bombing raids within Germany?
One of Muriel Sparks' jobs was to take in information from the RAF about the state of bombing raids on Germany so they could tell people accurate, up-to-date information about what had happened in a particular city and then convey to them.
You know it's all hopeless.
You know your city has been destroyed.
But they used because they didn't want to be relying on information that had come from people who had often left Germany, you know, in the early 1930s or before.
They needed to know what things were like for the German people at the time that they were broadcasting.
So they did use very extensive research in that.
And then they focused in on things which they knew people would like to talk about.
So they would talk about, for instance, the spread of typhus in German cities.
They would talk about the lack of rations.
So, in order to do that, they had to know some true details, in order that they could then add on to it an untrue story.
And as we know now, we see what happens.
Once you put out false information about the spread of a disease in a community, people will spread it and they will spread it further.
And that was what you needed is one person to hear the radio station and then to tell all of their friends.
OK, so can you introduce us, to say, two or three, of the most sort of devious cunning and, I guess, successful operations that were masterminded by the political warfare executive?
One of the interesting things is how they changed what they were doing during the course of the war and got a lot more sophisticated.
So one of the initial stations that they had was called Gustav Siegfried 1, and that was a black propaganda station.
It was supposed to be run by somebody called Der Chef, who claimed to be a disillusioned ex-Nazi Prussian officer, and he had a sidekick who is adjutant and he would talk about how they were all being absolutely betrayed by the German leadership and that this was all terrible.
But they decided that this was getting a bit out of date because the people they wanted to be reaching instead were soldiers in occupied France, were submariners In the seas in the Atlantic.
And so they actually shot him supposedly live on air.
Der Chef said, I've been discovered.
You know, this is terrible.
Oh, no.
Betrayed at last.
Bang.
He was he was shot.
But apparently this because they all could only use recorded stations at the time.
They did this on record.
And apparently the record got played out twice.
So Der Chef died live on air twice.
That wasn't one of the most successful ones.
But they also did really almost like radio drama.
So when they were talking to submariners, they would have one of the team who had been on submarines and learnt about what it was like to be on submarines.
And he actually reenacted live, having been rescued from a sinking ship.
And so they were doing quite sort of you know vivid reenactments and telling people you know this is what it's like to be out in the Atlantic and to be rescued.
So I think some of those things they really knew how to appeal to their audience, certainly by later on in the war.
And do we have any evidence that this propaganda campaign of disinformation, did it actually work?
Can we say that it changed the course of the war?
That is a very interesting question.
One of the ways they tried to find out whether it worked or not was that they talked to prisoners of war in particular, and they asked people have you heard any of these stations?
Have you heard any of these stories that we were putting out?
And in some cases they said, yes, we did.
And they knew that that was a mark of success.
The other mark of success that they had was if the German government in its official broadcasts then responded
So in one case, they had talked about a senior German official who they accused of murdering.
And he responded and said, no, no, I'm not.
I'm not abusing my rations.
I am a normal consumer.
And this is totally fine.
And he had a bit of a reputation for being greedy and drinking too much.
So they knew that somebody somewhere was listening to this and that this message had got through.
But there were also smaller successes.
For instance, after Tunis, PWE coined the phrase Tunisgrad, which then, they heard, popularised and became widely used for the German defeat there in Tunis.
So they thought, well, this is a slogan that has certainly caught on.
And also in Italy as well, when Pantelleria, which was near Sicily, was attacked.
Yes, it was absolutely bombed to smithereens, but there were also loads and loads of leaflets.
They used leaflets as well as radio. which were dropped over the island.
And PWE did then say that when we spoke to Italian commanders on the ground when they were deciding to surrender, some of the leaflets that gave them information about this is what's going to happen if you give up now, if you hand over that they felt that those leaflets had been influential in changing the minds of some of the military commanders as well in making those decisions to surrender.
Speaking of the Germans, how aware were they of the work of the political warfare executive, and did they at any point try and target it?
They did certainly know pretty much that this was going on and the PWE believed that in a way, this was all slightly a shadow game.
The Germans knew what we were doing.
We knew what they were doing, but the point was not to let anybody beyond Goebbels and the other leaderships know what you were up to, because certainly Germany tried to jam radio stations and tried to block them from getting through to people who could listen to them.
Towards the end of the war, there was sort of an actual, a sort of almost a game of cat and mouse over the airwaves, because Delma was allowed to broadcast, to hop onto official German frequencies and do something that he'd wanted to do for the whole of the war, which is to put fake news actually pretending to be official German news, onto the radio.
And so he would come on to tell different stories in the same format to the official German radio stations when they'd gone off on off air because bombing raids were happening.
And then the german station would hop back onto their own frequency and say don't believe what you've just heard.
We are the only official station, not the other thing, wasn't the official station?
And then of course, the next broadcast delma, would then add said don't believe what you've just heard, we are the only official station, don't believe the other guys.
So they were doing this towards the end of the war, you know, trying to mimic one another.
And what did the heads of the army, the navy and the royal air force make of this new entity?
Was there ever a sense that they felt that their toes were being stepped on?
Well, there was certainly one big conflict with Bomber Harris, because of course they were dropping millions and millions of leaflets at certain points in the war.
And Harris was, to say the least, not very keen on the idea that his bomber command planes should be used for dropping leaflets.
He would much rather they dropped as many bombs as possible.
And he, you know he had a point and you know they were potentially putting air crews at risk to go and drop paper over over europe and he thought that was not necessarily the best use of resources but they could appeal to his vanity to a certain extent and said you know look, we'd love you to make a broadcast for us.
We'd love you to go on the airwaves and tell Germany exactly, you know, why we are bombing them.
And he was, you know, he was very flattered by this.
But the trouble was when they then put this out as a leaflet and the reports of the broadcast got back into the UK, there was a huge political uproar.
They said a military commander is intervening in politics.
We don't want that to happen.
He has promised security. things that we can't absolutely deliver.
He said, we will bomb you come rain, blow and snow.
And they said, well, what happens if we can't bomb you in poor weather conditions?
So that turned into a huge political row between PWE and the Air Ministry.
And it had to be smoothed over at the highest levels of government by ministers saying you know, can we calm this down a bit?
And eventually they got everybody to calm down and PWE were able to use aircraft to send their leaflets out.
Okay, so for you, as a historian and researcher, what were the specific challenges of, you know, delving into a topic that is, by definition, shrouded to a certain extent in secrecy?
Well, it was really interesting to go back into this story, because I think it's one that hasn't been told for a long time.
Some of the people who were involved in pwe had written their memoirs, you know, not until many of them the 60s or the 70s, once they were released from some of the the secrecy that obviously surrounded it all.
But then they could only tell the story in part and you know, as we already discussed many of them And I found it was really interesting.
This was an organization which was staffed by women in the majority.
And in particular, a lot of the women didn't write their own stories about what they did.
There were women who were broadcasting.
There were women who were producing.
There were women who were running sections of the show.
Of the organisation, in particular Elizabeth Barker, who had been a BBC journalist, went back to be a BBC journalist again after the war.
And also, you know, there are still documents which have not been released.
I had to get Freedom of Information requests to get some of these documents to come out.
But it was just so interesting to to see what had been released online more recently, to be able to relate some of the stories that were told in the memoirs and in people's private letters and diaries with the official version of events.
And you know, hopefully I've managed to find out quite a lot more about what was going on at Woburn and in Whitehall.
And why does this story have resonance today?
I mean, why do we need to be considering these issues in the 21st century?
Well, a few reasons, really.
I mean, I first started researching this during lockdown.
And one of the things that really interested me about it was how do people behave under pressure?
And I think what's interesting is that we sometimes have the idea that politics, as usual, stopped during the Second World War.
There was a coalition government.
Everyone was pulling together.
And when you look at what was happening huge public rows between government ministers in restaurants about their policies, about each other's personal failings.
They were cursing and swearing at each other.
You know, we don't think of that as being, you know, what was going on, but it certainly was.
And now we know, now we see ministers' WhatsApps to one another, you know, discussing what they got up to.
So, you know, politics didn't stop.
Politics was essentially quite chaotic.
And of course, now, you know, we have still got the issue of, fake news.
And if Delma returned today and was able to see what's going on on the internet, what's going on on social media, you'd have to explain the concept to him.
But he would completely get exactly what is happening now in terms of fake news, how you spread it.
And they'd just be astonished the PWE to discover that everybody sitting at home with their own computer and their own phone could create the fake news that it took them a whole organisation and the You know.
Seeing how that works, seeing how disinformation spreads and then trying to combat it, I think is still really, really important.
That was Terry Stiastny speaking to Spencer Mizen.
Terry is an author, journalist and broadcaster, and her new book telling the story of the political warfare executives' covert war on the Nazis is called Believable Lies The Misfits Who Fought Churchill's Secret Propaganda War.
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