Photo de l'auteur

Sefton Delmer (1904–1979)

Auteur de The counterfeit spy

13 oeuvres 82 utilisateurs 1 Critiques

A propos de l'auteur

Crédit image: Delmer Estate

Œuvres de Sefton Delmer

Étiqueté

Partage des connaissances

Nom canonique
Delmer, Sefton
Nom légal
Delmer, Denis Sefton
Date de naissance
1904-05-24
Date de décès
1979-09-04
Sexe
male
Nationalité
UK

Membres

Critiques

Sefton Delmer spent his early years in Berlin, where his Australian father was professor of English before World War I. He was educated in the UK and went into journalism, becoming one of the main foreign correspondents for Beaverbrook's (popular, right-wing) Daily Express. As Berlin correspondent of the Express in the 1930s, he got to know Hitler and the rest of the Nazi leadership personally.

This second volume of Delmer's autobiography opens with him leaving Bordeaux to return to the UK after the fall of France and describes his wartime work for "a department of the Foreign Office", running psychological warfare operations against Germany and German-occupied Europe. His speciality was "black" propaganda. In the jargon of the time, it seems that "white" propaganda is material which is open about where it comes from (e.g. BBC broadcasts and leaflets dropped by the RAF), whilst "black" propaganda is meant to deceive you into thinking it is something else. Delmer's main product was radio - first shortwave transmissions from a station calling itself Gustaf Siegfried Eins (GS1) that purported to be part of an underground resistance movement of army officers and broadcast a mixture of bogus coded signals and subversive gossip about people in authority, then, once they had access to more powerful transmitters, a fake naval entertainment station Deutscher Kurzwellensender Atlantik aimed at demoralising German submarine crews, and, most famously, the medium-wave station Soldatensender Calais which pretended to be a Wehrmacht station broadcasting to troops in France, but was also meant to be "overheard" by civilian listeners in Germany.

Delmer brought his popular press experience to bear: he insisted that his fake stations had to supply higher quality news and entertainment than the real thing. News stories had to be accurate, relevant and up-to-date, with the deliberately false or misleading items buried between genuine, verifiable ones. Listeners had to be allowed to feel that they were drawing their own conclusions, not being told what to think - he specialised in techniques like "accidentally" juxtaposing an official statement with a news item that undermined or contradicted it, or burying a negative message in an ostensibly positive item. Where necessary, a short piece of music could be brought in to give listeners time to work out what it was that was wrong with what they'd just heard. Presenters had to use informal, direct language (a lesson that many German radio stations still haven't learnt...) - he favoured NCOs with reassuring regional accents and a good command of current military slang. And the music had to be top-notch - MI6 had a team buying up the latest German hit records in neutral Stockholm, and Delmer also had access to specially commissioned recordings from exiled and PoW German musicians. Even Marlene Dietrich recorded some German songs for him, although she wasn't told what they were to be used for.

Like everything else you read about World War II, the scale of all this is astonishing. Just to create believable false news broadcasts required a team of hundreds of people analysing intelligence reports, monitoring German press and radio, interrogating prisoners of war (and bugging their conversations), liaising with allied forces, and collating it all with information from a huge library of German street-plans, directories, old newspapers and all the rest. And towards the end of the war they were doing it in German, Italian, Romanian, Hungarian and Bulgarian (the Bulgarian station was particularly subtle - they found presenters who could speak Bulgarian with a strong German accent and used the station to transmit the crudest and clumsiest Nazi propaganda they could come up with...). And printing a German-language newspaper (in an edition of up to 2 million copies a day) for the RAF to drop to frontline troops.

The objective of it all was to demoralise and confuse German troops and civilians, convincing them that the war was lost and that the suffering they were enduring was the fault of those in authority over them, and thus - it was hoped - making them more likely to perform acts of subversion and sabotage or to desert or surrender when the opportunity arose. One particular strand of this was to implant the idea that there was a significant anti-Nazi movement in the military - Delmer claims that this propaganda encouraged the participants in the 20th of July assassination plot, although to him the success or failure of the plot wasn't the point: what mattered was that resources were dissipated due to distrust between the political leadership and experienced military commanders.

In the last third of the book, Delmer discusses one of the big problems with any kind of propaganda: that false stories can take on a life of their own, outside the control of those who initially release them, the boomerang of his title. Germans (as he sees it) have retrospectively fixed on this quite false notion that there was a credible opposition to the Nazis, and that they themselves were (passive) supporters of this opposition and are therefore exonerated from the nasty stuff that happened between 1933 and 1945 and can carry on as though nothing had happened, with ex-Nazis in positions of authority again and a legal code that has barely changed since the Third Reich. This leads him into hitting Adenauer with a J'accuse about the Otto John case, which will interest few present-day readers, but was important to Delmer because John was a personal friend who had worked with him after escaping from Germany in the aftermath of the 20th of July plot.

Modern British representatives of the popular press might be a little startled at the key things Delmer believes necessary for a well-functioning free press: firstly, an English-style libel law that means that newspapers have to be prepared to take responsibility for the accuracy of what they print; and secondly, proper respect for the presumption of innocence, so that people accused of crimes get their fair trial in court, not on the front page.

An interesting historical document, but also a rather disturbing and fascinating primer on how to do "fake news" that has sadly not gone altogether out of date yet.
… (plus d'informations)
 
Signalé
thorold | Mar 4, 2019 |

Statistiques

Œuvres
13
Membres
82
Popularité
#220,761
Évaluation
2.9
Critiques
1
ISBN
10
Langues
1

Tableaux et graphiques