Britain’s answer to Lord Haw-Haw: how ‘der Chef’ fooled the Nazis

britain’s answer to lord haw-haw: how ‘der chef’ fooled the nazis

‘Der Chef’: Sefton Delmer making a propaganda broadcast to Germany in November 1941 – Getty Images

In the summer of 1941, Germans twiddling the dial of their state-issued Volksempfänger radio sets seeking respite from endless propaganda heard a subversive but intriguing voice pulsing over the airwaves.

Known only as “der Chef”, he was the star of a mysterious new station called GS-1. He spoke with a Prussian accent and was as chauvinistic as they they came. An ardent supporter of the war, he was furious at the way it was being waged. The regular armed forces were heroes. But they – and the German people – were being betrayed by the SS and Nazi apparatchiks. In salty barrack-room language he denounced them as low-life sybarites and perverts, larding his denunciations with titillating descriptions of orgies and feasts.

Speculation raged about der Chef’s identity and the location of the GS-1 transmitter. To his many listeners in the Reich he sounded like an old-school military man, broadcasting perhaps from occupied France. In fact the outraged patriot was a dissident Berliner called Peter Seckelmann and the GS-1 studios were to be found on the Woburn Abbey estate in Bedfordshire.

In total war, the radio waves were just another front in the struggle. The advent of mass communication encouraged all sides to believe they could get into the heads of the enemy population and seed them with morale-sapping misinformation. The hope was that in time this might induce at least apathy and cynicism and perhaps outright opposition to the war effort. The British had noted the Germans’ susceptibity to Hitlerian hypnotism. One man believed he was uniquely placed to break the spell.

Denis (better known as “Tom”) Sefton Delmer was a journalistic star of the era, a dynamic 17-stone bon viveur who when a row erupted over his expenses explained that he could “only think clearly in a five star hotel”.

He appears, thinly disguised, as “Alistair Tudsbury” in Herman Wouk’s Second World War saga The Winds of War, a tweed-enveloped quintessentially English correspondent who knows everyone and pops up everywhere. But Delmer was of Australian parentage, raised in Berlin, and only came to England when his academic father was kicked out during the First World War. As a boy he witnessed the Berliners’ hysterical joy when war was declared. Although now classed as one of the enemy by his schoolmates, he tingled to the electricity of the crowds and briefly identified with their joy, wishing to be one of them.

Later he gained an unusual understanding of the Nazi psyche. Though an ardent anti-fascist, as Berlin corrspondent of Lord Beaverbrook’s Daily Express he had charmed his way into the party hierarchy, befriending the Storm Trooper chief Ernst Röhm and travelling on Hitler’s aeroplane during the 1932 presidential election campaign. Delmer would draw on these ambiguities and insights to inspire his black propaganda strategy.

britain’s answer to lord haw-haw: how ‘der chef’ fooled the nazis

Daily Express journalist Sefton Delmer at his desk, August 1956 – Ronald Dumont

He began his wartime career with the BBC German Service and soon alarmed his bosses by issuing an unauthorised and highly insulting rejection of Hitler’s public peace offer to Britain on July 19 1940. His talents were clearly better used elsewhere and he was soon recruited by the Political Warfare Executive which was setting up multiple radio stations to subvert enemy listeners.

Their broadcasts often took the form of pious appeals by exiled German progressives, urging their countrymen to return to the straight and narrow of democratic liberalism. Delmer’s experiences taught him the approach was futile. Making his pitch for GS-1 he wrote: “We want to spread disturbing and disruptive news about the Germans which will induce them to distrust their government and disobey it, not from high-minded political motives [but] from ordinary human weakness… we are not catering for idealists.”

The mixture of righteous disgust and scandal, studded with enough verifiable fact to make it credible, certainly got listeners. Delmer’s relish in salacious detail was too much for the famously priggish socialist bigwig Stafford Cripps who denounced it as “the most foul and filthy pornography” and tried to get him sacked.

But dirty tricks were acceptable in a dirty war and Delmer went on to oversee several other stations which became ever more elaborate and complex in their psychological objectives. Soldatensender Calais did not pretend to be genuine. It aimed instead to seduce war-weary enemy soldiers with big band music introduced by the sultry “Vicki” – in fact the Berlin-born part-Jewish actress and singer Agnes Bernelle – interspersed with real news of sinkings, defeats and home-front privations.

Peter Pomerantsev is a journalist, academic and human rights activist with a particular interest in propaganda. He was born in Soviet-era Ukraine and his telling of Delmer’s story draws continuous parallels with the disinformation strategies currently pursued by Russia and China at home and abroad. How To Win An Information War also seeks to learn lessons from Delmer’s tricks on how the plague of lies might be countered.

Can an information war actually be won? Is it morally OK to stoop to the same base tactics as your opponents if the cause is just? Pomerantsev has more questions than answers, understandably so given the confusion of the picture. For all the energy, ingenuity and resources that went into British black propaganda, the measurable returns were meagre. Delmer’s efforts riled and sometimes alarmed his arch-rival Joseph Goebbels but there is no evidence that a single platoon downed rifles after hearing one of the shows. One case cited – of a U-boat captain surrendering when he heard Vicki reading out congratulations to the wife he had not seen for two years on giving birth to twins – sounds apocryphal, and Pomerantsev could find no corroboration for it.

Judged by the evidence of the present, der Chef’s mutinous rantings against party venality stood little chance of significantly subverting anyone. Delmer’s creation bears a striking resemblance to the real-life Wagner mercenary boss Yevgeny Prigozhin who in 2023 bombarded social media with foul-mouthed attacks on the ineptitude and corruption of the Russian Ministry of Defence. The posts were enjoyed by millions. But when he launched a mutiny last summer, his fan base just stood by and watched. The putsch collapsed almost instantly and not long afterwards Prigozhin was dead.

Patrick Bishop’s Paris ’44: The Shame and the Glory will be published in July. How To Win An Information War: The Propagandist Who Outwitted Hitler is published by Faber at £20. To order your copy for £16.99 call 0844 871 1514 or visit Telegraph Books

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