Graham2021 Book BritishSubversivePropagandaDur

BRITAIN AND THE WORLD
British Subversive Propaganda

during the Second World War
Germany, National Socialism and the
Political Warfare Executive
Kirk Robert Graham

Britain and the World
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Kirk Robert Graham
British Subversive
Propaganda
during the Second
World War
Germany, National Socialism and the Political
Warfare Executive
Kirk Robert Graham
School of Historical and Philosophical Inquiry
University of Queensland
St Lucia, QLD, Australia
Britain and the World

ISBN 978-3-030-71663-9 ISBN 978-3-030-71664-6 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-71664-6
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This one’s for you, Matilda.
Acknowledgements
This book would not have been possible without the patient and generous
support of Matilda, who is much smarter and prettier than me, and
Edith, whose imminent arrival hastened the completion of the manuscript.
Special thanks also to Andrew Bonnell, my Ph.D. supervisor and comrade,
whose invisible hand marks every page. On behalf of all the graduate
students at UQ’s School of Historical and Philosophical Inquiry, a big
thank you to Judy King for her tireless jousting with university bureau-
cracy on our behalf. I’m grateful to the junior researchers at the Institute
for Advanced Study in the Humanities, UQ, for being so welcoming and
generous during what proved to be quite a productive fellowship—special
thanks here to Lucia Pozzi, Elese Dowden, and Brendan Walsh. Thank
you also to Richard Scully, whose feedback and support breathed new life
into this project when it could easily have languished in a dusty thesis
library. Thank you to David Welch and Daniel Siemens who recognized
the potential for this book when I sketched out a proposal, offered some
pertinent suggestions for my work, and then had some very kind words
to say about the finished product. At various times over the course of this
project, parts of this book were subject to blind peer review: I am enor-
mously grateful to the editors and anonymous reviewers at the Journal
of Contemporary History and the Journal of the History of Sexuality
for their excellent and thoughtful feedback—apologies again to Annette
Timm for having to withdraw the article over a copyright conflict (I’m
vii
viii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
still kicking myself about this). I’m sure I haven’t mentioned everyone
who helped bring this book into the world. It takes a village…
There are also quite a few people out there doing their utmost to
vandalize higher education and kill off humanities and social science
research. I reserve particular loathing for the recent run of federal educa-
tion ministers in Australia—there’s nothing special about them other than
their visibility atop a towering dung-heap of neoliberal mediocrity that
includes politicians, publishers, media personalities and overpaid university
bosses. To them I say: rot and be forgotten.
Praise for British Subversive
Propaganda during the Second
World War
“Kirk Graham’s book is a valuable contribution to the origins and

the understanding of British subversive propaganda in Nazi Germany
during the Second World War. Focusing on the activities of the Polit-
ical Warfare Executive, it demonstrates to what extent these efforts
were shaped by the British elite’s deep-rooted prejudices about an
authoritarian German national character and how these views even
informed the first years of British occupation policy in Germany after
1945.”
—Daniel Siemens, FRHistS, Professor and Chair of European History,
Newcastle University, UK
“This impressive and innovative study explores the activities of the Polit-
ical Warfare Executive in their attempts to destabilise Nazi Germany
during the Second World War. Taking a thematic approach, Graham sheds
much light on British subversive propaganda, its functions and form, and
the assumptions that underpinned its use. From an overall institutional
analysis, Graham moves through the various biographical and cultural
contexts of the propagandists, via several revealing case-studies; culmi-
nating in the intellectual context and ‘logic’ of propaganda. British Subver-
sive Propaganda during the Second World War is a book in which readers
ix
x PRAISE FOR BRITISH SUBVERSIVE PROPAGANDA DURING THE …
will not only find much new analysis, but an authoritative and up-to-
date engagement with the scholarly literature. It is a valuable addition
to the ‘Britain and the World’ series, as well as the broader scholarship on
propaganda.”
—Richard Scully, Associate Dean and Associate Professor in Modern
History, University of New England, Australia
Contents
1 Introduction: British Propagandists and the German

Problem 1
2 The View from Woburn Abbey: The Political Culture
of PWE 29
3 The Brazen Horde: British Propagandists
and the Course of German History 67
4 Germany on the Couch: The Role of Psychology
and the Social Sciences in the Development
of Subversive Propaganda 105
5 No Man so Lecherous as the German: Nazi Perversion
and German Masculinity in British Subversive
Propaganda 145
6 A Rebellion Against the Divinely Appointed Order:
Totalitarian Theory, Secular Religions, and Religious
Anti-Fascism in British Subversive Propaganda 183
7 The Logic of Subversive Propaganda 227
8 Epilogue: Breaking Hearts and Minds 277
Bibliography 285
Index 303
xi
CHAPTER 1
Introduction: British Propagandists

and the German Problem
200 sharks have been sent from Australia to Britain and released in the
Channel.
—British subversive rumour directed at Germany, January 19411
This is a study of Britain’s intelligentsia and political elite, working

together in the service of the state, responding to a period of crisis.
During the Second World War, British organizations such as the Political
Warfare Executive (PWE) waged a covert propaganda offensive against
Nazi Germany. Their great hope was to undermine German morale and
hasten the end of the war. Their efforts were largely in vain. Rather than
a Technicolor revival of the Kiel Mutiny, German soldiers and civilians
fought on to the rubble-strewn corridors of the Reichstag. Something
of a consensus among historians long maintained that Allied propagan-
dists were inhibited in their task by the Allied demand for Germany’s
unconditional surrender, which seemingly rendered the war a fight for
survival. This narrative is complicated, however, by a closer examination
of the character of Britain’s propaganda organizations and the manner in
which they developed an understanding of the supposed German national
character.
1 The National Archives of the United Kingdom (TNA) FO 898/70, “A Note for the
Consideration of the Committee” (c. April 1941).
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1

Switzerland AG 2021
K. R. Graham, British Subversive Propaganda during the Second
World War, Britain and the World,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-71664-6_1
2 K. R. GRAHAM
This book was conceived as a kind of double helix—two thematic

threads dancing around a single question. The first thread is an archival
study of British propaganda departments during the Second World War.
The second thread is an exploration of the ideas that underpinned
these propagandists’ efforts, a theoretically informed exegesis that draws
on histories of anti-fascism, gender, religion, sexuality, psychology, and
sociology, and even the history of history itself. The core question is
deceptively simple: what did British propagandists think of Germany and
National Socialism?
With particular attention to PWE and its associated organizations
(including Department EH, the BBC, and the Special Operations Exec-
utive), this book tells the story of British subversive propaganda during
the Second World War. British propagandists used diverse and often pecu-
liar means to promote resistance against Nazi hegemony in Europe and
undermine the morale of German servicemen and civilians. Their task
was complicated by a surfeit of responses to Nazism circulating in Britain
during the 1930s. Rather than analysing military strategy or tactics, or
producing a narrative history of major campaigns, this book focuses on
the genesis of PWE’s ideas about Germany and National Socialism, and
the social and political context in which these ideas were developed and
deployed.
Partly an outgrowth of the British Foreign Office’s intelligence and
publicity divisions, PWE was primarily a civilian propaganda and intel-
ligence department working within the ambit of wartime military and
military intelligence organizations. While mathematicians and cryptog-
raphers gathered at Bletchley Park, linguists, historians, civil servants,
journalists, and anti-Nazi European exiles came together at neighbouring
Woburn Abbey. Together they conceived of an enemy audience suscep-
tible to morale subversion. Their project produced some intriguing results
and reveals as much about the intellectual currents of late-imperial Britain
as it does Nazi Germany.
PWE was a large and diffuse organization, a product of its func-
tion and its historical moment; compartmentalized to a degree, it kept
offices not just in Bedfordshire and London but also in Stockholm and
Cairo. This book will not try to draw a detailed institutional picture
of the organization but instead focus on the intellectual tendencies in
and around the department’s German section. Formally established in
September 1941, PWE was the last in a brief succession of shadowy
foreign propaganda departments which had purview over all propaganda
1 INTRODUCTION: BRITISH PROPAGANDISTS … 3
from Britain to enemy and occupied Europe. This included open, or

“white,” propaganda, including the BBC European Service, and clan-
destine, or “black” propaganda, which concealed its British origins and
was disavowed by the government. In the realm of black propaganda,
PWE launched more than forty unique clandestine radio stations and they
maintained a prolific outpouring of leaflets and other printed propaganda.
Throughout the war, PWE’s experts also trained secret agents in psycho-
logical warfare. Later, the department’s political warfare school trained
more than four hundred Allied personnel in practices such as propaganda
and re-education ahead of D-Day. From 1943, PWE was enmeshed in
joint Anglo-American activities, contributing personnel, intelligence, and
material to the Psychological Warfare Division of the Supreme Head-
quarters, Allied Expeditionary Force (PWD/SHAEF). Meanwhile, the
department published soldier’s guides on the politics, culture, and history
of Germany and Europe—known colloquially as “bibles”—which were
issued to British officers and servicemen bound for the continent.2 And
later British policy during the occupation stemmed in part from the
wartime research and experiences of these propagandists. While there is
reason to doubt whether British propagandists helped to shorten the war
by any significant measure, PWE was nevertheless a powerful medium
of cultural influence in both Germany and Britain. Indeed, as Richard
Dove argues, the PWE-controlled BBC German Service “[constituted]
a virtual paradigm of British cultural and political attitudes towards the
German-speaking world.”3 PWE’s historically contingent and dynamic
understanding of Germany pays further scrutiny.
PWE did not exist in isolation. In the British context, it stood as a
nexus between government ministries and war departments including the
Foreign Office, the Ministry of Information, the Ministry of Economic
Warfare, the BBC, the Special Operations Executive, the Secret Intelli-
gence Service, Naval Intelligence, and Bomber Command. Significantly,
the chapters that follow also explore the international collaborations and
transnational cultural and intellectual tendencies that constituted British
2 Pauline Elkes, “The Political Warfare Executive: A Re-evaluation Based Upon the
Intelligence Work of the German Section”, PhD Thesis, University of Sheffield (1996),
91–92.
3 Richard Dove, “Introduction”, “Stimme der Wahrheit”: German-Language Broad-
casting by the BBC, ed. Charmian Brinson and Richard Dove (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2003),
ix.
4 K. R. GRAHAM
subversive propaganda’s broader context. Professional exchanges such as

that between PWE and the American Office of Strategic Services (OSS),
for example, demonstrate outside influences on departmental thinking
while also illuminating the idiosyncrasies in the British perspective.
Writing shortly after the war, senior propagandist Richard Crossman
argued that “[p]ropaganda, to be effective, must be not only factually
true, but credible…This demanded a tremendous effort of empathy, not
merely feeling with the listener, but feeling into his emotions, so as to
avoid statements and forms of presentations which would create hostility
and suspicion.”4 For British propagandists, the spur to empathy meant
that they had to develop not just an intellectual but also an emotional
understanding of Nazism’s appeal. Of course, Germany was a distant
object of study, further isolated by the war, which lent itself to a degree
of reductionism. Underpinning PWE’s varied operations was a tangle of
axioms about the German national character. While by no means the
reflection of a party programme, even the most pragmatic moments in
the propaganda war speak to the cultural and social prejudices of mid-
century Britain, which were only heightened by the turbulent atmosphere
of political and ideological emergency.
Modern propaganda organizations generally, and PWE in particular,
are fascinating because they operate in a space where an intellectual and
political elite can proselytize and respond to the public sphere. In the
liberal-democratic Britain of the interwar period, propaganda was gener-
ally regarded with suspicion; the patriotic propaganda of the First World
War, replete with stories of enemy brutality and obscene stereotypes,
disturbed many who came to realize that the government had lied to
them about the nature of the war. Indeed, as David Welch demonstrates,
many British citizens were so wary of government communiques by the
time Britain was once again at war, that when they were informed of the
mass murder of Jews in Nazi camps the reports were initially dismissed
as yet more “atrocity” propaganda disseminated to galvanize a war-weary
populace.5 Inherited from British experiences in the First World War and
fostered by a cadre of like-minded foreign service personnel, the strength
4 Richard Crossman, “Supplementary Essay”, Sykewar, ed. Daniel Lerner (New York:
George W. Stewart, 1949), 336.
5 David Welch, “‘Opening Pandora’s Box’: Propaganda, Power and Persuasion,” Propa-
ganda, Power and Persuasion: From World War I to Wikileaks, ed. David Welch (London,
I.B. Tauris, 2014), 6.
of their belief in the power of propaganda was variable and often qualified
by the idea that morale subversion was a particularly effective weapon only
so long as the enemy was on the back foot. At the same time, discourses
throughout the interwar period pointed to the seemingly magical power
of propaganda and its absolute necessity during times of conflict. As Mark
Connelly et al. observe, “‘Propaganda’ was a word to conjure with in the
aftermath of the Great War.”6 The tremendous potential of propaganda
took on sharper connotations in the over-heated political climate of 1930s
Europe.
In one sense, this is a history of the birth of the technocracy that
came to define post-war Europe. Propaganda was a necessary evil: an
anti-democratic bludgeon in the hands of Europe’s dictators, it could
in fact act as a shield to preserve democracy so long as it was wielded
by an appropriate “managerial aristocracy.”7 Figures such as Stephen
Tallents, who worked for the Empire Marketing Board before becoming
Controller of Public Relations for the BBC, were convinced that this
“technocratic elite” was needed “to guide and manage the ill-informed
masses… deluged by the flow of information caused by advances in
modern communications.”8 For such mid-century planners, then, propa-
ganda was an expression of a new elitist hierarchical model of democracy
envisaged to protect democracy from itself. When war finally came,
propaganda became an important weapon in Britain’s arsenal.
The 1980s witnessed a debate regarding the complicated pre-war plan-
ning history of Britain’s propaganda departments.9 At stake was the
ideological riddle of how an ostensibly open and democratic state came
to embrace a centralized and often secretive approach to propaganda.
Philip M. Taylor argued that the new Ministry of Information had been
modelled on British experiences during the First World War while Ian
6 Mark Connelly, Jo Fox, Stefan Goebel and Ulf Schmidt, “‘Power and Persuasion’:
Propaganda into the Twenty-First Century” Propaganda and Conflict: War, Media and
Shaping the Twentieth Century (London: Bloomsbury, 2019), 4.
7 Connelly et al., “‘Power and Persuasion’: Propaganda into the Twenty-First Century”,
2.
8 Connelly et al., “‘Power and Persuasion’: Propaganda into the Twenty-First Century”,
2.
9 A brief summary of this debate appears in: Kirk Robert Graham, “Germany on
the Couch: Psychology and the Development of British Subversive Propaganda to Nazi
Germany” Journal of Contemporary History 54.3 (2019): 492.
6 K. R. GRAHAM
McLaine suggested that inspiration came instead from Joseph Goebbels’s

more recent innovations. Weighing into the debate, Temple Wilcox cast
doubt on both positions.10 He argued that Tallents, the civil servant
who directed the development of MoI plans during the late 1930s,
could not hope to replicate the Nazi apparatus, but, at the same time,
Tallents “positively avoided all consultations with Great War veterans,
since recent technological changes meant that the methods developed
during 1914–18 now required considerable modification.”11 Wilcox’s
argument is certainly compelling, but evidence suggests that Tallents
did in fact consult with First World War propaganda veterans including
Campbell Stuart, who was later nominated as the first foreign propa-
ganda chief—after Tallents was himself ousted—specifically because of
his previous wartime propaganda experience.12 Responsibility for foreign
propaganda changed hands frequently, but evidence supports a quali-
fied nod to Taylor’s argument. Of course, drawing on First World War
experiences was problematic, as Taylor argues, because such a perspective
“tended to exaggerate the role which British propaganda was believed to
have played either in bringing the United States into the war on the Allied
side in 1917 or in bringing Germany to her knees the following year.”13
Little wonder that the power of propaganda took on mythical propor-
tions. As the chapters that follow will demonstrate, this debate over the
source of inspiration during the planning stages is rather academic. Intel-
lectual engagements with the problems set by the mid-century ideological
crisis and the war meant that British propagandists were inexorably drawn
to long-running discourses on Germany and Europe, on mass politics
and democracy, on gender, sexuality, and class. Even if Britain’s wartime
foreign propaganda departments emerged sui generis, their worldview did
not.
10 Philip M. Taylor, “‘If War Should Come’: Preparing the Fifth Arm for Total War
1935–1939”, Journal of Contemporary History 16.1 (1981): 34; Ian McLaine, Ministry of
Morale: Home Front Morale and the Ministry of Information in World War II (London:
George Allen & Unwin, 1979), 12–13.
11 Temple Wilcox, “Projection or Publicity? Rival Concepts in the Pre-War Planning of
the British Ministry of Information”, Journal of Contemporary History 18.1 (1983): 103.
12 TNA FO 898/1, “Extract from the minutes of the fifth meeting of the Ministry
of Information Sub-Committee, held on 14th December, 1938”; Andrew Roberts briefly
discusses Stuart’s role in his introduction to David Garnett’s official history: A. Roberts,
“Introduction”, The Secret History of PWE (London: St Ermin’s Press, 2002), ix.
13 Taylor, “‘If War Should Come’”, 35.
Propaganda is, in essence, ethically neutral, a method of persuasive

communication that may well relay distasteful content through dubious
form.14 That form depends to large degree on the historical context.
During the Second World War, PWE focused its efforts across radio
broadcasts, leaflet propaganda, and subversive rumours. The line between
these mediums is inevitably blurred, however, as subversive campaigns
often demanded a multi-media attack. Rumours, for example, might be
disseminated by agents in Europe but they were also a core element
of subversive broadcasting and air-dropped leaflets. All three media are
discussed throughout this book, but radio does have a special place in
this account, as the Second World War was certainly the first war of the
airwaves.
In a very real sense, radio was a democratizing medium, narrowing
the distance between subject and ruler by “bringing the voices of leading
statesmen… directly to the homes of citizens.”15 Of course, this democra-
tizing medium was very quickly put to anti-democratic ends. In Germany,
radio was a key element in Nazi efforts to create a Volksgemeinschaft,
or people’s community. Within months of coming to power, the Nazis
began mass-producing an affordable medium-wave radio set—the Volk-
sempfänger, or people’s receiver—to aid in their efforts to Nazify German
society. The Volksempfänger was hugely popular, not necessarily because
of its affiliation with the Nazis but because it brought music, drama,
and light entertainment directly into people’s homes. Cheaper than
commercially manufactured receivers, Nazi Propaganda Minister Joseph
Goebbels ensured that it was available to Germans of even modest
means. “By 1935,” writes Welch, Nazi control of the airwaves means
that “Hitler’s speeches reached an audience of over 56,000,000.”16 “By
1941,” writes Eric Rentschler, “65% of German households owned a
14 Welch, “‘Opening Pandora’s Box’”, 11.

15 Ulrike Jordan, “‘A Mixture of Stubborn Resistance and Sudden Surrender’: The
British Media Report on the End of the War in Europe,” Conditions of Surrender: Britons
and Germans Witness the End of the War, ed. Ulrike Jordan (I.B. Tauris, London: 1997),
41.
16 Welch, “Restructuring the Means of Communication in Nazi Germany”, Readings
in Propaganda and Persuasion: New and Classic Essays, ed. Garth S. Jowett and Victoria
O’Donnell (London: Sage, 2006), 132.
8 K. R. GRAHAM
‘people’s receiver’.”17 The Volksempfänger was designed to be too weak

to receive foreign broadcasts, but Germans soon discovered that on
clear evenings they might pick up transmissions from further afield—and
when British propagandists learned of this, they quickly invested in more
powerful transmitters.
Of course, Nazi broadcasting was also an immediate concern for British
authorities. In a fascinating study of rumour-mongering in Britain precip-
itated by the Lord Haw-Haw broadcasts, Jo Fox argues that “[p]ersistent
rumormongering in wartime Britain was, in part, generated by popular
suspicions that the authorities were withholding certain details about the
course of the war [sic].”18 Where Whitehall was seemingly tight-lipped,
snippets of information woven into subversive Nazi broadcasts offered
anxious Britons enough to piece together the “truth” about what was
going on. It is remarkable that Nazi efforts so clearly pre-empted PWE’s
later rumour-mongering strategy. As Will Studdert demonstrates through
his research into the role of jazz in the propaganda war, English and
German “propaganda strategies did not emerge in a vacuum but directly
influenced and affected one another.”19 The subversive dangers of the
Lord Haw-Haw broadcasts were later dismissed as incompatible with the
nostalgic remembrance of the “people’s war.” At the time, however, they
were a cause for alarm among British authorities.
British propagandists began the war with tremendous optimism about
the potential for their own propaganda. And in fact, British propaganda
was popular in Germany, despite the strict prohibitions placed on it by
the Nazi government. The Gestapo’s own figures for BBC listeners in
Germany suggest an audience of fifteen million in 1944, up from one
million in 1940.20 Interviews with German prisoners of war supported
these figures, pointing to a large and engaged audience for both open and
clandestine broadcasting.21 As the war turned against the Germans, Marlis
17 Eric Rentschler, “The Fascination of a Fake: The Hitler Diaries,” New German
Critique 90 (2003): 186.
18 Jo Fox, “Confronting Lord Haw-Haw: Rumour and Britain’s Wartime Anti-Lies
Bureau”, Journal of Modern History 91 (2019): 79.
19 Will Studdert, The Jazz War: Radio, Nazism and the Struggle for the Airwaves in
World War II (London: I.B. Tauris, 2019), 2.
20 Michael Balfour, Propaganda in War, 1939–1945: Organisations, Policies, and Publics,
in Britain and Germany (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1979), 96.
21 TNA FO 898/65, CSDIC, “German Morale” (21 July 1943).
Steinert writes, “[m]ore and more Germans began listening to foreign

radio; no one admitted listening, but there were animated discussions
about how Englishmen were allowed to tune into German stations.”22
Despite this hard-won audience, British efforts did not seem to produce
desiderata. Several years of middling results tempered their enthusiasm,
but subversive operations continued to expand even in the final months
of the war. This book suggests that the ongoing commitment to subver-
sive propaganda was bound to ideas about German national character and
the advent of fascism that had developed during the interwar period and
were later conditioned by the social milieu of PWE itself. The epigraph to
this introduction—an almost whimsical British-authored rumour meant
to undermine the morale of Luftwaffe crews—hints at the occasional
divorce between the British understanding of their German audience
and any external reality. But, as studies of the Ministry of Informa-
tion have shown, even propagandists addressing their own countrymen
at times “framed [propaganda] as if for an alien people.”23 The propa-
gandists’ perspective on Germany was more than merely a reflection of
wartime chauvinism. As James Chapman observes, “like other aspects of
government, the direction of propaganda policy has often exposed ideo-
logical tensions, institutional differences and personal rivalries.”24 This is
certainly true of PWE. While PWE was relatively politically heterogeneous
for a war department (it even weathered criticism for being uncommonly
left-wing), it was still an outgrowth of British officialdom, bearing all the
hallmarks of elite mores and institutional prejudices.
Mid-century stereotypes were not limited to Germany, of course.
According to an instructor at PWE’s political warfare school, the Dutch
were humourless, the Belgians had pluck, and “Norway [was] a country
of middle classes,” but a Norwegian who drank was “a labouring type
of man.”25 The coded prefix for PWE’s clandestine Italian language
22 Marlis G. Steinert, Hitler’s War and the Germans: Public Mood and Attitude During
the Second World War, ed. and trans. Thomas E.J. de Witt (Athens, OH: Ohio UP, 1977),
207.
23 McLaine, Ministry of Morale, 21–22.
24 James Chapman, “‘War’ Versus ‘Cultural’ Propaganda: Institutional and Ideological
Tensions Over the Projection of Britain During the Second World War”, Propaganda,
Power and Persuasion: From World War I to Wikileaks, ed. David Welch (London, I.B.
Tauris, 2014), 80.
25 TNA FO 898/99, Lecture Notes, “The Norwegian Way of Life” (c. 1944).
10 K. R. GRAHAM
stations, meanwhile, adopted the letter W denoting “Wop.”26 However,

the manner in which ideas about Germany were constructed is significant
as Germany received more attention from Britain’s foreign propagan-
dists than any other nation, and with possibly the least to show for it.
The mutable relationship between Britain and Germany, going back at
least into the late nineteenth century and anxieties around the ambitions
of the Kaiserreich, was brought to bear on PWE’s subversive war. At
the centre of this relationship rests the spectre of the supposed German
national character. “The whole concept of ‘national character’ is, of
course, highly problematic,” writes Anthony J. Nicholls in a discussion
of Allied denazification policy,
and I sympathize with those who would reject it altogether. However, the
fact that notions about national character were widely disseminated in the
first half of this century, and even seem to have affected political decision-
making, does make them an object of legitimate interest to historians.27
Richard Scully demonstrates the value in taking seriously this predilection

for national character, demonstrating over the course of the nineteenth
century “the growing sense of debate, and ambivalence, in British imag-
inings of Germany and the Germans, rather than any simple transition
from admiration to antagonism.”28 A comprehensive understanding of
the propaganda war must consider the British conception of German
national character because it was integral to the dominant tendency in
PWE thinking and preceded concerns about the nature of fascism.
John Dower contrasts the abiding racism of Anglo-American attitudes
regarding Japan with the contemporary view of Germany: the Allies
reserved their greatest hatred for the Japanese, he argues, because, while
the Germans were afforded a distinction between good and bad, Japanese
26 Communications chief Edward Halliday blamed this unfortunate choice on “technical

staff” while defensively reminding his reader that such designations were not supposed to
be known outside of the signals department: TNA FO 898/51, Halliday, Memorandum,
“Note on the Operation of PID Research Units” (4 October 1945).
27 Anthony J. Nicholls, “The German ‘National Character’ in British Perspective”,
Conditions of Surrender: Britons and Germans Witness the End of the War, ed. Ulrike
Jordan (I.B. Tauris, London: 1997), 26–27.
28 Richard Scully, British Images of Germany: Admiration, Antagonism & Ambivalence,
1860–1914 (Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 319.
behaviour was rooted in “history, culture, and collective psychology.”29

This book problematizes Dower’s distinction. While the concept of a
“good German” did a lot of heavy lifting, particularly during the early
phase of the war, British propagandists, planners, and analysts expended
tremendous energy trying to establish the roots of Nazism in German
culture and history.
This German national character received its fullest expression in reduc-
tionist Germanophobia, but this was not necessarily the propagandists’
default position. As Scully writes, in the years since the publication of Our
German Cousins, “[John] Mander’s concepts of ‘ambivalence’ and ‘ambi-
guity’ are now the key terms used to describe British attitudes towards
Germany and the Germans, and are emerging as more critical atten-
tion is devoted to the cultural history of Anglo-German relations.”30
Certainly, an air of ambivalence embodies even the most extreme ideas
about Germany and the rise of Nazism, particularly when it is remem-
bered that the process of describing a foreign “Other” often speaks to
more immediate or parochial concerns. Welch argues, for example, that
the peculiar tenor of Edwardian British Germanophobia “was a result of
the growing fear of losing imperial prestige and territories.”31 During the
Second World War, Germanophobia came in different hues. For many
British Conservatives, Nazism was merely Prussian militarism in a new
guise, another iteration of ahistorical German belligerency.32 Operating
during an important period in the history of Anglo-German relations,
PWE’s understanding of Germany is a pertinent reminder that dubious
ideas about this “Other” often do double duty, evoking a mythic Britain
while describing its antithesis.
29 John Dower, War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War (New York:
Pantheon, 1993), 34.
30 Scully, British Images of Germany, 4; John Mander, Our German Cousins: Anglo-
German Relations in the 19th and 20th Centuries (London: J. Murray, 1974).
31 David Welch, “Images of the Hun: The Portrayal of the German Enemy in British
Propaganda in World War I”, Propaganda, Power and Persuasion: From World War I to
Wikileaks, ed. David Welch (London, I.B. Tauris, 2014), 40.
32 In a 1943 debate in the House of Lords, one politician argued that “there would be
no negotiation with the present system, by which was meant not only Hitler but the whole
Prussian system”: Lord Simon, as paraphrased by Hedva Ben-Israel: “Cross Purposes:
British Reactions to the German Anti-Nazi Opposition” Journal of Contemporary History
20.3 (1985): 429.
12 K. R. GRAHAM
PWE’s image of Germany was by no means inevitable. The Third Reich

was a perennial subject of fascination for outsiders, generating substantial
contemporary literature in the genres of travel writing, memoir, and polit-
ical journalism. Since the 1990s, this literature has undergone a critical
reappraisal. Drawing on the example of an academic who “let herself be
infected by the mood of a complete break with the past so characteristic
of her National Socialist students,” Angela Schwarz suggests that “the
generally accepted image of British commentators in Hitlerite Germany as
matter-of-fact, disinterested observers may be in need of modification.”33
Likewise, in his analysis of 1930s Anglophone literature on Germany, Dan
Stone argues that “[t]he meaning of Nazism was hotly contested, and the
way it was discussed owed as much to essentially internal British debates
– about the empire, socialism, the constitution – as it did to a desire
to understand Germany.”34 For mid-century British observers, Hitler’s
Germany was a spectacle as fascinating as it was appalling.
One significant element in the conception of PWE’s Germany is
the tension between the pessimism of Germanophobia in extremis (i.e.
the Morgenthau Plan) and the more utopian goals of re-education.
Inter-generational continuities (and hostilities) were central to PWE’s
worldview. At the same time, however, new developments in the interwar
period were profoundly felt. In this, PWE’s relationship with other
propaganda and intelligence organizations, such as the American OSS, is
particularly important. Throughout the war, PWE maintained a distinct
worldview from that of its American counterparts for a number of reasons,
not least of which was fact that the New Deal had raised the profile of
the social sciences in the United States. Nevertheless, American perspec-
tives were brought to bear on PWE’s outlook over the course of the war.
The image of a militarist Prussian barbarian was subsequently inscribed,
for example, with psychological analyses that posited a national inferi-
ority complex necessitating a Shamanistic Führer. PWE’s Germany was a
palimpsest of old and new ideas, constantly under review, the conditions
of which were set by the intellectual inclinations of the British political
and intellectual elite. By the 1940s, answers to the old “German problem”
had certainly come a long way.
33 Angela Schwarz, “British Visitors to National Socialist Germany: In a Familiar or in

a Foreign Country?”, Journal of Contemporary History 28.3 (1993): 490.
34 Dan Stone, Responses to Nazism in Britain, 1933–1939 (Hampshire: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2003), 190.
While this book touches on a number of important themes, perhaps

the most pertinent is the wartime British understanding, or misunder-
standing, of fascism. Dan Stone points to philosopher and historian R.G.
Collingwood whose “intemperate outburst” against his fellow philoso-
phers in his 1938 autobiography stems from his dissatisfaction “with the
responses made to fascism in Britain” and particularly his realization that
fascism could not be fought with mere logic.35 Of course, a handful of
(typically younger) philosophers were engaged on this question; PWE’s
own Marxist Oxford don, Richard Crossman, for example, saw in Plato’s
utopian Republic the germ of a totalitarian philosophy that was sprouting
under Hitler and Stalin and so, in his 1937 book Plato Today, invited
this towering figure to defend himself against developments in modern
Europe.36 It took the war, however, to invest an appropriate energy in
the problem of fascism.
The history of British subversive propaganda is enmeshed with the
history of anti-fascism, but that is not to say that PWE and its asso-
ciated departments ought to be described as anti-fascist organizations.
In fact, the particular stripe of Germanophobia that came to define so
much thinking in the subversive war was, in many ways, at odds with
the contemporary intellectual advances of anti-fascism. London played
reluctant host to thousands of German anti-fascists who had, by 1939,
developed highly sophisticated analyses of Nazism.37 For British planners
and strategists, however, the propagandistic utility of these refugees lay
mostly in their linguistic skills. Initially, anti-fascist theory had no place
among a conservative elite for whom the enemy was so obviously the
Prussian spirit.38 Rather, the default status of British propaganda might
be described as “passive anti-fascist,” the term Philip Williamson adopts
for the British Conservative Party, whose efforts during the 1930s acted
35 Stone, Responses to Nazism in Britain, 20.

36 Richard Crossman, Plato Today (London: Allen and Unwin, 1937).
37 Stone, “Anti-Fascist Europe Comes to Britain: Theorising Fascism as a Contribution
to Defeating It,” Varieties of Anti-Fascism: Britain in the Inter-War Period, ed. Nigel
Copsey and Andrzej Olechnowicz (Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 184.
38 Lothar Kettenacker, “British Post-War Planning for Germany: Haunted by the Past”,
Jordan (I.B. Tauris, London: 1997), 16.
14 K. R. GRAHAM
as bulwark against the growth of British fascism thus entailing “anti-

fascist effects.”39 Instead of fascism, Conservative politicians attacked
“dictatorship,” a strategy that reduced the distance between fascism and
communism by asserting “that fascism and communism bred upon each
other, that more communist activity would provoke more fascist activity
and vice versa, degenerating into class war, civil breakdown and ending,
whichever prevailed, in the destruction of democracy and liberty.”40
Significantly, British propagandists and planners for the most part paid
little attention to anti-fascist theory and practice in their efforts to
undermine the Nazi regime. The lingering Germanophobia of an earlier
generation was actually reinforced by the more immediate cultural and
social prejudices of mid-century Britain. As a result, PWE emphasized
continuities in a supposed German character rather than recognizing
anything unique or radical in Nazism, ultimately downplaying the serious-
ness with which fascists took their own movement. Nevertheless, minority
tendencies within British propaganda departments, such as the Marxist-
inflected tendency expressed by key figures of German anti-Nazi exile
movements, were able to cut through and make important contributions
to the British propagandists’ understanding of Germany and of the wider
world. As Stone argues, these anti-fascist theorizations—a vital expression
of anti-fascist activity in exile—helped in “bringing about an urgent real-
isation of what fascism meant.”41 But the haphazard manner in which
British chauvinism engaged with anti-fascism at PWE only emphasized
the lack of seriousness with which too many British strategists regarded
Nazism.
Among post-war commentators, it was generally accepted that, what-
ever the merits of PWE’s work, the success of subversive propaganda
was hampered for one of the two reasons. The first reason was that
British propaganda was the victim of competing interests and a lack of
planning. British officialdom’s distaste for propaganda meant that propa-
ganda organizations could only be mobilized upon the declaration of war
and that planning for these organizations in peacetime was tentative and
poorly resourced. To make matters worse, territorial disputes between
39 Philip Williamson, “The Conservative Party, Fascism and Anti-Fascism, 1918–1939”,

Varieties of Anti-Fascism: Britain in the Inter-War Period, ed. Nigel Copsey and Andrzej
Olechnowicz (Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 73–74.
40 Williamson, “The Conservative Party, Fascism and Anti-Fascism, 1918–1939”, 89.
41 Stone, “Anti-Fascist Europe Comes to Britain”, 183.
different wartime ministries were a near constant feature of the propa-

ganda war. The second reason given was that PWE seemingly failed to
undermine German morale was that the Allied demand for Germany’s
unconditional surrender announced in 1943 reconfigured the relation-
ship between Germans and the Nazi State, functioning as a unifying force
and thus negating much of the propagandists’ good work. The critical
historical literature on British propaganda returns time and time again
to the problem of policy. As Philip M. Taylor writes, “the propagandists
needed more guidance on what the policy-makers planned to do with
Germany after the war if their propaganda was to be really effective.”42
This is what PWE’s Director-General Robert Bruce Lockhart referred to
as the question of a “hope clause”: without a promising future to present
to the Germans, British propagandists were fighting with one hand tied.
“Instead,” writes Taylor, “they had to resort to statements about the
inevitability of Germany’s defeat, the prolonging of German agony by
continued resistance, and the corruption of the Nazi regime by way of
contrast to the democratic and increasingly victorious Allies.”
The policy of unconditional surrender is a signal theme in Taylor’s later
critical analysis. Indeed, in a review that held much praise for Michael
Stenton’s Radio London, Taylor holds serious reservations about “the
absence of any substantial discussion of the policy of Unconditional
Surrender,” which “dealt the greatest blow to the PWE’s chances of
success, in that it denied the propagandists the opportunity of trying
to separate the German people from the Nazi leadership.”43 In his
introductory essay to the microfilmed PWE files, he is more assertive:
The main reason why PWE failed to emulate the experience of 1918
was the policy of Unconditional Surrender announced at the Casablanca
conference of January 1943… It placed all Germans in the Nazi boat, and
42 Philip M. Taylor, Munitions of the Mind: A History of Propaganda from the Ancient
World to the Present (Manchester: Manchester UP, 2003), 232.
43 Taylor, “Review: Michael Stenton. Radio London and Resistance in Occupied
Europe: British Political Warfare, 1939–1943”, The International History Review 24.1
(2002): 185–186.
16 K. R. GRAHAM
linked their destiny to that of the Nazi Party in a way that Goebbels –
who knew this – had never been able to achieve for all his own Ministry’s
propaganda since 1933.44
By this reasoning, the policy of unconditional surrender undermined any

chance of a popular rebellion against Nazism because defeat would come
in any case; the survival of Germany depended more than ever on the
people’s allegiance to the regime. This was indeed the interpretation of
the policy proffered by Nazi propagandists.
This stress on unconditional surrender minimizes the agency of the
German audience and their capacity for unexpected or ambivalent reac-
tions to propagandistic messages. Archival research suggests that while
British departments expended much energy anticipating German reac-
tions to British propaganda, reports pointing to evidence of reception
often simply assumed that audience reaction followed from propagandist
intention. And indeed, this assumption is repeated uncritically in much
historical research into British foreign propaganda. The lack of consider-
ation for German agency here is an extension of the way in which PWE
conceptualized the German mentality.
In recent years, historians have questioned the way that publics have
interpreted the output of propaganda organizations. Particularly inter-
esting is Jo Fox’s analyses of the Ministry of Information’s attempts to
adjust British public opinion over the course of the war.45 Fox develops
a productive methodology: by regarding MoI’s campaigns and the audi-
ence reaction to each holistically, she reveals that MoI’s many missteps
paradoxically fostered the development of a different but no less robust
kind of solidarity in the audience than that which the propagandists were
pursuing. Even if an audience seems to interpret propaganda in a manner
approximating authorial intention, the actual conditions of that interpre-
tation demand scrutiny. As a consequence of her findings, Fox charges
historians to “look for new, more complex ways of understanding the
dynamics of wartime propaganda that take account of the unforeseen
44 Taylor, “Introduction”, Allied Propaganda in World War II: The Complete Record of
the Political Warfare Executive (FO 898) (London and Woodbridge, CN: Primary Source
Microfilm/National Archives, 2005), 11.
45 Fox, “Confronting Lord Haw-Haw”, 74–108; Fox, “Careless Talk: Tensions Within
British Domestic Propaganda During the Second World War”, The Journal of British
Studies 51.4 (2012): 936–966.
outcomes of specific campaigns and place more emphasis on public agency

in constructing their own meanings from official communications.”46
Revisiting the surviving PWE documents today, it is essential to consider
British propaganda with an eye to German agency, however much that
agency was limited by the Nazi regime. In considering the place of foreign
propaganda in this environment, and particularly in speculating about its
influence, a greater appreciation is needed of the way in which British
propagandists came to know their German subject.
This book is built upon a study of the surviving archival docu-
ments pertaining to British foreign propaganda which are housed at the
British National Archives. The PWE files are notoriously problematic,
a significant volume having been deliberately destroyed after the war.
Propagandist-turned-historian Ellic Howe describes the researcher’s frus-
tration at the manner in which historical actors have considered posterity.
As PWE’s master printer and forger, Howe had a hand in manufacturing
the vast quantity of printed material distributed to Germany. Estimating
that about ninety per cent of the department’s “enormous amount of
paperasserie” was sent to the incinerator, Howe writes patronizingly of “a
lady archivist” employed to sort through the PWE files in April 1945;
according to Howe, her “knowledge of the Department cannot have
been very great,” and “[h]er instructions were to destroy rather than
preserve.”47 The surviving tens of thousands of pages of reports, corre-
spondence, and ephemera were preserved expressly to educate future
generations in the event of another war. While such anecdotes may
perhaps compromise the “truth-value” of the archive, the PWE files still
contain surprises. Stenton writes: “In these archives, rich in problems and
argument, is found London’s Europe: what was believed to be happening,
what was wanted, and what was not.”48
46 Fox, “Careless Talk”, 966.

47 Ellic Howe, The Black Game: British Subversive Operations Against the Germans
During the Second World War (London: Michael Joseph Ltd, 1982), 6–7. Many exam-
ples of British leaflets survive thanks to the efforts of dedicated collectors such as Klaus
Kirchner, who has published a multi-volume source guide to leaflet propaganda in twen-
tieth century, and Lee Richards, who has generously made his prodigious research into
the history of psychological warfare available to the public: Richards, “PsyWar.org”, www.
psywar.org; Kirchner, Flugblatt-Propaganda im 2. Weltkrieg (Erlangen: Verlag D + C,
1974–).
48 Michael Stenton, Radio London and Resistance in Occupied Europe: British Political
Warfare, 1939–1943 (New York: Oxford UP, 2000), ix.
18 K. R. GRAHAM
For this book, the PWE files have been supplemented with a study
of the personal papers of many of the figures involved in propaganda:
collections are held variously at the Imperial War Museums, the Well-
come Library, the National Library of Scotland, the Churchill Archive
Centre and the National Archives of the UK. German archives have also
been consulted, including the Bundesarchiv and the Politisches Archiv
des Auswärtigen Amts, with an eye to German responses to British
propaganda. Fortunately, many of PWE’s propagandists were enthusi-
astic memoirists, essayists, and journalists. The personal accounts of senior
propagandists such as Robert Bruce Lockhart and Sefton Delmer have
proved invaluable in gaining (highly subjective) insights into intellectual
developments in the propaganda war. Likewise, memoirs of other figures
such as German-language broadcaster Agnes Bernelle and duty-secretary
Muriel Spark have helped to illuminate the political culture and social
dynamics of wartime propaganda departments.
Of course, wartime memoirs are fraught with problems of authen-
ticity and accuracy, problems seemingly compounded when propaganda
is the subject under discussion. Elizabeth MacDonald’s Undercover Girl
is a case in point. Quick to capitalize on her wartime adventures (and
the fact that her British colleagues were still bound by the Official
Secrets Act), American OSS propagandist Macdonald published in 1947 a
memoir detailing a number of PWE’s activities. Writing about Bernelle’s
broadcasting persona “Vicki,” Macdonald reports that “[h]er greatest
single achievement was bringing about the surrender of a Nazi U-boat
captain who heard her programme when she accidentally announced
that the captain’s fiancée had married another man!”49 In the unsuc-
cessful attempt to verify this story, this author learned that another
historian, Lawrence Soley, had reproduced it as fact in Radio Warfare:
OSS and CIA Subversive Propaganda, effectively ratifying MacDonald’s
claim with academic authority.50 Several years later, the story was repeated
by Bernelle herself, who was surprised and amused to learn of this terrific
propaganda coup.51
49 It seems likely that Macdonald, listening to a recording of a subversive broadcast,

had taken seriously one of PWE’s rumours: Elizabeth P. Macdonald, Undercover Girl
(New York: Macmillan, 1947), 35.
50 Lawrence C. Soley, Radio Warfare: OSS and CIA Subversive Propaganda (New York:
Praeger, 1989), 150.
51 Agnes Bernelle, The Fun Palace: An Autobiography (Dublin: Lilliput, 1996), 96.
This book is certainly not the first history of British subversive

propaganda in the Second World War. As with many of Britain’s war
departments, PWE was the subject of a contemporary official history.52
David Garnett, wartime propagandist and novelist of the Bloomsbury set,
received the commission for this history in 1945. His text was subse-
quently classified for fear of embarrassing people and only published in
2002. Although highly critical of PWE’s many inefficiencies and petty
disagreements, Garnett’s work is largely descriptive, conceived (like the
preserved archive) as a lesson for future generations in the event of a war.
Aside from lacking critical distance, this instrumentalist logic is the mono-
graph’s main fault. Garnett does have the advantage over other historians
in that he had access to the full cache of PWE documents as well as
the fresh recollections of those involved. Assumptions about Germany
and about the nature of Nazism remain largely undisturbed. Functioning
as both a primary and secondary source, it has proved invaluable as a
comprehensive guide to PWE’s minor initiatives and false starts, which
other historians have, for various reasons, ignored. As a supplement to
Garnett’s work, William Mackenzie’s The Secret History of the SOE adds
further dimension to PWE’s narrative.53 This text offers an account of
the operational element to PWE’s work—namely, the dissemination of
rumours and leaflets in occupied Europe.
PWE’s files finally were released to the British public records office in
1975. Within a decade, several authoritative monographs and a number of
papers had been published offering for the first time a historical perspec-
tive on British wartime subversive propaganda. This early academic work
drew directly on the archival material and examined the formation of
PWE, as well as the broad strategy of political warfare, as characterized
by a handful of representative campaigns, and the techniques with which
this strategy was implemented. This early research privileged military-
historical concerns and was driven by questions about propaganda’s role
in the Allied victory. Perhaps as a consequence of earlier research interests,
British wartime ideas about the German mentality and its relationship to
the Nazi Weltanschauung have been somewhat neglected.
52 David Garnett, The Secret History of PWE (London: St Ermin’s Press, 2002).
53 William MacKenzie, The Secret History of the SOE: The Special Operations Executive
1940–1945 (London: St Ermin’s Press, 2000).
20 K. R. GRAHAM
Two monographs form the foundation of this PWE historiography.

Charles Cruickshank’s The Fourth Arm is the first published history of
British foreign propaganda derived from archival sources, a specialist study
of the executive and ministerial activity surrounding PWE.54 Essentially
a military history, Cruickshank relishes descriptions of bureaucratic inep-
titude and short-sightedness; in this sense, The Fourth Arm has much
in common with other British military histories of the 1970s that were
highly critical of British amateurism squaring off against a dangerous and
fanatical enemy. As a result, Cruickshank’s critiques are pugnacious: on
reviewing a recommendation for a new propaganda department ahead
of the war, the Foreign Office presented what he describes as a “pitiful
package of barrel-scrapings… a classic example of the defence of depart-
mental responsibilities at the expense of public policy.”55 Meanwhile,
impatient of 1960s historians who defended appeasement as a realistic
solution in keeping with the tradition of British foreign policy, Cruick-
shank condemns Neville Chamberlain as the “archdupe of the century.”56
An authoritative and entertaining narrative, Cruickshank’s arguments
are at times fashionable and unreflective. Significantly for this study,
Cruickshank also glosses over intellectual developments within PWE.
Michael Balfour’s Propaganda in War, 1939–1945, is, by contrast, a
relatively sober comparative study of British and German wartime propa-
ganda, admirable for its breadth rather than its depth, which skilfully
positions myriad propaganda campaigns in the context of military and
diplomatic developments.57 Balfour was a major figure in British and
German history writing: a fellow of Chatham House and an Oxford tutor
before the war, Balfour joined PWE as an intelligence officer in 1942.
Where the archive fails him, he calls on his own memory or the testi-
mony of his former colleagues to flesh out details. Propaganda in War
is a substantial study of wartime propaganda and a personal reflection
on the achievements of the secret work to which he contributed. Along-
side his enthusiasm for British institutions, Balfour, embraced the kind
54 Charles Cruickshank, The Fourth Arm (London: Davis-Poynter, 1977).

55 Cruickshank, The Fourth Arm, 14.
57 Michael Balfour, Propaganda in War 1939–1945: Organisations, Policies, and Publics,
in Britain and Germany (London: Kegan Paul, 1979).
of instrumentalist approach to the practice of history that characterized

many PWE thinkers. Richard J. Evans recounts, for example, Balfour’s
“dramatic confrontation” with David Welch in which the elder historian
took umbrage at Welch’s scepticism about the value of Allied re-education
policy.58 Balfour’s comparative approach is enlightening but, again, he
does not interrogate the undercurrents that informed morale subversion.
Subsequent research into propaganda has had to contend with the
legacy established by these two volumes. Like Balfour, Ellic Howe
includes many personal anecdotes from his time with PWE in The Black
Game, a romantic history that focuses on the “black art” of deception and
subversion.59 Conceived explicitly as a defence of PWE’s contributions
to the war, this is a descriptive rather than historically analytical work.
Howe’s interest lies more in the activities of rank-and-file propagandists
than with the executive and ministerial activities that concern Cruickshank
and Balfour, and for this, it is certainly absorbing. Howe conducted many
interviews with propaganda and intelligence veterans in the decades after
the war, recordings of which are housed at the Imperial War Museum.
He drew on this substantial body of oral history to expand on the more
academic work of his contemporaries.
More recent investigations into British foreign propaganda proceed
from different research interests and methodologies. Communications
historian Philip M. Taylor has written extensively on British propaganda
organizations. Like Cruickshank and Balfour, strategy and technique are
important to Taylor’s work; his general history of propaganda, written
some years after his more specialist work on Foreign Office organs such
as PWE and the British Council, is “concerned simply with means – with
persuasive methods – not with ends.”60 He is careful to contextualize
PWE through a broader foreign policy framework and is sympathetic
to the propagandist’s difficulty in responding to political expectations.
Rather than Cruickshank’s depiction of misappropriation of resources,
Taylor imagines instead PWE as the product of a rapidly changing
communications landscape, which accounts for many of the travails that
plagued the organization in its early years. His work greatly expands upon
earlier research but does not develop an analysis of PWE ideas about
58 Richard J. Evans, “Obituary: Michael Balfour”, German History 14.1 (1996), 63–64.
59 Howe, The Black Game.
60 Taylor, Munitions of the Mind, 8.
22 K. R. GRAHAM
Germany; he is, however, among the first historians to properly appre-

ciate that popular discourses such as Vansittartism need to be taken into
account when regarding British foreign propaganda. Interestingly, Taylor
suggests “one needs to redirect any moral judgement away from the
propaganda process itself and more to the intentions and goals of those
employing propaganda to secure those intentions and goals.”61 While this
methodology has proved highly productive, it does lend itself to an inten-
tionalist fallacy, which may account for an emphasis on the propagandists’
own claims to success and their justifications for failure.
Michael Stenton’s Radio London and Resistance in Occupied Europe
similarly recognizes the need to engage with broader contemporary
discourses in addressing its subject.62 Methodologically, Stenton’s work
represents a break with earlier research. Again drawing directly on
PWE archival material, Stenton focuses on the relationship between
British foreign propaganda and the development of resistance move-
ments in occupied Europe; his research suggests that European resistance
was a conceptual product of British propaganda that materialized as it
was articulated through mediums such as the BBC. Drawing on the
methodological traditions of intellectual and cultural history, Stenton’s
approach opens up possibilities in this book by demonstrating the mate-
rial significance of British propaganda to the contemporary European
understanding of the war; however, he does focus almost exclusively on
the relationship between British propaganda and resistance movements
outside of Germany.
In the field of Second World War history, recent decades have seen
scholarly interest move beyond military-historical matters. Through the
1990s and into the 2000s, studies in Anglo-German relations increasingly
took on the concerns of cultural history. Angela Schwarz, for example,
published a monograph and several essays on the British perception of
Germany as expressed in travel literature and political journalism.63 In

62 Stenton, Radio London.
63 Schwarz, “British Visitors to National Socialist Germany: In a Familiar or in a
Foreign Country?”, Journal of Contemporary History 28.3 (1993): 487–509; Schwarz,
Die Reise ins Dritte Reich: britische Augenzeugen in nationalsozialistischen Deutschland,
1933–39 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1993); Schwarz, “Image and Reality:
British Visitors to National Socialist Germany”, European History Quarterly 23 (1993):
381–405.
1997, Ulrike Jordan edited a slim volume of essays and primary source
documents about the final months of the war in which historians ask perti-
nent questions of the role that the supposed German national character
played in the formation of Allied post-war policy.64 Over the last fifteen
years, Stephanie Seul has published substantial and wide-ranging research
on British wartime broadcasting and propaganda, raising questions about
the extent of the BBC’s objectivity and, significantly, journalistic attitudes
to the Holocaust.65 Likewise in Germany, rigorous biographies of major
figures in the propaganda war have taken an express concern with the rela-
tionship between policy and prejudice.66 And on the subject of wartime
propaganda, Pauline Elkes’s efforts to integrate the history of PWE into
the field of intelligence studies have demonstrated significant shortcom-
ings in earlier work. After a detailed examination of PWE’s weekly social
and political intelligence reports on Germany from 1943 to the occupa-
tion, she argues that “PWE became more and not less important after
the announcement of Unconditional Surrender at Casablanca, as a result
of the expansion of intelligence services at that time which facilitated a
diversification of the activities in which it was involved after 1943.”67
Demonstrating the value of these reports to the social historian, Elkes
writes of “the accuracy of their detail and their confirmation of the exis-
tence of a non-fascist tradition in the shape of the ‘other Germany’” which
was “‘against the grain’ of existing policy.”68
64 Ulrike Jordan (ed.), Conditions of Surrender: Britons and Germans Witness the End
of the War (London: Tauris, 1997).
65 Stephanie Seul, “Appeasement und Propaganda 1938–1940. Chamberlains Außen-
politik zwischen NS-Regierung und deutschem Volk”, PhD Thesis, European University
Institute Florence (2005); Seul, “The Representation of the Holocaust in the British
Propaganda Campaign directed at the German Public, 1938–1945”, Leo Baeck Year Book
52 (2007): 267–306; Seul, “‘Plain, Unvarnished News’? The BBC German Service and
Chamberlain’s Propaganda Campaign Directed at Nazi Germany, 1938–1940”, Media
History 21.4 (2015): 378–396.
66 Important to this study are Karen Bayer’s “How dead is Hitler?” der britische Star-
reporter Sefton Delmer und die Deutschen (Mainz: Zabern, 2008) and Jörg Später’s
Vansittart: Britische Debatten über Deutsche und Nazis, 1902–1945 (Göttingen: Wallstein
Verlag, 2003).
67 Pauline Elkes, “The Political Warfare Executive: A Re-evaluation Based Upon the
21.
68 Elkes, “Assessing the ‘Other Germany’: The Political Warfare Executive on Public
Opinion and Resistance in Germany, 1943–1945”, Working Towards the Führer: Essays
24 K. R. GRAHAM
British Subversive Propaganda during the Second World War builds

on this historiographical tradition, situating British propagandists within
the turbulent, transnational history of ideas. It offers a critical genealogy
of British propagandists’ perception of Germany via a thematic chapter
structure. The intention here is to explore different but interrelated
areas of knowledge that informed the British perspective, a composite
of analyses that goes some way to answering that question posed at the
beginning of this introduction: what did British propagandists think of
Germany and National Socialism?
The View from Woburn Abbey:

The Political Culture of PWE
This chapter will offer a critical examination of the social and political
composition of PWE, while introducing the reader to significant histor-
ical actors, major developments, and important intellectual tendencies
feature in later chapters. Every history of British foreign propaganda
in the Second World War is at least partly an organizational history of
the Political Warfare Executive. The convoluted process by which PWE
came into being, and the amateurish atmosphere that it fostered, is the
central theme of both Charles Cruickshank’s The Fourth Arm and David
Garnett’s The Secret History of PWE. Cruickshank’s monograph describes
with relish failures and inefficiencies at the managerial and ministerial
levels, while Garnett’s official history regards as shameful the ministe-
rial and bureaucratic squabbles that developed over foreign propaganda.
Michael Stenton’s more recent Radio London is not so much interested
in this organizational history as in the concept of resistance embraced by
PWE; nevertheless, even Stenton devotes a lengthy introductory chapter
to PWE personalities and events, from which he is able to develop his
own thesis.69 Some familiarity with the organization of British foreign
propaganda is necessary for an understanding of its intellectual history.
Drawing on the research and insights of previous scholars, this chapter
offers a sketch of foreign propaganda’s organizational history. In doing
so, it takes advantage of previously unavailable archival documents,
in Honour of Sir Ian Kershaw, ed. Anthony McElligott and Tim Kirk (Manchester:
Manchester UP, 2003), 240.
69 Stenton, Radio London, 3–110.
including recently declassified personnel files, in order to develop a more

comprehensive picture of the political culture of PWE and its affili-
ated departments. Here, the often partisan testimony of the historical
actors—in the form of published memoirs, recorded lectures, and even
interviews made in the decades after the war—is useful in drawing out
their political and intellectual preoccupations, offering insight into how
they remembered and understood their contributions to the war.
The Brazen Horde: British Propagandists

and the Course of German History
The study of history was fundamental to British propagandists’ under-
standing of Germany and their conception of the Nazi mind. Indeed,
despite strongly contested political differences within the department,
history often offered the common ground necessary to build axioms
for morale subversion. This chapter reveals three distinct periods in the
department’s historical imagination that were conditioned in part by
changes to the department’s political culture, and which had a signifi-
cant impact on the genealogy of Britain’s Germany. In considering PWE’s
historical imagination, this chapter will also offer a sustained critique
of propagandists’ arguments for the relationship between fascism and
the German character. Numerous historical ideas about Germany find
expression in the PWE files, including tendencies that anticipate later
Sonderweg historiography. PWE also played a key role in broader mid-
century developments in professional history, legitimizing new approaches
in British universities such as social history and labour history, and
promoting the value of European history against the parochial inclinations
of the ruling class.
Germany on the Couch: The Role

of Psychology and the Social Sciences
in the Development of Subversive Propaganda
This chapter will consider the changing place that psychology and the
social sciences had in the development of PWE’s conception of Germany.
Where the American Office of Strategic Services launched its very own
Psychological Division to investigate the German mentality, PWE much
26 K. R. GRAHAM
preferred the judgement of journalists and civil servants with “prac-

tical experience” of German politics and society. Indeed, the insights of
professional psychology were at odds with PWE’s dominant tendency for
much of the war. Nevertheless, the psychological sciences left an indelible
mark on Britain’s propaganda effort. With particular attention to devel-
opments in psychoanalysis and social psychology during the interwar
years, this chapter will examine several abortive attempts to adopt the
new science, before analysing the conditions that allowed for a kind of
neo-Freudianism to make its mark on PWE.
No Man so Lecherous as the German:

Nazi Perversion and German Masculinity
in British Subversive Propaganda
This chapter will examine the place that sexuality and gender occu-
pied in the British conception of its German audience. Many post-war
studies of Nazi Germany stressed the sex-hostile and repressive nature
of the regime, but British propagandists, drawing especially on their
understanding of the German national character, understood the regime
to be excessively, even perversely, sexual. Popular discourses around
perversion granted British propagandists the opportunity to pathologize
the German mentality even as they resisted professional psychological
perspectives. In this, their understanding of perversion reflected broader
mid-century anxieties about gender and modernity underpinned by a
pervasive misogyny, which found further expression in disease-themed
propaganda.
A Rebellion Against the Divinely Appointed

Order: Totalitarian Theory, Secular
Religions, and Religious Anti-Fascism
in British Subversive Propaganda
Early in the war, religiously motivated resistance against fascism was
considered too problematic for propaganda treatment; by the end of
the war, however, it was enthusiastically exploited to promote Danu-
bian separatism and sectarian strife. Beginning with an exploration of
debates around the value of religious-themed propaganda and the rela-
tionship between Nazism and religious resistance, this chapter investigates
developments in PWE knowledge of, and attitudes to, German resistance

movements. The problem of religion introduced a number of new ideas
to the propaganda war, including an interwar Catholic theory of totalitar-
ianism, and the associated concept of a secular, Ersatz or political religion.
Prefiguring the Cold War discourse on totalitarianism, this tendency
encouraged propaganda that elided the distance between Nazism and
Communism to turn Germans against the Nazis.
The Logic of Subversive Propaganda

Drawing on the findings of earlier chapters, this chapter asks how PWE
arrived at clandestine morale subversion as a key to victory in Europe,
and why they believed that Germans were especially susceptible. PWE’s
subversive propaganda grew out of experiences and missteps during the
early months of the war but was otherwise, in many ways, historically
unprecedented. It reflected a complicated milieu, a concurrent expression
of the history of Anglo-German relations, domestic political tenden-
cies, the social conservatism of British elites, and popular discourses on
psychology, sexuality, and national character. PWE’s own perspective has
been insufficiently historicized, evident in the elision of German agency—
the capacity for dynamic interpretation of material, which existed even
within the greatly reduced parameters of a terroristic police state—in the
historical discussion. The complicated environment in which Germans
received foreign propaganda makes it difficult to ascribe any shortcomings
in the logic of subversion to Allied demands for Germany’s unconditional
surrender or, indeed, any other single cause. Following a critical engage-
ment with the historiography around British propaganda, this chapter will
also draw on surviving German primary sources and recent research in the
social history of the Third Reich to speculate about German reactions to
British subversive propaganda.
CHAPTER 2
The View from Woburn Abbey: The Political

Culture of PWE
This chapter will sketch out the organizational history of British propa-
ganda directed at Germany during the Second World War, introducing
those key historical figures and significant developments that feature in
the subsequent chapters of this book. This is certainly not the first work
to consider the wartime role of British subversive propaganda, and so, in a
sense, this chapter treads on well-surveyed territory. In doing so, however,
it pays close attention to the social and intellectual milieu fostered by PWE
and other departments.
Shortly after the war, propaganda intelligence officer Robert Walm-
sley observed that “[o]ne of the lessons of the Department seems to be
the very great importance of personal relations and personalities.”1 The
volatility and organizational weaknesses of British propaganda depart-
ments—largely a product of territorial and ideological disputes in the
pre-war planning stages—allowed for strong personalities within PWE to
determine the intellectual palette of foreign propaganda through direct
interventions as well as indirect processes such as recruitment. Walmsley’s
lesson is especially prescient when considering the development of PWE’s
Germany. The social background of British propagandists, and the way
1 TNA FO 898/547, Robert Walmsley, “E.H/P.I.D/P.W.E. German and Austrian

Intelligence Recollections of A.R. Walmsley”, (20 January 1946).

Switzerland AG 2021
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-71664-6_2
30 K. R. GRAHAM
they came to join the organization, can shed light on the department’s
character and its lively political culture. The wartime careers of propagan-
dists Campbell Stuart, Frederick Voigt, Richard Crossman, and Sefton
Delmer will illustrate the point.
This chapter argues that departmental politics—characterized by the
influence of strong personalities, the homogenizing weight of popular
opinion, and even the stimulus of an oblique mode of patronage—
were brought to bear on the inconstant conceptualization of Germany
to which Britain spoke. Proceeding chronologically, this chapter will
consider developments at the ministerial and executive levels of foreign
propaganda, and discuss the impact that these developments had on the
propagandists’ perception of Germany. At the same time, it will contex-
tualize several important ideological shifts in Britain’s propaganda war,
including the broad rejection of “good Germans” and the rise of Vansit-
tartism among British elites. The final part of this chapter will then
examine more closely staff composition and the practice of recruitment,
which extends to the active role played by European refugees in the
propaganda war and their place in this dynamic political culture.
Historian Charles Cruickshank stresses the effects of experience and
professionalism on the gradual improvement of British subversive propa-
ganda as the war progressed.2 While holding true, this whiggish argument
glosses over the underlying—and often axiomatic—ideas that were at play
in British propagandists’ perception of Germany. Certain of these ideas
were legitimated by their association with key individuals. Quite apart
from any rationalist or empirical understanding of the enemy, social and
cultural capitals were fundamental to the formation of PWE, reinforcing
a milieu that was characterized by distinct intellectual tendencies. As
Pauline Elkes writes, from 1941 PWE was run by “highly experienced,
conservative and career led diplomats… [who] all shared similar educa-
tion and social backgrounds, had travelled Europe and had worked in
the Foreign Office during the First World War either for the intelligence
services or as a diplomat.”3 Even when propagandists disagreed with each
2 Charles Cruickshank, The Fourth Arm: Psychological Warfare 1938–1945 (London:

Davis-Poynter, 1977), 74–75.
3 This, Elkes argues, goes some way to explain why the German Section’s young intel-
ligence officers (almost all “professional amateurs”) pursued research initiatives at odds
with official policy during the later stages of the war: “[t]hey were aware of the political
climate surrounding them, to the extent that they took positive action to counter that
2 THE VIEW FROM WOBURN ABBEY … 31
other (not an infrequent occurrence), something of a doxa was preserved

by the peculiar affinities of this small elite.
The problem of war aims and the question of Germany’s future,
expressed in policies such as the demand for unconditional surrender, are
woven through British political warfare and raise further questions about
planning and political culture. Lothar Kettenacker argues, for example,
that a lack of “political direction from above” encouraged planning based
on common assumptions; in regard to Germany, planners reasoned long
before the Casablanca declaration that “there should be no compromise
peace, not only because bargaining over terms would make any advance
planning so much more difficult; but because it meant that German mili-
tary potential would only be weakened, as in 1918, not removed for
good.”4 With so much of the propaganda effort bound to these common
assumptions, it is certainly worthwhile considering the environment in
which they arose.
Later chapters in this book will explore in some detail a number
of themes that informed subversive propaganda. This chapter’s findings
will help to provide a context for later exegeses. For example, chapter
six explores the question of religious-themed propaganda, a subject in
which personal convictions (and connections) had obvious influence.
Brendan Bracken, Minister of Information from July 1941, had “a special
interest in religious broadcasts,” an interest which gave propagandists a
convenient excuse to send intractable decisions upstairs.5 The Ministry
of Information’s “Religions” director was a progressive Protestant who
“refused to see Christianity identified with the ‘status quo’.”6 When
A.W.G. Randall wrote on behalf of the Foreign Office with the inten-
tion of revising the official attitude to religious propaganda, he was
climate”; Pauline Elkes, “The Political Warfare Executive: A Re-evaluation Based upon the
105–108.
4 Lothar Kettenacker, “British Post-War Planning for Germany: Haunted by the Past”,
Jordan (London: I.B. Tauris, 1997), 15.
5 As an example, Robert Bruce Lockhart took the occasion of Bracken’s interest to pass
the ball on the question of whether the BBC might substitute once a week a Lutheran
service in German for an English service: TNA FO 898/13, Minutes, “Meeting of the
Propaganda Policy Committee” (7 April 1942).
6 Michael Stenton, Radio London and Resistance in Occupied Europe (Oxford: Oxford
UP, 2000), 65.
32 K. R. GRAHAM
firmly rebuffed by the Marxist Richard Crossman for showing too much
“Catholic prejudice.”7 Sources of intelligence, too, were coloured by
faith. Unsurprisingly, PWE held an open line of communication with the
Vatican Legation through the Foreign Office.8 But British propagandists
were also informed by unofficial channels. Mother Superior Archer Shee
of the Order of the Sacred Heart was recruited to sound out opinions
ahead of a 1940 trip to the Vatican to attend a conference of Mothers
Superior from across Europe. She dutifully reported that “the Germans
were very anti-Hitler but she said she would have to go very carefully
with them to avoid their getting into trouble.”9 While the activities of
Department EH and PWE were ostensibly secret, developing a portrait
of Germany depended heavily on outside voices. Throughout the so-
called Phoney War, Department EH was in correspondence with Douglass
Woodruff of The Tablet , gathering “some notes about the Catholic side
of official propaganda to Germany.”10 And, after the commencement
of religious broadcasts on the BBC, the Bishop of Chichester provided
“definite evidence from Germany showing that they were listened to and
appreciated.”11 Unsurprisingly, the Bishop advocated giving more space
to religious voices in the war against National Socialism.
The changing fortunes of the people involved in subversive propa-
ganda, from ministers and civil servants to Oxbridge dons, from socialist
agitators and bourgeois novelists to German expatriates and refugees,
provide us with a key to the mentality behind Britain’s subversive effort.
Many compelling perspectives contributed to Britain’s conception of Nazi
Germany but, as this chapter will demonstrate, force of reason alone was
rarely enough for any one perspective to win the day. An understanding
of the political culture of British foreign propaganda organizations is
fundamental to the intellectual history of the propaganda war.
7 TNA FO 898/177, Crossman to Valentine Williams, Memorandum (13 January

1941).
8 A number of telegrams travelled back and forth between PWE and the Vatican via
Bern.
9 TNA FO 898/177, Onlsow to Campbell Stuart, “I have Seen Mother Archer Shee”
(1 May 1940).
10 TNA FO 898/177, Douglas Woodruff to A.P. Ryan, Letter (19 November 1939).
11 TNA FO 898/177, Minutes, “Advisory Committee on Religious Broadcasting to
Germany” (7 July 1942).
Gentleman Amateurs and “the Other Germany”

The Political Warfare Executive was the third and final iteration of a
foreign propaganda department that was first mobilized upon the declara-
tion of war in September 1939. A long time in planning, the first iteration
was known as the Department of Enemy Propaganda, or Department
EH after its London office at Electra House. In mid-1940, Department
EH was then incorporated into the newly established Special Operations
Executive (SOE), where it formed the rump of a subversive propaganda
section known as SO1. Both the Ministry of Information and the Foreign
Office were displeased with this situation as it placed foreign propa-
ganda under the control of the Ministry of Economic Warfare. Finally,
in September 1941, after a protracted territorial dispute between these
competing interests, SO1 broke away from SOE to become the Political
Warfare Executive. Governed by a tri-ministerial committee comprising
the Foreign Office, MoI, and MEW, PWE would survive until the end
of the war. The Foreign Office’s prevailing ambition to centralize propa-
ganda under its own roof, however, coupled with a change of ministers at
MEW, meant that PWE increasingly represented Foreign Office opinion
to the exclusion of the other ministries.
The propagandists’ worldview and the ideas they projected on
Germany were a product of both prevailing policy and the varied enthu-
siasms of the figures chosen to enact that policy. For all its idiosyncrasies,
the inception of Department EH is indicative of this trend. A reflec-
tion of the pre-war appeasement policy, Britain’s official line on Germany
under the Chamberlain government was that Nazism represented only a
minority opinion in Germany and that, by appealing to the reason of
ordinary Germans to oppose their reckless government, war could be
averted.12 In keeping with this policy, Department EH was tasked with
persuading “the non-Nazi nation to yearn for a possible peace.”13 Given
12 This analysis translated into a military strategy in which, as Robert H. Keyserlingk

writes, Britain “foresaw no military confrontation with Hitler, but rather a slow crumbling
of his regime under the pressure of a tight economic blockade and propaganda”: Keyser-
lingk, “Arnold Toynbee’s Foreign Research and Press Service, 1939–43 and Its Post-War
Plans for South-East Europe”, Journal of Contemporary History 21 (1986): 544.
13 Stenton, Radio London, 7. This strategy produced occasional moments of dissonance,
serving as a reminder of the affinity that some Britons held for fascism. Ian McLaine points
to a remarkable German-language leaflet from October 1939, for example, which asserted
that “National-Socialism began as an honourable experiment. Its leaders started with many
34 K. R. GRAHAM
Whitehall’s initial ambition to win over so-called good Germans, the

person nominated as propaganda chief seems an odd choice. At the height
of the Munich Crisis in September 1938, the head of the Secret Intelli-
gence Service (SIS) approached Canadian newspaper magnate Campbell
Stuart to head up the inchoate Department EH.14 Following his successes
as a propagandist during the First World War, Stuart had become some-
thing of a press baron under Lord Northcliffe’s media empire. As with
many Great War ideologues, Stuart had an irretrievably low opinion of
the Germans, seeing “no real distinction between the [Nazi] regime
and its people.”15 When Britain went to war against Germany a year
later, Stuart’s nomination stood firm. Planners who had advocated for a
competent and efficient civil servant as propaganda chief would have been
disconcerted. Stuart was more society gadfly than Whitehall mandarin.
More worrying still, in the months following its mobilization, the char-
acter of Department EH very quickly began to reflect the dubious
passions of its chief.
Funded by the Secret Vote, it was thought best for propagandists to set
up a base of operations outside of London, away from prying eyes and
much-feared bombs. Woburn Abbey in Bedfordshire was chosen as the
new home of foreign propaganda following a “gentleman’s agreement”
with the stately home’s aristocratic owners.16 Descriptions of Stuart’s
country headquarters could have been cribbed from an Evelyn Waugh
novel. In an age marked by professionalization, Stuart’s approach to his
new role was anachronistic. Rather than censoring the press with D-
Notices, as was government practice, he maintained the secrecy of his
department’s work through regular meetings with newspaper moguls at
expensive London restaurants.17 Ellic Howe, who joined the organization
well after Stuart’s departure (his reputation evidently lingered), paints a
vivid picture of the propaganda chief as he “oscillated between London
and Woburn in his Rolls-Royce, accompanied by three personal assistants
fine ideals and the German people had every right to expect that they would be realised”:
McLaine, Ministry of Morale, 141.
14 David Garnett, The Secret History of PWE, 4; William Haley (rev. Robert Brown),
“Stuart, Sir Campbell Arthur (1885–1972)”, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography,
(Oxford: Oxford UP, 2004).
16 Garnett, Secret History of PWE, 9.
17 Stenton, Radio London, 7.
and a filing cabinet.”18 Stuart saw the spiritual and intellectual well-being
of his staff as paramount. David Garnett recalls the first meeting of the
EH Recreation Committee of October 1939, which.
busied itself with such matters as finding a squash court and a football field,
subscription to a nearby golf club, the hiring of horses and attempting to
obtain permission to ride them in Woburn Park, obtaining books from
the Times Book Club and elsewhere to form a library, the institution of a
weekly cinema show in the Abbey, the establishment of a canteen with a
bar, the laying of a dance floor and the providing of Christmas lunch, and
the laying out and care of two lawn tennis courts, table tennis, billiards
and clock golf.19
One would be hard pressed to find a better image of the Phoney War.
With characteristic irony, Garnett concedes that “[those] who did not
belong to CHQ [Country Headquarters] were inclined to believe that its
atmosphere had a damaging effect on the work of the department as a
whole.”20 From this idyll, Stuart and his propagandists hoped to conjure
an accurate idea of the realities of life on the continent and articulate a
response to Nazism.
With so many Foreign Office anti-appeasers resigning in protest over
government policy before the war, the personnel available to Depart-
ment EH was limited. Stuart’s “talent scout” and recruiter was Valentine
Williams, another veteran newsman who had joined SIS because he was
too old for the army and was then seconded to propaganda.21 Together
they invited several other journalists to join Department EH. Vernon
Bartlett was one such figure. A senior correspondent for The Times, the
Daily Mail, and the News Chronicle, he was quickly appointed to head up
the propaganda intelligence section. A crucial element to any propaganda
organization, Department EH’s intelligence section was small and under-
resourced. According to first-hand reports, it initially employed only two
young men who, between them, “were supposed to cover the whole
During the Second World War (London: Michael Joseph, 1982), 41.
19 Garnett, The Secret History of PWE, 31.
36 K. R. GRAHAM
world,” one of whom “knew nothing of Germany.”22 From the outset,

the ostensibly independent propaganda department was thus compelled
to lean on the Foreign Office for guidance and intelligence.
While the department later embraced refugees from Nazism as invalu-
able assets, Stuart and his advisors in the security services initially consid-
ered the employment of enemy aliens to be too great a risk. Valentine
Williams argued that Department EH “rarely used Germans for broad-
casting, because they were regarded as renegades, and were apt to be
bitter in feeling.”23 A November 1939 letter to Lord Perth, then Minister
of Information, protested at Stuart’s refusal “to have any dealings with
German émigrés.”24 The correspondence on this issue is revealing of
early wartime prejudices. While disagreeing with Stuart’s position, the
complainant recognized as a universal prejudice the “obvious and famil-
iar” arguments against using émigrés: “the majority of them are Jews and,
therefore, almost certainly incapable of forming objective opinions; their
sources of information are tainted and tend to be unreliable; and it is
seldom safe to assume that information divulged to them will not get
back to Germany.” Nevertheless, he argued, Britain was neglecting a vital
resource.
While suspicion certainly lingered regarding German refugees, a small
number of “reliable” aliens were in fact recruited at the outset. During
the pre-war period, the department’s executive reportedly depended on
“a Hungarian doctor called Csato” as their “tame expert on Germany,”
and in fact, he later appeared alongside Williams as “German Editor”
in Department EH’s mobilization orders.25 And by December 1939,
the exiled ex-Nazi politician Hermann Rauschning was advising the
Department on Nazi policy ambitions.26 Otherwise, however, the early
department was hardly cosmopolitan. This composition had an immediate
effect on propaganda. In the absence of both native German speakers
and a sufficient number of fluent German-speaking British propagandists,
22 TNA FO 898/547, Walmsley, “German and Austrian Intelligence Recollections”.

23 TNA FO 898/5, Minutes, “Electra House Co-ordination Committee” (29 February
1940).
24 TNA FO 1093/131, Mr Young to Lord Perth, Letter (3 November 1939).
25 TNA FO 898/547, Walmsley, “German and Austrian Intelligence Recollections”;
TNA FO 898/2, “Office Plan” (c. 1939); Csato’s contributions to the department are
discussed further in Chapter 6.
26 TNA FO 898/4, “Note of a Conversation at Electra House” (6 December 1939).
Department EH leaflets were, for a time, apparently being written in

English and then translated into German “by a… mining engineer called
Schmidt.”27 This inefficiency is all the more surprising for the fact that
these leaflets were Department EH’s main concern for the first year of the
war. Garnett attributes this situation to Stuart’s experiences in the First
World War.28
Stuart cultivated a parochial and amateurish milieu. Naturally, he had
many detractors both inside and outside of Woburn Abbey. The most
significant of these was Frederick Voigt, a British journalist of German
descent who had made a name for himself as the German correspondent
for the Manchester Guardian. Voigt’s association with Department EH
began when he was invited to give German talks on the BBC. Later, in
early 1940, the decision was made to expand Department EH, by which
point Voigt’s expertise was considered invaluable.29 He rose quickly.
During the spring of 1940, a propaganda planning committee was estab-
lished to address German questions more directly. While journalist and
politician Vernon Bartlett initially chaired this committee, he was soon
called away on parliamentary commitments, and Voigt was nominated as
his replacement.30 Given Department EH’s limited brains-trust, he was a
welcome addition. But the department’s new German expert would prove
controversial.
Significantly, Voigt’s staunch hostility to Nazism was premised on
his religious conviction. In 1938, he penned Unto Caesar, a polemic
against both Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Russia, which Dan Stone
argues “marks him out as an outstanding [contemporary] commentator
on Nazism.”31 Voigt was a Calvinist with strong ties to Catholic intel-
lectuals whose arguments against both fascism and Bolshevism permeate
his writings from the late 1930s. Dismissing contemporary Marxist anti-
fascist perspectives, Voigt suggested that these totalitarian secular religions
were a consequence of the slings and arrows of modernity. Disparaging

31 Dan Stone, Responses to Nazism in Britain (Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003),
36.
38 K. R. GRAHAM
of the “good German” line, he wasted no time in trying to reform both

the theory and practice of British subversive activities.
At the same time, however, Voigt’s interpretation of Nazism stymied
many potential avenues of morale subversion; he opposed direct religious-
themed propaganda, for example, because “[t]he message of the religious
‘Opposition’ in Germany is one of obedience and not of defiance, least
of all of political defiance.”32 Even more troublesome, Voigt was entirely
averse to clandestine propaganda and, according to Walmsley, “seemed
unable to distinguish between propaganda to different audiences.”33 As
the department’s senior German expert, Voigt was influential enough in
the first half of 1940 to see his vision upheld. However, as the department
expanded with the establishment of SOE, he was increasingly isolated by
his views.
There is little evidence to suggest that Stuart was a creative thinker
or a dynamic leader—he is more often characterized as an Establishment
today—but the tension between the demands of policy and the advice
of his experts cannot have helped matters. To the propagandists that
joined later, Department EH was an embarrassment. Michael Balfour
has little to say about it except that the department was too small and
isolated to exert itself on the BBC; Sefton Delmer barely mentions it;
Robert Bruce Lockhart’s 1947 memoir, Comes the Reckoning (a study in
avoiding awkward conversations), does not mention Stuart and says only
that with Churchill’s ascendancy, Department EH came under the control
of Hugh Dalton and the Ministry of Economic Warfare; Howe dishes up
vitriol for the department’s choice of typeface in leaflet propaganda and
argues that, outside of leaflets to Germany, the early propagandists were
“mainly concerned with… policy directives for the BBC’s German service
which in any case never welcomed them.”34 By May 1940, the appeal
to ordinary Germans to overthrow the Nazis had demonstrably failed.
Meanwhile, the Wehrmacht had advanced through Western Europe and
32 This aspect of Voigt’s thought and his wider influence on the department are
discussed further in Chapter 6; TNA FO 898/177, Frederick Voigt, “Religion and
Propaganda” (30 July 1940).
34 Michael Balfour, Propaganda in War, 1939–1945: Organisations, Policies, and
Publics, in Britain and Germany (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1979), 89;
Lockhart, Comes the Reckoning, 96–97; Howe, The Black Game, 43.
Churchill had replaced Chamberlain as Prime Minister. Foreign propa-

ganda entered a period of transition that effected personnel as much as
policy. The Woburn “innocents,” as Howe describes them, were soon met
with new blood.35
The advent of Churchill’s prime ministership in May 1940 brought
major changes to the senior propaganda staff. Propaganda was to become
increasingly aggressive, as Churchill hoped to develop a new fifth column,
a secret army of anti-Nazi patriots in Germany and across the conquered
nations of Europe, who would be “ready to rise against the ‘fragile’
nazi regime at the appropriate moment.”36 Churchill’s command to “set
Europe ablaze” meant first and foremost some fresh faces in the field
of propaganda. Department EH was incorporated into the newly mobi-
lized Special Operations Executive, with oversight passing to the Minister
for Economic Warfare, Labour social democrat Hugh Dalton. Campbell
Stuart was ousted before summer’s end.
In this new political context, one of Stuart’s later recruits was especially
well-placed to advance a new perspective on Nazism and the propaganda
war. Having come under increasing pressure to produce results in the
spring of 1940, Stuart began reaching out to some well-known left-wing
experts on Germany. Like Voigt, Richard Crossman had been delivering
intelligent and occasionally controversial German talks over the BBC. An
energetic young luminary of the British Left, Crossman was an avowed
Marxist and an Oxford don with the unique distinction of having been
the first person to denounce Plato as a fascist in print.37 According to his
biographer, he had a reputation as a ferocious debater “with a special
gift for the toughest sort of dialectic.”38 As a student, he spent time
in Germany, even becoming friendly with left-wing German luminaries
such as Willi Münzenberg. He initially joined the department as a liaison
between Woburn Abbey and the BBC, but soon saw his role expanding.39
35 Howe, The Black Game, 46.

36 Keyserlingk, “Arnold Toynbee’s Foreign Research and Press Service”, 547.
37 Richard Crossman, Plato Today (London: Allen and Unwin, 1937).
38 Anthony Howard, “Crossman, Richard Howard Stafford (1907–1974)”, Oxford
Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2004).
39 Howard, Crossman: The Pursuit of Power (London: Jonathan Cape, 1990), 84; TNA
FO 898/547, Walmsley, “German and Austrian Intelligence Recollections”.
40 K. R. GRAHAM
Michael Balfour identifies a shift in the first months of 1940 from

“an anti-Nazi to a generally anti-German basis” in foreign propaganda.40
Crossman’s political commitments complicated this development consid-
erably. According to Stenton, it was Crossman’s avowed opinion “that
there was nothing much wrong with Germany that a free election and
a natural socialist majority could not put right.”41 Indeed, it would be
a mistake to view Crossman’s quick integration into the department—
he soon became Director of the German Section—as an abandonment of
his socialist convictions. As Richard Weight argues, “[t]he rediscovery of
patriotism by the British intelligentsia during the war did not, for most,
mark a shift to the right.”42 The direction of Crossman’s propaganda,
and of the new staff he brought in to help him, affirms this.
Under Stuart, Crossman was just another unruly advisor, but after
foreign propaganda passed to Dalton and MEW, his star began to
rise. In October 1940, he established a clandestine German-language
radio station called Sender der Europäischen Revolution. Earlier qualms
about drawing on the “unreliable” émigré community were put aside
as Crossman built up his station through his contacts with Britain’s
European refugee community. His choices at this point are telling. At
a moment when London played host to the full spectrum of Germany’s
anti-fascist community, Crossman opted for a collaboration with a rela-
tively small, but quite influential, splinter group called Neu Beginnen.
Originally emerging in the late 1920s as a conspiratorial Leninist cadre,
Neu Beginnen (then calling itself the Org) was made up of revo-
lutionaries who had grown impatient with the sectarian yen of the
German Left. Reflecting a broader political tendency that emerged in
the wake of the KPD’s Stalinization during the 1920s, the cadre posi-
tioned itself between German social democracy and communism.43 After
40 Balfour, Propaganda in War, 169.

42 Richard Weight, “State, Intelligentsia and the Promotion of National Culture in
Britain, 1939–45”, Historical Research 69.168 (1996): 99; an obvious example of this
would be George Orwell, who was perhaps more sincere in his convictions than Crossman.
43 John M. Cox, “Circles of Resistance: Intersections of Jewish, Leftist, and Youth
Dissidence under the Third Reich, 1933–1945”, PhD thesis, University of North Carolina
at Chapel Hill, 2005. 57; Terence Renaud, “Restarting Socialism: The New Beginning
Group and the Problem of Renewal on the German Left, 1930–1970”, PhD Thesis, UC
Berkeley, (2015), 4.
1933, the organization was able to leverage its conspiratorial praxis

into underground resistance activities. In September 1933, the group’s
leader, Walter Loewenheim, pseudonymously published a pamphlet enti-
tled “Neu Beginnen!” which reportedly “lit up underground cells of
socialist resisters throughout Germany.”44 Loewenheim’s call to arms
was even potent enough to drag the exiled SPD’s Sopade organization
into slightly more radical territory, if only briefly, with the 1934 Prague
Manifesto.45 The pamphlet gave the cadre some notoriety and with that
came their new name. Eventually, Gestapo arrests and later Nazi inva-
sions of neighbouring countries drove Neu Beginnen’s leadership into
exile in London and New York. At Crossman’s invitation, and under his
complacent supervision as “housemaster,” senior Neu Beginnen figures
relocated to Bedfordshire where they continued their work, writing and
performing programmes for Sender der Europäischen Revolution as a
means of keeping the revolutionary anti-fascist spark alive.46 As might
be expected, the employment of German radicals raised a few eyebrows,
but Neu Beginnen’s anti-fascist credentials were impeccable.47
Among British propagandists, Voigt was not likely the only anti-
communist perturbed by this sudden influx of godless Bolsheviks. John
Baker White had transferred from the SIS’s enigmatically named Section
D to the propaganda arm of the Special Operations Executive along with
several other personnel in 1940. Baker White claimed to have founded
Section D as early as 1923 (the MI6 official history suggests Section D
only came into existence in 1938) when he “was fighting a more or less
one-man battle against Communism, and was often derided as a scare-
monger with a ‘Bolshy under his bed.’”48 Perhaps unsurprisingly, his
44 Renaud, “Restarting Socialism”, 42.

45 Renaud, “Restarting Socialism”, 44.
47 The SIS wartime reports on Neu Beginnen describe the group as “revolutionary
socialist and orthodox Marxist… [and] can therefore be described as a semi-Communist
group… in favour of a government of workers and peasants”: TNA KV 5-63, SIS, “The
Neu Beginnen Group” (6 November 1944). A post-war report was less restrained, arguing
that as radical socialists Neu Beginnen “[held] that, to make the forthcoming German
revolution a success, the use would be necessary of similar means to those employed by
the Bolshevists in 1917”: TNA KV 5-63, SIS, “The ‘Neu-Beginnen’ Group” (28 August
1946).
48 John Baker White, The Big Lie (London: Evans Brothers, 1955), 26; Keith Jeffrey,
MI6: The History of the Secret Intelligence Service, 1909–1949 (London: Bloomsbury,
42 K. R. GRAHAM
memoir makes no mention of the fact that throughout the 1930s he

also served as Intelligence Chief for the British Fascist’s “Fascisti Grand
Council.”49 Similarly, Robert Bruce Lockhart, who would become PWE’s
Director-General after first serving as Czechoslovakian expert, made his
name as an anti-Soviet agent at the time of the October Revolution and
maintained an association with Oswald Mosley.50 It is necessary to appre-
ciate that, among these propagandists, attempts were made to cultivate a
collegial disinterest in each other’s political convictions. Voigt, it seems,
was less able to temper his opinion.
Tension between Voigt and Crossman might have simmered under
Stuart but it only reached its denouement under Dalton’s leadership.
Voigt’s opposition to clandestine propaganda, to religious propaganda,
and to socialist propaganda was increasingly at odds with the prevailing
climate of opinion. In early 1941, he penned a long memorandum
indicting Crossman’s SO1 German Section as dangerously pro-German
and submitted it to the Foreign Office rather than the Ministry of
Economic Warfare, presumably because there was less of a chance that
it would land in the lap of a sympathetic socialist.51 Eventually, arbitra-
tion was called for and Voigt was fired, or resigned, in April 1941.52
Crossman’s perspective on Germany was not necessarily more prescient
than Voigt’s, but he had a ministerial patron who appreciated the
character of his subversive operations.
Both Crossman and Voigt began their association with Department
EH before Churchill’s premiership and both survived the transitional
phase, in part, because neither had been tainted by support for appease-
ment, but also because, in an expanding theatre of war, both had some-
thing vital to contribute. For British foreign propaganda, the Germany
of the Phoney War was a land of good Germans and naughty Nazis. The
2010), 320; White’s wartime colleague Eileen Champion discusses his propaganda role
in: IWM 12/29/1, EB Champion, “Wartime Diary of Eileen Champion (nee Roberts)”,
Unpublished Memoir (2011).
49 Stephen Dorril, Blackshirt: Sir Oswald Mosley and British Fascism (London: Penguin,
2007), 197.
50 Dorril, Blackshirt, 14.
51 Howard, Crossman, 89.
52 Cruickshank claims that he was fired, while Howard suggests that he resigned. The
extant PWE files do not make the matter any clearer: Cruickshank, The Fourth Arm, 32;
Howard, Crossman, 89.
Marxist Crossman and the anti-communist Voigt brought considerable

nuance to this position, and for almost a year, they were the department’s
leading minds when it came to the German question. Under Dalton’s
governance, however, only Crossman would remain tenable.
The Significance of Germanophobia

With the 1940 Government reshuffle came significant changes to the
organization of foreign propaganda. Hugh Dalton removed Stuart, who
was replaced by Rex Leeper. Former director of the Foreign Office
News Department and founder of the British Council, Leeper was a
Foreign Office veteran who had been peripherally involved in propa-
ganda as director of the FO Political Intelligence Department (PID),
providing material support to the eclectic Department EH.53 Leeper
brought a number of staff over from PID, including the future Director-
General, Lockhart.54 At the same time, the controversial anti-German
tub-thumper Robert Vansittart was appointed as Dalton’s senior advisor.
Vansittart was Leeper’s old boss and long-time confidant, having been
the FO’s Permanent Under-Secretary from 1930 until 1938 when he
resigned in protest over the appeasement policy. These figures were old
friends with Germanophobic pedigrees to match Churchill. Together
they provide a tidy example of the role that personal networks played
within the propaganda community.55 Lockhart even credits Leeper with
getting him his “war job.”56 And research reveals that Leeper had also
recommended Vansittart to his position at MEW; returning the favour,
Vansittart then recommended Leeper to the Executive of SO1.57
53 According to Philip M. Taylor, Leeper occasionally abused his position as Director

of the FO News Department, giving “public expression to his own personal views” and
subsequently trying to modify British Foreign Policy via unretractable statements. On one
occasion, he even tried to force the government’s hand, suggesting in a September 1938
press communiqué that, should Germany invade Czechoslovakia, Britain would go to war:
Philip M. Taylor, The Projection of Britain: Overseas Publicity and Propaganda 1919–1939
(Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1981), 31, 36, 41–42.
55 Taylor, The Projection of Britain, 32.
56 Lockhart, Comes the Reckoning, 226.
44 K. R. GRAHAM
As mentioned above, Balfour identifies a shift towards anti-German

sentiment in British propaganda from the beginning of 1940, referring
specifically to two documents that suggested the necessity for a change in
approach because “German listeners distrusted and were sick of all propa-
ganda.”58 This new approach was a pragmatic response to Germany’s
apparent propaganda fatigue rather than any fundamental change in the
British understanding of their audience. Later in the war, British propa-
ganda also demonstrated an anti-German rather than anti-Nazi tone.
However, the early turn towards anti-German sentiment identified by
Balfour was of a markedly different character to later propaganda. Voigt
was sincere in his conviction that problems lay with Germany as a whole,
but he was isolated by his puritanism. With the departmental restruc-
turing that followed the creation of SOE in July 1940, a stronger
Germanophobic tendency contributed to the discourse on Germany. As
Lockhart later wrote, it was thanks to the enterprising Leeper that “our
department contained no ‘guilty men’.”59 The changing of the guard
had a lasting effect on the intellectual disposition of the department.
Anti-German sentiment was no longer merely a pragmatic choice.
There are many examples of the new, often reductive image of
Germany that anti-appeasers brought to subversion. Defending “porno-
graphic” stories as a means of attracting an audience, Leeper stressed that
Germans had a uniquely sadistic nature that was drawn to smut even
as Britons were repelled by it.60 Meanwhile, Dalton’s December 1941
memorandum on propaganda policy argued that “[we] should… appeal
to [Germans’] instinctive feelings of ‘doom’ or ineluctable fate, culmi-
nating in a ‘Gotterdämmerung’.”61 Lord Hood’s shrug of a commentary
on Dalton’s memo is telling: “Apart from passages where Dr Dalton’s
58 Balfour, Propaganda in War, 169–170.

59 The phrase “guilty men” entered the public consciousness at this time thanks to
the publication of a polemic by that title, which denounced in the strongest words advo-
cates for Chamberlain’s policy towards Hitler’s Germany: “Cato”, Guilty Men (London:
Gollancz, 1940); Lockhart, Comes the Reckoning, 55.
60 The subject of pornographic propaganda is discussed at length in Chapter 5; TNA
FO 898/60, Leeper, “Gustav Siegfried” (16 June 1942).
61 TNA FO 898/13, Hugh Dalton, “Propaganda Policy (P.W.E.)” (6 December 1941).
political prejudices run away with him there is nothing particularly objec-
tionable or original in this paper.”62 For propagandists operating in this
political climate, anti-German sentiment was de rigueur.
As an expression of British Germanophobia in the public sphere,
Vansittartism is significant in this regard, as Hedva Ben-Israel argues, not
because of its extremism but because of “the infiltration of stereotyped
notions into official, public and even academic usage” that it reflected and
encouraged.63 This is of particular importance to a propaganda organi-
zation with a vested interest in the attitudes and opinions of the German
enemy because “[t]his affected the attitude to the opposition, for the
more Germans were seen as tending to be equally guilty, the less it
mattered who the actual people governing Germany were.” Taylor recog-
nizes Vansittartism’s importance to domestic propaganda, and even the
influence of this anti-German turn in PWE, but he does not explore
the often subtle ways that Germanophobic ideas influenced the develop-
ment of foreign propaganda.64 While many SO1 and PWE propagandists
resisted the more emotive thrust of Vansittartism, this new tendency had
a striking effect on the British understanding of Germany.
In early 1941, Vansittart published Black Record: Germans Past and
Present, an extended essay based on a series of talks he had given over
the BBC in late 1940, in which he argued that “[t]he bird of prey
is no sudden apparition. It is a species. Hitler is no accident. He is
the natural and continuous product of a breed which from the dawn
of history has been predatory and bellicose.”65 Black Record found a
substantial audience; a highly readable tract released at the height of the
Blitz, the pamphlet quickly went through fourteen printings.66 Vansit-
tart’s arguments were difficult to ignore. This was particularly true for
Britain’s propaganda departments, not least because Vansittart was a pres-
ence among the propagandists since at least mid-1940. While Vansittart
62 TNA INF 1/895, Minute (6 June 1941).

63 Hedva Ben-Israel, “Cross Purposes: British Reactions to the German Anti-Nazi
Opposition”, Journal of Contemporary History 20.3 (1985): 428–429.
64 Philip M. Taylor, Munitions of the Mind: A History of Propaganda from the Ancient
65 Vansittart, Black Record: Germans Past and Present (London: Hamish Hamilton,
1941), 16.
66 Vansittart initially delivered Black Record as a series of talks via the BBC Overseas
Service, which certainly boosted its notoriety; Vaget, “Vansittartism Revisited”, 28.
46 K. R. GRAHAM
held little official power as “Chief Diplomatic Advisor,” he remained close

to a number of Foreign Office personnel serving as senior propagan-
dists including Leeper (who would act first as Director and then Deputy
Director of foreign propaganda) who shared Vansittart’s worldview. The
minutes of propaganda committee meetings in September and October
1940 suggest that Vansittart was only an occasional presence, but that he
ranked second to Leeper as Chair; and it was in one of these meetings that
he first “interpolated a suggestion that the word ‘Nazi’ should be avoided,
and the word ‘German’ always used in its place.”67 Vansittart’s second-
ment to the Ministry of Economic Warfare came to an end amid the
Black Record controversy, but he left a lasting impression on the develop-
ment of British foreign propaganda, an impression reinforced through his
abiding relationships with senior propagandists such as Leeper.68 While
the Foreign Office never endorsed Vansittartism, and the Allies finally
abandoned the analogous Morgenthau plan in 1944, Vansittart’s polemic
is nevertheless indicative of a significant tendency among British perspec-
tives on Germany. Even where propagandists dismissed its more extreme
expressions, the engagement with Vansittartist arguments conditioned
their outlook.
Outside of official circles, Vansittart maintained relations with groups
across the political spectrum in the early 1940s as a means of promoting
his ideas. On Britain’s far right, a group called the “Never Again”
Association (NAA) promoted Vansittartism through public lectures and
pamphleteering. The NAA was chaired by Eleonora Tennant, a former
Conservative Party candidate who would later collaborate with British
Union of Fascists (BUF) fanatic Jeffrey Hamm to form the Hamp-
stead anti-alien movement.69 Vansittart’s wife, Sarita, was not only a
67 TNA FO 898/9, Minutes, “The 7th Meeting of a Committee held by R.A.L. in the
Committee Room at Tring” (12 October 1940); given his friendship with Leeper and his
extensive contacts in the Foreign Office, it is of course conceivable that Vansittart had
some influence on propaganda before he was directly involved in the department.
68 While he had been replaced as head of the Foreign Office by Alexander Cadogan
in 1938, Vansittart only finally severed his ties with the foreign service by resigning his
honorific position as Chief Diplomatic Advisor in May 1941. There is, however, a mass
of correspondence in Vansittart’s personal papers discussing foreign policy with senior
officials in the months and years after he had left the service: CAC VNST II 1/11.
69 Graham Macklin, “‘A Quite Natural and Moderate Defensive Feeling’? The 1945
Hampstead ‘Anti-Alien’ Petition”, Patterns of Prejudice 37.3 (2003): 289–296.
member of the NAA but sat on its Council.70 Curiously, at some point
in late 1942, it seemed as if Vansittartism might offer common ground
for the NAA to form a productive collaboration with left-wing émigré
groups also banking on the dissolution of Germany. This affiliation broke
down, however, when Tennant turned on Vansittart after he refused to
accept her offer of the NAA presidency (he insisted that such a move
would compromise his nonpartisan efforts to promote Germanophobia).
Tennant then accused Vansittart of succumbing to the influence of left-
wing Germans and, subsequently, of allowing his anti-German policy to
be “trimmed.”71 Only in this context did Vansittart begin to distance
himself from the anti-Semitic Tennant.72
It might be imagined that Vansittartism was antithetical to Hugh
Dalton’s social democratic values. Isabelle Tombs demonstrates, to the
contrary, that a strong Vansittartist faction emerged among Labour social-
ists, which was less an aberration than an articulation of long-standing
anti-German sentiment within the party. This can be demonstrated in
Labour’s association with an organization called Fight for Freedom Edito-
rial and Publishing Services Ltd (FFF). Established in December 1941,
FFF quickly became a focal point for socialist Vansittartism. According
to Tombs, FFF’s “basic ‘Vansittartist’ view was that German society,
70 CAC VNST II 1/23, Vansittart to Miss Sturdy Smith, Letter (8 February 1943).
71 CAC VNST II 1/23, manuscript of a speech, ‘Never Again’ Association, “Public
Statement Made by Mrs. Tennant at the Wigmore Hall, 8th July 1943”; in this heated
atmosphere, gossip and innuendo were rife. Tennant’s accusation regarding German influ-
ence over Vansittart was hardly isolated. Relationships between Germans exiles and British
officials offered fertile ground for such speculation. A 1941 SIS report into the activities
of Neu Beginnen suggested, for example, that Werner Klatt was “said to exercise a great
influence over Crossman”. Meanwhile, when the German expressionist author Karl Otten
was told that the BBC no longer required his services, he alleged Crossman had been
“influenced, directed and dominated by” Sefton Delmer and Hugh Carlton Greene who,
in turn, he accused of self-interest and ambivalence about the war: TNA KV 5-63, Sykes,
“Report on Neubeginnen and the Deutsche Freiheitspartei” (10 October 1941); TNA
KV 2-2586, SIS, “P.F. 45807 V.8 OTTEN, Karl 316b” (16 January 1942).
72 CAC VNST II 1/23, Vansittart to Wickham Steed, Letter (6 February 1943). This
is not to say that Vansittart was a fascist sympathizer. While other conservatives flirted with
British fascism in the 1930s, Vansittart remained sceptical of Mosley and the blackshirts,
no doubt because of their friendly overtures to Nazi Germany. As Dorril writes, he even
“interceded on MI5’s behalf… with new information in an attempt to secure a warrant
for ‘a carefully restricted examination’ of Mosley’s correspondence”; Dorril, Blackshirt,
409.
48 K. R. GRAHAM
including German socialism, had been afflicted for generations by nation-

alism and militarism.”73
While FFF represented another split from the SPD, it was of quite a
different stripe to the radical left Neu Beginnen. Offering some insight
into the faction’s worldview, leading FFF publicist Walter Loeb claimed
the SPD “was as responsible as the rest of Germany for supporting
German and Prussian militarism and pan-Germanism.”74 Tombs identifies
Dalton alongside Bevin and Attlee as socialists in high public office with
FFF affiliations who maintained “[t]heir deeply-rooted mistrust towards
the German people” during and after the war.75 Other German socialist
exile groups had long been held as contemptible by FFF Vansittartists
like Loeb. Almost a caricature of the internecine spite that the German
Left carried with them into exile, “[v]irtually all this organization’s publi-
cations contained vicious attacks against fellow German and Austrian
Socialists in exile.”76 For FFF, none of Germany’s pre-war political parties
could have a role in Germany’s future as they were all tainted by the same
political tradition that had produced Nazism. Significantly, the British
Labour Party was generally careful to avoid entanglements with exile poli-
tics, but leading figures came to endorse the FFF position. This in turn
contributed to the marginalization of German socialist exiles at the height
of the war.77
Richard Crossman’s association with Labour’s incipient Vansittartist
faction began in the 1930s, not because of any budding Germanophobia
but because he could not abide pacifism in the face of the Nazi
73 Isabelle Tombs, “The Victory of Socialist ‘Vansittartism’: Labour and the German
Question, 1941–5”, Twentieth Century British History 7.3 (1996): 294.
74 Tombs, “The Victory of Socialist ‘Vansittartism’”, 288, 292–293; Jorg Später
describes Loeb as the “Spiritus Rector” of the publishing company which assumed the
voice of right-wing socialists in exile: Später p158.
75 Tombs, “The Victory of Socialist ‘Vansittartism’”, 308.
76 Jörg Thunecke, “‘Fight for Freedom’: A Vansittartist Network of Rightwing German
Socialists in Great Britain (1941–1945)”, Networks of Refugees in Nazi Germany: Conti-
nuities, Reorientations, and Collaborations in Exile, ed Helga Schreckenberger (2016:
Brill/Rodopi), 69.
77 Isabelle Tombs, “The Victory of Socialist ‘Vansittartism’: Labour and the German
Question, 1941–5”, Twentieth Century British History 7.3 (1996): 299.
threat.78 At PWE, Crossman was actually something of a bulwark against

unchecked Germanophobia. As a result, he and his Neu Beginnen confed-
erates were subject to a smear campaign by FFF Vansittartists for being
ideologically compromised. In February 1942, Crossman was prompted
to send a memorandum to the PWE Executive Committee complaining
about the activities of both Loeb and Voigt, who by this time had been
expelled from PWE. According to Crossman, “both... [Loeb and Voigt]
claim to have the ear of Lord Vansittart,” and had “for some months
been carrying on a campaign in the Press and, even more, in the clubs
and lobbies, against P.W.E., more particularly its German Section.”79 As
a conditioning factor in British propaganda, Vansittartism is difficult to
ignore. Certainly, it was a concern among non-Vansittartist propagandists.
Crossman was aligned with the Labour Vansittartists, but his close affil-
iation with left-wing radicals tempered his pessimism about Germany’s
future. Indeed, he was dissatisfied with the intellectual change that the
department experienced in the wake of Black Record. With Vansittar-
tism proliferating in popular and elite spheres, broadcast operations like
Sender der Europäischen Revolution came under threat. In a February
1941 memorandum written in defence of his German Section, Crossman
lamented: “[i]t has been suggested that we have insufficiently exploited
the motif of Fear in our propaganda to Germany: in particular that
the distinction frequently drawn between the Regime and the German
people removes from the German people a sense of their responsibility
and guilt.”80 Penned at the height of his row with Voigt, this paper was
one of the last vain attempts to promote the idea of the “good German”
within PWE.
Crossman’s revolutionary radio boasted no great success, but
continued broadcasting up until June 1942, shortly after Dalton was
moved to the Board of Trade. Two decades after the war, Crossman
claimed that a feud between Sefton Delmer, the rising star of clandes-
tine propaganda, and Hugh Carlton Greene, head of the BBC German
78 William E. Daugherty, “Richard H.S. Crossman”, A Psychological Warfare Casebook,

ed. William E. Daugherty and Morris Janowitz (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins Press,
1958), 246–248.
79 TNA FO 898/60, Crossman, Memorandum (9 February 1942).
80 TNA FO 898/178, Crossman, “On the Use of the Motifs of Fear, Guilt and Hate
in Our Propaganda to Germany” (3 February 1941).
50 K. R. GRAHAM
Service, “drove me to take refuge in Eisenhower’s headquarters.”81 The

truth of the matter is hazier. Fellow propagandist Ellic Howe suggests
that Europäischen Revolution owed its longevity to Dalton because, in
Dalton, Crossman had the support of a politically like-minded patron.82
Whatever the case, Dalton’s departure left foreign propaganda in the
hands of Conservatives Anthony Eden and Brendan Bracken. Interest-
ingly, as Anthony Howard reports, only a matter of weeks after losing
Dalton’s protection, “Eden… had to receive a deputation of MPs in his
room in the House of Commons and assure them that Dick [Crossman]
was neither a Bolshevist nor a Fascist.”83 Shortly thereafter, Crossman’s
agitprop black station was shut down. In time, Sender der Europäis-
chen Revolution was succeeded by another left-wing station; however,
this station abandoned Neu Beginnen’s robust Leninist and anti-Stalinist
ideology (by this time, Britain had a welcome ally in the USSR), satisfied
instead with reporting on working conditions and providing “examples
of resistance of French workers and of sabotage or organized workers’
opposition in Germany.”84
Contemporary to the termination of Crossman’s revolutionary radio,
a memorandum was circulated restating the “general objective of black
propaganda to Germany.”85 It claimed that:
[w]e do not appeal exclusively to their higher instincts or their idealistic

opposition to the regime. We try to exploit against the German war effort
the ordinary German’s ‘Schweinehund’, his desire for self-preservation,
personal profit and pleasure, his herd instinct to do as others do and his
ordinary human passions of fear, lust and jealousy.
The document is unsigned but it echoes the argot of another prominent

propagandist who came to dominate British subversive propaganda.
Cruickshank argues that “experience” steered the propagandists away
from resistance or opposition radio programmes towards “a more subtle
81 Crossman, “Black Prima Donna”, New Statesman (9 November 1962).

84 TNA FO 898/67, Douglas Wilson to Leeper and Barman, “Notes on Propaganda
to Germany” (31 October 1942).
85 TNA FO 898/67, Memorandum “The General Objective of Black Propaganda to
Germany” (4 July 1942).
approach,”86 namely the style of propaganda developed by Sefton Delmer

in a subversive broadcast operation called Gustav Siegfried Eins, which
began broadcasting in the Summer of 1941. Delmer had spent his child-
hood in Germany and spoke the language like a native Berliner. The
son of a Professor of English Literature at the University of Berlin, he
went on to enjoy a successful career as a journalist with the Beaverbrook
press. As the Daily Express ’s German Correspondent, he covered the rise
of Nazism with a kind of even-handed panache that won the praise of
Joseph Goebbels. His reward was an exclusive seat on Hitler’s aeroplane
as the Nazi leader flew from city to city during his dramatic 1932 elec-
tion campaign. Delmer’s apparent intimacy with Nazi Party bosses, and
his taste for the good life, earned him a dubious reputation; according
to Delmer’s SIS file, Labour’s chief whip in the House of Lords strongly
suspected the journalist of being a Nazi sympathizer and had asked Otto
Katz (a Stalinist spy) to investigate.87 The investigations came to nothing,
but rumours persisted, not helped by Delmer’s behaviour. Walmsley later
claimed that in Delmer’s Woburn offices he had on display “a trophy
– a shield bearing the words ‘Hier sind Juden unerwünscht’, allegedly
captured in Germany by C.E. Stevens [ancient historian and PWE Intel-
ligence Officer] and smuggled out in a side-car.”88 Certainly, Delmer
despised the Nazis, but his outward attitude to the Third Reich might
be better characterized as sardonic rather than contemptuous, a posture
that rubbed some people the wrong way. Despite (or because of) this
apparent ambivalence, Delmer soon proved to be the most highly valued
recruit to Britain’s propaganda war.
Delmer’s first broadcast operation, Gustav Siegfried Eins, professed
patriotic support for Hitler and the Wehrmacht, while decrying the
corruption and criminality of the SS. Delmer’s conception of Germany
was integral to the admiration felt by those around him. Indeed, his
colleagues were reportedly amazed at his “phenomenal capacity for
86 Cruickshank, The Fourth Arm, 104–105.

87 TNA KV2-2586.1, Report (5 July 1934).
Stevens was one of the Inklings, an Oxford literary discussion group that counted C.S.
Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien as members. An imaginative propagandist, he was celebrated for
suggesting that the opening four notes of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony—“V” in Morse
Code—be adopted for the BBC’s “V for Victory” campaign: “Obituary: Mr C.E. Stevens,
Distinguished Ancient Historian”, The Times (2 September 1974).
52 K. R. GRAHAM
‘tuning in’ to, or penetrating the German mind and its mental processes,
almost as if he himself resembled an ultra-sophisticated radio receiving
set.”89 Drawing on the idea of the “innere Schweinehund,” the inner
pig-dog, he articulated a capricious, low view of the average German.90
Angela Schwarz argues that for British travellers in the Reich before
the war, there was “a constant temptation” to engage in “commonly
accepted images and stereotypes in confronting the German dictator-
ship.”91 Delmer, the tabloid veteran, bowed to this temptation like it
was a vocation.
Delmer was not the only experimental new hire, but his subsequent
career trajectory was unique. The frustrations of a contemporary recruit
are illustrative. Peter Ritchie Calder joined the department only a few
months later. A socialist journalist with a passion for science, he later
acknowledged that he “was not an expert on any country or region…
Nor an expert linguist.”92 In trying to understand why he was recruited,
he determined that the department was “looking for someone familiar
with methodology but they were too scared to have a real scientist so
they decided to compromise by having a science-writer who was an expert
on experts.”93 As a journalist for the Daily Herald during the Blitz, he
raised the ire of some officials by skirting MoI edicts; his reports on the
harrowing experiences of ordinary Londoners throughout the bombing
were remarkably candid in their condemnation of the neglect citizens
suffered at the hands of the British government.94 Once the Allies began
their retaliatory bombing of Germany, Calder’s insight into life during

90 Delmer, Black Boomerang, 41. This concept of an inner pigdog is examined further
in Chapter 5.
91 Angela Schwarz, “Image and Reality: British Visitors to National Socialist Germany”,
European History Quarterly 23 (1993): 400.
92 Calder, quoted in: National Library of Scotland (NLS) ACC 12799/3, Fiona Rudd,
“Cloak and Dagger” (extract of an unpublished biography) (26 April 1988).
93 NLS ACC10318/3, Peter Ritchie Calder, “The Science of the Science of Science”,
Lecture, Hebrew University, Jerusalem (22 February 1973).
94 Calder’s best articles were collected for a book published as part of a series edited
by George Orwell: Peter Ritchie Calder, The Lesson of London (London: Secker and
Warburg, 1941); Calder’s son Angus Calder took up his father’s torch, writing insightful
and influential revisionist histories that thoroughly savaged the myth of national unity,
beginning with The People’s War: Britain, 1939–45 (London: Jonathan Cape, 1969).
the Blitz likely made him a good fit at PWE. Upon joining the orga-
nization, he styled himself as an impatient reformer, complaining to the
executive committee that the propagandists were out of touch: “I get the
impression that the atmosphere at C.H.Q. is rarified and exalted[ sic];
the regular inhabitants suffer from an inferiority complex; they are touchy
and jealous and aloof and not very humble… The papers that come up
from C.H.Q. bear the stamp of its ‘fugitive and cloistered virtue.’”95
Predictably, many of Calder’s recommendations—including a paper crit-
icizing the wisdom of bombing civilian targets, which was supported by
anecdotal and statistical data—were met with something less than enthu-
siasm.96 Nevertheless, he remained with PWE until the war’s end as
Director of Plans and Campaigns, taking on a major coordinating role
during the D-Day landings.
Delmer, on the other hand, quickly won the favour of his employers.
He had early support from both Leeper and Vansittart who found his
work ingenious and highly amusing.97 The broad anti-German sentiment
of Vansittartism sat comfortably with the cynical spirit behind Delmer’s
new style of black propaganda. Support did not end with the Foreign
Office Germanophobes, however. Crossman’s biographer goes so far as
to field a rumour that Delmer had “royal protection” owing to a visit by
George VI, during which the King “had apparently been very impressed
by what he saw of the ‘black’ propaganda side of the business.”98 As it
happens, the Queen’s brother, David Bowes-Lyon, also worked for PWE
and was not entirely sympathetic to the left-wing German exiles in British
employ.99 Revealingly, Howe later wrote that “Delmer’s chiefs in PWE
95 TNA FO 800/868, Calder to Lockhart, Memorandum, “What’s Wrong with P.W.E.”

(9 February 1942).
96 NLS ACC10318/3, Peter Ritchie Calder, “The Science of the Science of Science”,
Lecture, Hebrew University, Jerusalem (22 February 1973).
97 Delmer, Black Boomerang, 63.
99 Impatient with complaints among their German-exile staff about working conditions,
Bowes-Lyon wrote that “they are well paid, work moderately and if they were not there
would be most uncomfortable in the Isle of Man”: TNA FO 898/60, David Bowes-Lyon
to Rex Leeper (31 February 1942).
54 K. R. GRAHAM
liked and trusted him, whereas there is plenty of evidence of the extent
to which Crossman was mistrusted, at least by the British.”100
Whatever the case, Delmer’s work quickly drew admiration from all
the right places. This admiration was not based on evidence of successful
morale subversion. Regardless of Delmer’s own political beliefs, his
cynical, essentialized conception of Germany satisfied the Vansittartist
climate, anticipating and articulating the developing PWE orthodoxy. As
the Germanophobic perspective moved into the ascendant, expressly ideo-
logical operations such as Crossman’s Sender der Europäischen Revolution
became untenable. PWE’s Germany was no longer something to reason
with, but rather something to seduce and manipulate. After Crossman’s
departure for North Africa, Delmer became head of PWE’s German
Section and ultimately director of clandestine propaganda to enemy and
occupied Europe.101 His promotion meant a damnable Germany.
Why was PWE so enthusiastic about all of these elaborate plans for
clandestine propaganda when they had the tremendous broadcasting
power of the BBC at their disposal? Michael Balfour suggests that Camp-
bell Stuart coveted secrecy, believing that foreign propaganda would be
undermined if propagandists had to justify their work to a critical audi-
ence at home.102 In the months that followed Stuart’s departure, PWE
preserved this conspiratorial mode, so there is certainly some merit to
Balfour’s reasoning. But the dynamic political situation in 1940 suggests
a much more pervasive change in the air. Stephanie Seul’s recent research
into the use of the BBC European Service during the German occupation
of Norway in April 1940 suggests that the broadcaster’s main attraction
to their audience—the claim to truth and objectivity—was compromised
by dissonance between the policies of the Service Departments on which
it depended for information, and the journalistic principles to which it
100 Howe, The Black Game, 261. Walmsley reported that despite Crossman’s formidable
intellect he “was influenced with astonishing ease, provided that he was not asked to
change his mind in public and especially if the conclusion which he was asked to adopt
was original or had some publicity-value”. TNA FO 898/547, Walmsley, “A Study of
R.H.S. Crossman and D.S. Delmer in the Time of the Political Warfare Executive” (17
September 1973) (c. 1948–50).
101 Nicholas Pronay and Philip M. Taylor, “‘An Improper Use of Broadcasting…’
The British Government and Clandestine Radio Propaganda Operations against Germany
During the Munich Crisis and After”, Journal of Contemporary History 19.3 (1984): 8.
aspired.103 Later, there was great resistance from within the BBC to bend
its editorial line for propaganda purposes. This may help to account for
why, from the spring of 1940, propagandists were encouraged to develop
new lines of thought.
Filling the Ranks, Affirming the Orthodoxy

David Welch argues that prior to the First World War “[t]he rise of
Germanophobia in Britain was a result of the growing fear of losing
imperial prestige and territories.”104 Certainly, there is an element of
imperial neurosis at play within PWE; as subsequent chapters will suggest,
Germanophobic sentiment offered a means of distinguishing the German
“Other” from hale and healthy Britain. By the time of the Second World
War, things had changed. Reducing PWE’s worldview to imperial neurosis
risks simplifying a dynamic epistemology that drew directly and indirectly
on broader social and cultural currents. As Anthony J. Nicholls argues,
Second World War Germanophobia may have been nonpartisan, but “it
was always ambivalent and hedged with reservations.”105 In this context,
an apposite understanding of the supposed German national character
reflected the worldview of a particular social milieu and helped to cement
the legitimacy of new ideas in the propaganda war. Both Voigt and Vansit-
tart dismissed the “vulgar Marxist” argument that Nazism represented a
reactionary dictatorship of monopoly capitalism, instead insisting that it
was a natural consequence of a unique convergence between the German
mentality and the nation’s history. In the dispute between Crossman and
Voigt, which occurred in the context of increasingly anti-German rhetoric
inside the department, Voigt was dismissed not because his ideas were
out of step with the emergent tendency, but because he had no patron.
Voigt’s argument and his record as a propagandist would have had to have
103 Stephanie Seul, “‘Plain, Unvarnished News’? The BBC German Service and Cham-
berlain’s Propaganda Campaign Directed at Nazi Germany, 1938–1940”, Media History
21.4 (2015): 11.
Wikileaks, ed. David Welch (London: Tauris, 2014), 40.
Jordan (London: Tauris, 1997), 26.
56 K. R. GRAHAM
been exceptional for Lockhart to stand up to Dalton.106 Voigt’s position

cannot have been helped by his rejection of black propaganda, a mode
particularly favoured by Delmer and his powerful supporters.
In his colourful history of PWE, Howe acknowledges that while
Britain’s upper classes may have been drawn towards secret work with
the SIS and SOE, “the secret propaganda departments… were never
the Establishment’s happy hunting ground.”107 While there is truth to
this, propaganda was hardly an egalitarian pursuit; Oxford, Cambridge,
and the exclusive public schools were very well represented at PWE.108
Indeed, failing some prior connection to a senior figure such as Leeper,
the trappings of elite education went a long way to gaining a position
as a propagandist. Fresh from his Oxford graduation, Robert Walmsley
joined Department EH’s intelligence section on the back of a “Dear
Sir” letter addressed to the FO News Department.109 Howe made a
similar ovation in 1941, offering his insight not as a graduate (he left
Oxford without a degree) but as a decidedly cultured and well-travelled
journeyman printer.110
By its nature a process that attracted individuals of social and intellec-
tual affinity, recruitment played a fundamental role in bolstering intellec-
tual tendencies over the course of the war. Between them, Crossman and
Delmer had a considerable influence on the contours of British foreign
propaganda, both having expanded their fiefdoms by recruiting talented
and like-minded propagandists. This practice extended to British citizens
as well as European exiles, substantially altering the demographics of the
department from its genteel origins under Stuart.
Aside from occasional anecdotes recorded in memoirs, little has been
written about PWE’s European collaborators. This is partly a reflection
of the incomplete archival record. The Foreign Office ordered that docu-
ments relating to the identities of aliens working for secret organizations
106 Dubbed “the sycophantic Scot” by Cruickshank, Lockhart did not tend to joust
with his superiors: The Fourth Arm, 25.
108 Elkes also makes this observation: “Assessing the ‘Other Germany’: The Polit-
ical Warfare Executive on Public Opinion and Resistance in GERMANY, 1943–1945”,
Working Towards the Führer: Essays in Honour of Sir Ian Kershaw, ed. Anthony McElligott
and Tim Kirk (Manchester: Manchester UP, 2003), 225.
were to be destroyed at the war’s end. Many post-war accounts subse-

quently made use of noms de guerre in order to protect the identities of
European collaborators who had subsequently resumed careers in govern-
ment, academia, and the press. Recently released SIS files go some way
to resolving this historical omission. The members of the anti-fascist
Neu Beginnen group whom Crossman recruited included Dr Werner
Klatt, Baron Waldemar von Knoerringen, Erwin Karl Schoettle, Dr
Helmut von Rauschenplat, and Richard Löwenthal.111 Speaking perhaps
to Crossman’s own academic tastes as much as to the demands of the job
at hand, each of these figures was a prominent intellectual.
With the possible exception of Dalton, PWE’s political overseers felt a
degree of disquiet about these left-wing collaborators. There is an air of
“red scare” in the story of Rauschenplat, for example. After the dissolu-
tion of Europäischen Revolution, he was recommended for further work
with the German Section but was instead dismissed, “not because we had
anything definite against him but there was a feeling of uneasiness about
him and we concluded that it would be better if the Department got rid
of him.”112 While details are elusive, one may speculate that Loeb and
Voigt’s contemporary slandering of Neu Beginnen cannot have helped
matters. Certainly, other aliens of dubious character had no great trouble
finding their way into propaganda work.
No less than Crossman, Delmer saw the value of German and Austrian
émigrés in producing subversive propaganda. Like Crossman, he preferred
to bring in people with whom he had a pre-existing relationship and who
had sound anti-fascist pedigrees. Delmer’s first recruits were brothers Max
and Heinz Braun whom he knew from his time in Germany.113 A Saar-
land SPD politician and journalist, Max Braun became a singular figure in
Delmer’s unit during the early days of Gustav Siegfried. When compared
to Neu Beginnen, he was no radical. Still, he was initially regarded with
111 TNA KV 5-63, SIS, “The Neu Beginnen Group” (6 November 1944); TNA KV
6-106, Mr Murray to Stewart Roberts, Memo (4 January 1941); Renaud also mentions
that Paul and Evelyn Anderson and Karl Anders participated in this operation, but they
are not mentioned in these SIS documents: Renaud, “Restarting Socialism”, 87.
112 TNA KV 6-106, Chambers to Hollis, “Dr. Helmut Von RAUSCHENPLAT”,
Memo (20 June 1944).
113 IWM Recording 5132/02/01-02, “Frank Lynder” Interview (1981).
58 K. R. GRAHAM
a degree of suspicion, albeit for very different reasons. PWE’s security

reports stressed that:
[there] is nothing in our files to cast doubt on his claim to be an out

and out anti-Nazi. P.W.E. are nevertheless anxious about him as their
propaganda to enemy countries is based almost entirely on his informa-
tion. Although he cannot be suspected of sympathising with the Germans,
there is, nevertheless, some doubt as to him [sic] character and the purity
of his motives. His reputation in refugee circles is not good.
Braun, it seems, had been careless with Sopade funds; worse still, “when
he arrived in [Britain], he gave information to S.I.S. about other refugees
which was, at any rate partly, inaccurate and probably motivated by malice
[sic].”114 Effectively Delmer’s pet socialists, the brothers Braun had by
1942 effectively broken with those remnants of the SPD living in British
exile.115 Ernst Adam was another émigré taken in by Delmer. Adam had
served in the Republican Army during the Spanish Civil War, which is
where he first met foreign-correspondent Delmer.116 After Spain, Adam
had joined Willi Münzenberg along with Alexander Maas on a freedom
station in Paris before being recruited directly by Delmer for black work
at PWE.117 Maas and his wife Margit would also join the German Section
in due course.
From London’s refugee community, Delmer sought out confirmed
anti-fascists while avoiding anyone he might have regarded as an ideo-
logue. To this end, the Pioneer Corps offered a common route into
propaganda work. A British Army unit, the Pioneer Corps was unusual
in that it allowed enemy aliens to serve and thus had a secondary func-
tion as a guarantor of political dependability. Later, PWE figures including
Rene George Halkett, Franz Josef Leuwar, Peter Seckelmann, Ernst Hein-
rich, Leonhard Albert, and Hans Bermann all volunteered for the Pioneer
Corps at the earliest opportunity.118 Halkett was a minor aristocrat with
loose KPD affiliations. Leuwar (aka Frank Lynder), the son of Jewish
professionals in Bremen, made his way to the UK in 1936. Seckelmann,
114 TNA KV 2-1912, SIS, “Max Braun” (2 December 1941).

115 TNA KV 2-1912, SIS, “Max Braun” (21 April 1942).
116 IWM Recording 5132/02/01-02, “Frank Lynder” Interview (1981).
117 TNA KV 2-2193, SIS, “PF103167 Ernst ADAM” (27 May 1954).
118 TNA KV 2-3667, Ernest Bevin to James Chuter Ede, Letter (12 November 1945).
who performed as the vulgarian speaker on Gustav Siegfried Eins, was

a journalist-turned-novelist who left Berlin behind in 1937 because of
the Nazi crimes perpetrated against the Jews. Following a similar route,
historian Francis Ludwig Carsten was in fact a member of Neu Beginnen
before the war but later claimed to have grown sceptical of the utility of
the group’s anti-fascist activities inside Germany.119
One of Delmer’s more unusual recruits was Louis de Wohl. A
Hungarian astrologer of some notoriety, de Wohl came to PWE first via
British Naval Intelligence (NID) and then SOE. De Wohl was initially
recruited by NID on the “English misapprehension that Hitler and his
Nazi henchmen were obsessed with astrology and regularly consulted
a Swiss-born expert, Karl Ernst Krafft.”120 When this plan came to
nothing, the astrologer was shuffled around rather than discharged. It
seems de Wohl was the source of some anxiety in intelligence circles.
“[An] extremely clever man with multifarious connections and a very
singular background… guided no doubt solely by self-interest,”121 de
Wohl was effectively fobbed off to PWE because NID worried about
how he would react if he was cut loose. Delmer soon put him to work
producing a subversive astrological German-language magazine as well
as advising on another of Delmer’s subversive radio stations, the short-
lived Astrologie und Okkultismus . But de Wohl was hardly Delmer’s most
questionable recruit.
Hans Zech-Nenntwich (aka Nansen) was twenty-seven years old when,
in 1943, he arrived in Britain having previously served in the Condor
Legion in Spain, before becoming a police officer, and finally joining the
Waffen SS on the Eastern Front.122 According to interrogation reports,
119 IWM Recording 4483, “Francis Ludwig Carsten”, Interview (1979). Adding a
critical gloss to Carsten’s memoirs, Renaud suggests that, “[w]ith the benefit of several
decades of hindsight from his comfortable university post in England, Carsten could
transform the immediate failures of the anti-Nazi resistance into a reassuring success story
for (West) German democracy”: “Restarting Socialism”, 50.
120 P.R.J. Winter, “Libra Rising: Hitler, Astrology and British Intelligence, 1940–43”,
Intelligence and National Security 21.3 (2006): 398. The idea was that if the British had
their own astrologer reading from the same charts as Krafft, they could anticipate Krafft’s
advice to the Führer and act accordingly.
121 TNA KV 2/2821, SIS, “Minute 171” (6 October 1942); TNA KV 2/2821, SIS,
“Minute 148” (22 July 1942).
122 TNA KV 2-395, SIS, “Draft Minute to M.I.19 Thro’ M.I.14(d)” (21 October
1943).
60 K. R. GRAHAM
Zech-Nenntwich was by conviction (and rather incongruously) “violently

anti-Nazi.” In 1943, he was arrested by Nazi authorities; he claimed this
was because he had made contact with the Polish resistance movement,
but Henning Pieper’s research suggests that he was actually arrested for
rape.123 He escaped prison and deserted his SS unit in Poland, travel-
ling to Stockholm and from there to Britain with the assistance of the
SIS. His interrogators were of the opinion that “this man… is [truly]
disgusted and revolted by what he has seen in Poland and that the senti-
ments and views which he is expressing are genuine.” He willingly gave all
the information he could to the British authorities, hence his good treat-
ment and subsequent consideration for propaganda work. With a Waffen
SS officer at his disposal, Delmer produced what one colleague described
as an “off-beat” clandestine station called Kampfgruppe York directed at
Zech-Nenntwich’s old comrades.124 This repentant Nazi’s politics and
aspirations give some hint as to why Delmer was willing to take him on
board.
After the war, Zech-Nenntwich applied for work with the Control
Commission in occupied Germany. In vetting him, a British officer
commented that Zech-Nenntwich “spent one whole morning trying to
convince me that he is an utterly repentant German, anglophile and more
Lord Van Sittart than his friend Lord Van Sittart himself [sic].”125 Zech-
Nenntwich arrived at PWE after Vansittart’s departure so it is unclear
how—or even if—he managed to make Vansittart’s acquaintance, but
he evidently clued into a political orientation that would satisfy his
new employers (as Goebbels’s strawman synecdoche for British aggres-
sion, Vansittart was as notorious in Germany as he was in Britain, so
Zech-Nenntwich’s familiarity with Vansittartism is hardly surprising).
Of all people, it took this Waffen SS officer to describe, in the Vansit-
tartist mould, “the perfect German type, which he admits does not
yet exist, but which he sees in the Oxford graduate, who combines
culture with a V.C.”126 When he was first recruited, Zech-Nenntwich
123 Henning Pieper, Fegelein’s Horsemen and Genocidal Warfare: The SS Cavalry
Brigade in the Soviet Union (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 188.
124 IWM Cat No 5038, Peter W., Unpublished Memoir, “Memories of Political Warfare
1942–45”.
125 TNA KV 2-396, Wing Commander HN Roffey to Lt. Col. Holt, Letter, “Mr.
Nansen” (6 October 1945).
126 TNA KV 2-396, Wing Commander HN Roffey to Lt. Col. Holt, Letter, “Mr.
Nansen” (6 October 1945).
also expressed a desire not “to associate in any way with émigré circles
which in his opinion do not represent the best interests of Germany.”127
Zech-Nenntwich was on the PWE staff until the last month of the war
in Europe, at which point tensions finally boiled over.128 One of the
more credulous accounts of his activities states that “[his] work on ‘black’
propaganda in the last twelve months, has not altogether been a source
of satisfaction to him. Some of the more journalistic devices of this
Goebbels-like warfare have jarred on his self-respect.”129 Less compli-
mentary were Foreign Office reports claiming that Zech-Nenntwich had
“been behaving in an obstructive manner during the past few weeks and
no longer fits in with the unit.”130 After the war, he aided the British
occupation force by interrogating German prisoners. In 1964, he was
convicted of war crimes for his participation in a 1941 massacre of 5200
Polish Jews.131
Delmer was a pragmatist and an opportunist who spent a seemingly
inordinate amount of time staffing his department. Politically dubious
European exiles were not the only ones who had to meet with Delmer’s
personal approval. Despite working long hours during which he main-
tained exhaustive attention to detail in propaganda production, Delmer
found time to interview not just potential speakers and writers, but also
auxiliary staff and secretaries. Even the PWE listening post, established
to monitor foreign broadcasts, was manned by “3 or 4 girls that spoke
German that Delmer had found.”132 Anecdotal reports among the British
staff consistently place Delmer in the interview room, a singular figure
who acted as gatekeeper to PWE’s German Section. An element of class
camaraderie emerges in these accounts. “Peter W,” whose unpublished
memoir resides at the archive of the Imperial War Museums, came to
PWE as a naive twenty-year-old university graduate.133 Following his
127 TNA KV 2-397, SIS, “1st Detailed Interrogation of Obersturmführer of the Waffen
SS Hanswalter [sic] ZECH-NENNTWICH” (13 August 1943).
128 TNA KV 2-396, SIS, Letter to Dick White (12 April 1945).
129 TNA KV 2-396, SIS, “Memorandum on NANSEN” (18 April 1945).
130 TNA KV 2-396, SIS, “Joacim Nansen [sic]” (15 March 1945).
131 “Surrender of Escaped S.S. Officer”, The Times (8 August 1964).
132 IWM Recording 5134/04/03-04, “Harold Kilner Robin”, Interviewed by Ellic
Howe (1981).
133 IWM Cat No 5038, Peter W., “Memories of Political Warfare 1942–45”.
62 K. R. GRAHAM
interview with Delmer, he speculated about “whether my being a fellow

Old Pauline [St Paul’s School], albeit of a different generation, might
have influenced Delmer.” The proverbial tap on the shoulder was a reality
at PWE.
In other circumstances, even the loosest of social fellowships paid
off. Having spent much of the war in what is now Zimbabwe, Muriel
Spark was newly arrived in London and unemployed when she encoun-
tered what she described in her autobiography as some “extraordinary
luck.”134 Spark happened to have a novel, Elders and Betters by Ivy
Compton-Burnett, on her person when she visited the employment
bureau. According to Spark,
[the] recruiting administrator... leaned over and turned over my book,

which I had laid on the desk, so that she could read the spit.
‘Ivy Compton-Burnett,’ she said with great enthusiasm. We were soon
embarked on a long session of literary talk. I recall that I said Ivy
Compton-Burnett resembled the Greek dramatists in her stark themes,
and that basically her art was surrealistic. My new friend thought
Miss Compton-Burnett one of the most intelligent women writing in
English.135
A short while later, Spark’s new friend “slid aside her card-index box and
took another card out of her draw, remarking that she imagined I was
looking for an interesting job.” It is difficult to image Spark’s “extraor-
dinary luck” holding out had she been reading a volume by Djuna
Barnes or Raymond Chandler.136 Incidentally, she too places Delmer
in the final interview room, a figure “immensely large and fat with a
black beard.”137 Delmer dedicated an improbable amount of energy to
134 Muriel Spark, Curriculum Vitae: A Volume of Autobiography (London: Constable,

1992), 145.
135 Spark, Curriculum Vitae, 146.
136 As Pierre Bourdieu observes, “[t]aste classifies, and it classifies the classifier”: Bour-
dieu, “From Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste” (trans. Richard
Nice) The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, ed. Vincent B. Leitch (New York
and London: Norton, 2001), 1813.
137 Spark, Curriculum Vitae, 147.
surrounding himself with like-minded people. He may have been wrong

about Spark, however; she worked for PWE for only a few months.138
As Spark’s brief propaganda career suggests, PWE certainly attracted
talented women but, more often than not, placed them in support roles.
In 1942, Mauricette Murray (née von Kuenberg, wife of PWE Balkans
section chief Ralph Murray) was considered for a position as a censor-
monitor to ensure broadcasters adhered to their scripts. Murray, who
spoke French, Italian, German, Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish and
had a “slight knowledge of Dutch and Flemish,” was perhaps overqual-
ified for this position.139 While quite a few women lent their voices
to broadcasting, or were employed as illustrators or typists, only Elis-
abeth Barker, an Oxford-educated BBC journalist and the daughter
of a Cambridge Professor of Political Science, held a senior position,
becoming Balkans section chief after Ralph Murray, her immediate supe-
rior, was promoted.140
PWE had a reputation for heterogeneity, which was at odds with
contemporary departments associated with the conservative Foreign
Office and other war departments. At the same time, however, the contin-
gencies of the war and the structure of British society placed limits on the
composition of PWE. Subsequent chapters will explore the implications of
this dynamic for British perspectives on Germany and National Socialism
over the course of the war.
Conclusion
Stuart, Voigt, Crossman, and Delmer were significant figures in British
foreign propaganda, not just for their immediate influence on the
production of propaganda but also because their roles are indicative of
broader intellectual tendencies. British subversive propaganda imagined
138 At least, this is what has been surmised from a hastily sketched account of her tax
bill from the period: NLS ACC10607/1, Spark, General Correspondence.
139 TNA FO 898/51, Halliday to Bowes-Lyon, Memorandum, “R.U. Censor-
Monitors” (12 January 1942); Mauricette Murray reportedly moved into Swedish-
language broadcasting later in the war.
140 In an interview, Barker later confessed: “I was never a feminist and I often think
any good feminist would have regarded me as a traitor and a rat because I succeeded in
getting on myself but by and large I failed to fight the cause of women”: IWM Recording
10606/3/1-2 Elisabeth Barker BBC interviewed by Leonard Miall (1983).
64 K. R. GRAHAM
the Germany that it addressed, a creative act that was preceded by an envi-
ronment in which influence, patronage, and a congenial attitude could
determine a career just as easily as talent. The composition of PWE
may well have been extraordinarily varied, as Lockhart wrote, but this
was relative only to contemporary wartime organizations.141 It was over-
whelmingly an upper-middle-class organization with strong ties to the
British gentry and aristocracy, which, as subsequent chapters will demon-
strate, reproduced the intellectual traditions and proclivities of the British
Empire’s elite.
Cumulative experience may have been a driving factor in the devel-
opment of new modes of propaganda, but the influence of personality,
prejudice, and patronage cannot be discounted. With the transition from
Department EH to SOE, the German question offered a chance to exer-
cise chauvinism. This was a dynamic milieu in which alternative tendencies
jostled for supremacy. As an outspoken Marxist with (at least for a time)
radical sympathies, Crossman’s anti-fascism was assured. Nevertheless,
the wartime ideological crisis brought his politics under contention only
weeks after he lost the protection of his ministerial patron. Meanwhile,
Delmer’s work was supported in advance by conservative senior officials
such as Leeper and Vansittart, and his operations were kept alive without
substantial evidence of success. Despite interwar suspicions that Delmer
was a fellow traveller of the far right, his expertise of Nazi Germany won
him enough backing that, by 1943, he could air a clandestine station
hosted by a genuine Waffen SS prisoner of war.
Once established within PWE, cynical visions of a supposed German
national character provided axioms which preceded new intelligence.
Before long, Delmer’s Germany came to mean, first, a coherent audi-
ence inherently vulnerable to subversion, and only second, a subject for
study and consideration. Despite a poverty of evidence speaking to its
value, clandestine propaganda was expanded from 1940, with the largest
growth experienced after Delmer joined the department in mid-1941.
This expansion was premised on a conception of Germany that had begun
to take hold during the summer of 1940. As subsequent chapters will
141 Alongside soldiers and civil servants, Lockhart wrote that PWE fielded “journalists,
business men, advertising experts, schoolmasters, authors, literary agents, farmers, barris-
ters, stockbrokers, psychologists, university dons, and a landscape gardener. I do not think
that any one profession provided any initial advantage of training. A propagandist is born
not made”: Comes the Reckoning (London: Putnam, 1947), 156.
demonstrate, alternative tendencies such as a neo-Freudian psychosocial

orientation ultimately challenged this view. And yet, elements of this
tendency remained with the department until the war’s end.
CHAPTER 3
The Brazen Horde: British Propagandists

and the Course of German History
This chapter will examine the role that the historical imagination played
in the development of British subversive propaganda directed at Nazi
Germany. Charged with subverting the morale of German servicemen and
workers, British propagandists looked first to history for insight into the
enemy’s mind. Was barbarism inherent to the supposed German national
character, or did the Third Reich represent a revolutionary break with the
past? Had Prussian militarism returned under a new guise, or was Nazism
an irreducibly modern phenomenon with the potential to emerge in any
industrialized nation? British propagandists believed that answers to these
questions would not only hasten the end of the war but also lead to a
future of European peace and stability.
The British foreign service maintained a culture of historical thinking
from the nineteenth century, reinforced during the war by the hasty
mobilization of professional historians in research and intelligence roles.
It was perhaps inevitable then that history quickly joined the vanguard
of those disciplines by which the Allies came to know their enemy.
Reflecting mid-century tensions in both British and German histori-
ography, the debate around the course of German history was hotly
contested within the foreign propaganda community. The policy-focus of
many military and diplomatic histories has left unchallenged the under-
lying ideas that informed the subversive war. While policy determined the

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68 K. R. GRAHAM
broad parameters within which PWE operated, the department’s historical

perspective was not dictated from the top down but rather emerged as a
discourse between policy-makers and the often-combative propagandists.
British foreign propaganda must be understood against the backdrop of
a flourishing transnational discourse on Germany, a discourse that British
propagandists were cognizant of and contributed to.
Since the 1990s, a new genre of studies has emerged that emphasizes
the transnational nature of writings on national character. Angela Schwarz
demonstrates in her exemplary survey of interwar political journalism that
British thinking on Nazism was determined by “traditional images of
Germany, historically forged ideas of national character, and experiences
of the Weimar Republic.”1 More recently, Oliver Lubrich points to the
way in which foreign observers inside the Third Reich were influenced
by established interpretations or “[c]ultural patterns”, which meant that
“foreigners’ views not only mirrored what was happening at the time but
also represented the convergence of historical traditions.”2 Only by posi-
tioning PWE’s understanding of Germany in this transnational context
can any sense be made of the department’s historical imagination.
Placing PWE’s historical imagination in a transnational perspective,
this chapter tracks political and intellectual developments to establish
a loose periodization. Within the propaganda community, thinking on
Germany and on German history can be divided into three phases. Under
the Chamberlain government, foreign propaganda was directed towards
the “good German”—the civilized and sensible European rather than
the barbarous Nazi. The good German was premised on a dichotomous
understanding of Germany that had wide appeal in the interwar period
and reflected a proliferation of writing that suited a range of ideolog-
ical purposes.3 British conservatives, German republicans, and National
Socialist ideologues alike recognized yawning fissures in German society.
1 Angela Schwarz, “Image and Reality: British Visitors to National Socialist Germany”,
European History Quarterly 23 (1993): 397; see also, Schwarz, Die Reise ins Dritte Reich:
britische Augenzeugen in nationalsozialistischen Deutschland, 1933–1939 (Göttingen:
Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1993).
2 Oliver Lubrich, Travels in the Reich, 1933–1945: Foreign Authors Report from Germany
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 7–8.
3 As Antonia Grunenberg demonstrates, dichotomous thinking in Germany has a long
tradition that predates the era of fascism and anti-8fascism: “Dichotomous Political
Thought in Germany before 1933”, New German Critique 67 (1996): 111–122.
3 THE BRAZEN HORDE: BRITISH PROPAGANDISTS … 69
The editor of the Frankfurter Zeitung, one of the Weimar Republic’s few
newspapers ostensibly free of the era’s notorious press partisanship, even
claimed that his paper stood for that “other Germany which, through
the centuries, again and again interrupted sabre-rattling self-laceration.”4
Hopes for the good German did not last, however.
In the period after the formation of Churchill’s War Coalition in May
1940 and the London Blitz that followed, British attitudes to Germany
were predictably more bellicose. As the previous chapter demonstrates,
for British foreign service personnel, this change in attitude was advanced
by a change in staff as much as it was by a hardening of hearts. History
now demonstrated that the other Germany had long since been subsumed
by barbarism and that the Third Reich was the inevitable revival of an
ahistorical German character familiar to Britain most recently as Prussian
militarism. The phenomenon of Vansittartism exemplified this new pitch
of bi-partisan Germanophobia. Certainly, this tendency suited the mood
of the time, but for propagandists with a vested interest in the realities
of German history, hawkish Germanophobia had numerous practical and
ideological limitations. As Allied fortunes improved and thoughts turned
to the possibility of peace and reconstruction, a different perspective
on German history tempered the earlier, more abject, Germanophobia.
This apparent synthesis of ideas derived from social history rather than
the intellectual (and even metaphysical) approach taken by some Vansit-
tartists. In concert with broader historiographical developments, the
pioneers of this new phase in PWE’s historical imagination were polit-
ical exiles from Germany—dissident social democrats and communists,
many of whom had ties to the anti-fascist Neu Beginnen group—who
had found work in the propaganda war, as well as German historians,
social scientists, and critical theorists employed in the American Office
of Strategic Services (OSS) and Office of War Information (OWI).
While these three phases in PWE’s historical imagination suggest that
the department possessed considerable flexibility, intellectual inertia, and
4 Heinrich Simon, chief editor of the Frankfurter Zeitung in 1931, as quoted in Peter
Gay, Weimar Culture: The Outsider as Insider (New York: W.W. Norton & Company,
2001), 76; of course, by this time the liberal Frankfurter Zeitung was half owned by IG
Farben and, according to contemporary reports, was orienting editorial policy in favour of
industrial interests: Modris Eksteins, The Limits of Reason: The German Democratic Press
and the Collapse of Weimar Germany (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1975), 173–179.
70 K. R. GRAHAM
continuities in personnel mean that firm distinctions are difficult to artic-

ulate. Even radical departures in thought, such as the Allies’ novel policy
of re-education and denazification, represented a palimpsest of ideas
rather than a new paradigm. A reading of these propagandists’ histor-
ical imagination—contextualized within the broader interwar and wartime
transnational discourse on German history—provides for a deeper under-
standing of British perceptions of Germany, National Socialism, and
Europe.
This chapter will consider several key features of British propagandists’
historical imagination and how these features contributed to intellec-
tual tendencies that underpinned subversive propaganda. The study of
Germany’s recent and ancient past granted propagandists insight into
an alien mentality and, as subsequent chapters will demonstrate, even
provided a foundation for other areas of research such as psycholog-
ical surveys of German prisoners of war. In the hands of academics and
amateurs alike, history made substantial contributions to the direction of
the propaganda war. But the reverse was also true. Many of the ideas that
circulated at PWE anticipated post-war academic trends, including the
professional joust between social history and the old Geistesgeschichte,
as well as the rise of European history as a subject of study in British
universities, not to mention significant historiographical tendencies such
as the Sonderweg turn. “The historian should not aim at completeness,”
wrote R.G. Collingwood, “he should aim at relevance.”5 In their prag-
matism and their opportunism, British propagandists certainly embodied
this maxim, and often to their profit.
Hermann Rauschning
and the Two Germanies Theory
The study of history was central to British officialdom’s understanding of
Germany and National Socialism, an attitude reflected in (and certainly
encouraged by) the large cohort of professional historians engaged in war
work and especially propaganda. E.H. Carr, for example, found himself
chairing a propaganda advisory committee in the first months of the war,
while Oxford ancient historian C.E. Stevens was recruited as a propaganda
5 R.G. Collingwood, “Notes on Historiography”, The Principles of History, ed. W.H.

Dray and Jan van der Dussen. (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1999), 241.
intelligence officer. Christopher Dawson lent his considerable expertise to

the question of religious-themed propaganda directed at Germany. And
A.J.P. Taylor was employed to write a history of the Weimar Republic
for the benefit of the British occupying forces, the thesis of which he
expanded into The Course of German History in 1945.
But history was never the preserve of the ivory tower, particu-
larly within Foreign Office circles. British diplomats and planners had
history in their blood. T.G. Otte and Douglas Newton both demon-
strate the strong affinity for historical thinking in British diplomatic circles
throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a product of
élite education reinforced by the professional culture of the Foreign
Office.6 As Newton writes, the Foreign Office of early twentieth century
had a pronounced “Oxbridge esprit de corps.”7 Fostered by this common
social background and education, a privileged and dedicated cohort of
civil servants embodied “the Foreign Office mind,” a common world-
view that was for much of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries
characterized by, among other things, a strong historical consciousness.8
The Edwardian Foreign Office thus projected “a set of broad-based
departmental principles, experiences and traditions that had seeped into
institutional memory… [culminating in] a departmental view of the
world, and Britain’s place in it.”9 While PWE recruited from more diverse
avenues than did the fin-de-siècle foreign service, the previous chapter
demonstrates that Cambridge, Oxford, and the public schools were still
well represented. Otte points to this common heritage, and particularly
to the influence of Balliol College, in engendering the diplomatic service
with an “emphasis on history… [and] the political lessons it gave, as a
source of practical wisdom, and for the immutable principles of political
life that it illuminated.”10 A generation later, British foreign propagan-
dists inherited and embraced this instrumentalist attitude to history. One
time chief of Department EH’s German section, Frederick Voigt invoked
6 T.G. Otte, The Foreign OfficeMind: The Making of British Foreign Policy, 1865–1914
(Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2011); Douglas Newton, British Policy and the Weimar
Republic, 1918–1919 (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1997).
7 Newton, British Policy and the Weimar Republic, 54–56.
8 Otte, The Foreign OfficeMind, 16.
9 Otte, The Foreign OfficeMind, 6.
10 Otte, The Foreign OfficeMind, 15–16.
72 K. R. GRAHAM
the Battle of Bosworth, as well as Edward Gibbon’s account of Aure-

olus in the siege of Milan and Francis Bacon’s King Henry VII to justify
a campaign of rumours directed against the German military.11 Carr,
arguably one of the more accomplished historians to emerge from the
British civil service, embraced instrumentalism wholeheartedly; “[l]ike
many civil servants,” writes Richard J. Evans, “he was only interested
in what would serve the making of policy.”12 Shortly after the war,
when Bloomsbury novelist and senior propagandist David Garnett was
preparing PWE’s official history, the executive committee asked that he
“show the relative values of ‘black’ and ‘white’ propaganda, since one
of the principal objects of the history was to provide a lesson for the
future.”13 And Heinz Koeppler, an émigré historian who spent much of
the war writing for the BBC German Service before becoming a director
of the Wilton Park re-education programme, wrote that “[h]istory at
Wilton Park is an attempt to make them [German POWs] think afresh
in the hope that this will guide their future action as responsible citizens
of a free society.”14 As Peter J. Beck observes, many mid-century policy-
makers and other elites were enamoured of this approach to history,
“championing the concept of a ‘usable past’ linking, even subordinating,
historical writing to present-day objectives.”15 While PWE was never a
full-blooded avatar of the Foreign Office, the department shared from its
inception much the same intellectual and ideological milieu.
Of course, historians were never valued as much as history itself.
In an environment dominated by immediate practical concerns, profes-
sional opinions were often subject to official censure or to vacillating
internal politics. On historical matters, the expertise of an Oxford don was
weighed against the experience of a tabloid journalist or a civil servant.
While the instrumentalist approach to history meant that professional
historians cannot be said to have wholly determined the department’s
11 TNA FO 898/3, Frederic Voigt, Memorandum (1 August 1940).

12 Richard J. Evans, “Prologue: What is History?—Now”, What is History Now? ed.
David Cannadine (Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 3.
13 TNA FO 898/13, “Minutes of 30th Policy Meeting” (6 May 1946).
14 As quoted in David Welch, “Citizenship and Politics: The Legacy of Wilton Park for
Post-War Reconstruction”, Contemporary European History 6.2 (1997): 213.
15 Peter J. Beck, Using History, Making British Policy: The Treasury and the Foreign
Office, 1950–1976 (Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 5–6.
historical imagination, the fortunes of historical advisors are certainly

indicative of the prevailing intellectual winds.
Hans Rudolf Vaget argues that for wartime observers “the challenge
to an understanding of German history was not so much to explain the
existence of evil…, as it was to explain the cognation and coexistence of
evil and good.”16 A common response to this challenge was signalled
variously by the invocation of two opposing Germanies or the inherent
dualism of the German mentality. The two Germanies theory supposed a
tension between culture and politics in the development of the German
nation. Proponents of this approach sought to rationalize the praise-
worthy tradition of German Dichter und Denker with a contemporaneous
trend towards what satirist Karl Kraus dubbed Richter und Henker. For
mid-century conservative British commentators, this idea was typically
bound to a tradition of anti-Prussian sentiment. Schwarz describes at
length the two Germanies theory as a feature of British travel literature
during the interwar period, the origins of which she traces to the nine-
teenth century and the Franco-Prussian war.17 The idea of two Germanies
was certainly not a wartime novelty, nor was it exclusive to Britain. As
Mark W. Clark notes, the alienation of German culture from politics was
a key theme in leading German historian Friedrich Meinecke’s thought, a
problem that, in August 1914, he hoped might soon be resolved.18 After
the Second World War, Meinecke reintroduced the idea of two Germa-
nies under a new guise as a basis for his defence of German idealism in
light of the recent “German catastrophe”; his late methodology viewed
Nazism as “a sort of parasitic sub-growth, traceable to the negative forces
which had first come to the fore in the French Revolution, and existing
alongside the generally healthy and positive development of the German
State.”19 For British observers at the outset of the war, the two Germa-
nies theory allowed for the expression of ambivalent feelings; at the same
time, it gave political warfare planners (and particularly those aligned with
the Conservative government’s appeasement policy) room to manoeuvre.
16 Hans Rudolf Vaget, “Vansittartism Revisited: Thomas Mann, Bertolt Brecht, and the
Threat of World War”, Publications of the English Goethe Society 82.1 (2013): 33.
17 Schwarz, “Image and Reality”, 385.
18 Mark W. Clark, Beyond Catastrophe: German Intellectuals and Cultural Renewal
After World War II, 1945–1955 (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2006), 20.
19 Ian Kershaw, The Nazi Dictatorship: Problems and Perspectives (4th Edition) (London:
Arnold, 2000), 7–8.
74 K. R. GRAHAM
As noted in the previous chapter, in 1938 a significant number of influ-

ential British politicians and civil servants resigned in protest over the
appeasement policy, not to return to their posts until May 1940. With
anti-appeasers temporarily side-lined, propagandists focused their atten-
tion on a promising target. Under the Chamberlain government, the
received view was that National Socialism represented only a fraction of
the German people and that appealing to “good Germans”—the argu-
ments frequently fell to metonyms for German cultural and intellectual
achievement most admired by bourgeois Britain such as Goethe, Kant,
and Bach (but never Marx)—might lead to an internal division sufficient
to overthrow the regime. Shaped by the debate around good Germans
and the promise of a nation divided, the propagandists were from the
outset employing the study of history to justify their strategy and identify
psychological weaknesses in their audience.
It is possible to follow this tendency in the propagandists’ thought by
looking at those advisors brought in to help develop British propaganda
in the first months of the war. Hermann Rauschning was a right-wing
German nationalist who, as a member of the NSDAP, rose to become
President of the Senate of Danzig before renouncing the Party and taking
up exile first in Britain and then in the United States. As a conserva-
tive among the predominantly left-wing community of German exiles, his
voice was uniquely suited to the prevailing opinion of policy-makers under
Chamberlain, for whom appeals to the good Germany were a priority. In
December 1939, Rauschning was invited to a meeting with senior foreign
propaganda staff; by early 1940, his book Hitler Speaks was widely circu-
lated within the department with translations being made into German
and French for distribution in Europe.20 Rauschning reflected the general
impulse towards a conservative iteration of the two Germanies theory that
was representative of PWE’s historical imagination during the Phoney
War. Like many German conservatives, Rauschning had long admired the
NSDAP’s anti-communist stance but was only won over to Nazism by
the Party’s strategic moralizing during the early 1930s. He proclaimed
that he was subsequently dismayed by the apparent radicalization of Nazi
20 TNA FO 898/4, “Note of a Conversation at Electra House” (6 December 1939);

TNA FO 898/5, Minutes “Electra House Co-ordination Committee” (13 March 1940);
TNA FO 898/5, Minutes “Electra House Co-ordination Committee” (29 February
1940); Hermann Rauschning, Hitler Speaks: A Series of Political Conversations with Adolf
Hitler on His Real Aims (London: Thornton Butterworth, 1939).
politics, understanding this as a divergence from the will of the people.

Like Meinecke, Rauschning argued that Germany’s normal and healthy
development had been derailed by the Great War and its aftermath.21
Giving succour to advocates of the conservative two Germanies theory,
Rauschning believed that by the late 1930s Nazism could no longer be
regarded as a mass movement; rather, Britain was facing down a ship
helmed by “a ruling minority of super-careerists.”22
Significantly, Rauschning interpreted Germany’s militant posturing
during the late 1930s as a strategy to achieve foreign policy goals and
not as the natural impulse of an immutable, bellicose German national
character. Indeed, Rauschning believed that “Hitler’s will to peace is an
undeniable fact”; at the same time, however, the “nihilism” at the heart of
Nazi ideology suggested that “nothing can be more irrational than to ask
what are the final demands of its ‘dynamic’ foreign policy.”23 Rauschning
was well regarded among Chamberlain’s foreign propagandists. They even
proposed putting him on the air with Franz Borkenau to discuss the
phenomenon of “Communazism,” an effort to show Germans that the
Nazi-Soviet non-aggression pact was the first step towards the Bolsheviza-
tion of Germany.24 Despite antithetical political convictions, Borkenau
and Rauschning shared a number of common threads in their interpre-
tation of Nazism. If Rauschning might be described as an independent
figure of the German right, Borkenau was an equally independent figure
of the left; having quit the KPD in 1929, Borkenau was at this time
sketching a tentative totalitarian theory that drew on Marx alongside soci-
ologist Vilfredo Pareto.25 Like Rauschning, Borkenau was convinced that
21 Rauschning argued this in his introduction to H.G. Baynes, Germany Possessed

(London: Jonathan Cape, 1941), 13.
22 Hermann Rauschning, Germany’s Revolution of Destruction, trans. E.W. Dickes
(London: Heinemann, 1939), 17, 33.
23 Rauschning, Germany’s Revolution of Destruction, 191–194.
24 Propagandists from outside Department EH suggested that Willi Münzenberg, the
communist agitprop master, might also make for a suitable sparring partner, although
Valentine Williams raised an objection: TNA FO 898/5, “Electra House Co-ordination
Committee” (29 February 1940).
25 William David Jones, The Lost Debate: German Socialist Intellectuals and Totali-
tarianism (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1999), 85. According to Dan Stone,
Borkenau’s experience, and rejection, of Communism offers a reason as to why he was
willing to go beyond orthodox Marxism in order to understand fascism: Stone, “Anti-
Fascist Europe Comes to Britain: Theorising Fascism as a Contribution to Defeating it,”
76 K. R. GRAHAM
Nazi ideology, “to the extent that such a thing existed, was more or
less irrelevant to the direction the regime would take.”26 Both figures
identified Nazism as something other than an expression of the imagined
German will, albeit for very different reasons.
Not everybody within the propaganda community agreed with the
appeal to “good Germans,” and indeed the department experienced some
early internal resistance to the idea. Rauschning’s career in propaganda
was premised on his understanding that Germany’s embrace of Nazism
was an unfortunate and temporary departure from an otherwise proud
progress through history. By mid-1940, this perspective was untenable.
Two contemporary reports circulated among Department EH’s execu-
tive officers indicate which way the wind was blowing. In February 1940,
a memorandum advising Herbert Shaw, then deputy director of foreign
propaganda, recommended that in the future propaganda to Germany
should depict “Nazi Imperialism and militarism in historical perspec-
tive: as the latest and worst recrudescence of a German disease.”27 This
was markedly out of step with the departmental line as indicated by a
second analysis of the international situation. This second analysis exam-
ined Nazism from a political perspective and bore close resemblance
to Rauschning’s ideas; it suggested that National Socialism, like Italian
Fascism, was “[t]he opponent of Bolshevism… [which] began its career
as a thoroughbred of Nationalism, and therefore, with ambitions bound
to national states and not interested in uprooting the whole of humanity
in its social strata.”28 By this measure, the Nazis were an ultra-nationalist
sect, strictly counter-revolutionary and therefore a modern phenomenon
at odds with any imperial past. This ideological interpretation, over-
dependent on a shallow reading of the Nazis’ own propaganda, was
optimistic in its conclusions: “the war ended with the Polish campaign,”
wrote the analyst, “and they have no further aims.”29 By way of contrast,
Shaw’s advisor was arguing that “[t]he German record of conquest – and
Varieties of Anti-Fascism: Britain in the Inter-War Period ed. Nigel Copsey and Andrzej
Olechnowicz (Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 186.
26 Dan Stone, Responses to Nazism in Britain (Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003),
25.
27 TNA FO 898/3 Monahan to Shaw, “War Aims in Propaganda” (10 February 1940).
28 TNA FO 898/3, Memorandum, “Prolegomena. The Situation. Facts and Principles.”
(1940).
29 TNA FO 898/3, Memorandum, “Prolegomena.” Emphasis in the original.
I include Bismarckian conquest – has shown only too clearly what the real
German war aims are.”30 Where Shaw’s advisor banked on Germany’s
eternal belligerence, the second ideological interpretation predicted that
France and Britain were safe because “Germany will… refrain from
attack.”31 This prediction was shortly falsified, affirming the more cynical
approach.
The Chamberlain-era expression of the two Germanies theory had an
uncomfortable and brief existence. As mentioned above, in the lead-up to
the war, ministries such as the Foreign Office were split over the policy
of appeasement with many senior staff resigning in protest, a demonstra-
tion of their strong feelings on the German question. As a consequence,
the perspective of British propagandists was relatively parochial even with
as exotic a commodity as an ex-Nazi in the stables. European chauvinists
were less inclined to make such a ready distinction between the Germans
and their rulers.32 Inevitably, Britain’s appeal to good Germans to over-
throw their capricious rulers amounted to nothing. The conviction that
Dichter und Denker waited beyond the vulgar swastika began to strain
credulity, particularly for those Foreign Office veterans who had cut their
teeth as propagandists and strategists during the First World War; indeed,
the very idea of a “good Germany” was out of step with the tradition of
Foreign Office thought that had developed since the turn of the century.
With the ascendency of a coalition government under Winston Churchill
in May 1940, the anti-appeasers returned to their posts and the contours
of the propagandists’ historical imagination swiftly changed.
Robert Vansittart
and Transatlantic Germanophobia
Broadly anti-German—rather than anti-Nazi—sentiment first proliferated
within the propaganda community early in 1940 under the growing threat
of invasion. With the advent of Churchill’s premiership, the tone of
the propaganda war changed markedly. The executive officers in charge
30 TNA FO 898/3, Monahan to Shaw, “War Aims in Propaganda”.

31 TNA FO 898/3, Memorandum, “Prolegomena”.
Jordan (London: I.B. Tauris, 1997), 31.
78 K. R. GRAHAM
of foreign propaganda were replaced with foreign service veterans, at

least two of whom had previously resigned over the appeasement policy.
Meanwhile, ministerial oversight for subversive propaganda was trans-
ferred to Hugh Dalton, Minister for Economic Warfare, to whom Robert
Vansittart acted as senior advisor.
In discussing PWE’s historical imagination, it is worthwhile elaborating
on some aspects of Vansittart’s worldview because it had significant impli-
cations for the PWE conception of history. Vansittart joined the Foreign
Office as a young man, working in propaganda during the First World
War. His long and storied diplomatic career culminated in his nomination
to Permanent Under-Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, a position he
held from 1930 until his hostility to appeasement led to his removal. The
venom in Vansittart’s Black Record is so potent because it was conceived
as an attack not against Germany per se but against complacent Britons
who remained blithely ignorant of the fact that National Socialism was
a historically inevitable and banal recrudescence of the ancient German
mentality. He thus hoped to arouse an antipathy worthy of what he called
(after the Mongol khanate) the “Brazen Horde.”33 Citing no less an
authority than Tacitus, Vansittart argued that the Germans, as a race,
“hate peace.”34 He played down the radical or revolutionary elements
of National Socialism and severely rebuked the suggestion that Hitler was
a historically unique individual; “Hitler and the long murderous line of
his predecessors – Good Old Fritz, Glorious Otto, Divine Adolf – have
been outcomes,” wrote Vansittart, “not aberrations.”35 When measured
against modern Britain, Germany was found wanting. He subsequently
dismissed the Treaty of Versailles as inconsequential to Nazi policies and
the advent of war while listing German crimes against civilization from
antiquity to the present. Vansittart ended his polemic with a conde-
scending rebuke that only affirmed the unwavering continuity at the heart
of his thesis: “Germans call themselves a young nation. They are not.
They are as old as anyone else. They are quite old enough to know
better.”36
33 Robert Vansittart, Black Record: Germans Past and Present (London: Hamish
Hamilton, 1941), 6.
34 Vansittart, Black Record, 20.
In January 1941, senior British propagandists and strategists from

the Ministry of Information and the intelligence services met to discuss
the implications Black Record.37 If, as Vansittart observed, National
Socialism had historical roots in the Germania of Tacitus, then addressing
a German audience distinct from Nazism was speaking into the void.
While some PWE officials, such as Robert Bruce Lockhart, later claimed
to hold reservations about Vansittart’s extremism, they did not typically
express disagreement with his historical argument.38 With the intention
of shifting public debate away from the idea of the good German, the
lesson Vansittart drew was emphatic: “History puts it to you plainly.
The German is often a moral creature; the Germans never; and it is the
Germans who count.”39 Tellingly, when the propagandists convened to
discuss Black Record, they challenged not Vansittart’s version of German
history but rather its utility in subverting the German will to resist;
indeed, it is enlightening to examine those situations that compelled
PWE to direct propaganda in a regrettable contradiction of what many in
the department understood to be Vansittart’s quite reasonable historical
argument.
From 1940, conservative anti-Prussianism—deeply rooted in British
officialdom and often at odds with typically more ambivalent popular
attitudes—was important in fostering new Germanophobic tendencies
in propagandists’ historical imagination. The Germanophobic appeal of
Vansittartism was strengthened by these institutional traditions. In fact, a
number of striking continuities emerge between Britain’s First and Second
World War propaganda organizations. Charles Hardinge, the Foreign
Office Permanent Under-Secretary during the First World War and no
friend of the Germans, had appointed William Tyrrell to direct the FO’s
Political Intelligence Department. Tyrrell, who “had a reputation as a
convinced pre-war Germanophobe and social elitist,” in turn appointed
as German specialists three ancient historians and a journalist, each with
“comfortable upper middle-class origins and prospects.”40 Long-serving
Foreign Office veterans serving during the Second World War (such as
37 TNA FO 898/5, Minute, “Policy Committee” (23 January 1941).

38 The Director-General of PWE, Lockhart wrote defensively that, rather than hard-line
Vansittartism, “[w]e Propagandists Favoured the Hope Clause”: Robert Bruce Lockhart,
Comes the Reckoning (London: Putnam, 1947), 158.
40 Newton, British Policy and the Weimar Republic, 54–56.
80 K. R. GRAHAM
Leeper, who headed PID when it was re-established in 1939 before

joining PWE, and Vansittart, whose diplomatic career culminated in eight
years as the Foreign Office’s Permanent Under-Secretary) were especially
sensitive to this institutional memory. Both Leeper and Vansittart had
served under Tyrrell and shared his convictions about Germany.41
By 1939, Britain had a storied tradition of Germanophobia on which
to draw. From the nineteenth century, the Germany most familiar to the
British public was “the distorted image of the barbaric Hun,” which had
been “carried into the farthest corner of the empire by the propaganda
of the First World War.”42 While this view was by no means homoge-
neous, and indeed, recent research suggests that interwar Anglo-German
relations were more ambivalent than hostile until the mid-1930s,43
Germanophobia was de rigueur by the time of the Blitz. This accounts
in part for Black Record’s diverse list of subscribers. As discussed in the
previous chapter, German émigré socialist Walter Loeb and his publishing
group, the “Fight for Freedom” Association, promoted Vansittart’s ideas
on the social democratic left, while Eleonora Tennant and the “Never
Again” Association boosted Vansittartism on the far right. Frederick
Voigt, a PWE German expert and himself the son of German migrants,
also agreed with Vansittart’s reading of the German mentality, although
his support was loudest after his employment with PWE terminated.
Thomas Mann, too, gave qualified support to Vansittart’s sentiments in
his broadcasts of 1941, although he found the historical argument ques-
tionable.44 Vansittart’s polemic demonstrated his limitations as a historian
but he was hardly alone in his damning view of German history. His was
one of a cascade of contemporary reactionary voices that rejected the idea
of a good Germany.
During the 1930s, many interested parties, including several promi-
nent historians of different nationalities, toured the Third Reich and
reported back on what they had found. Schwarz identifies H. Powys
41 Nicholas Pronay, “Introduction: ‘To Stamp Out the Whole Tradition…’”, The Polit-
ical Re-Education of Germany and Her Allies After World War II , ed. Nicholas Pronay
and Keith Wilson (London: Crook Helm, 1985), 15.
43 Richard Scully, British Images of Germany: Admiration, Antagonism & Ambivalence,
1860–1914 (Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 81–82.
44 “Geschichtlich angreifbar, aber psychologisch wahr”, wrote Mann: Thomas Mann,
Tagebücher, 1940–1943 (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer, 1982), 271.
Greenwood’s The German Revolution as one of the more remarkable

accounts. For an observer like Greenwood, writes Schwarz, “the connec-
tion between the anti-rationalism of the Germans and the promises and
deeds of the National Socialists was obvious.”45 Like Vansittart, Green-
wood saw in the rise of National Socialism a fault in the German mentality,
“a certain lack of political instinct and balance which has dogged
the German people throughout the ages.”46 And again like Vansittart,
National Socialism’s success had the effect of stripping from Green-
wood any kind of Victorian idealism about the inevitability of progress:
“the turmoil in Germany to-day,” he wrote, “shows how thin lies the
veneer of ‘civilisation’ upon the primitive emotions of mankind.”47 But
in this observation Greenwood distinguished himself; he recognized that,
while Germany’s historical development may be peculiar, such barbarism
was potentially universal. The Vansittartists, blinded by a heightened
Germanophobia, could see only the old enemy.
Another historian who shouldered the burden of current affairs during
the interwar period, Stephen H. Roberts was an influential voice in the
debates around National Socialism, maintaining an ethnocentric perspec-
tive on Germany not dissimilar to that of Vansittart.48 Interestingly, as
Andrew G. Bonnell writes, these racial generalizations “led Roberts to
dismiss contemptuously the early opposition to Hitler… and to over-
look the persistence of opposition beneath the Third Reich’s monolithic
facade.”49 Readily satisfying the anxieties of witnesses to fascism, cynical
Germanophobic ideas clouded the judgement of otherwise perceptive
critics.
Black Record is representative of a school of thought. For Vansittartists
exasperated by the idea of a good Germany, the nineteenth-century
ascendancy of Prussia had placed barbarism in a constant struggle with
Germany’s much admired culture; with Prussian dominance achieved

46 H. Powys Greenwood, The German Revolution (London: Routledge, 1934), 17.
47 Greenwood, The German Revolution, ix.
48 Despite exaggerating the extent of his travels and the depth of his insight, Roberts’s
The House that Hitler Built (London: Methuen, 1937) was an international bestseller.
49 Andrew G. Bonnell, “Stephen Roberts as a Commentator on Fascism and the Road
to War in Europe”, History Australia 11.3 (2014), 28–30; see also, Bonnell, “Stephen H.
Roberts’ The House that Hitler Built as a Source on Nazi Germany”, Australian Journal
of Politics and History 46.1 (2000): 1–20.
82 K. R. GRAHAM
at unification, however, that which was admirable about Germany had

long since receded into the background. A great many of those writers
dismissive of the good Germany therefore sought to describe the hege-
monic Prussianization of Germany. Published several months before
Black Record, British historian F.J.C. Hearnshaw’s Germany the aggressor
throughout the ages made many similar arguments albeit from a somewhat
more academically rigorous conservative historical perspective. Hearn-
shaw’s contribution to the discourse was no less vitriolic than that of
Vansittart; he described Friedrich Wilhelm I, for example, as “the pioneer
of ‘Prussianism,’ that is to say of the general Germanic tendency to irra-
tional and non-moral brutality raised to the highest degree.”50 Structured
as a history of Germany at war from the ancient world to the present,
he takes a normative, whiggish line in suggesting that “the unification of
Germany was left to be accomplished not in the normal process of natural
growth and in the ordinary manner of political evolution by constitutional
monarchs, but belatedly, violently, abnormally, by methods of ‘blood
and iron’ by conquering Prussian autocrats.”51 These ideas would have
immediate bearing on the propaganda war.
Similarly concerned with the Prussianization of Germany, S.D. Stirk
argued in 1941 that “Hitlerism is for the most part Prussianism of the
very worst kind, so much so that it may even be regarded as a perver-
sion of Prussianism.”52 Later contributing to the German unit of PWE’s
political warfare school, Stirk penned a wide-ranging interrogation of the
historical roots of Prussia’s cultural and political ascendency, which led
him to conclude that:
Prussianism is not a question of locality and birth, or even of race, but

an attitude of mind and spirit, a type of character and a mode of life,
which is to be found among Germans everywhere. From this it follows
that any suggestions for separating the ‘Two Germanys’ or for ‘exorcizing’
50 F.J.C. Hearnshaw, Germany the Aggressor Throughout the Ages (New York: E.P.
Dutton & Co., 1941), 118–199.
51 Hearnshaw, Germany the Aggressor Throughout the Ages, 276–277.
52 PWE’s propaganda school began operations in late 1943 in anticipation of D-Day,
training officers in the history and culture of continental Europe as well as propaganda
strategy and technique; SD Stirk, The Prussian Spirit: A Survey of German Literature and
Politics 1914–1940 (Port Washington, NY: Kennikat Press, 1969 [1941]), 7.
Prussianism are futile, no matter how unattractive they may appear at first
sight [sic].53
Following a similar thread, Rohan Butler, advisor to the Ministry of

Information and the Special Operations Executive, published in 1941
an intellectual history that traced National Socialism back to Johann
Gottfried Herder.54
Outside of Britain, many accomplished and well-regarded observers
similarly placed Hitler within an established German tradition. The Amer-
ican adventurer-cum-political scientist William Montgomery McGovern,
wrote a best-selling and well-regarded account of the origins of National
Socialism in From Luther to Hitler.55 McGovern’s aim, as with Butler,
was to understand the historical roots of fascist ideology. While main-
taining that Nazism was an inevitable result of German history, McGovern
argued that its emergence was determined by a Prussian political philos-
ophy that raised the state above the citizen; McGovern was convinced that
“[p]olitical doctrines, like children’s diseases, are remarkably contagious,”
and so liberal-democratic states must arm themselves against such ideas.56
In describing German barbarism, these anti-Prussian publicists acknowl-
edged “the other Germany” as a historical entity long since squeezed
from existence by Prussian hegemony. In this they shared common
ground with Churchill and a great number of anti-appeasement politicians
and civil servants.
Whatever might be said for the good Germany, by 1941 the
tide of opinion had turned. For those with a disposition towards
Germanophobia—which we might imagine was common enough at
the height of the Blitz—Vansittartism, in one form or another, held
immediate appeal. Vansittart’s desire to banish from British minds any
distinction between Nazism and Germany was derived directly from his
reading of German history, which in time became central to discourses
on the development of propaganda. While Vansittart resigned from his
largely honorary position as Dalton’s advisor amidst the controversy
53 Stirk, The Prussian Spirit, 216.

54 Rohan d’Olier Butler, The Roots of National Socialism 1783–1933 (London: Faber
and Faber, 1941).
55 William Montgomery McGovern, From Luther to Hitler: The History of Fascist-Nazi
political philosophy (Cambridge, MA: Riverside Press, 1941).
56 McGovern, From Luther to Hitler, 8.
84 K. R. GRAHAM
around Black Record, the debates around his thesis continued. No longer
tethered to professional responsibilities, Vansittart even used his notoriety
to further promote Germanophobia in print, through public addresses
and (after being made a peer) in the House of Lords. The intellectual shift
from a naïve and ill-informed belief in the good Germany to a cynical and
pragmatic embrace of Germanophobia had serious implications for polit-
ical warfare as it undermined support for anti-fascists and erased from the
propagandists’ historical imagination the long-standing opposition to the
NSDAP within Germany.
Germanophobic Propaganda
and the Limits of Vansittartist History
In his overview of British historiography up until the early 1960s, E.H.
Carr writes that “[b]etween the middle of the last century and 1914
it was scarcely possible for a British historian to conceive of historical
change except as change for the better.”57 After the Great War, however,
such an optimistic view of historical trends was no longer tenable. A
reactionary undercurrent had entered contemporary British histories as
the field “moved into a period in which change was beginning to be
associated with fear for the future, and could be thought of as change
for the worse – a period of the rebirth of conservative thinking.” At
the outbreak of the Second World War, Foreign Office mandarins had
long been exposed to this more agnostic, conservative mode of history.
Progress was no longer inevitable, but the present-centredness of an
earlier age of whiggish history was difficult to shake for those enthusi-
asts for an instrumentalist embrace of the “usable past.” Exemplifying
a normative, present-centred perspective that was simultaneously divested
of any illusions about the inevitability of social progress, Vansittart typified
this reactionary historical imagination.58
Of course, Vansittart’s arguments were hardly unprecedented—the
anti-Prussian mode was demonstrably popular, playing on the public
memory of the First World War—but Vansittartism did have the effect
57 E.H. Carr, What is History? 2nd Edition (London: Penguin, 1990), 38.
58 In his biography of Vansittart, Jörg Später positions Carr as Vansittart’s opposite
(Antipoden), reflecting a generation gap in which Vansittart’s Edwardian conservatism
towards foreign policy was a constant source of tension: Jörg Später, Vansittart : Britische
Debatten über Deutsche und Nazis 1902–1945 (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2003), 83.
of crystalizing discussions on Germany, binding the course of German

history to concerns about national character, particularly within the
propaganda community. From mid-1940, British propagandists’ histor-
ical imagination increasingly aligned with this new tendency. Typical of
this second period, PWE’s discussions of history suggest that fascism
was peculiar to certain national mentalities; fascism’s appeal in broader
contexts was dismissed, and British fascism was not discussed at all.
This had important implications not just for what propaganda ought to
say, but also to whom it might be addressed. With a gesture towards
certain revealing passages in Herder or Fichte, deterministic ideas about
national character could help propagandists to understand the terror—
and subvert the authority—of the Third Reich. At the same time,
however, the extreme vitriol and pessimism of Vansittartism rendered it a
contentious position within PWE and the broader network of propaganda
departments.
PWE’s understanding of the past was not homogeneous, nor was it
constant. Rather, it was the product of an ongoing debate that involved
junior propagandists and advisors as much as it did government minis-
ters and policy-makers. This debate is particularly enlightening as it
often functioned to finesse the typically broad interpretations made by
polemical or otherwise unfocused perspectives on Germany and Europe.
Vansittartism found some resistance within the propaganda community,
and in fact the discussion around Black Record and its intellectual kin
successfully demonstrated many of the shortcomings of such polemical
history. Vansittart’s replacement as the Foreign Office Permanent Under-
Secretary, Alexander Cadogan, for example, was dismissive of Black
Record, believing that Vansittart “undermined British propaganda efforts
to drive a wedge between the Nazis and the German people.”59 For
this reason, Churchill’s Foreign Secretary, Anthony Eden, was disinclined
to embrace Vansittartism in public; nevertheless, his private statements
aligned well with Vansittartist sentiments. In much of the criticism levelled
at Black Record within the foreign propaganda community, the dissenting
view only ratifies the normative, present-centred elements of Vansittar-
tism. And, while there was certainly a faction within PWE that long
disagreed with the premises on which Vansittartist history was based, the
59 Trond Ove Tøllefsen, “The British-German Fight over Dismantling: The Removal
of Industrial Plants as Reparations and its Political Repercussions” PhD Thesis, European
University Institute (2016), 39–40.
86 K. R. GRAHAM
circumstances in late 1940 were not conducive to this dissenting view. In

the meantime, discussions about the accuracy and utility of Black Record
helped to enrich the department’s historical imagination.
Black Record’s enthusiastic public reception compelled senior propa-
gandists and intelligence officials to convene a propaganda policy
committee meeting in order to issue a directive and clear up any confu-
sion among the various propaganda departments.60 The consensus was
that while there was nothing objectionable in Vansittart’s reasoning,
some practical issues had arisen which needed to be addressed. Maurice
Peterson, then BBC Controller for Overseas Publicity, conceded that
Vansittart’s line “was a reasonable one on historical grounds, but was not
suitable for us in propaganda either to Germany or in this country.”61
The principal objection came from Kenneth Clark, who offered a coun-
terpoint to the unerring continuity of German history in a short paper
entitled “It’s the Same Old Hun”: “The thesis that the German people
are incurable and have always been so, and that this war is like the last,”
Clark argued, “cannot be propounded in order to make a favourable
impression in Germany.”62 This was not to say that such a thesis had
been entirely wrong-headed. The committee conceded, in agreement
with Clark, that “with the departure from Germany of so many eminent
men of science and culture and other developments associated with the
Nazi regime the enemy was in fact much more brutal than he had
been in the past.”63 This argument is characteristic of Clark’s world-
view; after studying history at Oxford, the independently wealthy Clark
became a well-regarded art historian and, in this capacity, later found
considerable fame for his 1960s television programme “Civilisation,” in
which he showed an abiding commitment to the “great man” school of
history.64 The policy committee settled on historical continuity with a
caveat, describing a familiar Germany now purged of its already meagre
60 TNA FO 898/5, Minutes, “Policy Committee” (23 January 1941).

62 TNA FO 898/5, Kenneth Clark, Memorandum, “It’s the Same Old Hun” (22
January 1941).
64 David Piper, “Clark, Kenneth Mackenzie, Baron Clark (1903–1983)”, Oxford
Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2004).
supply of great and good. The idea that only the intelligentsia or bour-
geoisie might offer a counterpoint to the coarsening of German national
character hints at the depth of class prejudice among some of the more
conservative propagandists.
Providing an apt example of this, Thomas Barman, PWE’s Scandina-
vian section chief, merrily effaced historical fact in a 1940 proposal to
dispense with appeals to German workers (the good Germans to whom
left-wing propagandists would address). “[T]he working class, as a class,”
he argued, “have contracted completely out of our social system and do
not care what happens to it so long as they themselves have enough
money and enough security.”65 With remarkable confidence, Barman
asserted “I do not believe that the average worker – and the political
history of Western Europe proves this to be the case – attaches the
slightest importance to free speech and the right to criticise.” A rebuttal,
swift and forceful, came from one of the department’s more cosmopolitan
thinkers. Ralph Murray, the Balkans section chief, decried Barman’s
“ignorance of history” which, he argued, stemmed from “Barman’s belief
in Homo Economicus.” Murray wrote:
To state that the average worker of Western Europe is proved by the

facts of political history to have played no constructive part in the social
system, is to claim that social legislation, progress in hygiene, advantages in
education and all branches of culture from architecture upwards, have been
brought about by the beneficent administration of generations of selfless
employers…66
Barman’s historical perspective, like that of fellow conservatives such

as Clark and later chief of clandestine propaganda Sefton Delmer, saw
history as the story of “great men.” Following Murray’s criticism,
Barman’s argument was quietly shelved and working-class propaganda
was permitted to continue. His argument, however, was not the last of
its kind.
65 There are further similarities here with the Edwardian Foreign Office. As Newton
writes, ‘the “German brains trust”’ of the First World War was also composed of four
upper-middle class men “who had little or no personal experience of the German working
class and its politics”: Newton, British Policy and the Weimar Republic, 57; TNA FO
898/3, TG Barman, “Notes on the Socialist Aspect of German Propaganda” (23 January
1940).
66 TNA FO 898/3, Murray to Shaw, Letter (25 January 1940).
88 K. R. GRAHAM
The question of whether Vansittartism offered a pragmatic basis for

morale subversion was predicated on the existence of an ahistorical
German national character. The cynical mode of propaganda devel-
oped under Delmer’s tenure—with Vansittartist encouragement—was less
friendly to the idea of class struggle as a propaganda theme, prefer-
ring instead to exploit the average German’s innere Schweinehund, their
supposedly innate lack of discipline and their vulgar instinct for self-
preservation.67 Scepticism about the character of the working class,
and their potential for anti-Nazi sentiment, remained a constant among
PWE’s more politically conservative propagandists.
Attempts to incorporate German history directly into subversive propa-
ganda prompted some interesting questions. In late 1942, the Stockholm
office of the Special Operations Executive took it upon themselves to
draft a subversive German-language pamphlet for distribution throughout
occupied Scandinavia. Major Henry Threlfall, Assistant Head of SOE’s
Scandinavian Section, delivered the pamphlet entitled “Janus” to PWE
for approval, describing it as a compilation “of parallel quotations from
prominent Germans on a wide range of topics, such as war and occupa-
tion, politics, science, art, etc.”68 In his pitch for the pamphlet, Threlfall
explained that “[e]ach quotation is illustrated with a portrait of the
author and each is diametrically opposed to the other, showing very
clearly the continuity of Nazism in German history and the struggle
against it put up by the great thinkers and authors.” The rationale behind
this document was not dissimilar to other subversive leaflets produced
contemporaneously by PWE. The juxtaposition of text and/or images
was a common technique, suitable for conveying a subversive message
quickly and without the need for complicated argument. For Threlfall,
“Janus” offered “the best condemnation one could wish of Germany out
of the mouth of the Germans themselves, without any comments.”69 In
67 This was the premise on which Delmer based his first clandestine radio station,
Gustav Siegfried Eins, which launched in mid-1941; TNA FO 898/67 Memorandum,
“The general objective of black propaganda to Germany” (4 July 1942).
68 IWM Cat. No. 8238 Audio Recording—Oral History Interview, Henry McLeod
Threlfall interviewed by Conrad Wood (14 May 1984); TNA FO 898/67, Threlfall to
Barman, Letter (21 December 1942).
69 TNA FO 898/67, Threlfall to Barman, Letter (21 December 1942).
its abstract form, “Janus” was a deft application of Vansittartism to propa-

ganda; in its execution of the conceit, however, there were unwanted
ideological ramifications. PWE’s directors were outraged.
Threlfall’s historical perspective was, it seems, precariously out of line
with that of Britain’s more seasoned propagandists. The sardonic Delmer
commented of SOE’s Scandinavian unit that “I have seen some of this
stuff and I think it so dangerous that I am almost prepared to believe
that the organisation may have been penetrated by German agents.”70
“Janus” turned on the idea that National Socialism was the expression of
an innate German quality, something with which a fragmented minority
of good Germans had been struggling for generations. Even at the height
of Vansittartism, this idea still held some capital within British officialdom.
The execution of “Janus,” however, was understood to convey an entirely
different message. After reiterating the historical juxtaposition Threlfall
capitalized upon, Delmer declared that “[t]he whole thing is beautifully
calculated to back up the German propaganda line that they are the alter-
native to chaos and Bolshevism.”71 In a note to Barman, Delmer made
clear his objection:
There is a tendency for the contrasts to appear mainly historical – that

of one generation with another. Kant, Lessing, Goethe, Schiller, Boerne,
Heine Hoelderlin [sic], all eighteenth or early nineteenth century writers,
are opposed to the Rosenberg, Goebbels, Hitler of today. This would
tend to stimulate the Nazis’ typically left-wing pride in the “progressive”,
“modern” nature of their creed.72
Even as they attempted to show Nazism’s deep historical roots, Threlfall

and the SOE Scandinavian section inadvertently depicted National
Socialism as a modern movement, giving credence to the revolutionary
claims of Nazi ideologues. The implication of a caesura between Germany
past and present was anathema to PWE’s conception of history during this
period as it inadvertently resurrected the two Germanies theory. Kenneth
Clark’s caveat demonstrated that unadulterated Vansittartism was insuffi-
ciently potent for propaganda precisely because it did not recognize the
uniqueness of Nazism in German history. At the same time, however,
70 TNA FO 898/67, Sefton Delmer to Richard Crossman, Letter (19 February 1943).
71 TNA FO 898/67, Sefton Delmer to Richard Crossman, Letter (19 February 1943).
72 TNA FO 898/67, Delmer to Barman, Letter (27 December 1942).
90 K. R. GRAHAM
British propagandists were anxious that representing Nazism as a modern

phenomenon in the course of German history would play into the hands
of Nazi ideologues. “Janus” reveals an interesting aspect of the propa-
gandists’ historical imagination: even on a point of consensus, such as the
generally unchanging nature of German national character, the course of
German history was no simple thing.
Vansittartism articulated a perspective that for several years helped
shape the discourse on German history and contributed significantly to
the outlook of Britain’s foreign propaganda organizations. But the propa-
gandists’ historical imagination was hardly constant. The interpretation
of German history set out in Black Record was only one iteration of
a broad epistemology rooted in Germanophobia, a synthesis of preju-
dices and received ideas coloured by political inclinations and professional
backgrounds. This understanding of the past was as much the result of
contemporary historiographical trends as it was a response to the objec-
tives of the department itself. Alexander Cadogan and his pragmatic peers
might have despaired that Vansittart undermined efforts to drive a wedge
between the German people and their Nazi leaders, but many propagan-
dists believed that the demand for unconditional surrender did much the
same thing.
No longer interested in appealing to the good German, British propa-
gandists were increasingly concerned with how they might correct the
bad German. Vansittart’s model of history offered the more cynically
minded propagandists a practical source from which to draw material
and inspiration for subversion; ultimately, however, as the objectives of
subversion shifted from morale collapse to re-education, the propagan-
distic limitations of Vansittartism were realized. An alternative vision of
German history could now take the stage. While never entirely displacing
the Vansittartist paradigm, this dissenting perspective made quick work
of abject Germanophobes in the final months of the war, reconfiguring
once again the department’s historical imagination. When, in 1944, A.J.P.
Taylor offered up his profoundly Germanophobic history of the Weimar
Republic for the enlightenment of the Allied occupation force, PWE
rejected it outright.
German Anti-Fascists
and the Value of Social History
For most of the war, Britain broadcast to Europe a portrait of Germany
shaped by an encounter between the conservative indictment of Prussian
militarism as a stand-in for the ahistorical German national character and
a critique of this stance that, while appreciating its roots in history, recog-
nized fascism as radical and modern. A review essay on the theme of the
German problem published in the Journal of Modern History not long
after the war’s end suggested that “while the Allied nations were quite
definitely on the defensive in the present war, the studies produced tended
to be of the Vansittart type; as the Allies gradually assumed the military
initiative and had military successes, an increase could be observed in the
number of more lenient studies.”73 A fundamental divide exists in this
literature, however, that is not related to the prospects of military success.
Conservative British propagandists embraced a present-centred
perspective, reproducing tropes of anachronistic anti-Prussianism, which
transposed Germany’s complicated history into a prehistory of National
Socialism. The subsequent interpretation of German history, bearing
a familial resemblance to post-war Sonderweg historiography, was the
inverse of contemporary conservative German historiography. Vansittartist
analyses (and their signal concern with the concept of German national
character) were not (or not entirely) a consequence of Britain’s desperate
situation but rather were derived from sometimes blinkered adventures
in intellectual history. Contemporary perspectives popularized by polit-
ical progressives (particularly left-wing German social scientists reacting
against Germany’s conservative academic orthodoxy), meanwhile, took
as their focus the social conditions that had fostered Nazism’s success.
In a 1942 review of From Luther to Hitler, Herbert Marcuse argued
that McGovern fundamentally mistook the relationship between Nazism
and the German public.74 Frustrated by McGovern’s claim that a dicta-
tor’s success is determined by “the political philosophy which dominates
the general public of a given country,” Marcuse argued rather that Nazism
“cannot be adequately interpreted in terms of political philosophy, for
73 Donald F. Lach, “What They Would Do about Germany”, The Journal of Modern
History 17.3 (1945): 243.
74 Herbert Marcuse, “Reviewed Work: From Luther to Hitler by William Montgomery
McGovern,” The Philosophical Review 51.5 (1942): 533–534.
92 K. R. GRAHAM
what appears to be their political philosophy is nothing but an utterly

flexible and opportunistic ideology that is ex post facto adapted to the
social and economic needs of imperialistic expansion.” The Nazis had
forced Marcuse into exile alongside the rest of the Frankfurt School and
its associates. Their visceral and immediate experience of fascist barbarity,
coupled with a Marxist social scientific framework, left these German anti-
fascists with an understanding of Nazism that was at odds with abject
Germanophobia. There are superficial similarities here to Rauschning’s
nihilistic vision of Nazi ideology, and indeed, many of Germany’s anti-
fascists were vocal proponents of the two Germanies theory during the
1920s and 1930s. But the historicist argument that Nazism represented
an aberration in an otherwise healthy national development did not satisfy
those critics versed in the social sciences and particularly historical mate-
rialism. In fact, the anti-fascist position shared some surprising common
ground with Vansittartism.
Reading Black Record in the context of the broader historiography on
Germany is illuminating. As Stefan Berger writes, a great many European
exiles, enemies of Hitler who had found refuge in Britain and the United
States, could also trace a link from Luther to Hitler in order to develop
“very critical perspectives on German national history.”75 This perspective
was a response to then contemporary conservative German histories that
viewed the peculiarities of German history as the key to German great-
ness. These émigré voices did not dispute the condemnation of the Third
Reich as a predictable outcome of German history, but they did recog-
nize Nazism as historically contingent, challenging the Vansittartist idea
that Nazism was the banal expression of an ahistorical national character.
In this sense, the émigré perspective anticipated the groundbreaking and
controversial work of post-war historians such as Fritz Fischer.76
But, as Newton reminds us, the progressive German Sonderweg histo-
rians “ought not to be flourished as if their historical discoveries vindicate
75 Stefan Berger, “A Return to the National Paradigm? National History Writing in

Germany, Italy, France, and Britain from 1945 to the Present”, The Journal of Modern
History 77.3 (2005), 637.
76 Fritz Fischer, Germany’s aims in the First World War (New York, NY: Norton,
1967); on the radical impact of Sonderweg history, Stefan Berger writes that Fischer
“drew attention to many unpalatable continuities in modern German history that seemed
to make National Socialism the logical end point of that history”: Berger, “A Return to
the National Paradigm?”, 643.
the caricatures peddled by British Germanophobes during both wars.”77

The normative basis of Vansittartism described Nazism as an atavistic
barbarism that other states had managed to circumvent by attaining
the liberal and democratic character of an advanced society. A nega-
tive ideology which had the virtue of always expecting the worst of the
Nazism, Vansittartism made for a broad church. As mentioned above,
Black Record was vaunted across the political spectrum, but this is not
to say that such a posture attracted different groups for the same reason;
in the immediate post-war period, Eleonora Tennant and other radical
right-wing British publicists continued to employ Vansittartist rhetoric
as a thinly veiled dog-whistle for anti-Semitism in anti-alien petitions.78
For exiled German Social Democrats and Communists, Vansittartism was
attractive only to a degree and, obviously, for very different reasons.
Francis Ludwig Carsten—later the esteemed historian of Central
Europe—takes the credit for rejecting on PWE’s behalf A.J.P. Taylor’s
history of Weimar Germany.79 Carsten’s journey from German anti-fascist
to British propagandist is worth recounting. From a young age a member
of the German Communist Party, Carsten claims that he soon became
disillusioned by the party line handed down from Moscow. By the early
1930s, he writes, his friendship with a number of other dissident commu-
nists and social democrats won him an invitation to “a secret organisation
of ‘professional revolutionaries’ who would work clandestinely both in the
SPD and KPD, occupy leading positions in them and one day reunite the
German Socialist movement.” Forced into exile by the rise of Nazism, this
group took on the name Neu Beginnen in 1933. In his exile during the
mid-1930s, Carsten began to take his historical studies more seriously;
after some time spent studying in the Netherlands, he was able to find
a place at Oxford. Because of his strong anti-fascist record, the outbreak
of war meant only a brief interruption to his studies. After being held as
an undesirable alien at Warth Mill and on the Isle of Man, he served as
a clerk with the Pioneer Corps, before returning to Oxford where he was
77 Newton, British Policy and the Weimar Republic, 5.

78 Graham D Macklin, “‘A Quite Natural and Moderate Defensive Feeling’? The 1945
Hamstead ‘anti-alien’ petition”, Patterns of Prejudice 37.3 (2003): 289–296; Kirk Graham,
“A Good Germany?”, History Today 67.7 (2017).
79 “[It] was so anti-German that it was rejected at my suggestion”: Francis Ludwig
Carsten, Memoir, “From Berlin to London”, Yearbook of the Leo Baeck Institute 43
(1998): 348.
94 K. R. GRAHAM
able to finish his thesis on the origins of Prussia’s Gutsherrschaft in 1942.

A short time later, he joined PWE. Together with fellow exile Richard
Samuel, Carsten was employed to oversee the production of handbooks to
Europe and particularly Germany, guides to history, politics, and culture
for the benefit of Allied officers and servicemen in anticipation of an Allied
victory and the ensuing occupation.80
After rejecting Taylor’s manuscript, Carsten invited E.J. Passant to
finish the job.81 Like Taylor, Passant would also turn his PWE work
into a monograph. His A Short History of Germany 1815–1945 is concise
and sober scholarship (“colourless” by Taylor’s estimation82 ), lacking
entirely in the grim foreshadowing of the Vansittartist histories. In fact,
Passant makes no significant mention of Hitler or the NSDAP until the
text arrives chronologically at the Weimar Republic. Gone is the terrible
teleology of the German national character. And in the Junkers—long
upheld as avatars of a Prusso-German spirit—Passant recognizes instead
the “personal interest in their political behaviour.”83 With the influence
of German anti-fascists such as Carsten, PWE’s historical imagination
changed tack.
Carsten was only one of a growing number of German émigrés who
came to work for PWE; as discussed in the previous chapter, Carsten was
not the first member of the small and secretive Neu Beginnen group
recruited into Britain’s propaganda war. PWE ultimately employed a
great many political exiles from Germany, people with useful talents and
expertise whose anti-fascist credentials were impeccable.84 The increasing
prominence of these exiles correlates with renewed interest in the “other
Germany”; this interest was, however, predicated on the idea that German
culture and society would need to be made anew. Those elements
80 Carsten, “From Berlin to London”, 342–347.

81 Carsten, “From Berlin to London”, 348; Passant, a Cambridge scholar, would
become head of the Foreign Office Research Department and Library after the war.
82 C.J. Wrigley, A.J.P. Taylor: Radical Historian of Europe (London: I.B. Tauris, 2006),
154.
83 E.J. Passant, A Short History of Germany 1815–1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP,
1962), 13.
84 Exact numbers are difficult to ascertain as the department sought to protect the
identities of its foreign staff, but memoirs and archival documents indicate that every
one of PWE’s German clandestine broadcast stations, as well as propaganda planning and
intelligence units, included European staff members.
of German history celebrated by conservatives such as Meinecke and

Rauschning were now to be condemned, a position that complemented
the prejudices of the department’s staunchest Germanophobes.
Richard Crossman recruited Carsten’s Neu Beginnen comrades,
including the group’s London head, Richard Löwenthal. Delmer, who
became PWE’s German section chief when Crossman was seconded to
Anglo-American operations in North Africa, also recruited from the
German anti-fascist left at the earliest opportunity. As well as Peter Seck-
lemann, a German-Jewish novelist, and Johannes Reinholz, a conservative
journalist, the SPD politician Max Braun was one of the first exiles Delmer
brought into the fold. Delmer claimed in his memoir that, alongside
historians Clifton Child, C.E. Stevens, and “a team of university grad-
uate girl researchers,” Braun proved himself indispensable as a propaganda
intelligence officer.85 The anti-fascist exiles brought a new perspective
to the German problem. Hired in a purely subordinate capacity—as
researchers, writers, and speakers low in the departmental hierarchy—it
took some time for their differing perspective on Germany to be heard
over the din of Germanophobia. But by the end of 1942, when British
and American propagandists were together looking for fresh perspectives
on the German problem, European exiles were in a good position to
challenge the orthodoxy.
Across the Atlantic, the social scientific perspective was making consid-
erable headway thanks in part to the aspirations of the New Deal. From
the outset, the collegial Research and Analysis division of the United
States’ OSS drew on the talent of American social scientists and German
émigrés. Alongside Frankfurt School contemporaries like Erich Fromm
and Franz Neumann, the OSS also recruited two of Meinecke’s talented
students, Hajo Holborn and Felix Gilbert. Inheritors to the German
historiographic tradition, Gilbert and Holborn were nevertheless dissatis-
fied with Meinecke’s historicist account of Germany. In an environment
populated by so many social scientists, Holborn and Gilbert sought to
reform their historical imagination. As Barry Katz writes, the intellec-
tual mode of these American departments embraced “the ascendant social
sciences… [which] demanded a methodology that approximated pure
85 Sefton Delmer, Black Boomerang (London: Secker & Warburg, 1962), 82.
96 K. R. GRAHAM
factual reportage and that displaced the subject entirely from the text.”86
Positioned between this social scientific perspective and the Rankean
tradition of historicism, Gilbert and Holborn “eschewed either of these
radical alternatives and groped instead for a conceptual apparatus that
would bring into a tactical alliance the warring factions of ‘abstractness
of generalization and the concreteness of aesthetic description.’” As PWE
and OSS began to work together more intimately (a relationship which
culminated in the development of the Psychological Warfare Division of
the Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force), PWE too turned
towards the social orientation favoured by its own anti-fascist German
staff.87
American propaganda and intelligence organizations incorporated
social science from the outset. Among British propagandists, for whom
such perspectives were a novelty, the rise of social science did not
entirely replace earlier historiographies. Carsten may have palmed off
A.J.P. Taylor’s Germanophobic history, but elsewhere within the depart-
ment Vansittartist ideas persisted. PWE’s remit included training Officers
and other Allied service personnel through a political warfare school
that operated from late 1943 and until mid-1944. On the syllabus
was a lecture by chief instructor R.L. Sedgwick entitled “The German
Mentality” in which he argued, among other things, that Germany
had an “Unbroken pedigree back to barbarism”—including the requi-
site mention of Tacitus.88 For Sedgwick, clues to the psychology of the
German national character could be found in the “Clumsiness, violence
and power of German [language] - the antithesis of French and Latin
lucidity.”89 This idea parallels F.J.C. Hearnshaw’s Germanophobic claim
that, “[c]ut off from the community of the Latin peoples by its harsh
and barbaric language, it [Germany] has failed to keep in touch with
the culture of the modern world.”90 Sedgwick, meanwhile, described
86 Barry M. Katz, Foreign Intelligence: Research and Analysis in the Office of Strategic
Services 1942–1945 (Cambridge, MA, 1989), 78.
87 Subsequent chapters explore further the Anglo-American relationship and its
implications for propaganda.
88 TNA FO 898/99, R.L. Sedgwick, lecture notes, “The German Mentality” (c.
1943/1944).
89 “[Did] the language make them”, Sedgwick asks, “or they the language?”: TNA FO
898/99, Sedgwick, “The German mentality”.
90 Hearnshaw, Germany the Aggressor, 271.
the “[p]aradox of German cultural achievement and political barbarism,”

tracing a line through German history that ran outside “the pale of the
European tradition,” giving rise to the German character most recently
embodied by Nazism.91 Sedgwick and the political warfare school’s
other British instructors tended to preserve the Germanophobic tendency,
taking the mere existence of the Third Reich as ratification of the ahis-
torical German character. The insistence on the paradoxes of modern
Germany resulted from an inability to reconcile those cultural artefacts
that observers valued as good with the horrors of National Socialism. For
proponents of this tendency, it proved difficult to appreciate the social
realities of life under Nazism.
Under Sedgwick’s directorship, PWE’s political warfare school also
included a separate unit on “Lessons from German History.” Unfor-
tunately, little of this lecture material survives, but ancillary documents
give us some hint as to what they described. According to a memo-
randum distributed ahead of the course, this German unit was “designed
to provide candidates with the basic information which will enable them
properly to understand the German political scene” and was the students’
“only chance of learning about the historical and sociological forces
which have shaped and still shape the German army.”92 Heinz Koep-
pler provided the introduction to this unit with a series of lectures on
political mythology, historical geography, and the background of modern
Germany. Koeppler had publicly dissented from the Germanophobic line
as early as 1940, arguing that “[t]he inevitability of Hitler is a myth, a
clever invention to saddle the whole German nation with a responsibility
which properly belongs to an infinitesimal part of it, a part, however,
possessing enormous influence and not afraid to use or to abuse it.”93
While he recognized that support for Hitler was widespread and that re-
education and social restructuring were necessary to expunge not only
Nazism but the conditions that fostered it, he was not beholden to the
91 “These characteristics, result of their past,” argued Sedgwick, “have been greatly
intensified by Nazism, which is not only a consequence of the last war, but also the
expression of deep seated aspects of the national character [sic]”: TNA FO 898/99,
Sedgwick, “The German Mentality” (c. 1943/1944).
92 TNA FO 898/100, Memorandum, “German Sub-Committee of the Joint Reoccu-
pation Committee” (1943/1944).
93 Koeppler argued as much in the chapters he contributed to the book he co-authored
with James Maxwell Garnett, A Lasting Peace (London Allen & Unwin, 1940), 231.
98 K. R. GRAHAM
reductionist idea of a bellicose German nature. By war’s end, Koep-

pler had become director of the Wilton Park facility, positioned at the
vanguard of efforts to re-educate German prisoners of war. As David
Welch argues, it was in this capacity that Koeppler proved himself to
be “one of Germany’s greatest friends and champions.”94 Interestingly,
Carsten actually attributes the idea for re-education at Wilton Park to
none other than Waldemar von Knoeringen, one of his Neu Beginnen
comrades who worked on Richard Crossman’s revolutionary socialist
station.95
The 1943 Allied policy demanding Germany’s unconditional
surrender, while placating the USSR (which was impatient for the Second
Front) also echoed Vansittartism’s political demands: Germany would
have to submit to foreign occupation in order to be rid of any vestiges
of Nazism. But polemical Vansittartism, with its insistence on the eter-
nally barbarous German character, also implied that denazification was a
fool’s errand. Social scientific perspectives offered an alternative. Progres-
sive arguments did not refute Vansittartist condemnations of Germany
but rather sought a material, and therefore remediable, explanation for
Germany’s special path.
In developing a response to the contradictions inherent to Vansit-
tartism, socialists simultaneously reoriented the department’s historical
imagination. Drawing attention back to the social conditions that fostered
Nazism, this new perspective recognized the potentially universal, rather
than inherently German, character of fascism. In this sense, the social
impetus of such histories echoed the supposition made by Meinecke and
other historicists who insisted that Nazism was “the terrible outcome of
European, not specifically German, trends.”96 Of course, the Socialists
were not so willing to dismiss the German traditions that lay behind such
developments. Later Sonderweg historians were especially thorough in
their assault on the older historicist arguments. Social historians recog-
nized that reactionary populism was not unique to Germany, but the
character of Nazism and those currents on which it once drew for electoral
strength and popular support most certainly were. The exiled German
94 Welch, “Citizenship and Politics”, 218.

95 Carsten, “From Berlin to London”, 348; TNA KV 6–106, Mr. Murray to Stewart
Roberts, Memorandum (4 January 1941).
96 Kershaw, The Nazi Dictatorship, 7–8.
anti-fascists who found their way to PWE were sceptical of the histori-
cists’ “other Germany,” but they were equally wary of Germanophobic
arguments against it.
A New Europe
In the earliest discussions on the historical development of the German
mentality, one propaganda advisor wrote of the “German disease of
conquest,” stating that while they “should not imply that all Germans
suffer from it,” certainly “it is peculiar to Germany.”97 Nazi barbarism,
or Prussian militarism, was an expression of an atavistic and destruc-
tive Other against which the increasingly contested good German was
measured. But the good German was itself a parochial concept cemented
in a bourgeois British perspective, a naive appraisal of what constituted
appropriate behaviour, a marker of distinction employed to condemn the
perverted course of German history.98 As Geoff Eley and David Black-
bourn remind us, “[t]he identification of militarist ‘bad Germans’ can
all too evidently serve an apologist purpose in distracting attention from
more pervasive flaws in society.”99
Independent thinkers like Koeppler quickly recognized the limits
of Vansittartism’s simplistic attempt to reconcile Nazism with German
history. Writing in 1940, Koeppler gestured towards a version of the two
Germanies theory, describing the “conflict between German democracy
and Prussian Junkerdom.” Four years later, however, he made clear his
disdain for the whole concept of a “good German.”100 In this he was
not alone. Working alongside Koeppler, economist and BBC German
Service broadcaster Lindley Fraser wrote that the effort to delimit good
and bad Germans was an “unprofitable controversy.”101 For progres-
sive British propagandists and their German compatriots, no less so than
the most strident Vansittartists, a rejection of the other Germany was a
97 TNA FO 898/3, Monahan to Shaw, “War Aims in Propaganda” (10 February 1940).
98 These ideas are explored further in Chapter Five.
99 Geoff Eley and David Blackbourn, The Peculiarities of German History: Bourgeois
Society and Politics in Nineteenth-Century Germany (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1984), 6.
100 Garnett and Koeppler, A Lasting Peace, 9; Welch, “Citizenship and Politics”, 212–
213.
101 Lindley Fraser, Germany Between Two Wars: A Study of Propaganda and War-Guilt
(London: Oxford UP, 1944), preface.
100 K. R. GRAHAM
necessary precondition of the re-education policy. This goes some way to

explaining why the left-wing German perspective did not initially generate
much dissonance with the normative prejudices of PWE’s reigning ortho-
doxy. As Nicholas Pronay observes, Vansittartism’s insistence on German
deviance implied that there was something to fix, even if the philosophy’s
innate pessimism placed the cure beyond the reach of mere mortals.102
Political exiles like Carsten and Koeppler could not accept the myth of
German barbarism as an explanation for the rise of Nazism. They knew,
rather, that Nazi violence had a political character, having been on the
receiving end of it. Social historians agreed that Nazism signalled the
bankruptcy of German society, but also suggested that a peaceful future
might lay in radical social and political change.
Keeping in mind the parochial nature of the good German, British
propagandists’ understanding of British character takes on renewed signif-
icance. PWE discussions about the course of German history are by
implication a discourse on Britain, the Empire, and its relationship to
Europe. Following Germany’s invasion of Soviet Russia and the Japanese
attack on Pearl Harbor, Britain was relieved of the isolation that had
fostered more strident Vansittartist adventures. With fortunes now bound
to two new and powerful allies, British self-perception (or at least the
image of Britain that propagandists felt would resonate best with the
British public) began to change. An example of this can be found
in Wendy Webster’s research into British domestic propaganda, which
demonstrates that between “1942–44 the British media came close to
identifying Britons as European – perhaps closer than at any other
moment in the twentieth century.”103
Early in the war, British propagandists concerned themselves with
reorienting the idea of Britain. Against the National Socialist invocation
of a “new European Order,” for example, Frederick Voigt reconstituted
Britain not as an island state but as the leader in a continent-wide struggle
for liberation from “despotic imperialism,” a movement that would result
in a new Europe “based on the freedom of the individual from oppression
and on the freedom of nations from alien rule.”104 The mid-century crisis
102 Pronay, “Introduction: ‘To Stamp Out the Whole Tradition…’”, 17–18.
103 Wendy Webster, ‘“Europe against the Germans”: The British Resistance Narrative,
1940–1950’, The Journal of British Studies 48.4 (2009), 959.
104 TNA FO 898/3, Voigt, Memorandum (1 August 1940).
rendered many shibboleths untenable, not least of which was British isola-
tionism. Of course, Voigt’s line was little more than a rhetorical gesture
designed to win over political dissidents in occupied Europe. With Soviet
Russia and the United States for allies, however, PWE’s image of Britain
appears to have undergone a minor revolution. Even among Foreign
Office veterans for whom the Empire was everything, a European Britain
became not only conceivable but necessary.
Vansittart’s old comrade, Rex Leeper, fronted an early and apparently
genuine push towards an image of Britain as a European rather than island
state; attempting to orient PWE in line with the vague liberal dictates of
the Atlantic Charter, he wrote:
The historian who will one day record the events of our time will draw
at least one lesson from this mid-war madness. He will observe that the
British people, one of the most politically mature peoples in the world,
failed to understand that they were an integral part of Europe, members
of one family who had lived either in peace or at war with one another for
centuries past.105
PWE’s hawkish conservatives pathologized the much-hated (and polit-

ically convenient) appeasement policy as symptomatic of the failure to
understand simultaneously both Germany’s character and Britain’s histor-
ically destined place in Europe. Tellingly, the Vansittartist Leeper managed
to avoid any mention of Germany in his vision of a new Europe. Never-
theless, in these propagandists we can see the inchoate Europeanism that
defined the immediate post-war intellectual palette, a reaction against the
dangerous nationalisms that were on the rise throughout the 1930s. The
good German (for the social democratic left an ideal that could be created
through proper policy) was a good European and the good European was
British.
Conclusion
At this point, it is worth briefly considering British post-war historiog-
raphy, in which British nationalism (understood to be relatively benign)
was reaffirmed. As Berger argues, after the war “[h]istory writing could
continue to be a tribute to British institutions, values, and virtues -
105 TNA FO 898/13, Leeper, “Never Again…” (3 February 1942).

102 K. R. GRAHAM
especially individualism, common sense, and pragmatism.”106 During

the first period of the propaganda war, British propagandists adhered
to a blinkered and essentialist perspective, which elided many of the
dangerous elements of German society that had contributed to the rise
of fascism. During the second period, PWE embraced Vansittartism of a
kind, a natural fit as it was a product of the normative, present-centred,
and instrumentalist historical imagination of the Foreign Office mind so
familiar to the propagandists themselves. During this period, Germany
was understood as a society terminally (and eternally) out of step with
the rest of civilized Europe. During the third period, which extended
into the occupation, social history gave British propagandists a means to
go beyond Vansittartist pessimism. At the same time, however, Britain’s
unique experience in the war—the British could boast that they were
never occupied, that they kept the light on for European democracy by
housing exiled governments and supporting anti-fascist partisans, and that
British society was more egalitarian by the end of the war than it was
in the beginning—encouraged a new pitch of British exceptionalism in
historical thinking, a return to the national paradigm (to borrow Berger’s
phrase) that could provide occupied Germany with an exemplar of the
modern, liberal, democratic European state. It is no coincidence that the
return to the national paradigm in British history writing was contem-
poraneous with an unprecedented academic and popular interest in the
history of continental Europe, a consequence both of the influence of
German anti-fascist historians such as Koeppler and Carsten and of the
wartime experiences of British historians who worked alongside them.107
There is reason to be sceptical of the impact that social history had on
Whitehall in the final months of the war. Anti-Prussian Germanophobia
had deep roots among British elites. As Lothar Kettenacker writes, “the
ghost of Prussia was more alive in Whitehall during the war than in
the German High Command.”108 As mentioned above, the propaganda
school was still describing in intimate detail the pathologies that plagued
the German national character even as Francis Carsten rejected A.J.P.
Taylor’s Germanophobic history of the Weimar Republic. And Churchill’s
106 Berger, “A Return to the National Paradigm?”, 642.

107 This is the central theme of Richard J. Evans’s Cosmopolitan Islanders (Cambridge:
Cambridge UP, 2005).
108 Kettenacker, “British Post-War Planning for Germany”, 16.
own notorious Prussophobia led to the dissolution of the Prussian

state during the Allied occupation, “a symbolic act,” writes Anthony J.
Nicholls, “since by then Prussia had ceased to exist.”109 PWE’s turn to
social history during the third period of the propaganda war did not
supplant the earlier Vansittartist mode; rather, the two tendencies existed
together in an uneasy tension. It is interesting to note that while the
process of planning for a post-war liberal and integrated Europe neces-
sitated embracing a socio-historical approach to the German problem,
Vansittartists such as Leeper could sooner conceive of a European Britain
than they were able to shake off the old bogey, Prussia. While British
propagandists were slower to take up social scientific perspectives than
were researchers in the United States (and in fact, PWE’s relationship with
the OSS no doubt encouraged the change in British attitudes, as indicated
in chapter four), social history nevertheless became an integral part of the
propagandists’ wartime historical imagination. British propagandists’ crit-
ical engagement with German history had a lingering influence on the
broader British historical imagination and was certainly a factor in the
direction of post-war British historiography. These wartime adventures
helped to legitimate a post-war turn towards social history fostered by
the 1942 Beveridge Report, the 1945 Labour election victory, and the
subsequent birth of the welfare state, which granted the social sciences
unprecedented opportunity for growth.
A.J.P. Taylor’s account of the 1944 rejection of his Weimar history
suggests that, unlike other British war departments, PWE was strikingly
left-wing and as such his own pessimistic history was out of step with the
PWE belief “in a strongly democratic Germany groaning under Hitler’s
tyranny.”110 It seems rather that Taylor misread a dynamic situation.
Dedicated socialists and Vansittartists alike were dismissive of the idea
that a good Germany existed in any kind of reality. But Vansittartism’s
limitations offered no way forward at a time when it was recognized
that Germany must survive capitulation as a viable European State. The
anti-fascist critiques never entirely displaced Vansittartism among PWE’s
more determined Germanophobes, but it did complement anti-German
sentiment and ultimately laid the foundations for the policy of German
109 Nicholls, “The German ‘National Character’ in British Perspective”, 28.

110 A.J.P. Taylor, A Personal History (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1983), 172.
104 K. R. GRAHAM
re-education. Had Taylor submitted his history in 1941, British propa-

gandists would have wholeheartedly embraced it (although they may have
attached caveats to its use). By 1944, PWE’s historical imagination, or at
least the historical imagination of forward-thinking elements within the
department, was embracing a new tendency, conditioned against that very
pessimism with which Taylor wrote.
Of course, the shift from Vansittartism to social history was not
merely a product of new-found optimism. Rather, social scientific perspec-
tives were already in the offing in both Britain and America thanks to
the contributions of talented émigré historians and researchers. These
perspectives subsequently rose to prominence as a consequence of the
shortcomings of Germanophobic intellectual history in responding to
the problems of occupation and re-education. Despite uneven resistance
from British officialdom, refugees from Nazism made substantial and
surprising contributions to the Allied war effort. While British elites were
hardly prepared to promote revolutionary socialism, an understanding
of the conditions in Germany predicated on social history meant that
figures such as Carsten and Koeppler could redirect antagonisms towards
a new Germany without PWE having to completely abandon Vansittartist
sentiment. When planning for post-war Europe began to gain traction,
German anti-fascists such as those associates of Neu Beginnen were well
positioned to influence thinking on Germany. Of course, it is difficult
to believe that the reforms imposed on Germany during the occupation
were radical enough to satisfy those anti-fascists who had been involved in
the propaganda war. After all, uncomfortable continuities with the Nazi
past lingered on in West German politics until at least 1969 when Willi
Brandt became the first SPD Chancellor. Neither Vansittartists nor social-
ists could have been pleased to see so much of the old Germany limp into
the future.
CHAPTER 4
Germany on the Couch: The Role

of Psychology and the Social Sciences
in the Development of Subversive Propaganda
The first half of the twentieth century witnessed significant developments

in the field of social psychology. Methodologies such as Wilfred Trotter’s
“herd instinct” and Freudian ego psychology branched and proliferated in
response to the ideological and political pressures of the 1920s and 1930s.
“By 1939,” writes Mathew Thomson, “the stage was set for concern over
psychological subjectivity to step out of the private arena or the specialist
environments of the clinic or schoolroom onto the very public stage of
national and ideological warfare.”1 An array of British and American intel-
ligence and propaganda departments expressed enthusiasm about these
scientific developments on the expectation that psychology could offer
insight into the German national character. For more intellectually conser-
vative officials, however, psychology often appeared to be little more than
an unwelcome distraction from the business at hand.
Writing a short time after the war, Robert Bruce Lockhart, Director-
General of the Political Warfare Executive, ruefully declared that he had
“an open mind about psychologists. We employed three, and one, at least,
did useful work for our German section.”2 PWE’s director of clandestine
1 Mathew Thomson, Psychological Subjects: Identity, Culture, and Health in Twentieth-

Century Britain (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2006), 225.
2 Robert Bruce Lockhart, Comes the Reckoning (London: Putnam, 1947), 156.

Switzerland AG 2021
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-71664-6_4
106 K. R. GRAHAM
propaganda, Sefton Delmer, meanwhile regarded psychology as a kind of

magic trick, more akin to mesmerism than science. He described PWE’s
activities generally as “psychological judo which exploited the impetus
of the enemy’s own ideological preaching to turn it against him.”3 In
Delmer’s opinion the greatest contemporary practitioner of psychology
was not a professional psychologist at all but rather his erstwhile and
future employer, the tabloid newspaper baron, Max Aitken, Lord Beaver-
brook: “Had Lord Beaverbrook been given the job of softening up
[Rudolf] Hess,” Delmer later wrote, “he would in two or at most three
interviews have laid all the psychological foundation the Intelligence men
needed.”4 When Delmer did in fact identify a professional psycholo-
gist employed by PWE—very likely the same “useful” man mentioned
by Lockhart—he described not the good doctor’s contribution to the
department’s understanding of psychology, but rather the utilization of
his anatomical knowledge as chief author of an elaborate campaign to
encourage malingering among German servicemen and workers.5 As far
as PWE’s senior staff were concerned, their professional psychologist was
more valuable as a sawbones than a shrink.
Nevertheless, the potential value of psychology was recognized early.
Ahead of the German invasion of France, for example, a widely circulated
memorandum demanded that “[p]sychologists, propaganda journalists,
wireless experts as well as sabotage and secret service authorities… co-
operate in planning and carrying out the [propaganda] campaign.”6 The
primacy that the unnamed author gives to psychologists suggests an
enthusiasm not matched by PWE’s hiring policy—it would be another
two years before a trained psychologist joined the ranks. As discussed
in Chapter Two, PWE preferred to employ veterans of Fleet Street or
the Foreign Office, individuals who possessed first-hand knowledge and
3 Sefton Delmer, Black Boomerang (London: Secker and Warburg, 1962), 42.
4 Delmer’s speculation here may well be a rather more pointed criticism. The psychiatrist
who actually did interrogate Hess after his ill-fated flight to Britain was Dr Henry Dicks,
who later advised PWE on the better use of psychology in political warfare. Dicks is
discussed later in this chapter. Ironically, Beaverbrook did actually visit the imprisoned
Hess in September 1941; Delmer, Black Boomerang, 57; Pick, The Pursuit of the Nazi
Mind, 71.
6 The archive includes commentary from the Prime Minister: TNA FO 898/3, Neville
Chamberlain, “Letter to Mrs Rodd,” (5 March 1940); TNA FO 898/3, “Rough Notes
on the Means to be Employed,” (March 1940).
4 GERMANY ON THE COUCH: THE ROLE OF PSYCHOLOGY … 107
experience of the people and politics of Europe along with a good dose
of what was deemed to be practical intelligence. Of course, the language
and logic of psychology had long since entered the public discourse; the
imagined power of propaganda that had developed in the wake of the
First World War correlates with an emergent “belief that human nature
itself could be improved through a coordinated series of psycholog-
ical interventions.”7 As Lockhart’s “useful” psychologist himself wrote,
“‘psychology’ is too much in the air to be neglected.”8 Positioned at
the vanguard of British foreign relations, PWE engendered an often
conservative milieu that nonetheless compelled propagandists to entertain
intellectual adventures.
Psychology represents something of a lacuna in PWE’s official history,
an understandable elision given the seemingly marginal status ascribed to
it by PWE’s directors. The works of Cruickshank, Balfour, and Taylor, for
example, give little space to such discussions. Such gaps in the narrative
reflect in part the questions historians have been asking. Recent years have
witnessed a change. Michal Shapira, for example, reorients the historiog-
raphy around civilian anxiety and bombing neurosis by moving beyond
the question of how much civilians suffered and examining instead the
discourse around “anxiety and fear as new concepts calling for professional
knowledge and management.”9 Developments in psychology were deeply
entangled with mid-century thinking on national character, on morale and
subversion, and on the construction of a post-war liberal society—and
scholarship in this area has been building for decades.10 A study of the
7 Rhodri Hayward, “The Invention of the Psychosocial: An Introduction”, History of

the Human Sciences 25.5 (2012): 4.
8 Churchill Archives Centre, Cambridge (CAC) ABMS 1/6/3, J.T. MacCurdy,
Memorandum, “Propaganda and Enemy Leaders” (17 October 1941).
9 Michal Shapira, “The Psychological Study of Anxiety in the Era of the Second World
War”, Twentieth Century British History 24.1 (2013): 31–33.
10 See, for example: Ian McLaine, Ministry of Morale: Home Front Morale and the
Ministry of Information in World War II (London: Allen & Unwin, 1979); Barry M.
Katz, Foreign Intelligence: Research and Analysis in the Office of Strategic Services 1942–
1945 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1989); Thomson, Psychological Subjects; Daniel
Pick, The Pursuit of the Nazi Mind: Hitler, Hess, and the Analysts (Oxford: Oxford UP,
2012); Louise E. Hoffman, “American Psychologists and Wartime Research on Germany,
1941–1945”, American Psychologist 47.2 (1992): 264–273; Hoffman, “Erikson on Hitler:
The Origins of ‘Hitler’s Imagery and German Youth’”, The Psychohistory Review 22.1
(1993): 69–86; Ellen Herman, The Romance of American Psychology: Political Culture in
the Age of Experts (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1995).
108 K. R. GRAHAM
PWE archive informed by this broader historiography modifies our under-

standing of British wartime perspectives on Germany and the imagined
future of Europe.
This chapter will examine the role that psychology played in British
subversive propaganda directed at Nazi Germany in light of develop-
ments at home and abroad. In Britain’s search for new answers to the
old German problem, a tension arose within the propaganda community
about the utility of these new scientific perspectives. The evolution of this
debate raises questions about the openness of the military-intelligence
apparatus to new modes of thought and offers new insight into British
wartime perspectives on Germany. Psychology was valuable only so long
as it was practical; for PWE, this meant that for much of the war any new
methodology was obliged to accommodate that parochial and broadly
anti-German attitude explored in previous chapters, rather than ques-
tion the dominant perspective. While their American contemporaries were
embracing a melange of anthropology, sociology, and psychology, and
the Ministry of Information was turning to behaviourism in conducting
its Wartime Social Survey, PWE opted instead for psychopathological
orientations that emphasized ahistorical German distinction. In this,
PWE’s curious engagement with psychology demonstrates the peculiar
and culturally contingent ways in which psychology transitioned from the
academy to the public stage.
This chapter will begin with a potted history of “crowd science” and
the development of social psychology from the late nineteenth century.
This chapter will then explore attempts to incorporate psychology into
Britain’s propaganda war, before tracing the genealogy and expression
of psychological thought in PWE’s conception of Germany within the
context of an antagonism that emerged in Britain between behaviourism
and psychoanalysis as a path to a new social psychology. This chapter will
also examine the influence in Britain of American interventions in the
field, with particular attention to those neo-Freudian advances associated
with the Frankfurt School. PWE’s wary attitude to scientific thinking had
a marked effect on the psychological tropes that were ultimately adopted
by the department in its analyses of their German foe. As a result, the
Germany to which Britain spoke was articulated in terms of an essential-
ized and frequently Germanophobic psychopathology that, for much of
the war, went unchallenged by expert opinion. This perspective was finally
contested only later in the war when British propagandists had to reckon
with expanding American influence, the exigencies of new policies that
sought to ensure a lasting peace, and prisoner of war interrogations that

provided the empirical data necessary to convincingly ratify novel theo-
retical models. Given the haphazard uptake of psychology within PWE,
Lockhart’s lingering ambivalence is hardly surprising.
Psychological Judo
Mid-century propagandists were heirs to a nascent tradition of psycholog-
ical research that sought to understand psyche in the plural. As Peter Gay
observes, many of the earliest works in the tradition of crowd psychology
were written by amateurs—novelists, journalists, historians, and social
critics—and often motivated by a political agenda.11 Perhaps the most
significant of these was French polymath Gustave Le Bon’s The Crowd:
A Study of the Popular Mind.12 Published in 1895, this curious work
drew on contemporary sociology and anthropology as well as psychology,
to explain the distinct behaviour of crowds as a product of their “racial
unconscious.” Le Bon’s work was indelibly marked by his reactionary
politics; his crowd was guided foremost by the “hereditary needs of the
race” and was, as such, instinctively conservative.13 If the crowd desires
social change, that change can only ever be superficial, as the society in
which the crowd lives is an outgrowth of their own racial genius; the
crowd preserves a “fetish-like respect for all traditions” and an “uncon-
scious horror of all novelty capable of changing the essential conditions
of their existence.”14 In this sense, Le Bon’s crowd is necessarily an
abstraction, akin to the unthinking Burkean rabble rather than “an aggre-
gate of men and women of flesh and blood”15 and equipped with a
power only for destruction. As Daniel Pick observes, nineteenth-century
11 Peter Gay, Freud: A Life for Our Time (New York: Norton, 1998), 405.
12 Gustave Le Bon, The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind (Mineola, New York:
Dover, 2002).
13 By “race,” Le Bon likely means something akin to ethno-nationality with a distinctly
biologically flavour; Gustave Le Bon, The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind (Mineola,
New York: Dover, 2002), 26.
14 Gustave Le Bon, The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind (Mineola, New York:
Dover, 2002), 26.
15 George Rudé, The Crowd in History: A Study of Popular Disturbances in France and
England 1730–1848 (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1964), 9.
110 K. R. GRAHAM
crowd science identified mob activities as symptomatic of a prior “dis-

aggregation of social bonds,” pre-empting the possibility that crowds
could act rationally or that their desires were marked by reason.16 In a
telling example, Le Bon argued that a person who goes on strike does
so more out of “obedience to an order than to obtain an increase of…
[their] slender salary.”17 It is no coincidence that the new science of
crowd psychology emerged during a period in which the European labour
movement was consolidating its power, compelling political reforms that
slowly expanded suffrage to new sections of society. While crowd science
developed rapidly in years following Le Bon’s study, he remained an influ-
ential figure. Writing seven decades later, historian George Rudé was still
working to redress Le Bon’s legacy, acknowledging that while “many of
his aristocratic prejudices and racial notions have been discarded by his
successors,” historians, and social psychologists alike seemed “[reluctant]
to abandon the old concept of the crowd as ‘mob’.”18
Twenty years after Le Bon’s great work, Wilfred Trotter hypothe-
sized “gregariousness” or sociability as the key to understanding crowd
behaviour in his highly influential Instincts of the Herd in Peace and
War.19 Where Le Bon might be described as something of a dilet-
tante, Trotter was an accomplished neurosurgeon and was knowledgeable
about contemporary advances in psychology. Reluctant to advocate for
or against Freud, Trotter nevertheless praised psychoanalysis for its “very
definite advance in principle” towards the enlightenment of the human
experience, which “shows that it is the product of a mind determined by
whatever effort to get to close quarters with the facts.”20 He did not take
up Freudian theory, offering instead his own list of instincts, “namely,
those of self-preservation, nutrition, sex, and the herd.”21 The idea of
herd instinct built upon Le Bon’s notion of a powerful drive that over-
came individualistic instincts in favour of the group. Trotter’s Instincts of
16 Daniel Pick, “Freud’s Group Psychology and the History of the Crowd”, History
Workshop Journal 40 (1995): 55.
17 Le Bon, The Crowd, 27–28.
18 Rudé, The Crowd in History, 10.
19 Wilfred Trotter, Instincts of the Herd in Peace and War (London: T. Fisher Unwin,
1916).
20 Trotter, Instincts of the Herd in Peace and War, 70–71.
the Herd was conceived very much with an eye to the inferno of the Great
War. Both Le Bon and Trotter placed a strong emphasis on the nation as
a natural organizing principle of humanity; this was particularly evident in
Trotter’s work when he considered Germany since unification as a herd
finally given over to a “conscious direction” and a sense of social cohesion
pregnant with destiny.22 This was a necessary step on the road to civiliza-
tion, but, tragically, the mode of gregariousness manifested by Wilhelmine
Germany was aggressively lupine and anachronistically out of step with
civilized Europe—a vestige of the barbarian past. Trotter compared the
German wolf-pack to the more advanced and intricately socialized gregar-
iousness of the beehive, to which Britain, naturally, aspired.23 By Trotter’s
measure, the German herd, as it existed in 1915, was destined to be short-
lived. Inevitably, Trotter garnered a broad and enthusiastic readership.
The absurd destruction of the First World War and the turbulent political
atmosphere that followed in its wake made group psychology a research
imperative for many practitioners.
Sigmund Freud self-consciously ushered in the twentieth century
with the publication of On the Interpretation of Dreams in 1900.24
Freud insisted on a strict adherence to the principles of empiricism in
the development of this new methodology, which drew on his exten-
sive knowledge of medicine and biology. This initial formulation gave
no oxygen to notions of a collective unconscious or crowd instinct.
However, the psychological devastation wrought by the First World War
prompted Freud and his followers to expand their views.25 As thera-
pists treated soldiers suffering from war neuroses on an unprecedented
scale, it became clear that the libido alone was insufficient to explain the
depths of the human mind. In a study of Freud’s work during this period,
Daniel Pick notes that Freud engaged with canonical crowd psycholo-
gists including Trotter and Le Bon.26 According to Pick, Freud found
otter’s work a stimulating read, if a little “propagandistic”; likewise, he
22 Trotter, Instincts of the Herd in Peace and War, 165.

24 Notoriously, the book’s first run appeared in 1899, but Freud insisted its publication
date reflect the dawn of the new century: Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams,
trans. Joyce Crick (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1999).
25 Hoffman, “War, Revolution, and Psychoanalysis: Freudian Thought Begins to
Grapple with Social Reality” Journal of the History of Behavioral Sciences 17 (1981):
256–263.
26 Pick, “Freud’s Group Psychology and the History of the Crowd”, 40–50.
112 K. R. GRAHAM
found much to admire in Le Bon but was compelled to re-frame his anal-
ysis, interrogating the very idea of a group and the fraught process of
identification and self-fashioning with an eye to the individual’s stormy
unconscious. From 1915 Freud theorized a means of understanding
repression, self-preservation, and aggression by way of a “reality-ego”
that stood alongside the already identified “pleasure-ego.” And then in
1920 he published Beyond the Pleasure Principle, describing an ego that
responds to external conditions in an act of self-preservation which in
turn generates a reality-principle that inhibits the id’s pleasure-principle.27
A year later he published Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego,
an early effort to move from individual analysis to the analysis of a
society which would distinguish much of his later work.28 This book was
steeped in the ideas of Trotter and Le Bon but nevertheless maintained
the primacy of the individual in understanding the psychology of the
group. “Freud agreed with Le Bon that crowds are more intolerant, more
irrational, more immoral, more heartless, above all more uninhibited,
than individuals,” writes Peter Gay, “But the crowd, as crowd, invents
nothing; it only liberates, distorts, exaggerates, the individual members’
traits.”29 As Pick suggests, the “eccentric and odiously anti-democratic
canon of early crowd ‘science’” stands at quite a remove from Freud’s
group psychology.30 Freud’s research in this direction would subsequently
lead to the theorization of the superego, the third element in his person-
ality theory—“the external world’s agent within the psyche”—and the
keystone in a new social psychology that saw “regression and identifi-
cation as the mechanisms of social cohesion.”31 These developments in
Freud’s own conception of the mind coupled with the ongoing trauma
of the First World War precipitated many new tendencies in psychology.
Where Trotter and Le Bon were primarily concerned with the
psychology of emotion, the wartime experience of many Freudians—
particularly of the second and third generations of analysts—fostered the
27 Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, trans. James Strachey (New York: Norton,
1989).
28 Freud, Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, trans. James Strachey (New York:
Boni and Liveright, 1922).
29 Peter Gay, Freud: A Life for Our Time (New York: Norton, 1998). 405.
30 Pick, “Freud’s Group Psychology and the History of the Crowd”, History Workshop
Journal 40 (1995): 39.
31 Hoffman, “War, Revolution, and Psychoanalysis”, 263.
development of a new social psychology, which, as Louise Hoffman points

out, often married Marxism and psychoanalysis in order to “[address
the psychology of] both emotion and interest.”32 These neo-Freudians
departed from Freud’s pessimism and biological determinism, instead
imagining that their work could help to emancipate humanity by enabling
“self-expression and social recognition.”33 The overheated atmosphere of
the Weimar Republic made Germany, and particularly Berlin, a natural
and wild frontier for psychoanalysts and others who sought to heal
the psychic scars of humanity. Founded in 1920, the Berlin Psychoana-
lytic Polyclinic—later the Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute (BPI)—attracted
some of Germany’s best psychoanalytic minds including Karl Abraham,
Karen Horney, and Melanie Klein. Certainly, the BPI was unusual for its
openness to other social movements including socialism and feminism and
for this it drew more than a few progressive thinkers to Berlin, including
Wilhelm Reich—alongside its share of reactionaries and eugenicists.34
Such was the concentration of talent in Berlin that, prior to the Nazi
seizure of power, the BPI had arguably supplanted Vienna as the centre
of the broader psychoanalytic movement. Veronika Feuchtner describes in
compelling detail the deep and abiding links between the Weimar Repub-
lic’s modernist culture and “the psychoanalytic discourse on war neurosis,
sexuality, and criminality specific to Berlin… [as] theorized and prac-
ticed at the Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute.”35 And, as Samara Heifetz
suggests, the Frankfurt School, whose work would become so impor-
tant to anti-fascist political warfare and mid-century critical theory, “was
essentially an outgrowth of the Berlin Institute.”36 While the BPI by
32 As Freud himself adhered to a biological (and hence ahistorical) view of psyche, he

disapproved of Marxism’s insistence on the contingent and the historical: Hoffman, “War,
Revolution, and Psychoanalysis”, 253, 262.
33 Geoffrey Cocks, Psychotherapy in the Third Reich: The Göring Institute (Second
Edition), (London: Transaction Publishers, 1997), 12.
34 Veronika Feuchtner, Berlin Psychoanalytic: Psychoanalysis and Culture in Weimar
Republic Germany and Beyond (University of California Press, 2011), 175–176. While
it does not play a large part in this history, Reich’s Mass Psychology of Fascism was a
brilliantly creative—and highly controversial—attempt to marry Marx and Freud in order
to explain the appeal of Nazism for the German people.
35 Feuchtner, Berlin Psychoanalytic, 1–2.
36 Samara Heifetz, “Between Sex and Gender: The Psychoanalytic Movement in Weimar
and Imperial Berlin,” 2010, New York University, PhD Thesis. 13–14.
114 K. R. GRAHAM
no means encompasses the breadth of interwar German psychology, its

history shows which way the wind was blowing.
Psychoanalysis, and psychology in general, was under threat of extinc-
tion under Nazism. The so-called Jewish science was an easy target for
Nazi ideologues who perceived in psychology “the ‘hyperrationalized’
culture of the Jew that was devoid of deeper feeling for nation, people,
nature, and race.”37 But in a more immediate sense, the advent of the
Third Reich rendered life precarious for Germany’s many Jewish prac-
titioners. By April 1933, the Nazis had banned foreign membership to
medical societies, which, by their obscene logic, extended to German
Jews.38 This reduced the executive board of the Berlin Psychoanalytic
Institute to two members. A month later, Freud’s books were put to
the pyre. The BPI limped on through the early years of Nazism, its
remaining members trying desperately to preserve what they saw as the
last bridgehead for psychoanalysis in Germany.
For a short time from 1933, it looked like Jungian psychotherapy
might win out against other modes of psychology in Nazi Germany.
The Swiss psychotherapist Carl Jung had an ambivalent relationship with
Nazism. A former champion of psychoanalysis, he had broken with Freud
in 1912 after questioning the centrality of the libido in psychological
development and arguing that there existed a collective unconscious.
While several of his publications hint at unsavoury convictions including
a brief enthusiasm for the vitality of Nazism, it is unlikely that he was a
Nazi sympathizer. Nevertheless, Jungian psychotherapy—with its mythic,
religious, and occult concerns and its interest in emotion as a supple-
ment to intellectual understanding—was undoubtedly the tendency most
ideologically in tune with Nazism. During Germany’s Gleichschaltung,
German psychotherapists made a concerted effort to secure their position
in the new regime by appealing to Jung to lend respectability to their
practice and win favour with the authorities. However, German Jungians
were soon outflanked by other developments. As Jung’s own ambivalence
37 Cocks, Psychotherapy in the Third Reich, 59.

38 The bravery of some of these analysts cannot be overstated. Jewish psychoanalyst
Edith Jacobson, for example, learned in 1935 that one of her former patients was in
trouble with the Nazi authorities because of their involvement with Neu Beginnen; when
she came to her patient’s aid, she was arrested by the Gestapo for refusing to help them
in their investigations and spent several years in prison; Feuchtner, Berlin Psychoanalytic,
13; Edward Kronold, “Edith Jacobson 1897–1978”, The Psychoanalytic Quarterly 49.3
(1980): 505–507.
about Nazism became more apparent from 1934, Jungian psychotherapy

slipped from the spotlight.
The BPI was able to continue in a protracted form through the
period of Gleichschaltung partly because of the distinctions between
neo-Freudianism and orthodox Freudianism. Distinct from the “Jewish
science” in key respects—not least of which was a “faith in the prospects
of psychosocial engineering”—the neo-Freudian ideas of figures such as
Alfred Adler became a line by which conservative or fascist practitioners
could make psychotherapy more palatable to the regime. Divested of its
Jewish members, the BPI was finally absorbed into the newly established
German Institute for Psychological Research and Psychotherapy under
the supervision of the Reich Interior Ministry in 1936. The new orga-
nization was otherwise known as the Göring Institute after its director,
Matthias Heinrich Göring, an Adlerian psychologist and a cousin of
Hermann Göring—it is through the family connection that he owed
his position of prominence. The accident of Göring’s birth was enough
to shield neo-Freudianism from the most aggressive Nazi ideologues.
Despite the supposedly decadent intellectual heritage of the BPI, the
Nazis were not willing to dissolve the organization entirely. After all, as
Ellen Herman suggests, “[n]o science poked more holes in democratic
ideals than psychology.”39
Gleichschaltung changed the intellectual contours of German
psychology in important ways but there is evidence to suggest that there
were substantial points of continuity throughout this period and into
the post-war era. Geoffrey Cocks points to the demographic continu-
ities in German psychotherapy before 1933, comprised of “Adlerians,
Jungians, Freudians, and independents. Each had its own intellectual
underpinnings but all united by professional aim, a general cultural back-
ground, and shared historical experience.”40 Exploring the Weberian
concept of an “iron cage,” Geoffrey Cocks describes the medical profes-
sion in Nazi Germany as more or less typical of the Bildungsbürgertum;
having “internalized values, habits, and attitudes of an Imperial Germany
at the height of its powers and in the depths of its final crisis” they
displayed in the interwar period “conservative and nationalist prejudices
39 Herman, The Romance of American Psychology, 23.

116 K. R. GRAHAM
easily exploited by the Nazis.”41 The Third Reich certainly had profound
effects on German medicine, but, in many respects, doctors’ entangle-
ment with Nazism only masked disturbing continuities in the process of
professionalizing the discipline.
The rise of fascism also had a direct influence on the development
of psychology in Britain and the United States. As progressive and
Jewish intellectuals and activists were driven into exile, they brought with
them a renewed interest in the importance of social context in under-
standing psychological development. By the end of the 1930s, London
had become the final destination for many psychoanalysts fleeing Euro-
pean anti-Semitism.42 Interestingly, however, the curious internal politics
of the psychoanalytic movement had a bearing on who could settle
where. As Michal Shapira indicates, establishment figures such as Ernest
Jones helped settle many refugees but Jones’s disdain for radical psycho-
analysts who “dangerously politicize psychoanalysis”—such as Wilhelm
Reich—meant that many Marxist neo-Freudians had to look elsewhere
for asylum.43
Neo-Freudian ideas were most welcome in the United States where
something of a revolution in the social sciences was being fostered by
the New Deal. PWE’s reluctant engagement with psychology in contrast
with their American contemporaries reflects these circumstances. When
the world once again found itself at war, neo-Freudians and other exiled
European social scientists who had found refuge in the United States were
well-positioned to contribute to the fight against Nazism. As Herman
argues, the Second World War was truly “a watershed in the history
of psychology.”44 In the United States especially, the laboratory of war
led to an alchemical fusion of anthropology, sociology, psychoanalysis,
and the latent concerns of crowd psychology. In their efforts to over-
turn the old Freudian orthodoxies, neo-Freudians demonstrated that
“individuals embodied their culture and cultures embodied the collec-
tive personality of the people”; with this revelation, argues Herman, they
devised a new conception of national character which “offered a way

42 Michal Shapira, The War Inside: Psychoanalysis, Total War, and the Making of the
Democratic Self in Postwar Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2013), 3.
43 Shapira, The War Inside, 13.
44 Ellen Herman, The Romance of American Psychology: Political Culture in the Age of
Experts (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 13.
of turning psychological insight into policy directives.”45 Shortly after

it was mobilized in 1942, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), at
the behest of William Donovan, began what Louise Hoffman describes
as a series of “studies of both national psychology and the psychody-
namics of enemy leaders” with a view to “conducting morale research and
other pragmatic wartime projects.”46 This programme was run through
the OSS’s Psychology Division—an official body itself anathema to the
British project—under behavioural psychologist Robert C. Tryon. From
this programme emerged some of the more curious artefacts of wartime
research, such as Walter C. Langer’s contentious The Mind of Adolf
Hitler.47 British observers, however, were not exactly enthusiastic about
this pioneering work. Mary Knight, a propagandist in PWE’s Italian
campaign, later wrote that:
PWE thought it unwise to place overmuch reliance on psychology which

had proved ineffective in the attempt to subvert the German armed
forces... We well knew that an American-commissioned in-depth study of
the psyche of Hitler, purporting to unlock the mind of the Fuhrer, had not
succeeded in throwing any light on Hitler’s next move or mood [sic].48
The broader American establishment was, like the British, reticent about
the practical value of psychology in certain provinces of the war, but
the OSS—an entirely new intelligence service rather than an outgrowth
of the State Department—was less hidebound by these traditions. Barry
Katz’s intellectual history of the OSS Research and Analysis Branch reveals
how Donovan’s unusual appreciation for academic expertise resulted in
a department uniquely staffed by an American university elite, which
by 1942 extended to European exiles such as Erik Erikson and affili-
ates of the Frankfurt School.49 Ex post facto, the OSS studies (many of

46 Hoffman, “American Psychologists and Wartime Research on Germany”, 265–266.
47 Langer, The Mind of Adolf Hitler: The Secret Wartime Report (New York: Basic
Books, 1972).
48 Archive of the Imperial War Museum (IWM) Cat No 16200–07/19/1 Mary Knight,
Unpublished Memoir, “An Italian Job: Churchill’s Secret Army at War in Italy 1943–
1945”.
49 Katz, Foreign Intelligence, 32.
118 K. R. GRAHAM
which fell on deaf ears)50 may justify PWE’s reservations regarding profes-
sional psychology, but the question ought not to rest on an anachronism.
In other spheres of the war, psychology indeed had practical value for
British planners. The phenomenon of shell shock, for example, had been
a tremendous and costly problem for Whitehall after the First World War.
When, in 1939, British psychologist Francis Prideaux convincingly argued
that denying pensions to victims of shell shock and war neuroses was in
fact therapeutic, he was awarded a knighthood.51
Psychology did not enjoy the same high standing in Britain as it did
in Germany or the United States,52 but even within the British context,
PWE’s engagement with psychology was singular. While psychologies
of personal development (as opposed to psychoanalysis, “a psychology
of breaking oneself down”) held general appeal in Britain during the
1930s, Thomason argues that “there was little sign of such an interest
becoming sustained, general among the political class, or genuinely influ-
ential.”53 The threat of war and the emergence of seemingly irrational
mass movements across Europe unsettled this paradigm. Thomson iden-
tifies in Britain a “mid-century international and ideological crisis,” bound
to questions of human nature, which “provided a unique opportunity for
the advance of psychology.”54 After some false starts, psychological exper-
tise did play a role in areas such as the Ministry of Information’s Social
Survey.55 But MoI’s psychological subjects were on hand, while PWE’s
Germany remained obstinately remote; for much of the war the foreign
propagandists had no recourse to the kind of empirical data on which
50 Paraphrasing Leonard Doob, head the Office of War Information’s Bureau of Over-
seas Intelligence, Herman writes that “the Work of his Researchers was used when it
Suited the Interests of Policy-Makers and Ignored when it did not”: The Romance of
American Psychology, 43.
51 Ben Shephard, “‘Pitiless Psychology’: The Role of Prevention in British Military
Psychiatry in the Second World War,” History of Psychiatry 40.4 (1999): 498–499.
52 According to L.S. Hearnshaw’s early history of psychology, for example, as late as
1939 in British universities “the Total Lecturing Staff in Departments of Psychology…
Numbered Only About Thirty”: L.S. Hearnshaw, A Short History of British Psychology,
1840–1940 (London: Methuen, 1964), 208.
53 Thomson, Psychological Subjects, 208, 215.
54 Thomson, Psychological Subjects, 248.
MoI’s modest psychological turn rested. Later in the war, joint Anglo-
American projects such as PWD/SHAEF—which drew on both OSS and
PWE resources to analyse German prisoners of war—were particularly
enthusiastic about the contribution of social science and psychology to
propaganda and morale research. However, PWE’s own more delimited
flirtation with the new methodologies was never so fruitful.
The Push for Pure Psychology

The PWE view of professional psychology was not static. Individual opin-
ions varied with regard to the role that psychologists and social scientists
might play in the subversive war, and indeed archival evidence suggests
that at a number of moments the story might have progressed in quite
a different direction. Even before the war, when PWE was nothing more
than a twinkle in the eye of a planning committee, there were attempts
to include professional psychologists on the roster. A document circu-
lated in early 1939 included Ernest Jones in a list of proposed staff for
the new foreign propaganda department.56 Jones was Freud’s biographer
and one of his staunchest advocates, a man who, according to Richard
Overy, “played a central part in securing a monopoly for Freudianism as
the only legitimate form of psychoanalysis and in bringing the infant prac-
tice to Britain.”57 While Jones never was recruited into the propaganda
war, the proposal to employ a Freudian psychoanalyst—a methodology
then generally regarded with suspicion and distaste by the British public
at least outside of the bourgeois intelligentsia—is curious. Fortunately,
the list’s author was good enough to cite Jones’s qualifications, should
there be any doubt: here was a man with a Harley Street address, “a
Leipzig degree and an Austrian wife” who was also prescient in having
“made a study of German psychology.”58 Context offers some further
enlightenment to the rationale here; Jones appeared on the list beneath a
hodgepodge of individuals, all men of high standing with what was imag-
ined were potentially useful skills, including “some rich Peer [who] has
interested himself in balloon experiments.”
56 The National Archives of the UK (TNA) FO 898/1, “Some extracts and remarks
on the private file of Mr. D.B. Woodburn” (January or February 1939).
57 Richard Overy, The Morbid Age: Britain Between the Wars (London: Allen Lane,
2009), 141.
58 TNA FO 898/1, “Some Extracts and Remarks”.
120 K. R. GRAHAM
At the same time as the above list was composed, an instructive

history of First World War propaganda entitled “Report on the Work
of the Department of Propaganda in Enemy Countries”59 (the depart-
ment colloquially known as Crewe House, of which Campbell Stuart was
deputy director in 1918) was circulated as a means of articulating plans
for the new organization. This report described the activities of those
“men versed in Continental politics, acquainted with the psychology of
the enemy peoples, and accustomed to bringing influence upon the public
opinion.”60 But psychological knowledge was not specialist knowledge;
rather, it was something that came naturally to anyone with sufficient
nous and worldly experience. In the absence of a standing propaganda
ministry, British planners necessarily looked to the old department, which
employed novelists, journalists, historians, and aristocrats, but not doctors
or social scientists. The imagined recruitment of Jones, in light of
this broader pre-war planning effort, thus represents a vague suspicion
of usefulness rather than a stage in the development of any concrete
plan to determine the outlook or methodology of the inchoate depart-
ment. Theories of the unconscious were less of a priority than linguistic
perspicacity and sound patriotic credentials.
The first months of the war saw the emergence of what was termed
a strategic rather than psychological methodology in PWE’s conception
of their German audience. In 1940, for example, Foreign Office stalwart
Rex Leeper observed that the “successes achieved by German propaganda
are due not only to an understanding of mass psychology…, but to the
close link maintained between political and military strategy in the use
of the propaganda weapon.”61 The study of mass psychology provided
guidance but was not permitted to dictate terms. By way of contrast,
the curriculum of PWE’s 1944 propaganda school had broader limits,
arguing that the “science of psychology can demonstrate convincingly
that the mythology of a nation represents in fact its psychology” and
that “German mythology is exceptional because its tales end throughout
59 TNA FO 898/1, “Report on the Work of the Department of Propaganda in Enemy

Countries” (c. 1939).
60 TNA FO 898/1, “Report on the Work of the Department of Propaganda in Enemy
Countries”.
61 TNA FO 898/4, Rex Leeper, “Propaganda and Political Strategy” (8 August 1940).
in defeat and decay.”62 This change in outlook can be traced in part to

some new and influential perspectives joining the conversation.
Significantly, some of the loudest advocates for a psychological turn in
PWE’s outlook came not from Britain but from the United States. In late
1941 and early 1942, as American involvement in the war escalated in the
aftermath of Pearl Harbor, a number of highly placed Americans encour-
aged British propagandists to embrace a more “psychological approach to
the propaganda problem.”63 And in some instances, these agitators found
a welcome reception.
Rae Smith was an American advertising executive living and working in
London before the war. He was initially employed by PWE to supervise
the production of “sibs” or rumours targeting enemy morale.64 Smith
evidently proved his worth, quickly becoming a ranking propagandist
until, in June 1943, he was appointed branch head of OSS Morale Oper-
ations in London.65 In December 1941, less than six months after Smith
joined PWE, he wrote to Richard Crossman, then director of PWE’s
German section, as well as Leeper and Valentine Williams, PWE’s SIS
liaison, suggesting a new approach to the problem of subverting German
morale. He recommended that PWE consider their task in terms of pure
psychology, arguing that in morale propaganda directed at Germans,
[n]o matter how successful you are, I believe you will still end up against
a combination of lethargy and a determination based on a dominating fear
of what will happen to the individual if Germany loses the war. If we grope
around with that as a problem in pure psychology, I believe we may find
an answer which will enable us to disintegrate this will to resist, in spite of
events.66
62 Emphasis in the original: TNA FO 898/99, R. L. Sedgwick, Lecture Notes, “Note

on a Method of Attacking German Morale” (c. 1943–1944).
63 TNA FO 898/182, David Stephens to Desmond Morton, Letter (26 February
1942).
64 TNA FO 898/9, “Week-end Decisions 19th/20th July, 1941” (22 July 1941).
65 Nelson MacPherson, American Intelligence in War-Time London: The Story of the
OSS, (London: Routledge, 2005).
66 TNA FO 898/182, Rae Smith to Richard Crossman, Valentine Williams, Leeper,
Letter (30 December 1941).
122 K. R. GRAHAM
Smith contended that thinking in terms of “pure psychology, as distinct

from psychological reactions to events,” offered a better means of under-
standing behaviour and directing propaganda. Smith’s self-confessed
“superficial diagnosis” had it that Hitler subjected the French people to
“strong doses of fear and hope, scientifically alternated,… the most fatal
known treatment for the will to aggression and resistance.” His reading
of the ease with which Germany invaded France claimed that “[n]either
events nor facts had anything to do with it; it was an exercise in pure
psychology.” Framed by the same logic, Smith’s interpretation of German
national psychology is significant: “As I understand it,” he wrote, “a
major element in the regeneration of German morale by Hitler was again
an exercise (or maybe two or three exercises) in pure psychology; he
merely freed the people of an acute sense of inferiority.” Smith signed off
with the observation that “I believe we are still thinking almost wholly in
terms of events and in political reactions instead of pure psychology.” The
novelty of his views in the context of PWE speaks to the epistemological
difference between PWE and their American contemporaries. Among the
surviving PWE files, there is no evidence to suggest that Smith’s report
affected any change in the department’s outlook.
Two months after Smith made his recommendations, however, another
well-positioned American was making similar noises. Percy Winner, the
colourful assistant to the United States Ambassador in London, had
brought to the attention of Major Desmond Morton, Churchill’s military
advisor and personal assistant, a recent journal article by psychoanalyst
Roger Money-Kyrle.67 Winner was at this time acting as a liaison between
PWE and OSS and, in an exchange between Winner and Morton, the
latter directly referred to PWE while attempting to summarize Money-
Kyrle’s argument, so there can be little doubt that the pair had designs on
PWE’s output.68 Money-Kyrle’s methodology is worth noting. Through
67 While Winner wanted the Allies to eliminate fascism, Allan Winkler suggests he had
doubts about the American commitment to that aim: Winkler, The Politics of Propaganda:
The Office of War Information, 1942–1945 (New Haven, Connecticut: Yale UP, 1978),
90–92; TNA FO 898/182, Morton to Stephens, Letter (23 February 1942); Roger
Money-Kyrle, “The Psychology of Propaganda”, British Journal of Medical Psychology 19
(1941): 82–94.
68 TNA FO 898/182, Morton to Percy Winner, Letter (23 February 1942).
a psychoanalytical discussion of propaganda as mass suggestion, Money-

Kyrle identified the psychological mechanism that guaranteed Nazi propa-
ganda success: “To be effective… [propaganda] must correspond with, or
symbolize, unconscious fantasies that are already there.”69 The paper, and
Winner’s observations, came to PWE by way of David Stephens, Secre-
tary to the Executive, who was also in correspondence with Morton.
Stephens’s reply to Morton speaks to a change in the air:
I was much interested in the importance you attach to a psychological

approach to the propaganda problem, as I have myself been thinking for
some time past, and in a humble way preaching too, that the “psycho-
logical” approach was a much better one than what might be called the
“strategic” approach. By this I mean that the first question to ask is “What
are the hopes and fears of the individual German (or Italian, or Japanese
as the case may be)?” – and not “What are the soft spots in their morale
as a whole?”70
Stephens’s reading of the Money-Kyrle thesis is remarkably close to what

Rae Smith proposed. Surrounded by hard-headed veterans of the Foreign
Office, it must have seemed forlorn to “have been hoping for more Freud
and less Clauseqitz [sic]”; little wonder that Stephens felt obliged to
remark that “this is a personal opinion only.”
Why, one might ask, did these appeals come from American rather than
British officials? It is worthwhile considering the attitude to psychology
among PWE’s contemporaries at the Ministry of Information. Before
1942, strictly psychological, and especially psychoanalytical, approaches
to the morale problem were met with a degree of scepticism in Britain.
This was partly due to the individual focus of interwar methodologies
such as psychoanalysis, an approach then still seen as ill-suited to the
study of mass populations. Behaviourism, meanwhile, had been slow to
find a place among the British intelligentsia, in part because its strictly
materialist character was at odds with the intellectual fashion of the
period.71 Events forced a revision of both psychology and its role in
society. In 1940 British psychoanalyst Edward Glover declared in The
69 Money-Kyrle, “The Psychology of Propaganda”, 94.

70 TNA FO 898/182, Stephens to Morton, Letter (26 February 1942).
71 L.S. Hearnshaw, A Short History of British Psychology, 1840–1940 (London: Methuen,
1964), 121, 210.
124 K. R. GRAHAM
Lancet that the “war has established conclusively the case for a new
social psychiatry,” and indeed, as Glover and other Freudians took up
positions on the Home Morale Advisory Committee and the Wartime
Social Survey, it looked like this new Freudian social psychiatry might
have its day.72 British authorities remained dubious, however, and resisted
the recommendations of psychoanalysts.73 Only when Stephen Taylor was
appointed Director of Home Intelligence did MoI change tack. However,
the Scientific Advisory Panel, introduced in mid-1941 under Taylor, took
up a pronounced behaviourist orientation. In appraising British morale,
the Social Survey now examined action rather than thought, leaving
Glover and his Freudian cohort in the cold.74 As much as it is possible
to say that MoI invested in psychology, behaviourism (grounded by the
Survey’s positivist pretence) became the method à la mode. But Winner
and Smith were not pitching behaviourism to PWE.
As noted above, researchers such as Harold Lasswell and Wilhelm
Reich made efforts to incorporate social orientations into orthodox
Freudianism. From such efforts sprung a new mode of Freudianism incor-
porating Marxism and sociology, which found an eager audience from
the late 1930s. Barry Katz describes the unusual circumstances under
which this perspective was taken up by certain American foreign policy
circles, as the OSS’s “eastern academic mandarinate” fostered first Ivy
League boffins and then Frankfurt School exiles who in turn developed
and disseminated this new social psychology.75 OSS researchers eschewed
strict behaviourism from the outset because, as Herman argues, “the
war’s ideological clashes made it impossible to trust such tangible indi-
cators of loyalty as what people said and how people behaved.”76 Two
different modes of social psychology—one behaviourist and the other
72 Edward Glover, “The Birth of Social Psychiatry”, The Lancet 236 (24 August 1940),
239.
75 Katz, Foreign Intelligence, 167.
76 Herman, The Romance of American Psychology, 32–33; Erich Fromm, whose work
would have a significant influence on researchers later in the war, also dismissed behav-
iorism, arguing that “we cannot regard human nature as being infinitely malleable and
able to adapt itself to any kind of conditions without developing a psychological dynamism
of its own”: Fromm, The Fear of Freedom (London: Kegan Paul, 1955 [1941]), 11.
neo-Freudian—were emerging in departments that had a direct relation-

ship with PWE. The PWE engagement with psychology that followed
reflects this transatlantic tension.
J.T. MacCurdy and Henry Dicks

Robert Bruce Lockhart’s “useful” psychologist was Cambridge lecturer
in psychopathology Dr. J.T. MacCurdy. Sefton Delmer suggested in his
memoir that this “wise old one-eyed Canadian” was only involved in
the composition of malingering guidebooks, at which the good doctor
reportedly excelled.77 Ellic Howe, meanwhile, wrote that MacCurdy
was brought in specifically to consult on “the use of psychology” in
black propaganda.78 Outside of these oblique references, he is largely
absent from the several academic histories written about PWE and David
Garnett’s official history makes no mention of him, although his name
may have been redacted. It is possible, however, to infer from Rex
Leeper’s singularly possessive reference to MacCurdy in July 1942 as “our
professional psychologist” that at least for some time MacCurdy’s role was
better aligned with his professional inclination, and that his was a unique
position within the organization.79
We can trace MacCurdy’s propaganda career through archival refer-
ences. While he exchanged correspondence with the department’s deputy
director during the Phoney War, his advice was that of an outsider, unso-
licited and generated based on public knowledge of events rather than
intelligence briefings.80 In 1941, while acting as an advisor to MoI, he
also sent recommendations to senior PWE staff but remained quite igno-
rant of the department’s activities.81 Not until May 1942 did MacCurdy’s

78 Howe, The Black Game: British Subversive Operations against the Germans During
the Second World War (London: Michael Joseph, 1982), 19.
79 TNA FO 898/63, Leeper, “Review of Black Propaganda Targets” (5 July 1942).
80 TNA FO 898/181 MacCurdy, Letters (c. 1939–1941): MacCurdy exchanged letters
with the department’s deputy director over several months from late 1939. There is
nothing in the archive, however, to suggest that anything came of this exchange. As
noted in chapter two, the first director and his deputy were forced out of the department
when Churchill came to power in May 1940.
81 TNA FO 898/181, MacCurdy to Valentine Williams, Letter (4 July 1941).
126 K. R. GRAHAM
name begin to appear on documents circulated around the department.82

From this moment on, he was making direct contributions to Britain’s
foreign propaganda and sitting in on campaign meetings. In June 1942
he was credited with a subversive rumour broadcast over a clandestine
station suggesting that “[a]lthough turnips contain vitamin C, they also
contain another substance which makes it necessary to eat double the
quantity of fresh fruit in order to avoid scurvy.”83 A couple of months
later he developed a plan to target “the morale of U-boat officers and
crews at a big French base by implying that, owing to sabotage in a
German torpedo factory, any torpedo might explode the instant it was
fired, thereby destroying the U-boat.”84 It should be noted that these
rumours are not at all dissimilar to the regular fare put out by PWE
during this period. MacCurdy may have introduced scientific authority
but he appears to have changed nothing regarding methodology.
In his first year with the organization, MacCurdy’s role was not limited
to propaganda production. In July 1942 Leeper suggested that “instruc-
tion in… German psychology by Dr. MacCurdy… should be added to
the syllabus of the Hackett School for the training of secret agents.”85
It seems MacCurdy had “promised… [to] give instructions on ways of
playing upon the nerves of the German occupying troops.”86 Leeper,
who had previously prioritized strategic over psychological thinking,
was changing his tune. MacCurdy’s involvement in the organization
continued into 1943 with regular visits to the Rookery, the compound
maintained as Delmer’s country headquarters for much of the war.87 At
the same time, his role within PWE as consultant psychologist was familiar
enough among their clandestine kin; the Ministry of Economic Warfare’s
Leonard Ingrams recommended “a chapter on Arctic hysteria in a book
called ‘Aboriginal Siberia’ by a man called Czaplicka, and the chapter on
Siberia in a book entitled ‘The Book of Talbot’ by V. Talbot” reasoning
82 This is shortly after Percy Winner made his recommendations for a psychological
turn; TNA FO 898/70, Rayner to MacCurdy, et al., Memorandum (26 May 1942).
83 TNA FO 898/70, “Miss Raine” (19 June 1942).
84 TNA FO 898/67, Colin Wintle to MacCurdy, Letter (3 December 1942).
85 TNA FO 898/13 minutes, “Meeting of the Propaganda Policy Committee” (7 June
1942).
86 TNA FO 898/63 Leeper, “Review of Black Propaganda Targets”.
87 TNA FO 898/51, “Visitors to R.U. Houses”.
that “McCurdie would no doubt interest himself in this research [sic].”88

In 1944 he continued with work on anti-U-boat morale campaigns,
featuring in correspondence between Delmer and Donald McLachlan
of the Naval Intelligence Department.89 One of the last mentions of
MacCurdy’s PWE work—a reference to his research—appears in the final
weeks of the war in a PWE station logbook.90 While the malingering
campaign may have been MacCurdy’s most memorable work, Delmer’s
memoir does not do the doctor credit.
A question arises as to why MacCurdy was tapped as a psycholog-
ical consultant in 1942 and not, say, Ernest Jones, mentioned above,
or R.L. Sedgwick, the social psychologist employed in MoI’s religious
division who was later brought in as chief instructor for PWE’s political
warfare school. To this question, answers may be found by comparing the
personal history and intellectual pedigree of the candidates.
While it is difficult to determine exactly when Sedgwick joined PWE,
he was already employed in some capacity in December 1941 ahead of
Rae Smith’s recommendations.91 He was working as a religious specialist
scripting the BBC’s German Catholic Forces programme under PWE’s
remit when, in January 1943, he was made PWE Director of Studies.92
Professionally, he seems to have been something of an academic merce-
nary, lecturing in 1952, for example, on “[t]he psychology of advertising
the tourist trade” at the annual conference for the Institute of Travel
Agents.93 According to a colleague, he “had run a language school in
Arundel before the war and was a Papal Chamberlain in the Roman
Catholic Church.”94 He was not, it seems, a medical practitioner, but
88 TNA FO 898/65, Leonard Ingrams to Sefton Delmer, Letter, “Attached is

something…” (17 August 1943).
89 TNA FO 898/65, Lt. Cdr. McLachlan to Delmer, Letter, “There are two possible
ways…” (9 January 1942).
90 IWM Cat. no. 12843, “Private Papers of ‘Political Warfare Executive, 1941–1945”,
Personal logbook of Squadron Leader Halliday (17 March 1945): “DSD [Delmer] does
not want McCurdy research—must speak HKR [Harold Robinson]”.
91 IWM Cat. No. 20203–12/29/1, E.B. Champion, Unpublished Memoir, “Wartime
Diary of Eileen Champion (née Roberts)” (2011).
92 Garnett, Secret History of the PWE, 395–396.
93 “Antiseptic Fare,” The Times, (28 October 52), 3.
94 IWM Cat. No. 20203–12/29/1, Champion, “Wartime Diary”, 13.
128 K. R. GRAHAM
did claim to possess both a PhD and a D.Phil.95 As Director of Studies,

Sedgwick was influential in spreading the PWE perspective among the
services. And it is through the surviving lectures of the propaganda school
that we see not the religious specialist but the social psychologist. “Sedg-
wick’s personality…” writes Garnett, “made the courses the great success
they were, profoundly modifying the outlook to Western Europe of all
the students who took part in them.”96
MacCurdy, meanwhile, trained in medicine at Johns Hopkins Univer-
sity and was a founding member of the American Psychoanalytic Associ-
ation.97 Like so many practitioners of his generation, he cut his teeth
studying shell shock during the First World War. In the early 1920s
he took up his lectureship in psychopathology at Cambridge, where he
remained until his death in 1947. He consulted to the Royal Air Force
during the 1920s but does not appear to have distinguished himself in
this role.98 Curiously, he never took the English medical qualifications
necessary to see patients and so his move to England meant an end
to his clinical practice. By the time he arrived at Cambridge, he had
disavowed orthodox Freudianism; however, in 1922 MacCurdy published
Problems in Dynamic Psychology, a text in which, as John Forrester has
it, “Freud’s concepts are demolished in the 100-page first of the four
parts and then resurface, without being attributed to Freud, as the
basic elements of MacCurdy’s own account of the instinctual basis of
psychopathology.”99 In 1939 he joined Charles Myers and a handful
of other eminent psychologists in offering their advice on shell shock
to Francis Prideaux; according to Ben Shephard, there was a consensus
among these elder statesmen “that a soldier’s previous personality”—a
concept heavily shaded with class prejudices—and “not the trauma to
95 His qualifications were helpfully included in the notes to one of his political warfare
lectures: TNA FO 898/99, Sedgwick, Lecture Notes “Terminology in the Social Sciences”
(c. 1943–1944).
96 Garnett, Secret History of the PWE, 401.
97 John Forrester, “1919: Psychology and Psychoanalysis, Cambridge and London—
Myers, Jones and MacCurdy”, Psychoanalysis and History 10 (2008): 72–73.
98 J.P.T. Bury, The College of Corpus Christi and of the Blessed Virgin Mary: A History
from 1822 to 1952 (Suffolk: Boyell, 1952), 261; TNA AIR 2/336, “Proposed visit of Dr
J.T. MacCurdy to Iraq” (1928).
99 Forrester, “1919”, 83.
which he [was] exposed, usually determined whether he got better.”100

Also significant is Shephard’s observation that the old guard’s “wartime
experience showed them the infinite suggestibility of patients, especially
soldiers.”101 MacCurdy’s experience and training had imbued him with
a belief in the dynamic unconscious, along with an understanding of
inherent and inherited dispositions, echoing the degeneration theories of
an earlier generation.102 He was flexible in his methodology, almost to
the point of sophistry; by 1942, he was describing national psychology
simultaneously through the Freudian unconscious and oblique references
to Jungian archetypes, as well as Pavlovian conditioning, an Adlerian
inferiority complex, and Wilfred Trotter’s “herd instinct.” The resultant
MacCurdian psychopathology deftly reproduced a typology of national
character—with barbarous Germany naturally appearing as the millstone
around the neck of civilized Europe—that was perfectly in keeping with
the “crowd science” orthodoxies that had been proliferating since the late
nineteenth century.103
1941 marked a broader transition in Britain towards scientific thinking
in the prosecution of the war. For the first time numerous war depart-
ments sought out scientific advisors, or “Tame Magicians,” to improve
efficiency and develop strategy.104 This shift saw science journalist Peter
Ritchie Calder recruited into PWE in a newly created position as director
of Plans and Campaigns.105 It is possible to speculate, given the broader
shift towards scientism, that PWE’s eventual nod to psychology may have
been a response to domestic petitioning, or perhaps that MacCurdy was
brought in to help align PWE output with the strategy of area bombing.
On these points, however, the archive is not forthcoming.
100 Ben Shephard, “‘Pitiless Psychology’: The Role of Prevention in British Military
Psychiatry in the Second World War”, History of Psychiatry x (1999): 510.
101 Shephard, “’Pitiless Psychology’”, 517.
102 Forrester, “1919,” 76.
103 Pick, The Pursuit of the Nazi Mind, 71.
104 National Library of Scotland (NLS) ACC10318/3 Peter Ritchie Calder, lecture
delivered at Hebrew University, Jerusalem, “The Science of the Science of Science” (22
February 1973).
105 According to Overy, Calder was largely responsible for the integration of area
bombing with political warfare during this period: Overy, “Making and Breaking Morale:
British Political Warfare and Bomber Command in the Second World War”, Twentieth
Century British History 26.3 (2015): 382.
130 K. R. GRAHAM
MacCurdian psychology marks a contrast with a number both Amer-

ican and British developments and may represent something more like
a diplomatic compromise. In the context of a department not yet ready
to embrace untested and potentially unsettling ideas, the combination of
MacCurdy’s personality, his methodological disposition, and the simple
fact that he was a known quantity seem to have been winning factors.
Psychoanalysis informed MacCurdy’s early work on shell shock and
neurosis, but he was by no means a psychoanalytic evangelist—as was,
say, Jones. He was not the sort of scientist that would introduce a
firm methodological framework to PWE’s already cavalier orientation.
Perhaps most significant of all, he was modest in his claims for the role
of psychology: “as a science,” he wrote in 1944, “psychology cannot
speak yet because it is still in the stage of gathering data and making
tentative hypotheses and has not yet advanced to the stage of established
theory.”106 Overy writes that “PWE, like Bomber Command, had a func-
tional interest to defend in presenting the political war in the best light
by fuelling fantasies about the capacity of enemy or friendly populations
to engage in politically significant action.”107 For Foreign Office prag-
matists such as Leeper and Lockhart, MacCurdy was the perfect man for
the job. He could provide a scientific justification for the work they were
already doing, while changing next to nothing. Increasingly, MacCurdy’s
role in the malingering campaign came to signify the sum total of his
contributions.
By the end of 1943 his value to PWE was diminishing but advo-
cates for the psychological approach to foreign propaganda were no less
enthusiastic. This enthusiasm was finally satisfied not from within but
from without. 1943 saw the Allies gain access to an unprecedented and
invaluable source of intelligence. Beginning with the success of Opera-
tion Torch, vast numbers of German prisoners of war became available
as research subjects to interested parties among the service branches. For
psychologists, morale subversion was no longer a wild stab in the dark.
The idea of a “national character” existed primarily as an intellec-
tual fiction, a dense tangle of stereotypes that, while speaking to some
cultural truths, did not satisfy the needs of those who were interacting
106 J.T. MacCurdy, Germany, Russia and the Future: A Psychological Essay (Cambridge:
Cambridge UP, 1944), vii.
107 Overy, “Making and Breaking Morale”, 396.
with real, living Germans. As Anthony J. Nicholls observes, “when it

came to the practicalities of occupation, the obsession with peculiarities of
national character began to wane quite rapidly.”108 For those researchers
charged with studying and interrogating German prisoners of war, the
idea of a national character proved equally dissatisfying. In February 1943
the British Army’s Deputy Director of Research chaired a meeting, the
purpose of which was to consider “any weaknesses in Nazi psychology”
and, significantly, “at the same time attempt to evaluate the evidence
on which this was based.”109 Aside from senior army research staff, this
meeting was attended by PWE’s military liaison Dallas Brooks and senior
propagandist Richard Crossman, recently seconded to PWD/SHAEF.
Psychological investigations into the mentality of German POWs were
only just getting off the ground at this moment; the minutes recorded
that “the psychiatrist working with M.I.19 should be re-inforced, by
a statistically-trained sociologist, working as a ‘backroom-boy’ [sic],”
suggesting that he was at that point working alone among the thou-
sands of detainees passing through British camps. Brooks reminded his
colleagues that PWE already “had an organization going round the
various camps” but this organization was interested in gathering intel-
ligence to develop verisimilitude in clandestine propaganda rather than
to better understand the German mind.110 This meeting resulted in the
expansion of the POW research programme under Dr Henry Dicks, which
in turn developed what might be termed the first empirical examination
of the German mind in wartime Britain.
Dicks was a British Army psychiatrist, fluent in German, who had
proved his merit analysing and interrogating Rudolf Hess.111 He was
an advocate of psychoanalysis but he held that, at least in the study of
national character, psychoanalysis was valuable only when paired with
108 Nicholls, “The German ‘National Character’ in British Perspective”, 37–38.

109 Archive of the Wellcome Library (Wellcome) PP/HVD/A/3/5, “Minutes of a
Meeting Held in Flat 110, Whitehall Court, on Friday 12th February, 1943, at 11 hours,
To Consider Available Information Regarding Psychological Characteristics of the Nazis,
and to Discuss Whether it might be Improved” (16 February 1943).
110 Nicholas Rankin, Churchill’s Wizards: The British Genius for Deception (London:
Faber, 2008), 309.
111 Pick, The Pursuit of the Nazi Mind, 65.
132 K. R. GRAHAM
statistics and social anthropology.112 The “backroom-boy” assigned to

Dicks, incidentally, was OSS officer Edward Shils, a distinguished sociol-
ogist, who had previously worked closely with colleagues from a range
of disciplines in the OSS Research and Analysis division. In his post-
war survey of propagandists’ efforts, Daniel Lerner argues that together
Shils and Dicks were “largely responsible for the governing conceptions
of PWD Intelligence”;113 as conduits for those methodologies favoured
by OSS researchers, they gave neo-Freudianism its greatest wartime role.
Indeed, the neo-Freudian reconceptualization of national character was
the direct inspiration for Henry Dicks’s methodology among German
prisoners of war.114 From late 1943 there was, at least according to
Dicks, “increasing demand for my advice by various departments inter-
ested in Psychological Warfare and Planning,” among which he listed
PWE.115 One of the first research documents to emerge from his work
in POW camps—a report on group psychology with regard to “existing
psychological predispositions or traits of the German population”—was
specifically conceived for the benefit of subversive propaganda.116 With
a psychological perspective now bound to an intelligence organization in
Britain, there was no call for MacCurdy’s abstractions; his appearances in
the archive are markedly less frequent over time.
The German National

Character and the Nazi Mind
If PWE experienced anything like a turn from strategic to psychological
thinking, it came after the United States stepped up their involvement
112 While Dicks had undergone the rigorous formal training to become a psychoanalyst,
he was a key figure at the prestigious Tavistock Clinic which was primarily oriented
around Freudian psychoanalysis: Pick, The Pursuit of the Nazi Mind, 24–28; Wellcome
PP/HVD/B/1/22, Henry Dicks, Lecture at the Royal Institute of International Affairs,
“The Psychological Approach to German Character” (22 September 1947).
113 Daniel Lerner, Sykerwar: Psychological Warfare against Germany, D-Day to VE-Day
(New York: George W. Stewart, 1949), 93.
115 Wellcome PP/HVD/A/3/23, Dicks, “Study of Nazi Psychology” (3 October
1944).
116 Wellcome PP/HVD/A/1, Dicks, “Recommendations for Psychological Warfare
Against Germany” (21 December 1943).
in the war. Katz argues that as US presence in the European theatre

expanded, “so the stature of the OSS rose in the estimation both of the
American Joint Chiefs of Staff and the older, more established European
agencies.”117 PWD/SHAEF reflected this growing OSS influence with
many OSS researchers contributing to the outlook of the new organiza-
tion. Of course, this is not to say that psychological tropes lay beyond the
thinking of the British political warfare.
In tracing the genealogy and expression of psychological thought
inside PWE, it is possible to better observe how British propagandists
understood their German audience and make sense of the ways that
nascent scientism fit into this complicated milieu. Despite its relatively
low standing in academic and political circles, the British popular imagina-
tion was steeped in the language of psychology by the late 1930s. Overy’s
research demonstrates a growing appetite for the new science; as a marker
of change in the public sphere, for example, he points to the “ledgers of
publishing data kept by the publishers Routledge & Kegan Paul, who
specialized in books on psychological subjects, [which] reveal a remark-
able rising market in the 1920s.”118 This sudden appetite for psychology
was coupled with an abiding “deep suspicion of the expert,”119 which
Ian Burney ties to the Great War and “the discourse of fear” bound
up with issues such as shell shock and the threat of civilian-targeted
bombing; in this environment, popular psychology appealed because it
“[stressed] over-civilized nervous subjects and the need for individual self-
mastery.”120 Psychological tropes such as the inferiority complex were
easily reproduced and came to enter lay discourses on nationalism and
national identity. Oliver Lubrich identifies among the accounts of Anglo-
phone travellers to Germany during this period the characteristic act of
“singling out the physiognomy (and psychology) of individual leaders” by
which “foreign observers put a face on the Third Reich.”121 In encoun-
tering Nazi Germany, propagandists and travellers alike demonstrated a
117 Katz, Foreign Intelligence, 80–81.

118 Overy, The Morbid Age, 144.
120 Ian Burney, “War on fear: Solly Zuckerman and civilian nerve in the Second World
War”, History of the Human Sciences 25.5 (2012), 50.
121 Oliver Lubrich, Travels in the Reich, 1933–1945: Foreign Authors Report from
Germany (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 13.
134 K. R. GRAHAM
readiness to pathologize and diagnose what they perceived to be an alien

society. Thomson describes how “psychology with a psychoanalytic orien-
tation, which paid particular attention to potentially destructive instincts”
was able to make advances “because of the on-going tendency to forge
an alliance between such a psychology and existing values.”122 But, as
Thomson writes, this kind of psychology, which consolidated existing
values, “was always far more successful in ideological rather than prac-
tical terms.”123 The mid-century crisis raised the profile of psychology
and transformed the discipline. Translated into the narrow epistemolog-
ical field of PWE’s Germany, the diagnostic language of psychopathology
found easy expression.
PWE deployed psychological tropes well before any psychologists
joined the ranks. Among Britain’s propagandists, few were wholly
averse to the language of psychology as it offered powerful explanatory
metaphors for seemingly irrational German behaviour. Lay propagan-
dists were confident enough with these tropes to draw analogies and
even make tentative diagnoses. In December 1939, a curious docu-
ment advocated just such a psychological basis for anti-Nazi propaganda.
Marginalia suggests that this memo was authored by PWE intelligence
officer Geoffrey Kirk, who was at the time doubling as MoI’s Director of
Communications.124 Kirk theorized an “emotional bond which binds the
majority of German people to the Nazi regime”; the German people’s
relationship with Hitler he characterized as “that which should exist
between a psycho-analyst and his patient.”125 Kirk observed that “[t]he
group psychology of the German nation, as it has developed during the
past twenty five years, bears a marked resemblance to the psychology of
a typical neurotic.” There is more than a whiff of Freud in his analysis of
Hitler’s neurosis as a function of his “union with the mother-Germany.”
He explicitly called on “the jargon of psychology” to suggest that “Hitler
has achieved an identification between himself and the average German,”
and of Hitler’s relationship with his parents, he commented that “[i]t is

124 Pauline Elkes, “The Political Warfare Executive: A Re-Evaluation Based Upon the
Intelligence Work of the German Section,” PhD Thesis, University of Sheffield (1996),
81; TNA FO 898/3, Geoffrey Kirk, “A Psychological Basis for Anti-Nazi Propaganda”
(16 December 1939).
125 TNA FO 898/3, Geoffrey Kirk, “A Psychological Basis for Anti-Nazi Propaganda”.
unnecessary to point out how common this situation is in the early history
of neurotics.” Kirk did not feel compelled to cite any specific theory nor
call on any actual research in order to justify his argument; the truth was
writ large in the actions of the Third Reich. Psychology, as understood
by the public, was a melange of different and often contradictory theories
and methodologies. According to Overy, “[t]he popularization of ideas
about human biology and medicine was a central aspect of the culture of
the early twentieth century and it supplied a convenient set of metaphors
for diagnosing the illnesses of civilization and dissecting its moribund
elements.”126 In laying a fabric of popular psychological concepts over
Germany, PWE delineated what they imagined was a more approach-
able subject for subversion while in fact describing the German mentality
in terms very much in keeping with an ideological impetus towards the
stigmatization of Germany.
MacCurdy’s contributions complement this yen to pathologize
Germany. Before joining PWE, MacCurdy was employed as a consultant
for MoI where his unacknowledged Freudianism emerged in the analysis
of one of Hitler’s speeches, which attempted “to reconstruct, if possible,
what was in Hitler’s mind.”127 Rich with the language of the dynamic
unconscious, MacCurdy concluded that “[b]ecause Hitler has tried the
Luftwaffe against England and failed, with his epileptic defeatism, he will
not try it again.” The extent of MacCurdy’s work in this role is unknown
but a dearth of evidence suggests that his diagnosis of “Shamanism,
epilepsy and paranoia” was deemed to be something less than useful by
his employers at MoI who were, by this time, expressing serious doubts
about the practical value of psychodynamic advice.
In describing Hitler as shamanistic, MacCurdy hinted at the influ-
ence of another key figure in early twentieth-century psychology. Jung’s
English translator, H.G. Baynes published in 1941 Germany Possessed,
a work of Jungian analytical psychology examining the condition of
Germany under Hitler. MacCurdy did not, of course, reference Baynes’s
research; Hitler’s apparent shamanism was, however, equivalent to the
126 Overy, The Morbid Age, 366.

127 J.T. MacCurdy, “Analysis of Hitler’s Speech on the 26th April, 1942” (10 June
1942), available courtesy of Daniel Pick at: http://www.bbk.ac.uk/thepursuitofthenaz
imind/JTM/MarkAbramsAnalysisofHitlersSpeech1942.pdf.
136 K. R. GRAHAM
Jungian archetype, an assertion that Baynes made early in his own argu-
ment.128 When Sedgwick lectured on the mythological roots of Nazism
within the German psyche, he turned not to Jung but to James Frazer’s
The Golden Bough,129 a work familiar to a much broader British reader-
ship. On this count Jung’s associations with National Socialism through
the Zentralblatt für Psychotherapie in the 1930s, and the anti-Semitic
character of a number of his articles published therein, may offer a reason
for British reticence.130 Providing the introduction to Germany Possessed,
former Nazi Hermann Rauschning offered a further clue as to why Jung’s
research may have been less appealing to British officialdom: “In no sense
is Hitler the expression of conscious political and spiritual currents of
Europe, neither is he of Germany,” wrote Rauschning, “[h]e is the symbol
of the dark side of our civilizing experiment.”131 Hitler was not, by this
reading, a uniquely German phenomenon; rather, he was a potentially
universal outcome of modernity. MacCurdy, by contrast, maintained the
Germanophobic line taken by British policy-makers, insisting that Hitler
was the “personification of fundamental German ideas and ideals.”132
As noted above, the MacCurdian Germany had many contemporary
rivals positing psychopathological interpretations of German behaviour.
In researching the debate around the Prideaux Memorandum, Ben Shep-
hard describes a generational divide in British psychology, with MacCurdy
and his contemporaries who had treated the onslaught of shell shock
during and after the First World War squaring off against a younger gener-
ation who were not inclined to “ignore the influence of social dynamic
factors.”133 Among the older cohort the idea persisted that “trauma does
not cause neurosis” but was rather related to biological or hereditary
predispositions. Many of the differences in professional outlook between
MacCurdy and the more historically contingent interpretations of Dicks,
or even Sedgwick, reflected this generational divide in British psychology.
128 H.G. Baynes, Germany Possessed, (London: Jonathan Cape, 1941), 35–38.
129 TNA FO 898/99, Sedgwick, “Note on a method of attacking German Morale”.
130 On the racist components of Jung’s thought, and the intellectual and professional
accommodations he and other psychotherapists made with National Socialism, see: S.
Grossman, “C.G. Jung and National Socialism” Journal of European Studies 9 (1979):
231–259; Cocks, Psychotherapy in the Third Reich, 75–95.
131 Hermann Rauschning, “Introduction,” in Germany Possessed, 13.
132 MacCurdy, “Analysis of Hitler’s Speech on the 26th April, 1942”.
133 Shephard, “’Pitiless Psychology’,” 516–517.
Certainly, Dicks’s research does at times speak to out-dated ideas; Pick,

for example, notes that Dicks’s report on Hess provided an anatom-
ical description reminiscent of nineteenth-century criminal anthropologist
Cesare Lombroso.134 And while Sedgwick did, on one occasion, cite the
work of degeneration theorist F.W. Mott while propagating the line that
“[c]ruel, brutal treatment does not produce the disease, neither does
good treatment prevent it,”135 but he was elsewhere quite amenable to
the idea, more often eschewed by MacCurdy, that “national character”
was socially or environmentally contingent. Take, for example, Sedgwick’s
lecture on “Anticipation-Neurosis.” Here Sedgwick argued “that many
Germans are at present suffering from ‘A-n’ as regards the terrible treat-
ment, that they believe, will be meted out to them after final defeat
by the Allies.”136 This illness was traced to National Socialist domestic
propaganda alongside an overarching “feeling of guilt” over the German
treatment of the occupied territories.137 The malady, in this instance,
was held as key to understanding German behaviour in the final years
of the war. “Anticipation,” Sedgwick asserted, “rather makes them hold
out for the time being than get rid of the system which has led them into
the present dilemma.”138 The substance of this lecture was not derived
from any psychological textbook but, rather, “based on Notes by Mr.
E.K. Bramstedt.”139 An astute and sympathetic observer, Bramstedt was
134 Pick, Pursuit of the Nazi Mind, 81.

135 TNA FO 898/99, Sedgwick, Lecture Notes, “Stacheldrahtkrankheit”.
136 TNA FO 898/99, Sedgwick, Lecture Notes, “Anticipation-Neurosis”.
137 This is not implausible given the tone of Goebbels’s propaganda following his
“Total War” speech. As Nazi propaganda was a significant intelligence source for British
propagandists (most useful when read against the grain), it seems likely that Sedgwick was
responding to these changed conditions.
138 TNA FO 898/99, Sedgwick, Lecture Notes, “Anticipation-Neurosis”. As Jo Fox
notes, contemporary psychologists were making a “distinction between fear and anxiety”—
she cites F. Bennett Julian who wrote that “anxiety is directed towards a potential rather
than an actual danger… The stimulus comes, not from perception of an object which
threatens, but almost entirely from fantasy or imagination. The physiological pattern of
anxiety is therefore not innate but acquired”: Jo Fox, “Confronting Lord Haw-Haw:
Rumour and Britain’s Wartime Anti-Lies Bureau”, Journal of Modern History 91 (2019):
95.
139 German sociologist and historian Ernest Bramstedt had found his way to PWE
after being forced into exile by the Nazis; TNA FO 898/99 Sedgwick, “Anticipation-
Neurosis.”.
138 K. R. GRAHAM
elsewhere citing Frederic Bartlett’s work on group psychology, which

demonstrated the advantages of a psychological strategy that develops
morale rather than discipline.140 This is worth noting, simply because of
the similarities between Bramstedt and Sedgwick’s Anticipation-Neurosis
and Bartlett’s iteration of anxiety neurosis, a disorder that “results from a
dread of some intolerable danger that is as yet not fully realised and that
belongs to a probable future.”141 Anxiety neurosis, in turn, can be traced
back to Freud; however, as might be expected, Freud attributes a slightly
different mechanism to the illness.142
This lecture also points to a distinction between MacCurdy and Sedg-
wick, as PWE minds, and Dicks. While Sedgwick conceded that anybody
was theoretically susceptible to Anticipation-Neurosis, he stressed above
all a German distinction derived from a whiggish mytho-historical (even
Jungian) perspective on German culture:
Without indulging in unwarranted sweeping generalisations, it is safe to

maintain that many Germans are particularly prone to it [Anticipation-
Neurosis], for most Germans unlike other nations are living more in the
future and for the future than in and for the present. Faust with his drive
towards the Unendliche is a characteristic of this German attitude.143
If, as Churchill’s advisor Major Morton claimed, “the German people…

are specially amendable to propaganda,” then understanding and
exploiting this predisposition was a PWE imperative.144 A psycholog-
ical orientation that lent itself to this most practical end could at least
recommend itself as being ideologically dependable.
140 E.K. Bramstedt, Dictatorship and Political Police: The Technique of Control by Fear
(London: Kegan Paul, 1945), 232.
141 Bartlett, incidentally, was generous enough to describe MacCurdy’s War Neuroses
as “[t]he best short study of the mental disorders of warfare available”; the circuitous
name-checking speaks to the small circle from which British perspectives on psychology
emerged: Bartlett, Psychology of the Soldier (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1927), 180, 189.
142 Henri F. Ellenberger. The Discovery of the Unconscious: The History and Evolution
of Dynamic Psychiatry (New York: Basic Books, 1970), 487.
143 TNA FO 898/99, Sedgwick, “Anticipation-Neurosis”; as Grossman points out,
Jung argued that “[t]he Faust image was biologically inherited along with the brain
of every German, and predisposed him to react to events in a characteristic manner”:
Grossman, “C.G. Jung and National Socialism”, 240.
144 TNA FO 898/182, Morton to Winner, Letter (23 February 1942).
Left-leaning neo-Freudians and critical theorists immersed in Marxist

theory led the psychoanalytical inquiry into the Nazi mind.145 It is
doubtful that MacCurdy ever read a word of Marx and indeed these
neo-Freudian inquiries were of quite a different stripe to MacCurdy’s
ahistorical German psyche. The psychopathological approach propa-
gated by MacCurdy was, like his attitude to class, reminiscent of an
earlier generation of psychoanalysts. Neo-Freudianism presented an intel-
lectual challenge to his approach. The shortcomings of mid-century
psychopathology of the MacCurdian type were an immediate concern
for OSS contributors such as Erik Erikson, for example, who wrote
that it “has weakened its case by diagnostic name-calling, designating
peoples and people actively or passively involved in totalitarian revolutions
as either pathological or immature human beings.”146 Louise Hoffman
writes that “[t]his approach, in Erikson’s view, perpetuated an unrealistic
dualism, in which normality (whether individual or social-psychological)
was clearly distinguished from abnormality, and adherents of commu-
nism or fascism were stigmatized but not truly understood.”147 Erikson’s
ideas were a departure from just the kind of psychopathological “name-
calling” favoured by departments in both Britain and the United States.
This neo-Freudianism began to contend with British officialdom as soon
as the United States entered the war, making significant headway when
Shils and Dicks resumed their partnership under PWD/SHAEF. Dicks’s
research points to the influence of OSS and OWI researchers such as
Erikson, Paul Kecskemeti and Nathan Leites, as well as Erich Fromm.148
Researchers such as Dicks and Shils helped to disseminate in Britain the
neo-Freudian social psychology that had come into vogue at the OSS. An
American influence on an Anglo-American operation is no revelation, but
the difference in orientation between Dicks and MacCurdy is certainly
significant.
145 Pick, Pursuit of the Nazi Mind, 88.

146 Erik Erikson, cited in Hoffman, “Erikson on Hitler”, 71–72.
147 Hoffman, “Erikson on Hitler”, 71–72.
148 Each of these names features in the bibliography of Dicks’s later account of his
wartime research. While he acknowledges that his reading in neo-Freudianism was limited
at the time, his thinking demonstrates that he was especially receptive to this variant of
social psychology: Henry V. Dicks, “Personality Traits and National Socialist Ideology: A
war-time study of German Prisoners of War”, Human Relations 3.2 (1950): 153–154.
140 K. R. GRAHAM
Dicks offered something akin to that which Rae Smith had called for
two years earlier. Based on interviews with German POWs, his research
did not overtly stress German distinction and stigmatization but rather
took each point of difference as a feature of a wider socio-dynamic
portrait. For example, in a 1944 memo Dicks discussed one of the
long-held goals of subversive propaganda—to prompt German soldiers
to desert their units—arguing that “we must pass beyond the problem
of desertion [of German soldiers] as an aim in itself, but draw the prac-
tical conclusions from the study of its psychology, which told us that it is
but an extreme manifestation of loss of identification with the group.”149
Dicks’s time with captured German servicemen had the potential to
underwrite a whole new approach to political warfare.
While it is difficult to determine the influence of Dicks’s or MacCurdy’s
research on British foreign propaganda, Dicks’s work does align concep-
tually with the PWE and PWD output from the time of the Normandy
landings through to the end of the war. British propagandists catego-
rized their work by its transparency as being either “black” or “white.”
Contemporary to Dicks’s early contributions, PWE also developed “grey”
propaganda via the clandestine broadcaster Deutscher Kurzwellensender
Atlantik, which over time grew more concerned with accurate (albeit
disheartening) news and less with disseminating rumours and misinfor-
mation.150 And then, ahead of D-Day, PWE in collaboration with PWD
began producing Nachrichten für die Truppe, a factual and relatively
objective daily newspaper dropped by aircraft for German soldiers. Not
black nor even grey, propagandist Sefton Delmer later described this
production as “dirty off-white” and claimed that it had an average print
run of as many as two million copies a day.151 Interestingly, in a May
1944 paper on psychological warfare Dicks advocated that British foreign
propaganda embrace an
Objective approach with facts and figures, statistical diagrams etc.; excerpts
from official speeches and documents of both sides for comparisons. This is
149 Wellcome PP/HVD/A/1, Directorate of Army Psychiatry, “Some Principles of

Psychological Warfare” (May 1944).
150 This station began as a short-wave broadcaster, later broadcasting also on the
medium-wave as Soldatensender Calais which, after D Day, changed its name to
Soldatensender West
widely held, among P.W., to be a most effective line. “The German likes a
sober, factual statement from which he can draw his own conclusions.”152
If Dicks’s PWD research did not influence the development of Delmer’s

newspaper, then it certainly ratified the strategy.
Dicks, it may be observed, was always careful to mark the distinc-
tion not between Germany and an imagined normative mentality but
between convinced Nazis and the ambivalent German majority. This
diverges significantly from the Germanophobia that had developed in
Whitehall and flourished among certain factions of PWE. Dicks’s research
led him to conclude that, although committed Nazis could be “char-
acterized by an unconscious over-emphasis of acceptance of paternal
authority, evasion of responsibility by blaming scape-goats, over-valuation
of masculinity, and depreciation of feminine and tender influences,” the
“psychology of Nazis… fails to show gross mental disorder.”153 Nazism
was not, as Robert Vansittart had claimed, the inevitable consequence
of the German mentality in which the “Brazen Horde remained savages
at heart.”154 On the contrary, Dicks argued that “[t]hese psychological
traits,” which were exhibited to some degree by only 35% of his subjects,
“are mirrored in current Nazi ideology which is thus a satisfying way of
life for men possessing the above outlined characteristics.”155 When the
new social psychology was judiciously applied to PWE’s German problem,
the distinction between subject and observer broke down and a nuanced
but no less approachable psychological subject emerged.
In contrast to the willingness of organizations such as the OSS to
engage in psychology and social science, the British situation appears
almost archaic. However, Katz and Hoffman alike recognize the unique-
ness of those American departments under William Donovan, whose
152 Wellcome PP/HVD/A/1, “Some Principles of Psychological Warfare”.

153 Dicks felt compelled to add a caveat: “The Views Expressed in this Memorandum
are Those of the Individual Research Worker Concerned, and do not Necessarily Repre-
sent War Office or Government Policy”: Wellcome PP/HVD/A/3/24, Dicks, “National
Socialism as a Psychological Problem” (3 January 1943).
154 Robert Vansittart, Black Record: Germans Past and Present (London: Hamish
Hamilton, 1941), 21.
155 Wellcome PP/HVD/A/3/24, Dicks, “National Socialism as a Psychological
Problem” (3 January 1943).
142 K. R. GRAHAM
“approach to intelligence gathering transcended the military and diplo-

matic traditions of the field.”156 Even in the American context, the OSS
was strikingly new, its embrace of academic expertise unprecedented;
meanwhile, British organizations such as PWE were “heirs to a 500-year
tradition of espionage and counterintelligence.”157 MacCurdy’s orienta-
tion satisfied the contemporary demand for scientism while preserving
PWE’s culturally hierarchical and stigmatizing perspective on Germany.
PWD/SHAEF characterized a shift in which American influence grew
alongside a renegotiation of priorities. Propagandists now had an eye
on a future post-war Europe, which rendered an undifferentiated and
malignant Germany an increasingly impractical formulation. With victory
appearing certain, political warfare shifted towards the denazification and
democratization of Germany. In a sense then, it was not the quality of
Dicks’s research that rendered the MacCurdian Germany obsolete, but
rather a change in the conditions that had allowed it to gain prominence
in the first place.
Conclusion
“Psychological analysis has undoubtedly a place in political warfare,”
Lockhart later wrote, “but it was not sufficiently tested in the war to
justify any firm conclusion.”158 Such sentiment no doubt prompted
chagrin among PWE’s frustrated advocates for scientific thinking. Had
PWE been more amenable to the idea of “pure psychology” at the
department’s inception, there is of course no guarantee that MacCurdy
or any psychologist could have significantly modified the perception of
Germany. Anecdotal evidence illustrates the point. In 1941 zoologist
Solly Zuckerman had turned to operational research and was examining
the psychological effects of air raids through statistics-based research in a
number of British communities.159 His research in the Hull-Birmingham
Survey undermined the credibility of Area Bombing of German civilian
targets as a military strategy. When the report got to Whitehall, however,
156 Hoffman, “American Psychologists and Wartime Research on Germany”, 271; Katz,
Foreign Intelligence, 32.
157 Katz, Foreign Intelligence, 80–81.
159 Burney, “War on Fear”, 60.
Lord Cherwell, chief scientific advisor to Churchill, manipulated the

conclusions; as Ian Burney demonstrates, “[i]n a minute prepared for
Churchill on 30 March [1942], some nine days in advance of the publi-
cation of the final report, Cherwell advised that the survey’s findings
supported the policy of targeting German civilian morale.”160 Simi-
larly, after Percy Winner introduced Morton to the Money-Kyrle thesis,
Morton took it upon himself to make some revisions, bringing the paper
into line with the Germanophobia then imbuing Churchill’s Cabinet and,
increasingly, PWE; contrary to Money-Kyrle, Morton deliberately placed
the emphasis on the hopelessness of the German cause while taking stress
off “Hitler’s personal responsibility for the coming German defeat.”161
Whitehall was not above elastic interpretations when it came to expert
advice.
PWE’s flirtation with scientism speaks to a significant moment in the
development of mid-century psychology in which new and outside voices
appealed for the first time to authorities. PWE’s psychological turn was
not, as Rae Smith had hoped, a new dawn of “pure psychology.” While
American interventions did erode institutional reticence and modify the
PWE attitude to psychology, the department typically only saw value
in those orientations that emphasized ahistorical German distinction.
Archival research suggests that MacCurdy ultimately had little impact on
PWE’s outlook; however, the events surrounding his recruitment reveal
much about wartime perspectives on Germany. Given Britain’s desperate
situation in the early phase of the war, there might be an expectation that
PWE will have entertained all manner of intellectual possibilities in their
search for a solution to the “German problem”; instead, the problem
itself set their epistemological limits. Psychology was valuable only so
long as it was immediately practical and for much of the war it was
practical only when German distinction and stigmatization were under-
scored. Germanophobia rendered National Socialism and the German
national character effectively synonymous, setting the course for psycho-
logical thinking in the years to come. “Pure psychology” could not hope
to nudge the tiller until the war entered a new phase in early 1943.
160 Burney, “War on Fear”, 67.

161 TNA FO 898/182, Morton to Winner (23 February 1942).
144 K. R. GRAHAM
For British propagandists, Nazism was the natural consequence of

the German national character—to admit otherwise would raise uncom-
fortable questions at the height of an ideological war. But a post-war
Germany required a different orientation. As joint Anglo-American oper-
ations expanded and the imagined contours of a European peace began
to take shape, psychopathological perspectives proved less and less satis-
factory. In the end, the successful uptake of neo-Freudian-influenced
psychological research inside PWD/SHAEF did much to justify for the
Allies a future in which Germany might exist.
CHAPTER 5
No Man so Lecherous as the German: Nazi

Perversion and German Masculinity in British
Subversive Propaganda
For many observers in the second half of the twentieth century, the
perversion of politics represented by Nazism went hand in hand with
an understanding of the Nazi mind as pathological. Born of wartime
adventures in critical theory, this psychosocial approach also pervaded
the discourse on sex in the Third Reich. As Dagmar Herzog writes,
the consensus opinion on sex under Nazism that developed during the
1960s (a consensus that largely survived until the end of the twentieth
century) was “that the Third Reich was ‘sex-hostile,’ ‘pleasureless,’ and
characterized by ‘official German prudery’.”1 More recently, scholars have
appreciated the ambivalent relationship between sexuality and fascism,
even challenging some of the foundations of psychosocial critical theory.2
During the Second World War, the Political Warfare Executive did
not perceive Nazi sexual repression or official German prudery. Charged
1 Dagmar Herzog, “Hubris and Hypocrisy, Incitement and Disavowal: Sexuality and
German Fascism”, Journal of the History of Sexuality 11.1/2 (2002): 3–4.
2 See, for example: Alison Moore, “Sadean nature and reasoned morality in
Adorno/Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment ”, Psychology and Sexuality 1.3 (2010):
250–261; Carolyn J. Dean, The Fragility of Empathy after the Holocaust (Ithaca,
NY: Cornell UP, 2004); Herzog, Sexuality in Europe: A Twentieth-Century History
(Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2021), 45–95.

Switzerland AG 2021
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-71664-6_5
146 K. R. GRAHAM
with undermining the German will to resist, PWE’s planners and propa-
gandists recognised expressions of sexuality as fundamental markers of
the (ill)health of the body politic. Certainly, PWE did not undertake
anything like a measured or rigorous study of the place of sexuality in
German society. But the PWE understanding of sexuality in wartime
Germany was nevertheless integral to the supposed German national
character that underpinned much of British subversive propaganda. And
from the perspective of wartime Britain, sexuality under Nazism was
not repressive but perversely excessive. A study of British propagan-
dists’ internal correspondence, research reports, and planning documents
demonstrates not only that sexuality was central to British concerns about
Germany and National Socialism, but also that it was intimately bound to
a related discourse on modernity expressed through gendered anxieties
about disease and social order. As a wartime intelligence organization with
a vital interest in German society, PWE’s activities can help us to under-
stand a number of currents in early critical approaches to fascism as well
as the intellectual milieu in which post-war Europe was imagined.
Histories of PWE and its propaganda war have largely glossed over
the significance of sexuality and gender in British thinking.3 There are
several reasons for this, not least of which is an elusive archival record.
More than anything else, however, the lack of engagement with these
themes is a product of methodology. In the mid-1970s, when the bulk
of PWE’s files were released to the British national archives, writing on
propaganda was dominated by diplomatic and military history. The books
and articles published in the subsequent decade explored aspects of propa-
ganda as they relate to foreign policy and the fortunes of the war, but
neglected the intellectual and cultural history that underpinned them.
Given the marginal status ascribed to sexuality for much of the period
in which the history of PWE was being written, it is fair to assume that
this element of the subversive war was simply a blind spot. An exacer-
bating factor perhaps, many of the ideas that circulated within PWE,
including spurious theories linking genocide with perverse sexuality, have,
since the 1960s, been enthusiastically reproduced both inside and outside
3 Of course, this is not true of film propaganda, which has been the subject of substan-
tial research since the 1990s. Of course, PWE could not show films to German audiences,
so they did not concern themselves with film propaganda.
5 NO MAN SO LECHEROUS AS THE GERMAN … 147
academia.4 PWE’s thinking thus prefigured the orthodoxy contemporary

to the scholarly interest in propaganda, obscuring the peculiar aspects of
this history.
Chapters Three and Four of this book discuss changes in the way that
PWE approached their German subject over the course of the war; where
Chapter Three examines a tension between intellectual and social scientific
methodologies in the department’s historical imagination, Chapter Four
considers British officialdom’s reservations about professional psychology
and the conditions that permitted a later turn towards neo-Freudianism.
This chapter dives a little deeper into the British portrait of the German
national character, exploring the interrelated notions of sexuality, gender,
and disease as they appear in wartime propaganda. When writing about
the Second World War, it must be remembered that Britain was an impe-
rial power which dominated a quarter of the globe through racist violence
and economic exploitation. British propagandists inevitably brought this
legacy to their war work. This chapter is indebted to a broad sweep of
recent histories of empire and histories of medicine that draw together the
threads of racism, sexuality, gender, and disease to describe the dynamics
of colonial experience. Particularly important to this study is Philippa
Levine’s fascinating work on the history of venereal disease (VD) in the
British Empire, which makes clear the deep intellectual and cultural roots
of British anxieties about VD as a marker of savage licentiousness, “an
insidious check on the march of civilization” and a threat to the fragile
integrity of the “race.”5 Also important to this study is John Dower’s
research into the abiding racism that underpinned the Allies’ activities in
the Pacific, but certainly had broader implications for every theatre of
war.6
This chapter will consider attempts to incorporate more carnal themes
into subversive propaganda at a moment when psychosexual interpre-
tations of fascism vied with older Germanophobic prejudices that held
4 Moore, “Sadean nature and reasoned morality”, 250. These ideas permeated 1970s
popular culture, viz. films like The Night Porter (1974) and even David Bowie’s turn as
the Thin White Duke. See: Susan Sontag, “Fascinating Fascism”, The New York Review
of Books (6 February 1975).
5 Philippa Levine, Prostitution, Race, and Politics: Policing Venereal Disease in the British
Empire (New York: Routledge, 2003), 2–5.
6 John Dower, War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War (New York:
Pantheon, 1993).
148 K. R. GRAHAM
Nazi perversions to be an expression of atavistic German barbarism.

Drawing on Alison Moore’s discussion of sadism in late nineteenth- and
early twentieth-century criminological literature,7 this chapter argues that
PWE’s Germanophobic tendency fostered an image of excessive German
sexuality as a potent representation of German barbarism out of step with
European civilization. Here the hypermasculine aesthetic of fascism as a
mass political movement became synonymous with, and symptomatic of,
national degeneracy. In one sense a simple “Othering” of the enemy, the
psychosexual nature of the German national character became a hook on
which to hang all manner of social anxieties. This in turn diverted atten-
tion from a serious consideration of the social and economic conditions
that fostered fascism.
Even before the war there were intimations that Nazism and perver-
sion spoke to a common pathology. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s,
the NSDAP’s political opponents fell back on claims that homosexu-
ality proliferated among the Nazi elite and, by extension, that Nazism
was inherently homosexual. While such accusations were initially used
to discredit the Nazi Party as it tried to shoulder a cloak of bour-
geois respectability, associations between homosexuality and Nazism were
increasingly used to explain fascist crimes, becoming almost a shib-
boleth of the German anti-fascist Left by war’s end, and hardening
into a pseudo-scientific fact thanks to the psychologizing yen of mid-
century intellectuals.8 One may even speculate that German anti-fascists
employed by PWE account in part for the department’s peculiar stress on
sexual perversion.9 Certainly by the end of the war, the socially oriented
understanding of fascism emerging from inter-Allied collaborations held
homosexuality as a characteristic of the Nazi mind. The influence of
PWE’s own German anti-fascists, however, did not precede the attitudes
of hawkish British conservatives.
7 Moore, “Rethinking Gendered Perversion and Degeneration in Visions of Sadism and

Masochism, 1886–1930”, Journal of the History of Sexuality 18.1 (2009): 138–157.
8 Dean, The Fragility of Empathy, 107–108; Harry Oosterhuis even argues that homo-
sexuality was a fundamental theme of interwar socialist thought, earlier ascribed to
aristocratic and bourgeois decadence before being incorporated into anti-fascist rhetoric:
Oosterhuis, “The ‘Jews’ of the Antifascist Left: Homosexuality and Socialist Resistance to
Nazism” Journal of Homosexuality 29.2–3 (1995): 238.
9 For example, SPD politician Max Braun was recruited specifically to gather intelligence
and gossip on prominent Nazis: Delmer, Black Boomerang, (London: Secker and Warburg,
1962), 50–51.
This chapter will first establish the importance of German sexuality

and deviance to British wartime thinking by considering the curious
enthusiasm a number of senior propagandists had for what they termed
“pornographic” propaganda. This chapter will then consider the specifi-
cally gendered nature of the perceived pathology that underpinned Nazi
Germany through an extended exploration of the way that disease-
themed propaganda became integral PWE’s arsenal. While they were not
alone in doing so, these propagandists grounded sexuality and disease
in the same epistemic strata, reflecting an understanding of fascism as
a culturally, and even biologically, bound aberration that prefigured the
introduction of psychosocial perspectives. This will lead into a study of
the genesis of PWE’s “sadistic German” by considering some of the
language used to Other their enemy within the broader context of
twentieth-century anxieties about the perceived speed of social change
and the various morbidities of modernity. Previous chapters have detailed
a shift in thinking towards the end of the war as propagandists began
to recognize the utility of social scientific methods. In regard to Nazi
perversion, the social scientific encounter cannot be said to have toppled
the established view. Instead, with the gradual introduction of psychoso-
cial perspectives to British war departments beginning with inter-Allied
collaboration in 1942, these same perversions were read onto a newly
constituted subject. Privileging the Nazi mind over the German character,
neo-Freudian thinkers recognized that these same perversions had a much
more intimate (even causal) psychological relationship with the regime’s
criminality. Interestingly, while British propagandists were less enthusi-
astic about these new ideas than were their American contemporaries,
continuities in the discourse on perversion appear to have given credence
to neo-Freudian thinking among otherwise sceptical propagandists. Ulti-
mately, the apparent explosion of perverse sexual energy under Nazism
was a keystone in the aetiology of both the German national character
and the neo-Freudian Nazi mind. In both cases, perversion spoke for a
broader pathologization of German society.
Pornography and the German Mind

A secret organization, PWE kept its activities well out of the public eye.
While parliament was aware of the department’s existence, only a handful
of ministers had any real knowledge of the manner in which Britain
waged its subversive war. An incident in June 1942, however, made PWE
150 K. R. GRAHAM
the subject of some uncomfortable scrutiny. Stafford Cripps—Leader of

the House of Commons, Lord Privy Seal, and a member of Churchill’s
cabinet, a popular and outspoken politician who had recently played a
pivotal role in negotiating the alliance with Soviet Russia—wrote to the
Foreign Secretary, Anthony Eden, accusing the propagandists under his
charge of disseminating “pornography” throughout Europe. Cripps was
incredulous that such pornography could appeal to anyone but “the thug
section of the Nazi Party,” preferring instead propaganda that appealed
to “good” anti-Nazi Germans.10 Cripps was prompted to complain after
getting wind of a broadcast put out by PWE’s subversive right-wing clan-
destine station Gustav Siegfried Eins, in which the station’s speaker, “der
Chef,” related in sensational detail the events surrounding an orgy hosted
by a German Admiral.11 Eden was “shocked” by the accusations levelled
against PWE and demanded an explanation.12
A number of PWE’s historians have discussed this minor scandal.
Charles Cruickshank uses the story as another opportunity to colour
his narrative with examples of British amateurism and to take a dig
at the prudery of “austerity Cripps,” while David Garnett mentions it
only briefly to explain the modus operandi of the station in question.13
The historical literature’s bemused dismissal of the incident hints at the
methodological limits that have been applied to consideration of the
subversive war. The controversy is of interest here because it prompted
a discussion within the department that tugged at a number of threads
running through the propagandists understanding of German fascism.
PWE did not deny the allegations of “pornography.” By early 1942
stories rich in salacious detail and frequently suggestive of immoral or
criminal sexual behaviour had in fact become integral to several strictly
clandestine broadcast operations owing largely to the influence of Sefton
10 This quote comes from Garnett, who was apparently in correspondence with Cripps
at the time: David Garnett, The Secret History of PWE (London: St Ermin’s Press, 2002),
44–45.
11 Incidentally, PWE’s director-general argued that Cripps could not have heard the
broadcast in question because it went to air several months earlier. Instead, he suggested
Cripps was being informed by “a cabal working in London against the country [Country
Headquarters, PWE].” By 1942 the department was dealing with a number of disgruntled
ex-employees who were dissatisfied with the ideological direction taken by subversive
propaganda: TNA FO 898/60, Lockhart to Eden, Letter (20 June 1942).
12 TNA FO 898/60, Lockhart to Leeper, Letter (16 June 1942).
13 Cruickshank, The Fourth Arm, 81–82; Garnett, The Secret History of PWE, 44–45.
Delmer. A prominent tabloid journalist, Delmer had joined PWE the

previous year, launching Gustav Siegfried just in time to patriotically
cheer Hitler’s ill-conceived decision to invade the Soviet Union. From
the outset, so-called pornography was a key feature of Delmer’s subversive
work. Years later, he defended his methods:
we did not use pornography because we thought it would have a dele-

terious effect on our German listeners. We used it simply for its listener
appeal - just as some popular newspapers use scabrous stories and pictures
of scantily clad models to increase their circulation. And we took great
care not to let it seem that the Chef enjoyed the bawdy details of what
he revealed of the licentious sexual excesses of Hitler’s "elite". He never
sniggered over them. His denunciations were filled with the indignation
and horror of a Salvation Army evangelist. He was a puritan diehard of the
old Prussian army revolted by the depravity and corruption of the party
functionaries and determined to expose and chastise them.14
The idea that pornography was simply a means of attracting an audience

is the justification repeated uncritically in historical discussions of PWE, a
consequence, certainly of Delmer’s own public defence of his activities.15
And, of course, PWE planning documents and internal correspon-
dence suggest there was some truth to the claim pornography served as
bait for a political hook. A broadcasting report dated September 1941,
for example, described how Gustav Siegfried had included as “the usual
‘vote-catcher’” a story about “Ursula von Hebenlohe [sic] and her Berlin
orgies.”16 Sex was an important theme in much of the propaganda
Delmer produced and was certainly not limited to the patriotic ranting of
der Chef. Launched in 1942, Wehrmachtsender Nord was another British
14 Sefton Delmer, “HMG’s Secret Pornographer”, Times Literary Supplement (21

January 1972), 64; Delmer made a similar claim in his memoir, Black Boomerang, 66.
15 A consummate self-promoter, Delmer determined to a large extent the post-war
understanding of PWE. David Hare’s BAFTA-winning 1978 TV Play, “Licking Hitler,”
drew directly on Delmer’s memoirs. A 2004 documentary entitled “Sex Bomb” (David
Monaghan Productions), ostensibly telling the story of PWE, is little more than a bawdy
hagiography of Delmer.
16 TNA FO 898/67, Report (6 September 1941); another report, contemporary to
Cripps’s complaint, stated that such stories were “not for the sake of pornography in
itself, but in order to attract listeners and gain their attention for the main objects of the
station, viz. the undermining of confidence in the regime”: TNA FO 898/60, “Gustav
Siegfried” (16 June 1942).
152 K. R. GRAHAM
clandestine operation; disguised as official German army propaganda, this

station broadcast news and entertainment and included a character tasked
with delivering “philosophic advice on suicide among the troops, sex life
in Norway and the problems of child evacuation in Germany.”17 A station
report described how the pornographic element was woven into news
bulletins; throughout 1942 Wehrmachtsender Nord ran
a serial detective story about the removal of a memorial tablet from the
Fuehrerbunker in the Siegfried Line. Investigations into the crime are,
strangely enough, taking the SS officials on an extensive tour of the night
life of European capitals.18
The scaled-up fake military broadcaster Deutscher Kurzwellensender

Atlantik meanwhile employed a small harem of young women as
comperes who would vamp for lonely German sailors between illegal jazz
music and disheartening news bulletins.19 The vote-catcher line undoubt-
edly had some currency within the department. However, while this
argument quieted Cripps, there is reason to doubt PWE’s claim that
pornography served such a prosaic purpose. In the constellation of British
propagandists’ ideas about Germany, sex was never so simple.
The vote-catcher argument was stressed at least partly because British
propagandists knew they were engaging in transgressive behaviour. The
idea that pornography could be used to attract an audience was not
universally held among propagandists and seems to have been a novelty
when Delmer launched Gustav Siegfried Eins.20 While some propagan-
dists enthused over their new vote-catcher, others held reservations. The
department’s Italian section, for example, argued that “no listener is
going to risk imprisonment for… pornography, which he can obtain
17 TNA FO 898/67, Wilson to Leeper and Barman, “Notes on Propaganda to
Germany: 24th to 30th October, 1942” (31 October 1942).

Germany: 24th to 30th October, 1942” (31 October 1942).
19 Before long, this short-wave operation was expanded with a simultaneous medium-
wave broadcast as Soldatensender Calais .
20 “There were repeated protests from the Foreign Office,” writes Garnett, “and Mr
Leeper had to become the unwilling apologist for a matter which was extremely distasteful
to him”: Garnett, Secret History of PWE, 44–45.
without danger wherever men gather.”21 Reflecting Cripps’s moral

disquiet, meanwhile, exiled German historian Francis Carsten claims that
he initially turned down an offer to work for the department (a serious
matter given the precarious status of Germans in Britain) because he
was disturbed by Delmer’s insistence that they use “filth and dirt in
political propaganda.”22 And Delmer himself was unenthusiastic about
printed pornography, later confessing that while PWE’s German section
manufactured a small number of pornographic leaflets for the Special
Operations Executive (SOE), this was not because SOE agents thought
the leaflets affected German morale “but because they found them excel-
lent for the morale of their men distributing them!” 23 Nevertheless,
sex became integral to subversive propaganda. If propagandists were
conscious of engaging in transgressive behaviour, and there were some
doubts about pornography’s efficacy as a vote-catcher (as indicated by
the Italian section), one might ask whether there were other reasons
motivating the use of sex.
The vote-catcher argument does not account for the propagandists’
contemporary understanding of the supposed German “national char-
acter.” As argued in previous chapters, Delmer’s recruitment in early 1941
was the product of political and ideological changes in the department,
which effectively meant a hardening of attitudes towards Germany in line
with this tendency. Sceptical of the appeal to “good Germans” character-
istic of the Phoney War, British propagandists were now less inclined to
make distinctions between the Nazi Party and the German people. PWE
thus launched the (very novel) right-wing, pro-Hitler but anti-SS, Gustav
Siegfried, which aired alongside a pre-existing German anti-fascist station.
The introduction of pornographic propaganda must be understood
in the context of the Germanophobic tendency in PWE thought. In
fact, only in this context do other claims for pornography aired during
this period begin to make sense. In response to the Foreign Secretary’s
21 TNA FO 898/60, Captain Ivor Thomas, “Radio Italia: The First Year’s Work” (17
November 1941).
22 It took a second job offer to work in a more scrupulous section of the department
for Carsten to join the organization: IWM Cat. No. 4482, interview recording, “Francis
Ludwig Carsten” (1979).
23 The rationale here speaks to contemporary understandings about the relationship
between medium and message which are discussed in the final chapter of this book;
Delmer, “HMG’s Secret Pornographer”, 64.
154 K. R. GRAHAM
unease about his propagandists’ activities, for example, Robert Bruce

Lockhart furnished the minister with his own justification. According
to Lockhart, the use of pornography as a vote-catcher was a deliberate
and strategic choice, meant not just for any audience but rather for a
specifically German audience: “I have spent more than a quarter of a
century of my life in Central and Eastern Europe including three years
at Marburg, a purely German university,” wrote Lockhart, “I have no
hesitation in saying that there is no European man so lecherous or
so coarse in his lechery as the German.”24 Rex Leeper affirmed this
position, arguing that “[t]here is a sadism in the German nature quite
alien to the British nature and German listeners are very far from being
revolted by the sadistic content of these broadcasts.”25 In appealing to
a peculiarly German mode of lechery, Delmer professed that he studied
the work of Magnus Hirschfeld, writing enthusiastically of the cornu-
copia of “fetishisms and perversions” documented by the sexologist, and
which were “beloved of German audiences.”26 This, despite the fact that
the Nazis persecuted homosexuals, proscribing Hirschfeld’s works and
forcing him into exile. For Delmer, the simple fact of the existence of
Hirschfeld’s Institut für Sexualwissenschaft was enough to overlook this
inconvenient discontinuity.
The pathologizing instinct of Germanophobic British propagandists
was certainly encouraged by available intelligence. Newspapers such as
the Frankfurter Zeitung, Neues Wiener Tagblatt, and Das Schwarze Korps
were routinely parsed for information about the German domestic situa-
tion.27 Of interest to this study, organs of the Nazi press were notorious
for their own emphasis on sex. As Herzog argues, SS newspapers like Das
24 Lockhart demurred, confessing “that this particular specimen of Mr. Delmer’s

pornography went too far”; TNA FO 898/60, Lockhart to Eden, Letter (20 June 1942);
as the epigraph to this chapter suggests, Lockhart was not alone in his opinion.
25 TNA FO 898/60, Leeper, “Gustav Siegfried” (16 June 1942).
27 The PWE files present multiple instances in which the SS newspaper was used for
this purpose: TNA FO 898/67, Wilson to Leeper, “Notes on Propaganda to Germany,
25th to 31st December, 1942” (3 January 1942); TNA FO 898/30, “Analysis of British
Wireless Propaganda to Germany” (17–31 October 1940); TNA FO 898/177, “Copy of
a despatch from the British Embassy, Berlin. Dated 24th February 1937. Addressed to
The Rt. Hon. Anthony Eden”; TNA FO 898/179, “Extracts from Minutes of S.O.E.
Council Meeting Held on Friday, 12th November 1943.”; TNA FO 898/179, “Propa-
ganda to Foreign Workers on the B.B.C.” (27 January 1943); TNA FO 898/192, “Policy
Schwarze Korps, and other obscene Nazi publications such as Nuremberg

Gauleiter Julius Streicher’s Der Stürmer, frequently used condemnations
of Jewish sexual criminality to produce smut through a story’s “nar-
rative pacing, its description of sex crimes, and its pictures of naked
blondes defiled by big-nosed Jews.”28 British propagandists were inti-
mately familiar with the content of Das Schwarze Korps, and indeed, it
seems likely that Gustav Siegfried’s tone and style were even modelled on
the Nazi press. A wartime report, delivered via PWE’s Stockholm office,
claimed
that an official of the Propaganda Ministry in Berlin who arrived recently

in Stockholm said that in Berlin everyone was listening to L.F. and that
they thought it was connected with the army or the S.S. The latter seems
to me a very strange conjecture in view of the Chef’s continuous attacks
on the S.S. May be it is the scurrilous tone, which is somewhat reminiscent
of the Schwarze Korps, which prompted this identification [sic].29
The pornographic Nazi press affirmed the lecherous caricature of the

Nazi regime, a caricature that befitted the broader Germanophobic preju-
dices of British officialdom, which was at odds with the sex-hostile image
of the post-war period. Stafford Cripps claimed that pornography could
only appeal to the “thug section” of the NSDAP. But for Delmer, Lock-
hart, Leeper, and the other propagandists drawn to the Germanophobic
tendency, Nazi thugs could not be differentiated from the rest of the
population.
A Gendered Pathology
Much of Britain’s clandestine German-language broadcasting wore a
veneer of patriotic conservatism in order to attack Nazi excesses and
perversions, thus driving a wedge between the Party and the people. But
and Propaganda Appreciation” (2 September 1942); TNA FO 898/463, “Evidence of

Reception” (16–31 August 1942).
28 Reader appeal is ambiguous, argues Herzog, as it is unclear whether the satisfaction
was sexual or, as it helped to dehumanize Jews, “whether the longing being stoked was
the longing to hate without guilt”: Herzog, “Hubris and Hypocrisy”, 12.
29 “L.F.”, short for Larchfield, was Gustav Siegfried’s codename; TNA FO 898/60,
draft memorandum “12th – 25th August, 1941.” (25 August 1941).

156 K. R. GRAHAM
the propagandists understood these excesses and perversions to be char-

acteristic of Germans en masse and not just Nazis. Indeed, pornographic
stories meant to encourage these divisions supposedly appealed because
the German people were impelled by baser instincts, an idea fundamental
to PWE’s understanding of the abnormality that had fostered Nazism.
Writing on the textual history of sexual normativity, Alison Moore
describes an interwar trend “toward a unique concern with… gender-
appropriate excesses.”30 From the late nineteenth century, Moore argues,
anxious discussions of sadism and masochism inspired a culturally reso-
nant understanding of the process of degeneration as gender-appropriate
“aberrations of excess” which “tended to be imagined as a return of the
barbaric evolutionary past rather than as a sickly decline to the decadent
present.”31 Degeneration was a potent concept in the early twentieth
century, which—like eugenics—attracted proponents from across the
political spectrum; Weimar-era campaigns for sexual liberation, such as
the decriminalization of female sex workers and the near-victory in the
campaign to repeal Germany’s “Sodomy law” led by Magnus Hirschfeld,
were premised on the idea that the state need only restrict the excesses
of the supposedly degenerate individuals.32 The early twentieth century
saw a flowering of such literature on degeneration and “national char-
acter.” 33 Meanwhile, as Sonya Rose argues, interwar British masculinity
was increasingly understood in terms of, and fashioned against, the hyper-
masculine Nazi.34 Taken together, these ideas can help make sense of the
milieu that informed PWE’s perception of Germany. For Vansittartists in
particular, tropes of gender-appropriate excess cut across the themes of
sex and disease in British propaganda and supported an image of German
atavism at odds with European—or, rather, British—civilization.
30 Moore, “Rethinking Gendered Perversion and Degeneration in Visions of Sadism

and Masochism, 1886–1930”, Journal of the History of Sexuality 18.1 (2009): 150–151.
31 Moore, “Rethinking Gendered Perversion”, 140, 152.
32 Laurie Marhoefer, “Degeneration, Sexual Freedom, and the Politics of the Weimar
Republic, 1918–1933” German Studies Review 34.3 (2011): 542.
33 Anti-German publicists of the First World War such as Henry de Halsalle had no
doubts about the character of their enemy, observing that while “crime… is relaxing her
hold upon the British she is tightening her grip upon the Germans. Crime, the offspring
of atavism and degeneracy, would seem to hold the German people in a grip of steel”:
de Halsalle, Degenerate Germany, (London: T. Werner Laurie, 1916), 168.
34 Sonya Rose, Which People’s War? National Identity and Citizenship in Britain, 1939–
1945 (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2003), 153.
If German perversion is understood as a gendered perversion reflected

in fascist hypermasculinity, then the discourse on German sexuality func-
tions as a means of differentiating the German national character from a
healthy, respectable, and reserved British masculine ideal. Here the partic-
ular perversions that came to be associated with Nazism play an important
role, contributing to a pathology that could sustain distinctions between
fascism and liberal democracy. Moore argues that “the degeneration of
excess relied more on invoking a haunting of the present by a past, the
return of some slumbering and animalistic force of nature from the deep
recesses of an earlier evolutionary stage.”35 Fascist hypermasculinity was
a convenient extension of supposed German barbarism contra civilization
and thus corresponded to national degeneration, which in turn diverted
further attention from a serious consideration of the social and economic
conditions that fostered fascism.
At this point, it is important to consider British propagandists embrace
of disease-themed propaganda. The subjects of illness and injury featured
heavily in British subversive propaganda because propagandists under-
stood that disease-themed propaganda had a cross-class appeal: “That
four out of five of us are deeply concerned and amazingly gullible in
regard to our own bodily health is a truth which must be patent to all
who sell pills to the people,” students of the PWE political warfare school
were reminded, “[w]e have in the subject of health a topic which goes
straight to the most fundamental anxieties, passions and suggestibilities
of the listener.”36 Interrogations of German POWs demonstrated that
questions of disease had a particular resonance among servicemen. British
propagandists learned from captured German sailors, for example, that
“[t]reatment for contagious diseases could not be carried out in small
ships such as submarines” and that many captured U-boatmen were “suf-
fering from contagious diseases, including dirt diseases.” 37 Of course,
35 Moore, “Rethinking Gendered Perversions”, 144.

36 TNA FO 898/99, “A Project for Four Lectures on Campaigns (Delivered by Lt.
Col. R.L. Sedgwick, based on material provided by Mr. David Garnett.)” (c. 1943–1944).
37 TNA FO 898/13, “Minutes” (24 April 1942); Mark Harrison’s research intimates
that this may well have been a further consequence of hypermasculinity as “Elite German
units exhibited… an anachronistic masculine code that viewed sickness as a sign of weak-
ness, and medicine as a form of pampering”: Harrison, Medicine and Victory: British
Military Medicine in the Second World War (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2004), 5.
158 K. R. GRAHAM
war and disease go hand in hand. But the way that British propagan-
dists pursued the disease theme is suggestive of more than simply another
vote-catcher.
A few examples may be illustrative. In the last weeks of 1942, clan-
destine station Wehrmachtsender Nord implemented “a health campaign,
enumerating various new diseases now raging in Germany,” as a supple-
ment to stories about suicide in the German military.38 Discussing
the intelligence used for Gustav Siegfried, meanwhile, Delmer gave the
example of a report from the German press in which Goebbels heaped
praise on “the blood transfusion units of the Nazi medical service.”39
This report was warped into a story about Russian and Polish prisoners
plagued with venereal diseases, whose “infected slav blood” negligent
Nazi officials were “[pumping] into the men who have given their own
clean German blood for the Fatherland.” Playing on the theme of German
anti-Slavic racism, another rumour suggested that brain diseases like
encephalitis afflict a fifth of all patients suffering from “Russian dysen-
tery.”40 And a series of rumours disseminated in early 1943 insinuated
that Hitler’s own health was deteriorating; banking on the superstitions of
a news-starved populace, these rumours played concerns about the Party
leadership against the recent hardships suffered by the German people
as Allied Area Bombing gained momentum. “One of the Führerhaup-
tquartier astrologers told Hitler that Germany would not be defeated by
Britain, America or Russia, but by that occupied country in which the
pestilence will start,” one story went, so “Hitler ordered him to be shot.
His hair turned white on the night of the shooting.” 41 Another rumour
attached to the same memorandum, slightly more obtuse in its content,
suggested that “Hitler is very much worried by a recurrent dream, in
which a hedgehog is attacked by ants.” Less ambiguous was a rumour that
claimed Hitler’s father died in an asylum, which “is why mental disease has
always been a banned subject of conversation in the Führer’s presence.”
Goebbels took seriously these rumours about Hitler’s health; as early as

Germany, 25th to 31st December, 1942” (3 January 1943).
39 Sefton Delmer, Black Boomerang (London: Secker and Warburg, 1962), 67.
40 TNA FO 898/69, Minutes, “U.P. [Underground Propaganda] Minutes” (28 April
1944).
41 TNA FO 898/69, Minutes, “U.P. [Underground Propaganda] Minutes” (15 January
1943).
1941, PWE heard accounts of Nazi propaganda defending Hitler’s virility

against the “senseless and fabricated reports” in circulation throughout
Germany.42
Significantly, not long after Delmer joined the department, the disease
theme was expanded into a campaign to promote malingering via radio
and leaflets.43 Faux-patriotic stations would relate stories of German
servicemen and workers who had escaped duty by faking injury or illness,
sharply denouncing them while simultaneously reporting in minute detail
the means by which they counterfeited symptoms. In July 1943, for
example, a clandestine station broadcast a fiction in which “2 Ukrainian
working women rubbed their skin with ranunculus and caused it to blister.
They then put salt on the blisters to simulate skin disease, which kept
them away from work for many months.”44 And the print propaganda of
which PWE alumni seem most proud was a handbook called Krankheit
rettet, or “Illness Saves,” by Dr Wilhelm Wohltat (always disguised, for
example, as a French-German phrasebook or a weapons manual) which
detailed how to fake various diseases and injuries in order to escape
duty and thus encourage self-preservation over self-sacrifice.45 For British
propagandists, disease was a consistently important subject.
The questions that motivated disease-themed propaganda were not
specific to Germany and, in fact, archival evidence suggests that imme-
diate British experiences and concerns informed this theme. Disease
propaganda reflected a patriarchal, middle-class discourse on the desta-
bilizing effects of modernity as well as the Vansittartist perspective on
the German character. Mathew Thomson writes of how Britain’s experi-
ence of the mid-century ideological crisis foregrounded “the problem of
human nature,” which, as discussed in the previous chapter, goes some
way to account for the improved standing of the Freudian Left during
the Second World War.46 These wartime experiences can be understood
42 TNA FO 898/71, Peterson to Adams and Brooks, Report, “We have entered the
following under Remarks on our Sib Cards” (20 August 1941).
43 TNA FO 898/67, “German Black Leaflet Production” (1941).
44 TNA FO 898/71, Report, “G.9. Broadcast Main Rumours” (23 July 1943).
45 Delmer, Black Boomerang, 130–131; uncritically repeating PWE’s claims, Cruick-
shank writes that “the malingering booklets and the desertion leaflets” were highly
successful: Cruickshank, The Fourth Arm, 172–173.
46 Mathew Thomson, Psychological Subjects: Identity, Culture, and Health in Twentieth-
Century Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 248.
160 K. R. GRAHAM
as the denouement of a trend that, by the late 1930s, saw the British
popular imagination steeped in a language of psychology and pathology,
readily reproducing tropes of nervous disorder and degeneration. Perhaps
inevitably, this language found expression in concerns about European
fascism. Oliver Lubrich’s analysis of interwar Anglophone travel literature,
for example, points to the manner in which rich descriptions of the phys-
iognomy and psychology of Germany’s new leaders helped outsiders “put
a face on the Third Reich.”47 And Carolyn Dean discusses how critics
“employ ‘sexual pathology’ to convey a dimension of Hitler’s personality
that escapes meaning.”48 Nazism’s novelty and mystery was particularly
suited to contemporary British tendency towards pathologization.
There was a sound basis for the implementation of the disease propa-
ganda in a campaign of morale subversion. Geoffrey Cocks describes
how Nazi health policy shifted with the demands of the war from
“racial improvement… to securing and maintaining healthy bodies for
deployment as soldiers and workers.”49 In this context, the spread of
malingering represented an increasing threat to German productivity as
the war dragged on. And indeed, while most of the malingering stories
PWE broadcast were fictions, British researchers had reason to believe that
it was a genuine and possibly widespread phenomenon under Nazism.
Working among Kriegsmarine prisoners of war, Henry Dicks even iden-
tified “a tendency in the prisoners’ accounts to hint that V.D. is being
‘caught’ on purpose to escape going on cruises and that the reaction of
the naval authorities is to treat infection as a crime on a par with cowardice
and malingering.” 50 By most measures, popular resistance against Nazism
in the Third Reich was so minimal as to have been non-existent. At the
same time, however, the Nazis’ “implementation of heartlessly militarized
social-utilitarian triage” manifested modes of popular “antidiscipline,” a
resistance to state domination “in the tradition of the modern state’s
47 Oliver Lubrich, Travels in the Reich, 1933–1945: Foreign Authors Report from
Germany (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 13; Delmer himself professed a
journalist’s fascination with Hitler’s health, personally interrogating a German émigré by
the name of Dr Bloch, the Hitler family doctor, in the hopes of substantiating “rumours
that he [Hitler] suffered from a congenital disease”: Delmer, Black Boomerang, 30–31.
48 Dean, The Fragility of Empathy, 113.
49 Cocks, “Sick Heil”, 102.
50 Wellcome PP/HVD/A/3/12, Henry Dicks, Memorandum 11/02/9A, “The
psychological foundations of the Wehrmacht” (February 1944).
practice of supervision, discipline, and punishment.”51 Malingering thus

manifested as an apolitical but nevertheless potent act of resistance against
the state. The spread of subversive malingering handbooks, even in the
absence of actual offenders, meant that Nazi authorities would clamp
down even harder on their subjects, further widening the rift between the
people and the regime. PWE knew that disease stories resonated with their
German audience. However, the audience’s appetite for disease propa-
ganda had little to do with the supposed German national character and
much to do with the relationship between the atomized individual and
the onerous demands of the state.
“Nothing is more punitive than to give a disease a meaning,” argues
Susan Sontag, “that meaning being invariably a moralistic one.”52 PWE
utilised disease as a subject of propaganda because the material problem
of health concerned Germans under Nazism, but British propagandists’
invocation of disease also overlapped with a wartime discourse on gender
and perversion, granting diseases an expansive meaning. “In the nine-
teenth century,” argues Sontag, “the notion that the disease fits the
patients’ character, as the punishment fits the sinner, was replaced by the
notion that it expresses character.” 53 Here, the ideological component
to British subversive propaganda comes to the fore. A German soldier’s
bout of tuberculosis contracted on the eastern front was not the final
consequence of an aggressive foreign policy; rather, his tuberculosis was
an indication of the inherent weakness that had fostered that aggression
in the first place.
PWE’s understanding and presentation of venereal disease is espe-
cially rich in significations. Following Delmer’s recruitment, VD, like
pornography, was a regular subject of clandestine broadcasting.54 Stories
of incurable and highly contagious “Japanese gonorrhoea,” for example,
51 Cocks, “Sick Heil”, 104–105; Cocks borrows the idea of “antidiscipline” from
sociologist Michel de Certeau.
52 Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors (New York, NY:
Picador, 2001), 58.
53 Sontag, Illness as Metaphor, 43.
54 While the state of the PWE archive makes quantitative statements impossible, propa-
ganda depicting the spread of venereal diseases in Germany is recurrent, most often
featuring in salacious stories.
162 K. R. GRAHAM
were deployed against German soldiers garrisoned in Norway.55 Gustav

Siegfried spread rumours “that the Posen blood transfusion centre had
taken blood from syphilitic Poles. In consequence many soldiers and offi-
cers had developed this disease in hospital.”56 And VD was incorporated
into malingering propaganda; one British rumour suggested soldiers were
deliberately getting themselves infected with VD in order to avoid the
eastern front.57 As we might expect, VD introduced a plethora of related
concerns. A draft report describing the ways that leaflet and broadcast
propaganda attacked the morale of German servicemen suggested that
“the exposure of their women-folk” to air-raids and industrial accidents
was paired with “the unhealthy influence of the foreign worker as a carrier
of venereal and other diseases and a stimulant to sexual infidelity.”58 VD
was a sign of both physical and moral decay.
VD held a particular meaning that resonated during periods of social
upheaval. As Richard Bessel argues, the European discourse on modernity
encouraged a strong link between VD and “unease about women gener-
ally.”59 Following the First World War, disquiet about immoral behaviour
found expression in heightened concerns about the spread of VD. Across
Europe authorities feared that an epidemic of VD would accompany
demobilizing soldiers, which would corrupt the body politic and lead
to social collapse. German authorities in particular believed they were
witnessing a public health crisis. Of course, this was largely a projection of
other anxieties. “The problem was not that venereal disease had reached
this or that particular level,” argues Bessel, “but that social and sexual
behaviour, particularly of women, appeared out of control.”60 The fear
of a VD epidemic echoed the fear of social revolution, pushing politics
into the domestic sphere.
55 TNA FO 898/63, Leaflet draft included in a memorandum from Thurston to

Delmer, “When were you last together with a woman. New venereal disease, Comrades
beware.” (7 March 1944).
56 TNA FO 898/67, “Progress Report for the Week Ending Sept. 13th” (13 September
1941).
57 TNA FO 898/60, Draft Report “12th – 25th August, 1941” (25 August 1941).
58 TNA FO 898/61, Draft Report “The campaigns we are following…” (c. 1944).
59 Richard Bessel, Germany after the First World War (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993),
238–239.
60 Bessel, Germany after the First World War, 238–239.
In Britain, anxiety about venereal disease took on yet another dimen-

sion. As Levine argues, attempts by colonial authorities of the British
Empire to control the spread of venereal disease are underpinned by
a belief that “the east” had “[failed] to move beyond the primi-
tivism of unchained nature, to contain sex within boundaries that made
it productive and purposeful rather than merely sensual and pleasur-
able.”61 Levine’s analysis points to a discourse in British imperialism that
established the feminine, prerational, and promiscuous colony against
the masculine, civilized, and moral colonist. In this discourse, race,
gender, and sexuality are inextricable. Interestingly, the moralistic impe-
rial discourse concerned with policing VD also maintained a “constant
unease with European decadence” which helped to entrench British
exceptionalism.62
Alongside the explicit metaphorical thrust of VD, British propagan-
dists continued to conflate health and sexuality in addressing the subject
of German women for their largely male audience. In their campaign
to “stimulate despondency and anxiety in the German Armed Forces,”
PWE distributed black leaflets that, while “pretending to reassure soldiers
concerning their wives on the home front, in reality stimulates the
gravest misgivings both as to the fidelity and health of women in
factories.”63 George Mosse argues “[i]t was part of the appeal of nation-
alism, and subsequently of racism and fascism, that they promised to
support respectability against the chaos of the modern age.”64 Drawing
on parochial anxieties about social change, PWE subverted Nazism’s
own claims to protect the body politic. Nazism’s assault on bourgeois
respectability was easily translated into a question of national dignity.
British propagandists overtly constructed women as a site of conta-
gion in both a biological and a social sense. “A fairly constant theme
[of clandestine broadcasting],” stated one report, “is that the women-
folk of soldiers in the field are being delivered over to Italian and
other foreign workers in Germany.”65 The sexualized, corrupting foreign
61 Levine, Prostitution, Race, and Politics, 182.

62 Levine, Prostitution, Race, and Politics, 6.
63 TNA FO 898/67, Report “German Black Leaflet Production” (1941).
64 George L. Mosse, Nationalism and Sexuality: Respectability and Abnormal Sexuality
in Modern Europe (New York: Howard Fertig, 1985), 180.
65 TNA FO 898/60, “G3 report” (24 June 1941).
164 K. R. GRAHAM
worker figured prominently in subversive propaganda because it was a

potent symbol of the manner in which Germany had been reconstituted
under Nazism. Usually these associations were implicit, but occasion-
ally the purpose was more clearly stated, as is the case with a draft
memorandum about a campaign detailing “the unhealthy influence of the
foreign worker as a carrier of venereal and other diseases and a stimulant
to sexual infidelity.”66 Similarly, on the SOE agenda for propaganda in
July 1942 was a campaign “Prospectus for Italian workers – Germany as
sexual paradise.”67 Meanwhile, Gustav Siegfried attacked the SS “both for
their brutality and licentiousness in Norway, which disgraced Germany’s
good name, and for the official permission they had now obtained to
commit adultery with wives, widows and fiancés of front line soldiers.”68
Already by August 1941 the propagandists were describing as “a rather
more old-fashioned piece” a rumour disseminated “about the SS men
being put on the job of race preservation at home, helping wives and
widows and sweethearts of fallen soldiers, prisoners and even soldiers
unable to come on leave to have their children which their own men
would have provided them with normally.”69 Under the guise of social
conservatism, Delmer was able to reimagine the SS as a foreign body
on German soil; the SS thus duplicated the role of over-sexed foreign
workers, even as they embodied the German national character. By this
slippery discourse, foreign workers and the Nazi elite thus came to occupy
a similar role in British propaganda.
As Birthe Kundrus demonstrates, the Third Reich’s insatiable demand
for labour meant that millions of foreign labourers ended up living and
working in Germany. These labourers represented a threat to the Nazi
ideal of racial purity and so elaborate regulations were put in place
proscribing sexual relations between foreigners and Germans. Of course,
these regulations were not applied evenly to men and women; a German
man’s illicit encounter with a foreign woman could be seen as “another
form of ‘conquest’,” but a German woman’s fraternization with a foreign
man was a “‘sexual surrender’ [and]… a humiliation for the entire
66 TNA FO 898/61, “The campaigns we are following…” (c. 1944).

67 TNA FO 898/62, Report “S.O.E. German” (18 July 1942).
68 TNA FO 898/67, “Progress Report for the Week Ending Sept. 13th ” (13 September
1941).
69 TNA FO 898/60, Report, “G3 Progress” (12 August 1941).
Volk.”70 Back home, the British government was also concerned about
fraternization between British women and foreign—especially black—
men.71 The largely unsuccessful attempt to police fraternization and place
limits on black labourers and soldiers coming to Britain laid the ground-
work for covert policies of discriminatory immigration policies in the
post-war period.
Mid-century conceptions of British femininity are particularly impor-
tant here. The war saw a proliferation of hand-wringing about shifting
gender norms, a product of the patriarchal imagination in a moment
of crisis. Of course, labour performed by women was menial as ever,
and British women’s social and economic gains were modest. Signifi-
cantly (and predictably), those social changes most visible to critics were
contingent to some extent on female sexuality. “The [British] wartime
discussion about young women’s morality,” Sonya Rose argues, “fash-
ioned a class-neutral, normative female moral subject who would exhibit
both sexual restraint and social responsibility,” a moral subject condi-
tioned by the notion of the good citizen as the new masculine ideal.72
With disruptions caused by evacuation and mobilization, women’s sexu-
ality became increasingly visible; social conservatives could not but notice
that this visibility was paired with an increase in illegitimate births and a
higher rate of divorce.73 Indicative of the double-standard, Henry Dicks
was simultaneously using rates of venereal disease among German POWs
as “another pulse chart of morale” because it pointed to “the need of the
soldier for relaxation and ‘comfort’.” 74 “Beginning in late 1942,” writes
Rose, “a greater and more diverse public commented on and denounced
the romantic escapades of women and girls, intensifying both official and
unofficial scrutiny of their behaviour… The public commentary about the
70 Birthe Kundrus, “Forbidden Company: Romantic Relationships between Germans

and Foreigners, 1939 to 1945,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 11.1/2 (2002): 221.
71 Wendy Webster, “‘Fit to Fight, Fit to Mix’: Sexual Patriotism in Second World War
Britain” Women’s History Review 22.4 (2013): 617–621.
72 Sonya Rose, Which People’s War? National Identity and Citizenship in Britain, 1939–
1945 (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2003), 83.
73 Jose Harris, “War and Social History: Britain and the Home Front during the Second
World War” Contemporary European History 1.1 (1992): 26.
74 Wellcome PP/HVD/A/3/12, Henry Dicks, Memorandum 11/02/9A “The
psychological foundations of the Wehrmacht” (February 1944).
166 K. R. GRAHAM
behaviour of women and girls was clearly stimulated by the growing pres-
ence of American GIs in British towns and cities.”75 As a consequence,
the phrase “good-time girl” became ubiquitous in “the language of moral
alarm.” 76 Good-time girls’ licentiousness represented a material threat
to the social fabric of British society. Convened in July 1943, the Joint
Committee on Venereal Disease pointed to young, sexually active women
rather than the men with whom they were consorting, as the main source
of infection.77
While lecherous German men embodied the German national char-
acter, the propagandists’ image of the German woman spoke for pater-
nalistic anxieties closer to home. As Jo Fox demonstrates in her research
into British domestic propaganda, “[w]omen were thought to be espe-
cially sensitive to the subversive broadcasts and more prone to pass on
rumors.”78 In pushing for more diverse voices on air, for example, the first
head of the department’s German section, Frederick Voigt, argued that
“Women should talk occasionally [via BBC radio broadcasts], addressing
themselves to German women, telling them about clothes, shopping,
family life and so on in this country,” thus illustrating by way of contrast
the hardship suffered by German women who now lacked access to such
frivolities.79 Perhaps thinking of the working women’s march that sparked
Russia’s February Revolution, Voigt reminded his colleagues that “food
queues where women talk and complain are among the chief sources of
revolutionary contagion.” Four years later, the vulnerabilities and radical
potential of women were the subject of a clandestine rumour in which “SS
troops in Vienna opened fire on a crowd of women who were queuing
up for ration cards, killing 64 and wounding 103. The SS thought they
were demonstrating for peace.” 80 Interestingly, during the Blitz, the
Ministry of Information demonstrated particular concern with “the lonely
woman,” believing it to be a point of considerable weakness in British
75 Rose, Which People’s War?, 74.

78 Jo Fox, “Confronting Lord Haw-Haw: Rumour and Britain’s Wartime Anti-Lies
Bureau”, Journal of Modern History 91 (2019): 99.
79 TNA FO 898/3, “Memorandum by Mr. F.A. Voigt.” (31 May 1940).
80 TNA FO 898/69, “U.P. Minutes” (10 November 1944).
solidarity.81 The same revolutionary contagion cultivated in Germany was

being consciously curtailed in Britain.
Of course, British society was not the hale and healthy bloc that it is
nostalgically remembered to be. Wartime domestic research, such as Mass
Observation surveys, demonstrated extensive worker absenteeism, dissat-
isfaction, and resentment towards government and management, as well
as “widespread fear of displacement by women and unskilled workers,
and widespread anger among managers about the perceived breakdown
of industrial discipline that had been brought about by war.”82 With
difficulties in obtaining intelligence on Germany, British wartime expe-
riences directly informed the production of subversive propaganda. An
illustrative example: in 1942 PWE opened a line of communication with
the Factory Department of the Home Office specifically to source mate-
rial and ideas for propaganda. Via this route, PWE learned that working
women experienced
shopping difficulties… bound up with the difficulty of trying to do a full

factory job and, at the same time, run a house. The shops are not open
when the women are free from the factory and, perhaps worst of all, this
gives a feeling that that they are not getting a fair share of the unrationed
goods that are available.83
The Home Office informed PWE of workplace accidents common to

women, such as fingers and hair getting caught in machinery and “T.N.T.
poisoning which is a toxic jaundice that may have fatal results.” PWE
also learned that, as a consequence of TNT poisoning, women workers
feared a yellowing of the skin “because it spoils their looks.”84 The
correspondence between the two departments also mentioned a letter of
complaint—unfortunately lost—which apparently detailed the experiences
81 TNA FO 898/5, Policy Committee, Memorandum “Propaganda Directed Exclu-

sively to Women” (2 January 1941).
82 Harris, “War and Social History”, 29; Mass Observation, People in Production: An
Enquiry into British War Production (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1942).
83 TNA FO 898/70, [Factory Dept. of Home Office] to John Rayner, Letter, (27
May 1942). This correspondence kept up for a month, with requests for more detailed
descriptions of workplace accidents.
84 “They get dermatitis of the skin through handling both the above, but more severely
from handling fulminate (fulminate of mercury)”: TNA FO 898/70, Letter, (27 May
1942).
168 K. R. GRAHAM
of a Scottish woman employed in factory work; for the propagandists “[i]t

was particularly interesting because there was nothing specific that really
emerged from her complaints, but the general picture gave an impression
of unhappiness.”85
As might be expected, PWE was enthralled by these hardships about
which they had apparently been ignorant. Before long, such details
appeared in subversive propaganda directed at the German armed forces.
From its super-patriotic platform, Gustav Siegfried used the question
of women’s industrial labour to sow divisions between NSDAP offi-
cials and the population, asking why women should be forced to suffer
such hardships in the factories when so many able-bodied party members
were enjoying easy work as office assistants.86 A progress report from
PWE’s equally conservative subversive Catholic station, Deutsche Priester,
recorded “[o]ne particularly good talk [which] deplored the fact that
women were working in factories and becoming sterile.”87 Another
broadcast rumour encouraged associations between declining morality
and industrial work by juxtaposing two new Nazi decrees, the first lifting
the ban on contraceptives and the second demanding that doctors notify
authorities of miscarriages and premature births, of which “the employ-
ment of women in industry is one of the chief causes.”88 A 1943
memorandum listed some sample story-lines PWE had put into circula-
tion in the wake of the labour call-up that followed Goebbels’s Sportpalast
speech. PWE informed German soldiers of the flight of horrors to which
German women were now exposed:
‘Industrial accidents among newly called-up women caused the accident

rate to rise 236,000 in February’; ’Women in the war factories are losing
their good looks, their skins go yellow’; ’Women in war factories lose their
capacity to bear children’; ’Women in war factories have premature change
of life’; ’Women in war factories lose all ability or desire to look after a
85 “This is just the sort of model we are after”, wrote Rayner: TNA FO 898/70,
Rayner to Garrett, Letter, (9 June 1941).
86 TNA FO 898/60, “‘The Sender Gustav Siegfried 1’. Report from Stockholm” (18
June 1942).
87 This was “a well-worn theme of the R.U.’s [clandestine stations], treated this time
from the Catholic standpoint”: TNA FO 898/67, Wilson to Leeper and Barman, “Notes
on Propaganda to Germany” (27 November 1942).
88 TNA FO 898/72, “G.9. Broadcast, Main Rumours” (1 October 1943).
home’; ’Women in war factories have their homes taken away from them if
their husbands are soldiers at the front and their children are in evacuation
camps, as of course they don’t need a home, they can live in the factory
barracks and save transport’, etc. etc.89
Many of these lines had already entered into clandestine broadcasting as

a concerted effort to aggravate labour problems, only intensifying after
Germany committed to total war.90 Industrialization’s assault on women
was an assault on the bourgeois ideal of the family, and an assault on the
family was an assault on the health of the nation. Industrial labour intro-
duced a host of maladies that struck directly at a transnational feminine
ideal and corrupted the body politic. Ironically, even as they argued for
the uniqueness of the German mind, British propagandists were using
British experiences to attack it.
Pigdogs and Englishmen

As a number of scholars have observed, British masculinity underwent
significant changes during the interwar period as a result of the trauma of
the First World War.91 Asking “why misogyny and homophobia seemed
to energize antifascist rhetoric,” Mark Meyers suggests that the answer
lies in fascists’ own claims to virile masculinity. The dialectic of the mid-
century crisis forced anti-fascists to reconsider their own masculine ideal,
becoming now “a question of degree, thereby making the problem exces-
sive masculinity and brutish authoritarianism, rather than the connection
89 TNA FO 898/61, Memorandum, “Political warfare by rumour…” (30 March 1943).

90 TNA FO 898/67, Report, “The general objective of black propaganda to Germany”
(4 July 1942).
91 As Julie Gottlieb writes, “Breaking ground in the mid-1980s, historians of
masculinity stressed the shattering of male identity caused by the war experience, with
shell-shock as a real psycho-medical condition as well as a metaphor for the disfigure-
ment and necessary reconstruction of a universal masculinity. Later work acknowledged
more continuity with the ‘Edwardian gender scripts into midcentury’, while others have
shown how ‘the disillusionment stressed by the war poets did not lead to a rejection
of manliness, but to its reconfiguration around themes of pain and sacrifice’”: Gottlieb,
“Body Fascism in Britain: building the blackshirt in the inter-war period”, Contemporary
European History 20.2 (2011): 114.
170 K. R. GRAHAM
between masculinity and authoritarianism itself.”92 Across Europe, anti-

fascists were concerned with ideals of healthy, respectable masculinity.
Significantly, Meyers writes of an intellectual trend among French anti-
fascists, which interpreted “fascist virility as coextensive with femininity,”
functioning “as a challenge to the hypermasculine image that fascists tried
to give to their movements.”93 In an argument that has strong parallels
with Moore’s reading of interwar perversion as gender-appropriate excess,
Meyers argues that “[i]n the face of a threat coded as hypermasculine,
ideal republican manhood may well have grounded itself in the notion
that the man who does not soften his masculinity through his openness
to femininity risks becoming extreme in his virility, and thus paradoxically
effeminate.”94
Certainly, there are hints at these concerns in the surviving PWE files.
In a lecture on the future of Germany delivered to PWE’s political warfare
school in early 1944, one R.A. Bicknell blamed a lack of vitality among his
contemporaries for the rise of Hitler. “We have called ourselves the LOST
GENERATION,” he wrote, “but this piece of masculine coquetry does
NOT ABSOLVE ITS SURVIVING MEMBERS from their duty to step
right into the circle of ACTION and to consider themselves as the arbiters
and mentors, in their own mature way, of the destiny of the younger
generation.”95 Bicknell explicitly bound masculinity to both personal
responsibility and a paternalistic attitude towards Germany and the “inter-
national order.” The occupiers’ mission—to revitalize German democ-
racy—was a test of manhood, but this was manhood narrowly defined.
In wartime Britain, Rose argues, “‘Good citizenship’ and masculinity
were virtually the mirror images of one another. Masculinity, in other
words, was normative personhood.”96 Germanophobia was bound up in
this interwar reconfiguration of British masculinity. Indeed, the normative
discourse on German sexuality implied an antithesis of German excess: the
good citizen, a celebration of restrained British middle-class masculinity.
92 Mark Meyers, “Feminizing Fascist Men: Crowd Psychology, Gender, and Sexuality in
French Antifascism, 1929–1945”, French Historical Studies 29.1 (2006): 109–110, 140.
93 Meyers, “Feminizing Fascist Men”, 109–110.
94 Meyers, “Feminizing Fascist Men”, 141–142.
95 Emphasis in the original: TNA FO 898/99, R.A. Bicknell, Lecture Notes, “Germany
Today and Tomorrow” (13 October 1943).
As George Mosse argues, the Victorian association between

respectability and nationalism promoted a peculiar racial logic. In the
language of fin-de-siècle racist publicists such as Otto Weininger (influ-
ential on a young Hitler), this was a moralized pathology, organized
hierarchically so that a masculine ideal, immune to the baser instincts,
occupied the upper strata while its converse was concerned only with self-
interest: “Neither women nor Jews possess moral sense” by this rubric;
“they know only sexual passion.”97 This naturalized absence of self-
discipline was symptomatic of degeneration and a return to barbarism,
a discursive construct which reproduced the slippery tangle of racialized
ideas about sexual mores under British colonial rule. Supposed German
lechery, as witnessed by British propagandists, played into these peculiar
notions of gendered morality.
At this point, it is worth considering more closely one of the ideas that
supported PWE’s conception of German national character. In a detailed
report on subversive propaganda, distributed only weeks after Cripps’s
complaint about pornography (not likely a coincidence), the German
Section articulated their approach to morale subversion:
We do not appeal exclusively to their higher instincts or their idealistic

opposition to the regime… We try to exploit against the German war effort
the ordinary German’s ‘Schweinehund’, his desire for self-preservation,
personal profit and pleasure, his herd instinct to do as others do and his
ordinary human passions of fear, lust and jealousy [sic].98
Schweinehund, or pigdog, was a derogatory term popularized in

Germany during the First World War. In the interwar period, talk of an
innere Schweinehund began to take on sharper political connotations. In a
1932 sitting of the Reichstag, SPD politician Kurt Schumacher famously
condemned the Nazis for their cynical appeal to the average German’s
innere Schweinehund, attracting censure and ensuring his arrest upon the
Nazi seizure of power.99 Delmer’s frequent usage of the term parallels
97 Mosse, Nationalism and Sexuality, 145.

98 This report included allusions to Germans’ libidinal tastes, but discreetly avoided any
mention of pornography; TNA FO 898/67, “The general objective of black propaganda
to Germany” (4 July 1942).
99 Kurt Schumacher, “Der Appell an den inneren Schweinehund”, Reichstag Speech
(23 February 1932): https://www.fes.de/fulltext/historiker/00781a20.htm.
172 K. R. GRAHAM
that of Schumacher, although he attributed the concept, significantly, to

the Nazis themselves, later claiming Hitler had told him personally that
“there is an inner pigdog in every man.”100 While much of Delmer’s
writing is marked by a sardonic sense of humour, he was apparently
sincere in his belief in the bestial German innere Schweinehund. Indeed,
for PWE the innere Schweinehund became a potent image of gendered
German distinction that paired self-interest with a litany of other traits
at odds with British nationalists’ notions of respectability. One might ask
whether Delmer deployed the term because of its ideological connota-
tions, or whether he imagined that this peculiar mode of individualism was
a positive trait in the face totalitarianism. Evidence suggests the former.
PWE’s gendered German national character lent the innere Schweine-
hund a significance that went beyond laziness or inertia. The bulk
of Britain’s clandestine German-language broadcasting wore a veneer
of patriotic conservatism in order to attack Nazi excesses and perver-
sions, thus driving a wedge between the Party and the people. But
Germanophobic propagandists understood these excesses and perversions
to be characteristic of Germans en masse and not just Nazis. Indeed,
pornographic stories meant to encourage divisions between the Party and
the people supposedly appealed because the German people were impelled
by baser instincts, an idea fundamental to PWE’s understanding of the
abnormality that had fostered Nazism.
In considering the innere Schweinehund in the context of PWE,
the question of class prejudice also enters the frame. Even before
fascist masculinity was subject to critique in anti-fascist rhetoric, British
masculinity was being oriented in terms of familiar class ideals. As
Rose demonstrates, the reformed British masculinity of the interwar
period “had long-standing historical connections to middle-class and elite
Britishness.”101 In a discussion of body aesthetics among interwar British
fascists, meanwhile, Julie Gottlieb writes of how Jewish stereotypes were
deployed in opposition to “Edwardian constructions of British manliness
and gentlemanliness in particular.”102 The fascist ideal was inscribed on
the fascist body, echoing contemporary eugenicist tropes in their assertion
100 As Berlin correspondent for the Daily Express, Delmer spent much time in the
company of the NSDAP leadership during the early 1930s: Delmer, Black Boomerang,
41.
102 Gottlieb, “Body Fascism in Britain”, 128.
of a class-bound conception of health. Among the interwar British middle

class, for whom “playing by the rules… [was] a test not only of physical
ability but of citizenship,” the anti-Semitic contention “that Jews were
not team-spirited” functioned simultaneously as a self-affirmation of their
own racial superiority.103 This class-oriented biological mode of thinking
complemented PWE’s Germanophobic tendency.
As discussed in the previous chapter, early attempts to psycholo-
gize the German character reproduced many of these class-oriented and
organicist traits. J.T. MacCurdy was PWE’s first professional psycholo-
gist, a Cambridge researcher who, in his early work on hysteria and war
neuroses, advocated a “distinction between the officer and the private”
in both their susceptibility to, and experience of, nervous disorders.104
In 1939, MacCurdy joined colleagues Charles Myers, George Riddoch
and T.A. Ross in arguing against compensation for shell shock victims
on the grounds that tough love was more therapeutic and the reward of
a pension only “encourages the weaker tendencies in their character.”105
Meanwhile, R.L. Sedgwick, another PWE psychologist, delivered a lecture
in 1944 to the political warfare school in which in he discussed “Stachel-
drahtkrankheit,” or barbed-wire disease, a tapestry of nervous disorders
that afflicted prisoners of war.106 This lecture is particularly revealing
for the way in which it wove normative nationalist ideas together with
psychological concepts and gender stereotypes. Referencing F.W. Mott,
an early twentieth-century British psychiatrist and influential proponent
of degenerationist ideas, Sedgwick informed his students that “hysteria
and severe neurasthenia” could be attributed to “Sexual excesses” and
“Immoderate smoking.” According to Sedgwick, barbed-wire disease
was an example of delusional melancholia in which the lack of sexual
intercourse was a primary contributing factor.107
103 Gottlieb, “Body Fascism in Britain”, 128.

104 John Forrester, “1919: Psychology and Psychoanalysis, Cambridge and London
– Myers, Jones and MacCurdy” Psychoanalysis and History 10,1 (2008): 77.
105 Ben Shephard, ‘“Pitiless psychology”: the role of prevention in British military
psychiatry in the Second World War’, History of Psychiatry, x (1999): 509–510.
106 TNA FO 898/99, Sedgwick, Lecture Notes, “Stacheldrahtkrankheit” (c. 1944).
107 Interestingly, Sedgwick also felt compelled to remark that “Homosexuality [is] not
as frequent as might be imagined especially in the case of Italians”: TNA FO 898/99,
Sedgwick, Lecture Notes, “Stacheldrahtkrankheit” (c. 1944).
174 K. R. GRAHAM
Intellectual hangovers from the late-Victorian and Edwardian era

cannot be dismissed as the awkward habits of old men. Delmer may
have claimed that pornography served merely as a vote-catcher but a
report on Gustav Siegfried, filed only weeks before Cripps made his
complaint, suggested that “Erotic corruption of listeners” was the reason
for airing “detailed descriptions… of proceedings on the Kraft durch
Freude brothel ship in Norway.”108 This idea—that pornography was
itself a subversive influence—is repeated in another contemporary docu-
ment. As mentioned above, Delmer found inspiration in Hirschfeld’s
research, suggesting that Germans were especially fond of reading about
“fetishisms and perversions.” In a draft report on the output and effect
of Gustav Siegfried we have the opportunity to see how this insight
was translated into propaganda. The report makes mention of a Gustav
Siegfried story “about a pyromaniac who is using the British bombing and
the lighting of decoy fires as a cover for setting houses on fire for himself
and for his perverse sexual enjoyment. Object of this is to encourage pyro-
mania.”109 The connection between telling a story about a pyromaniac
and inciting pyromania in the listener (even a pyromaniac listener) is, from
the vantage point of present-day psychology, vanishingly tenuous. Even
the mid-century psychoanalytic understanding of pyromania described a
developmental disorder in which neurosis was brought on by the denial of
instinctual drives. The emphasis on a flagrant sexual component in PWE’s
pyromania echoes rather the rhetoric of late-Victorian moral insanity.
The widespread potential for erotic corruption turned on a degenerate
national character, the perversity of which was indicated by popular
interest in perverse material. A function of degeneracy, the salacious story
could thus induce further dangerously corrupting behaviour.
PWE was at the vanguard of British wartime thinking on Germany
but many figures in the department reproduced patterns of prejudice that
belonged to an earlier generation. Out-dated science found its parallel
in anachronistic political ideas such as the persistent belief that Nazism
was merely Prussian militarism under a new guise. The perceived sexual
excesses that typified mid-century Germany in the British imagination
were a means by which Britain could mark out German distinction; the
108 Emphasis in the original: TNA FO 898/60, G3 Report (24 June 1941).
109 I have found no evidence that this story was aired, but it is interesting nonetheless:
TNA FO 898/60, “12th – 25th August, 1941” (25 August 1941).
radical or revolutionary aspects of Nazism that promoted these excesses,

however, represented a blind spot for much of the war. British propa-
gandists read as perverse Das Schwarze Korps but, within the logic of the
Nazi racial state, this pornography was a healthy outlet for the sexual ener-
gies necessary to uphold the new masculine ideal. The manner in which
British propagandists interpreted the German character as pathological
might even be said to have underpinned this elision by binding a perverse
sexuality not to Nazi fanatics but to the German people. Pornography was
introduced into British propaganda because figures like Delmer and Lock-
hart held that Germans were inherently lecherous, a degenerate people
who responded atavistically to such stimuli in a way that was beneath
civilized British subjects.
A New Answer to the German Question

From the perspective of many mid-century British propagandists, German
perversion was a gendered perversion. Fascist hypermasculinity disrupted
the idealist conception of women as mothers, wives, and sweethearts.
The insistence on the abnormality of Nazi Germany, of its deviance
from a supposed civilized European tradition, was central to these propa-
gandists’ understanding of both Nazi barbarism and Germany as the
well-spring of that barbarism. As a dominant pole in the British under-
standing of fascism, the Germanophobic tendency largely conditioned
PWE’s pathologization of German character. Sexual perversion spoke for
German atavism, part of a broader discourse on gender and society that
reflected anxieties at home. Significantly, PWE’s hesitant turn to social
psychology preserved a value-laden portrait of German perversion, which
anticipated post-war intellectual tendencies.
In late 1941, contemporary to the embrace of so-called pornographic
propaganda under Delmer, PWE’s senior staff entertained a proposal for
a new clandestine radio station directed at the Italian military.110 This
proposal was the brainchild of Rae Smith, an American with close ties
to US government officials, and John Barry, one of PWE’s central plan-
ners. Barry and Smith were relatively progressive thinkers, both having
worked together in advertising before the war.111 As noted in the previous
110 TNA FO 898/60, Barry to Martelli, “Italian Military R.U.” (12 December 1941).
176 K. R. GRAHAM
chapter, Smith was also an early advocate for what he called “pure
psychology” in propaganda planning, suggesting that PWE instigate long-
term plans based on psychological analysis of the enemy rather than
short-term plans that responded to political and military circumstance.112
In keeping with this psychological approach, the new Italian station was
not to shy away from the sexuality of their target audience. Indeed, sexu-
ality was central to its rationale. “Our station should be frankly sexual,”
Barry wrote to the chief of the Italian section, “exploiting largely in sexual
terms the jealousy and inferiority that the Italian reserve officer must feel
at the sight of his swaggering self-satisfied opposite number [the German
officer] in the streets of Italy.”113 Promoting divisions between distinct
interest groups was the bread and butter of British morale subversion;
the rationale offered for Italian sexual jealousy of their German allies,
however, was certainly new to PWE. Smith and Barry argued that
the deepest of all appeals that Hitler makes to the German people is sexual
– the Herrenvolk appeal, the appeal to convince them that their blood and
their seed is superior to that of any other race on earth, and that Europe
must bow to the procreative urge of the higher type of man...
While it is now a commonplace in literature on fascism, these propagan-

dists were already drawing fertile connections between Nazism’s racial
and sexual politics. Despite contemporary interest in German sexuality,
however, PWE’s Italian Section was not convinced. Barry and Smith
found their plan a hard sell, but their ideas intimated the origins of a
new tendency in British propagandists’ approach to Germany.
While the German national character was increasingly understood
in terms of its perverse sexuality, few propagandists at this time were
willing to engage directly with fascism’s sexual entanglements. British
army psychiatrist Henry Dicks was less reticent. Beginning in late 1942,
Dicks developed through his research among German prisoners of war a
coherent psychosocial portrait of life under Nazism that shook out many
of the old cobwebs of British Germanophobia. In this new tendency,
the horrors of fascism were attributed to a socially contingent, neo-
Freudian “Nazi mind” rather than an ahistorical German character. He
112 TNA FO 898/182, Rae Smith to Richard Crossman, Valentine Williams, Rex
Leeper, Letter, (30 December 1941).
113 TNA FO 898/60, Barry to Martelli, “Italian Military R.U.” (12 December 1941).
was one of very few British wartime thinkers in a position of influence

to put forward a cohesive clinical understanding of sadomasochism as
a fundamental characteristic of the Nazi regime.114 And, in fact, some
of his ideas appear to have made it into PWE’s political warfare school,
which offered vaguely neo-Freudian insights alongside Sedgwick’s refer-
ences to degeneration theory. Bicknell’s lecture on the future of Germany,
for example, described a possible outcome of the Allied occupation of
Germany: “The sadism of the Germans [rather than Nazis] against the
Jews and the uncounted millions who have died to serve their lusts in
concentration camps, the ghettoes and under the Gestapo may well turn
into mass masochism.” 115 As a consequence of this mass masochism,
Bicknell suggested that the Germans may “plunge precipitously and with
shut eyes into a kind of super-Communism to escape from themselves and
the wrath of their conquerors.”
As Dicks’s research began to attract attention in 1943 and 1944,
he became more ambitious about its possible applications. In keeping
with his discovery that German soldiers responded positively to accu-
rate and objective news and information, for example, he proposed a new
German-language programme to be broadcast over the BBC: a doctor of
appropriate esteem would deliver a series of scientific talks on the Nazi
mind
in which the pathological nature of Nazi fanaticism is interpreted in frank,

stark terms, in language at once expert yet clear. We would endeavour
to demonstrate the sado-masochistic, destructive, necrophiliac basis of the
homosexual, perverted, adolescent Nazi idealism with its false heroics; we
would support this with as many quotations as possible from literary and
psychopathological writings by well-known Aryan German authorities. We
would stress especially the unmasking of unconscious guilt and escape
mechanisms (projection), inferiority etc. in bogus heroics, and detach it
114 While British Germanophobes happily described Germans as sadists, this sadism was
the sadism of the barbarian and lacked the particular connotations introduced by neo-
Freudians. In his influential polemic against German barbarism, Vansittart himself argued
that sadism, while native to the German character, was too weak a word to be “applied to
present practices in Germany”: Robert Vansittart, Black Record: Germans Past and Present
(London: Hamish Hamilton, 1941), 10.
115 TNA FO 898/99, R.A. Bicknell, Lecture Notes, “Germany Today and Tomorrow”
(13 October 1943).
178 K. R. GRAHAM
from healthy patriotism, from love, and show the anti-biological, decadent
nature of Nazi suicidal tendencies, brutal sexuality and immorality [sic].116
Dicks’s doctor-speaker was to put Germany on the couch, offering a cure

by enlightenment. So convinced was he of the centrality of patholog-
ical masculinity to the rise of fascism that elsewhere he even advocated
a greater civic role for German women, alongside the Churches, as a
means of tempering male aggressiveness and thus aiding in the process
of re-education.117 Dicks understood as socially conditioned a range of
behaviours that comprised the modern German mentality and it was this
conditioned mentality that the Nazis had benefited from in garnering
mass support. Where the more extreme British Germanophobes wanted
Germany laid low in order to ensure a future peace, the constructive and
even utopian aspects of the neo-Freudian tendency led Dicks to argue that
correcting German misogyny would remove one of the pillars on which
Nazism was built.118
While there were in the end a number of PWE advocates for
psychology, many senior propagandists inclined towards Germanophobia
demonstrated inertia in their thinking. The recent history of Anglo-
German relations made it difficult for Foreign Office veterans in particular
to think of fascism as anything but a German phenomenon. Carolyn Dean
suggests that psychosocial models appealed in part because they could
account for “the active collaboration and compliance of non-Germans
in Nazi crimes, and the appearance of ‘totalitarian’ regimes in diverse
cultures and traditions.”119 In the case of many wartime British strate-
gists, however, such logical consistency was not a high priority. After
all, Churchill’s insistence on the dissolution of Prussia as the source of
116 Wellcome Library Archive (Wellcome) PP/HVD/A/1, Henry Dicks, Memo-

randum, “Broadcasts on Nazi Psychology” (27 October 1944).
117 Wellcome PP/HVD/B/1/22 H Dicks, Lecture Notes, “The psychological
approach to German character” (22 September 1947); Wellcome PP/HVD/A/3/24 H
Dicks, Memorandum “National Socialism as a Psychological Problem” (3 January 1945).
118 One of his doubters questioned the logic of Dicks’s deductions, writing that placing
women in positions of authority was more “a pious hope that it might do some good
rather than on the basis of evidence that it will do so… There is also the anthropological
fact that women can be almost as aggressive as men. I do not wish to press this point
too much since I am all in favour of the emancipation of women on other grounds”:
Wellcome PP/HVD/B/1/11, Cohen to Hargreaves, Letter (5 March 1945).
119 Dean, The Fragility of Empathy, 121.
the Third Reich’s belligerency ignored the fact that Hitler was Austrian,
that many of his ideas were built upon a tradition of Austrian and
völkisch pan-German anti-Semitism, that Bavaria was the Nazi heartland,
and that Hitler’s would-be assassins of 20 July 1944 were members of
the Prussian military caste. Finding perhaps their fullest expression in
the late-war policies of denazification and re-education, psychoanalytical
methodologies were able to gain traction within war departments only
because they reflected the ideological conditions of Britain’s mid-century
crisis. The gendered understanding of perversion identified by Moore,
which underpinned the neo-Freudian sadomasochistic and homosexual
Nazi mind, was vital because it preserved the normative understanding
of respectability shared by Britain’s overwhelmingly male, middle-class
propagandists.
The focus on German sexuality and disease under Delmer must be
understood independently of the kind of psychoanalytical ideas familiar
to the post-war period. Perversion was not inherent to PWE’s innere
Schweinehund but it did echo anti-fascist and middle-class nationalist
rhetoric on hypermasculinity and degeneration. A gender-appropriate
perversion of excess was important to PWE—and at odds with the post-
war image of a sexually repressive Reich—because such excess confirmed
atavistic German barbarism. The link between homosexuality and fascism
thus pointed to a distinction between Germans and the rest of Europe
in which the German mentality had a hereditary basis, binding together
sexuality, race, and class as constituent elements in a nationalist discourse
on respectability. Psychosocial theories, which suggested the potential
universality of fascism, challenged organic distinctions. Barry and Smith’s
1941 proposal met resistance at least in part because it was out of
step with contemporary thinking. The later neo-Freudian pathologiza-
tion of Nazism preserved elements of this discourse but abandoned the
organic basis, asserting distinction against an authoritarian personality.
Of course, the manner in which neo-Freudianism encoded sadism—as
a gender-appropriate perversion—demonstrated strong continuities with
the paradigmatic notion of German national character. It may even be said
that the sexualized image of German national character legitimized later
psychosocial concerns. Importantly, the transition from national char-
acter to authoritarian personality did not prompt a major revision in
the way that PWE understood the relationship between sexuality and
fascism. Perversion was merely displaced from the barbarous German
to the Nazi mind. This shared intellectual milieu that placed stress on
180 K. R. GRAHAM
gender-appropriate perversions of excess goes some way to explain how

PWE could begin to incorporate neo-Freudian theories of fascism that
were at odds with the paradigmatic German national character.
In this ideological landscape, women were inscribed as a synecdoche
for the health of the body politic. As an extension of perverse or atavistic
hypermasculinity, stories of venereal disease functioned as an obvious and
potent signifier. However, all disease propaganda adhered to a common
logic. Even the malingerer’s disease held a special meaning: no fiction
at all, it was, rather, a social disease that appeared alongside VD as
if drawn from a common well. The display put on by the malingerer
was only the outward symptom of an underlying problem. The preva-
lence of malingering, or rather the propagandistic suggestion that it was
widespread, subverted an understanding of citizenship that encoded self-
lessness, restraint, and adherence to duty as masculine, middle class,
British qualities. Meanwhile, the selfish, duty-averse malingerer occu-
pied the same imaginative territory as the good-time girl. In this sense,
one might read a society of malingerers as a feminized body politic.
At the very least, malingering complemented the pathological nature
of German hypermasculinity in its deviance from contemporary healthy
British masculinity. It is no coincidence that malingering propaganda only
featured heavily in the department’s output after Sefton Delmer and his
innere Schweinehund weighed in on PWE’s Germany.
British propaganda engaged in a dialogue with Nazi propaganda,
responding to Nazi claims of racial purity with examples of how Nazism
had not only failed in the task it had set for itself, worse, Nazi practices
were themselves occasion for the contamination of Germany. Diseases real
and imagined featured heavily as a propaganda theme that reflected the
normative criteria by which the department understood German char-
acter. As pornography implied a perversely excessive German lechery, a
hypermasculinity that paradoxically led to a feminized fascism, so disease
implied a corrupted and (by the rubric of British propagandists) feminized
body politic. Together the themes of disease and sexuality offered PWE a
space to sublimate common European anxieties about social change.
Conclusion
While British propaganda policy towards Germany and Europe was
largely pragmatic, changing in response to the fortunes of the war,
the constellation of ideas underpinning this policy was far less mutable.
British propagandists’ early and persistent claim that lechery, rather than
prudery, was a constituent part of the supposed German national char-
acter reflected the atavism that had motivated first Prussian militarism and
then Nazi barbarism. While these ideas were not alien to psychosocial
orientations, their organicist colour meant that they later only mapped
imperfectly onto those neo-Freudian models of fascist or authoritarian
personality types familiar to post-war critical theory. Nevertheless, conti-
nuities in the discourse on perversion appear to have given credence
to neo-Freudian thinking among an otherwise sceptical department. In
some respects, the epistemological shift introduced by the social sciences
was not as radical as might be imagined; if the Nazis were inclined
towards sadomasochistic perversions, as neo-Freudians argued, they were
gender appropriate perversions of excess in keeping with the atavistic,
hypermasculine German national character.
Susan Sontag observes that disease metaphors in classical political
philosophy assume the possibility of a cure, they look for balance; in
modern political discourse, however, disease metaphors assume a different
quality, “not as a punishment but as a sign of evil, something to
be punished.”120 For propagandists aligned with the Germanophobic
tendency, there was indeed little interest in a cure. Even after social scien-
tific perspectives began to gain traction, hopes for a new and peaceful
Germany were premised on re-education and denazification, a quasi-
utopian project that first required the dissolution of the old, diseased body
politic. Germany was suffering from a terminal illness, of which fascism
was only a symptom. The propagandists’ job then was to accelerate the
collapse. Disease propaganda was an attack on Nazi Germany, but the
metaphors introduced by disease propaganda had much wider resonance.
Perhaps inevitably, PWE’s portrait of Germany was inscribed with
British experiences of industrial warfare and mass mobilization. In some
cases the relationship between British experience and the production of
subversive propaganda is immediate, such as in the case of British women
manufacturing TNT. Even in such cases, however, details were translated
into subversive propaganda along ideological lines. The normative ideas
that fed into both PWE’s understanding of the German national character
and the later neo-Freudian Nazi mind were part of a broader discourse
on sexuality, gender, and disease centred on a patriarchal concern with
120 Sontag, Illness as Metaphor, 76–77, 81.

182 K. R. GRAHAM
the effects of modernity. PWE’s interest in disease propaganda, and

particularly the sustained campaign to encourage malingering, is partly
a reflection of this discourse. Malingering propaganda served immediate
subversive ends but it also spoke for the pathology that propagandists
understood lay at the heart of the German body politic, the very thing
that propelled the Nazis to power in the first place. In a period of ideolog-
ical crisis, British propagandists sought a means of distinguishing German
society from their own. However, the fact that they turned to British
experiences in order to understand and describe Germany paradoxically
implied similarities rather than differences with the Other against which
Britain came to be measured.
CHAPTER 6
A Rebellion Against the Divinely Appointed

Order: Totalitarian Theory, Secular Religions,
and Religious Anti-Fascism in British
Subversive Propaganda
In the first months of the Second World War, when the appeal to
“good Germans” was at its most earnest, British propagandists were
wracked with indecision about how they might address what was poten-
tially the largest cohesive anti-Nazi bloc in Germany. Devout German
Christians, and especially German Catholics, were understood by many
contemporary observers to be less susceptible to Nazism than their coun-
trymen. The ongoing bitterness of the Kirchenkampf—the bitter struggle
between the German Churches and the fascist state which had begun
with Nazi’s hegemonizing Gleichschaltung—made the subversive poten-
tial of religious-themed propaganda irresistible; however, the convictions
of the German devout, both Catholic and Protestant, were at the same
time understood to be too sensitive a subject for the vulgarities of propa-
ganda. In his wide-ranging history of the Ministry of Information, Ian
McLaine notes that “there seem to have been few qualms about pressing
religion into the service of propaganda.”1 While this may be true in terms
of domestic British propaganda, it is certainly not the case for foreign
propaganda. Senior propagandists held that any British appeal to German
1 Ian McLaine, Ministry of Morale, 151.

Switzerland AG 2021
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-71664-6_6
184 K. R. GRAHAM
faith would be open to a charge of hypocrisy, which would compromise

the message and, worse, play into Goebbels’s hands. Britain lacked the
moral authority to tell German Christians how to behave.
By mid-1940 Department EH had determined that religious propa-
ganda was a non-starter. However, over the months that followed,
petitioning from both propagandists and public figures slowly eroded
resistance to the possibilities of religious propaganda. Senior religious
personalities such as George Bell, the outspoken Bishop of Chichester,
felt that the European faithful were being neglected and brought his
influence to bear on government ministries. At the same time, many
propagandists complained that their hands had been unnecessarily tied
by a skittish moratorium. This agitating paid off. Towards the end of
1940, a broadcast programme of alternating Catholic and Lutheran
sermons was under consideration. Soon German-language hymns and
prayers began appearing on the BBC. The controversial anti-Nazi activi-
ties of Clemens August von Galen, the Bishop of Münster, and Conrad
Gröber, Archbishop of Freiburg, were the subject of talks directed at reli-
giously minded listeners in Germany, and stories of religious resistance
inside Germany were used to bolster more secular propaganda themes.
By 1942 many concerns about the feasibility or merit of religious propa-
ganda had been seemingly resolved. In July of that year, Brendan Bracken,
the Minister of Information, complained that “too much time was given
to the [BBC] Forces programmes and not enough to religious broad-
casts.”2 By September the Political Warfare Executive had launched a
clandestine Catholic broadcast station through which the host, a genuine
Austrian priest, took up the leitmotif of clandestine socialist broadcasts in
describing examples of sabotage and organized opposition in France and
Germany. According to one of PWE’s strategists, the priest even went “so
far as to point out that the opportunities for martyrdom have never been
better for German Catholics.”3
The previous chapter explored the significance of sexuality and disease
as British subversive propaganda themes. This chapter will continue the
exegesis of PWE’s subversive efforts by turning to another under-explored
aspect of wartime propaganda. Religion was an important element in
2 TNA FO 898/13, Minutes, Propaganda Policy Committee (22 July 1942).

Germany” (31 October 1942).
6 A REBELLION AGAINST THE DIVINELY APPOINTED ORDER … 185
British propagandists’ thinking on Germany, directly influencing propa-

gandists’ perception of their audience as well as contributing to the
intellectual framework on which their propaganda was based. It is striking
then that so little has been said about the place of religion in the subse-
quent historiography that has developed around wartime propaganda.4
The halter placed on the uninhibited development of religious propa-
ganda for some of the war has certainly contributed to this lack of serious
historical consideration, exacerbated no doubt by PWE’s failure to give
rise to any active resistance within Germany. Nevertheless, religion came
to represent a cornerstone in PWE’s output and a key factor in the
department’s analysis of the Third Reich. Of course, the path that led
to religious propaganda was discursive, its possibilities uncertain. Even
as cogent arguments for religious-themed propaganda proliferated, there
lingered that underlying concern that any religious propaganda emerging
from Britain would be seen as two-faced or cynical. Clandestine propa-
ganda offered new opportunities for political warfare that were less likely
to be traced back to British sources and so could skirt around the ques-
tion of hypocrisy. But Britain’s moral authority was only part of a larger
tangle of obstacles that British propagandists recognized as inherent to
religious-themed propaganda.
Analysis of the arguments for and against religious propaganda can
reveal much about how German social divisions were understood by those
who hoped to exploit them. These ideas deserve scrutiny not only for the
effect they had on wartime propaganda, but also for their broader signifi-
cance to mid-century intellectual history. This chapter argues that the tacit
admission to a lack of moral authority among PWE’s strategists ultimately
precipitated the development of religious propaganda by guiding perspec-
tives towards a distinct mode of intellectual conservatism. During this
formative phase of the propaganda war, canny propagandists and intel-
ligence officers resisted the well-meaning enthusiasms of advisors who
were compelled by their own religious convictions. The religious ques-
tion instead fell into the orbit of figures such as propagandist Frederick
Voigt, who held a very particular understanding of National Socialism.
4 Charles Cruickshank, for example, only briefly discusses religious propaganda as

a minor broadcasting theme and altogether fails to mention clandestine religious
propaganda: Cruickshank, The Fourth Arm: Psychological Warfare 1938–1945 (London:
Davis-Poynter, 1977), 84–85.
186 K. R. GRAHAM
Influenced by a Catholic concept of totalitarianism immanent in contem-

porary theories of political or secular religion that found traction during
the interwar period, Voigt sought a means to disturb the apparent comity
between the NSDAP and religious conservatives. British propagandists’
engagement with religious propaganda thus also reflected an important
chapter in Catholic intellectual history and the Church’s transition to
modernity. The perceived relationship between religion and resistance
came to be rooted in conservative Catholic perspectives on totalitari-
anism bound intrinsically to anti-communism; for PWE then Nazism was
a hegemonizing secular religion akin to “Bolshevism.”
James Chappel’s recent research demonstrates that totalitarian theory,
so familiar to Cold War political science, drew on this interwar Catholic
discourse that “saw totalitarianism as the pathological consequence of
modern freedoms.”5 British propagandists were early proponents of this
maturing totalitarian theory, which elided the distance between Soviet
communism and Nazi fascism. “In the face of mounting crisis,” writes
Paul Hanebrink, “European Catholics transformed old critiques of secu-
larism and the secular state, devised originally to channel opposition to
liberalism (in the nineteenth century) and communism (in the twen-
tieth) into a more capacious defence of religion that could also be
aimed at Nazism and the Nazi state.”6 This Catholic intellectual tradi-
tion, increasingly taken up by Protestant circles sympathetic to Germany’s
Bekennende Kirche in the late 1930s, was a direct influence on PWE’s
engagement with religious propaganda. Moral condemnation of Nazism
from the relative safety of liberal, imperialist Britain raised the spectre of
hypocrisy. Propagandists were thus led to reconsider Germany’s religious
opposition in terms of a terrible contest between true and false religions.
In this struggle, totalitarianism, the natural outcome of modernity’s hege-
monizing forces, stood in opposition not to liberal democracy—as was the
case in Cold War totalitarian theory—but rather to traditional, and non-
denominational, Christianity. The secular, false religions were dangerous
not just because they threatened persecution but ultimately because the
unwary Christian would inevitably be subsumed by the leviathan and
5 James Chappel, “The Catholic Origins of Totalitarianism Theory in Interwar Europe”

Modern Intellectual History 8.3 (2011): 562.
6 Paul Hanebrink, “European Protestants Between Anti-Communism and Anti-
Totalitarianism: The Other Interwar Kulturkampf?” Journal of Contemporary History 53.3
(2018): 623.
become (in the words of a leading Catholic intellectual and advisor to

PWE) “the conscious or unconscious servant of the ruling powers.”7
These ideas had a long afterlife; as Richard J. Evans observes, “the idea of
Christianity as fundamentally opposed to nazism was a significant part of
the ideological underpinning for the dominance of Christian Democracy
in West German politics.”8 Meanwhile, the related concept of a “polit-
ical religion” has enjoyed something of a resurgence in writings on the
history and theory of fascism.9
After first considering the reasons for British propagandists’ initial
reluctance to take advantage of oppositional sentiment among religious
groups, this chapter will examine the discourse on the religious problem
in light of broader intellectual developments in 1930s Europe. Chappel’s
investigation into the roots of totalitarian theory as a Catholic rather than
secular political critique will inform the analysis of intellectual develop-
ments inside PWE.10 Catholic anti-fascists were keenly aware that Nazi
policies of seeming pronatalism and anti-Bolshevism (with its attendant
anti-Semitism) held great appeal for many German Christians. As a conse-
quence, Voigt and his supporters did not try to encourage active resistance
among Church groups; they argued instead that the best way to bolster
a robust and cohesive, non-denominational religious opposition was to
re-inscribe Nazism not as a respectable, conservative political system that
complemented religious views but rather as a rival secular religion that was
enacting “a rebellion against the divinely appointed order.”11 Later in the
war, when Voigt was forced out of propaganda and the department was
led by more cynical thinkers, religion was seen less as a matter of faith
than as a political chit, an identity that could be asserted against Nazi
hegemony. Even in this more flexible milieu, however, PWE critiques
7 Christopher Dawson, “The Claims of Politics”, Scrutiny 8.2 (1939): 140–41.

8 Richard J. Evans, “Nazism, Christianity and Political Religion: A Debate.” Journal of
Contemporary History 42.1 (2007): 6.
9 Emilio Gentile is the most vocal proponent of the concept of political religion as a
means of understanding fascism. See, for example: Gentile, “Fascism as Political Religion”
Journal of Contemporary History 25.2/3 (1990): 229–251; Gentile, The Sacralization of
Politics in Fascist Italy, trans. Keith Botsford (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1996).
10 James Chappel, Catholic Modern: The Challenge of Totalitarianism and the Remaking
of the Church (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 2018); Chappel, “The Catholic Origins
of Totalitarian Theory in Interwar Europe”, 561–590.
11 TNA FO 898/177, Frederick Voigt, Memorandum “Religion and Propaganda” (30
July 1940).
188 K. R. GRAHAM
preserved in essence Voigt’s totalitarian theory. A case study of PWE’s

clandestine broadcast station Deutsche Priester demonstrates that even in
clandestine propaganda untethered from the problem of hypocrisy, this
discourse continued to be reproduced. In fact, many of the concerns that
Voigt first raised in his theorization of religious opposition were reprised
following the Moscow Declaration on Austria when PWE encouraged a
separatist politics based on religion as a political identity.12
Kicking Against the Pricks

Among the PWE archival ephemera is an extract from the “Manual
of Military Intelligence in the Field,” a wide-ranging guide published
in stages from 1938 through to 1940 that covers a range of subjects
including propaganda and publicity. “[P]ropaganda based on religious
ideas is often the most effective,” the Manual asserted. However, the
Manual also delivered an emphatic warning, arguing that religious propa-
ganda was
by far the most difficult type of propaganda to handle and... it should

never be conducted except by experienced officers intimately acquainted
with the history, the habits and customs, the traditions and the religious
beliefs of the people concerned.13
Evidently British propaganda departments took this warning to heart. In

1939 Department EH’s senior staff were in general agreement that, while
Protestant community fragmentation and the development of Positives
Christentum (the Nazi effort to appease Christians by creating a Nazified
version of nondenominational state Protestantism) raised concerns about
the political allegiances of many Protestant Germans, Catholic Germany
had not yet been subsumed by Nazism. There was some disagreement,
12 Peter Pirker’s recent critiques of Robert H. Keyserlingk’s writing on Austria and

the Moscow Declaration will inform the latter section of this chapter, examining the
role of Catholic opposition in fomenting Donauraum separatism: Pirker, “British Subver-
sive Politics towards Austria and Partisan Resistance in the Austrian-Slovene Borderland,
1938–1945”, Journal of Contemporary History 52.2. (2016): 319–351; Pirker, Subversion
deutscher Herrschaft: der britische Kriegsgeheimdienst SOE und Österreich (Vienna: Vienna
UP, 2012).
13 TNA FO 898/4, “Extract from Manual of Military Intelligence in the Field,
Pamphlet No. 5” (c. 1939).
however, about how to exploit this situation. Without a clear path

forward, officials were reluctant to act. From the outset, the British
approach to religious propaganda was characterized by restraint.
Catholics represented a relatively cohesive community within Germany
that had historically resisted the State’s attempts to marginalize their polit-
ical power. While critical research has revealed a degree of affinity between
Catholicism and fascism, Department EH’s interest in Catholicism as a
base for resistance was not unfounded. “Apart from the organized sectors
of the working class,” writes Ian Kershaw, “the Nazis had greatest diffi-
culty, as is well known, in penetrating the Catholic sub-culture, where
the dominant image of Hitler provided by Catholic opinion leaders was
equally negative.”14 As J.M. Palmier observes, the émigré press in Britain
maintained a consistent scepticism towards the Reichskonkordat (the
treaty between the Nazi government and the Holy See guaranteeing the
rights of the Church in Germany so long as the clergy refrain from polit-
ical activity), affirming among the exile community the impossibility of
a true “entente between the churches and the Nazi regime.”15 Main-
taining strong links with a number of conservative luminaries among the
European émigré community in Britain, Department EH was entirely
cognizant of the tension that had developed between Nazism and the
German faithful particularly since the mid-1930s. The propagandists’
problem, as they conceived it, was certainly not the lack of a ready
audience.
Rather, after a months-long debate, the department’s executive finally
sided with a cohort of German experts and advisors who argued that
Britain lacked the moral authority to engage in direct religious propa-
ganda abroad. One of these advisors was Tibor Csato, a Hungarian
physician, who in December 1939 delivered one of the earliest compre-
hensive arguments against the possible use of religious propaganda. Csato
was of the opinion that Christian propaganda “is potentially the most
important and the most effective against the materialistic creeds of Nazism
and Bolshevism.”16 Nevertheless, he urged British propagandists to hold
14 Ian Kershaw, The Hitler Myth: Image and Reality in the Third Reich, (Oxford:
Oxford UP, 2001), 34.
15 J.M. Palmier, Weimar in Exile: The Antifascist Emigration to Europe and America
(London: Verso, 2006), 301.
16 TNA FO 898/177, Tibor Csato, “Roman Catholic Propaganda: Brief Outline of
Policy” (7 December 1939).
190 K. R. GRAHAM
back on this most powerful of weapons. The problem was not the message
but the messenger. Csato’s model for religious propaganda was predi-
cated on the idea that “[f]or propaganda to be successful it is essential to
consider not only those who are to be convinced or the convincing argu-
ment, but also the fact that certain individuals and organizations by their
very sincerity will be convincing.” Simply put, it was beyond the pale for
anyone speaking from the safety of England (a nation not “entirely” nor
“exclusively” Christian) to ask German Christians to put risk their lives
in resisting Nazi tyranny. “England,” wrote Csato, “has been laughed
abroad [sic] for keeping the conscience of other powers, and for her
persistent appeal to conscience and duty thought to be reminiscent of
the nursery governess.” Csato’s memorandum sketched out the anxieties
surrounding religious propaganda that would persist in the months ahead.
The problem of hypocrisy is worth clarifying at this point. Accusations
of hypocrisy from abroad being a professional hazard, British propa-
gandists were acutely sensitive to the reception of their work by their
Nazi counterparts. A British stocktake of Department EH propaganda
conducted in December 1939, for example, argued against describing
German atrocities against Poles, Czechs, and Jews because “Goebbels has
found an answer in his talk of Palestine and Ireland and India, as proofs
of the hypocrisy which inspires our attitude.”17 On the religious ques-
tion, it is possible that Britain’s brutal treatment of Catholic Ireland did
indeed muddy the waters. While extant reports do not make an emphatic
connection, Irish sympathies were certainly a concern early in the war. An
August 1940 Department EH intelligence report revealed that Germany
had been successful in reaching neutral Ireland through subversive propa-
ganda which suggested “that Catholics suffer many disabilities and other
injustices in the Six Counties, and that the Church would have everything
to gain by the solution of the Partition question.”18 Whatever the case,
religious propaganda prompted concerns about hypocrisy throughout
17 TNA FO 898/3, Memorandum (6 December 1939).

18 TNA FO 898/4, Intelligence Report, “Department E.H.: German Propaganda in
Eire” (26 August 1940). A contemporary report on Irish politics made similar arguments,
suggesting “it would be very dangerous to use sectional organisations like the Catholic
Church for political propaganda” and so religious propaganda to Ireland must be restricted
to “the anti-Christian character of Nazism, both in theory and in practice”: TNA FO
898/5, BBC Empire Division, “Memorandum on Propaganda in Eire” (31 July 1940).
the war, particularly when it hinged on a question of morality. Depart-

ment EH’s Deputy Director, in concert with the Propaganda Planning
Committee chaired by historian E.H. Carr, was concerned that if religious
broadcasts “were deliberately given a propaganda flavour by introduction
of more than a normal number of German hymn tunes or otherwise, so
that Germans might recognize a special effort to appeal to them,… the
effect upon the enemy people might well be other than that desired.”19
Four years later, senior propaganda advisors continued to hold reserva-
tions about the potential outcomes of direct religious propaganda. In his
capacity as chief instructor of PWE’s propaganda school, R.L. Sedgwick
lamented with his students that “more harm than good has been done
by the exploitation of Galen’s and other bishops’ sermons in programmes
which are palpably inspired by other than Christian ideals.”20 The spectre
of British hypocrisy was not easily resolved.
Importantly, the problem as framed by mid-century Catholicism was
not so much that Britain governed an empire through violence and
repression, but rather that the United Kingdom was seen by Catholic
Europe as a liberal, progressive and permissive society. Britain proclaimed
itself a proud democracy with a long heritage; ironically, this heritage
invoked for some critics a number of uncomfortable—and far-fetched—
associations. As McLaine observes, contemporary to MoI’s enthusiasm
for the use of religion in domestic broadcasting, the Ministry’s Catholic
section was also warning “against the dissemination of propaganda
appearing to support ‘the democratic counter-revolution against the Nazis
and Fascists’” because of its associations with Catholicism’s true enemy,
“Bolshevism.”21 The problem, as Csato and many of his contemporaries
saw it, was that Britain had not been keeping house. In an era where
a modernizing Church had come to embrace authoritarianism for the
guarantees it made towards the private sphere, liberalism represented the
greater threat to an influential intellectual tendency within the Church. A
critique of modernity, liberalism, and the dangers of reform lay at the
heart of Catholic perspectives on Germany, a critique which came to
inform PWE attitudes towards religious propaganda.
19 TNA FO 898/177, Shaw to Ogilvie, Letter (16 January 1940).

20 TNA FO 898/99, Sedgwick, “Plan for Catholic Broadcasts to Germany” (c. 1943–
1944).
21 Ian McLaine, Ministry of Morale, 211.
192 K. R. GRAHAM
As a Viennese-educated Catholic, Csato was acutely aware of the

trends in Catholic intellectual sphere. Preferring not to dwell on the
Catholic embrace of Nazism in the early years of the regime, Csato praised
outspoken critics of Nazism such as Galen and Cardinal Michael von
Faulhaber who possessed innate propaganda value as “tremendous moral
forces.”22 But this value was conditional on such dissidents remaining in
Germany with their congregations; moral integrity here was contingent
on risk to the speaker. Pragmatic issues exacerbated the problem. Before
British propagandists made the imaginative leap towards clandestine
propaganda, subversion could only be relayed through open channels,
whether that be via the BBC or leaflet drops. Subversive ideas were thus
necessarily tied to the British government. The Church’s subversive power
lay in its untainted image as a transcendent bastion of community and
tradition. In discussing Nazi attacks on religious freedom, Csato suggests
that, because it affects the Church as a whole, “[p]ropaganda… might
be carried out by any Catholic and from any country. But I still feel
that one should make an exception even in this category, for Germans
speaking and writing from Great Britain.” Csato hoped to relay a message
of religious resistance from Germans in Germany but a German exile
speaking from England would be even more odious than a native Briton:
“Certainly any propaganda on these lines by Germans living in Great
Britain might be highly detrimental to the Roman Catholic Church and
its cause in Germany.” At a moment when German refugees living in
Britain were perceived as unpatriotic, any association between the Church
and these traitors would thus nullify its subversive power. Despite the
political potential of such a large anti-Nazi population, the ideological
distance between mid-century Britain and the conservative, anti-modern
Church was too great. Department EH agreed with Csato; religion was
too volatile, the outcomes uncertain.23
22 Both Galen and Faulhaber had, of course, initially welcomed the advent of the Nazi
regime; TNA FO 898/177, Tibor Csato, “Roman Catholic Propaganda: Brief Outline of
23 Concerns over religious sensibilities were not unfounded. Certainly, there were occa-
sions where religious propaganda struck the wrong note, even later in the war when PWE
had embraced clandestine propaganda. In one example, an SOE agent who had been
distributing black propaganda took exception to the contents of an unidentified Catholic
leaflet, reporting “that a Catholic who really knows his business may take grave objection
to it and would not only request permission to destroy the copies he possesses but would
ask me to have all copies of the leaflet withdrawn.” SOE’s liaison to PWE observed that
However, the subversive political capital to be gained by promoting

Catholic opposition was too great to be abandoned for long. The MoI’s
Church Advisory Group, for example, argued a month later that they
appreciated Department EH’s concerns but, believing the department’s
decision to eschew religious propaganda to Germany had been too hasty,
the advisors were “extremely anxious that action along these lines should
be started.”24 Religious sentiment needed only be approached with
sufficient tact. Hugh Martin, a Baptist church leader and publisher, reit-
erated in a memorandum the Church Advisory group’s proposed plan
for religious broadcasting, imagining perhaps that Department EH had
misunderstood their intentions; MoI’s desire, he wrote, was for broad-
casts as “an act of worship, comprising German hymns, readings from
the German Bible, possibly prayers, but no address.” In this it was
hoped they might instil “certain common spiritual and moral standards”
across Europe to provide for “a stable and reasonable peace.” Religious
propaganda as such would be free from partisan politics.
The Catholic section of the advisory committee provided an addendum
to Burns’s memorandum, written by prominent Catholic publisher
Thomas Ferrier Burns, which suggested, predictably, that special consider-
ation should be given to Catholic broadcasts.25 Citing an article included
in The Tablet (a widely-read and, at the time, well-regarded Catholic
weekly periodical) by a Father Roggendorf that “attracted considerable
interest in the Ministry,” Burns argued that “Allied propaganda must not
place its hopes on revolutionary groups in Germany without discrimina-
tion. ‘It must strive to win over… the loyal, patriotic, moderate masses…
and their greatest bulk is the thirty million German Catholics.’”26
Concerned that British intellectuals’ sympathies lay with social democracy
and the political interests of the industrial working class, Burns stressed
instead an alternative worldview: “The approach should not be from an
“apart from being unsound and a travesty it [the leaflet] is calculated to cause much
resentment”: TNA FO 898/62, Thurston to Delmer, “Urgent” (5 October 1944).
24 TNA FO 898/177, Hugh Martin to RL Carton, Memorandum, “Religious
Broadcasts to Germany” (31 January 1940).
25 Burns included in his addendum a long list of Catholic intellectual heavyweights
with whom he had consulted, including the Duke of Württemberg, The Tablet ’s editor
Douglas Woodruff, and Hermann Rauschning.
26 TNA FO 898/177, T.F. Burns, Memorandum, “Broadcasting to German Catholics”
(1 February 1940).
194 K. R. GRAHAM
ideology which is foreign to them,” wrote Burns, “but from the stand-
point of those fellow-Catholic Englishmen who are at one with them
in agreement about the traditional Catholic Christian foundation and
spirit of Europe.” Citing another clergyman—the exiled Father Friedrich
Muckermann—Burns argued that rather than politicking, Britain must
broadcast talks that “breathe the spirit of the Gospels.” Catholic Britain
was distressed by Whitehall’s silence. As they understood it, religious
dissent was a genuine phenomenon inherent to a devout Christian popu-
lation, and this was being ignored by British propagandists. Yet, on the
advice of their own experts, Department EH demurred. The problem of
hypocrisy was intractable. Indeed, by March 1940 even senior MoI repre-
sentatives now questioned the wisdom of going before the German people
“with a bomb in one hand and a prayer book in the other, however pure
our motives.”27 Hugh Martin and his religious advisory group were not
to be satisfied.
Nevertheless, religious groups continued to petition for propaganda
that acknowledged and responded to the sentiments of a conservative
anti-Nazi opposition in Germany. Coupled with the enduring discon-
tent of MoI’s advisors, these outsider voices were troublesome enough
to prompt Frederick Voigt, the foreign propaganda department’s then
German section chief, to pen what proved to be a lasting resolu-
tion on the religious question. Sensitive to the potential for hypocrisy,
Voigt’s memorandum sketched out an alternative means to take advan-
tage of oppositional religious sentiment. He agreed emphatically with the
Catholic intellectual critique of modernity, in which Britain’s liberalism
compromised official claims to moral authority. Importantly, in reframing
the idea of dissent, Voigt saw a way clear of the problem. Instead of broad-
casting programmes in support of revealed religion, he argued, Britain
could target Nazism as a “false” or secular religion, an “Ersatzreligion.”28
Voigt was developing ideas he had first expressed in his 1938 book,
Unto Caesar, a polemic against the twin evils of Nazism and Bolshe-
vism. A Calvinist, he was at pains to demonstrate that the Nazis were not
merely persecuting Catholics through repressive Gleichschaltung; rather,
they represented an existential threat to the foundations on which rested
Christianity and, by extension, European civilization. Describing Nazism
27 TNA FO 898/177, D.E.L. Wellington to Shaw, Letter (28 March 1940).

28 TNA FO 898/177, Frederick Voigt, “Religion and Propaganda” (30 July 1940).
as such, he argued that “Christians in Germany will not feel that the
Christian faith is being exploited by the foe as a vehicle of propaganda.”29
This intellectual sleight of hand was compelling.
Despite their divergent conclusions, there is a degree of affinity
between Voigt’s arguments and those of MoI advisors such as Martin
and Burns. Voigt recognized in the behaviour of the religious opposition
a “message… of obedience and not of defiance, least of all political defi-
ance.”30 This was not to say that the religious opposition was complicit in
the regime but rather that such opposition was intrinsically conservative.
Advocates of religious propaganda had confused the situation. The reli-
gious opposition was a defence of tradition, not “on behalf of freedom,
democracy, human progress and so on” but rather against the Nazis’ own
“rebellion against the divinely appointed order.” “National Socialism,”
wrote Voigt,
exercises a power over men and women which, outwardly at least, resem-
bles the power induced by religious devotion... We hold that National
Socialism ought to be attacked in the exercise of this power, as a secular,
false, or substitute religion. We must show that it is more than a false polit-
ical or social doctrine, that it corrupts the mind and enslaves the human
spirit in pursuit of an ultimately irrational purpose, that it is essentially
nihilistic.31
Subsequent arguments in favour of expanding religious propaganda had

to reckon with Voigt’s thesis on secular religion; his memorandum fixed
policy for at least twelve months and continued to exert influence on the
outlook of the organization for the duration of the war. The religious
question was in truth a question about the nature of National Socialism,
which led Voigt to make rather a big call: “If National Socialism is robbed
of its religiosity,” wrote Voigt, “its spell will disappear.”32
30 The central line of his propaganda memorandum appeared as a footnote in his earlier
work: Frederick Voigt, Unto Caesar (London: Constable, 1938), 288.
196 K. R. GRAHAM
Ersatzreligion and the Origins

of Totalitarian Theory
British propagandists’ attitudes inevitably reflected the climate of opinion
in the years preceding the war. Many contemporary perspectives on
fascism, and on National Socialism in particular, could not help but see
in such mass movements an element of religiosity. As Gearóid Barry
observes, “[n]o theoretical sophistication is required to identify the super-
ficial resemblances between the ‘new’ politics of totalitarianism in the
1930s and traditional revealed religion.” 33 Oliver Lubrich describes how
visitors to the Reich—and especially ideological outsiders such as cultural
critic Denis de Rougemont—saw in the mass spectacle of Nazi politics
“the cultic nature of the regime.”34 Likewise, after travelling on and off
for five years throughout Germany, E. Amy Buller wrote of the Nazi rallies
she had witnessed that “their religious trend is of real importance.”35
Buller was part of a growing community who recognized that “the Nazi
message spoke to men in the sphere of their religious understanding, and
gave them a new conception of their value and of their place both in
the cosmic order and in the society around them.”36 In witnessing the
strange rites of a mass rally, the insular character of National Socialism’s
Volksgemeinschaft only encouraged this anthropological perspective. Situ-
ating Nazi ideology within the intellectual tradition of Germany, historian
Rohan Butler (employed in the Ministry of Information and the Foreign
Office) wrote contemporaneously of how “[a]uthority, community and
totality, aristocracy, army and folk, pessimism, cynicism and idealism…
advanced as one, incorporated and transfigured within the mystic whole
that was the new faith of Germanity.”37 Across the Atlantic, the Amer-
ican literary theorist Kenneth Burke, too, saw a religious element to Nazi
33 Gearóid Barry, “Political Religion: A User’s Guide.” Contemporary European History

24.4 (2015): 624.
34 Rougement was one of the founders of the Collège de Sociologie, established to
comprehend the role of the sacred in an increasingly secular society; upon attending a
Nazi he rally, he wrote: “I thought I was going to a mass meeting, some sort of political
demonstration. But it is worship that they are engaged in!”; Oliver Lubrich, Travels in the
Reich, 13, 87.
35 E. Amy Buller, Darkness over Germany (London: Longmans, Green, 1943), 157–158.
36 Buller, Darkness over Germany, 157–158.
37 Rohan d’Olier Butler, The Roots of National Socialism, 1783–1933 (London: Faber
and Faber, 1941), 284.
ideology. In his analysis of Mein Kampf he observed that the “material-

ization of a religious pattern is, I think, one terrifically effective weapon of
propaganda in a period where religion has been progressively weakened
by many centuries of capitalist materialism.”38 For the émigré Protestant
scholar Karl Barth, the exiled leader of the Bekennende Kirche whose
theology came to influence Voigt’s ideas, the Nazism of the late 1930s
was no longer a “political experiment” but rather “a religious institution
of salvation.”39 National Socialism’s appropriation of religious elements
offered witnesses a tantalizing insight into the inner mechanisms of a
powerful mass political movement. For some observers, however, Nazi
religiosity was not a superficial characteristic but rather went to the heart
of Führer worship.
Among some witness theorists of the 1920s and 1930s, the apparent
spiritual element to mass politics engendered the idea that fascism could
be understood as a political religion. Barry writes that this idea was the
product of “a remarkable and varied group of interwar European intel-
lectuals,” the resulting interpretative framework a reflection on numerous
idiosyncratic personal histories.40 Eric Voegelin’s pioneering Political
Religions, first published in 1938, makes for an interesting contempo-
rary comparison with the secular religion central to Voigt’s thinking. Like
Voigt, Voegelin saw in the new regimes of Germany and Russia a mate-
rialist eschatology: “The common feature of the new symbolism is its
‘scientific’ character,” he wrote; “[w]ith its claim to be scientific analysis,
the Apocalypse [in the case of Germany, the ascendancy of the Aryan race]
takes a stand on the basis of scientific discussion and is analysed from the
point of view of its own prerequisites.”41 For Voegelin, however, political
38 Kenneth Burke, “The Rhetoric of Hitler’s Battle”, Readings in Propaganda and

Persuasion: New and Classic Essays, ed. G.S. Jowett and V. O’Dowell (California: Sage,
2006), 151.
39 Emphasis in the original. Interestingly, according to Paul Hanebrink, Barth was
perhaps more “sanguine” than many of his peers about the co-existence of Chris-
tianity and communism: Hanebrink, “European Protestants Between Anti-Communism
and Anti-Totalitarianism”, 625; Karl Barth, The Church and the Political Problem of Our
Day, (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1939), 41; Markus Huttner, “Voigt, Frederick
Augustus (1892–1957)” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford UP, 2009).
40 Gearóid Barry, “Political Religion: A User’s Guide.” Contemporary European History
24.4 (2015): 626.
41 Eric Voegelin, Political Religions, trans. T.J. DiNapoli and E.S. Easterly III (New
York: Edwin Mellen, 1986 [1938]), 61.
198 K. R. GRAHAM
religions are not necessarily a modern phenomenon; he writes at length,

for example, about ancient Egyptian sun worship. The religious revolu-
tion that took place under the Pharaoh Akhenaten is taken as an ur-text
rather than an analogy for twentieth-century political religions.42 Voigt
was less enamoured of such a long view, preferring instead to draw on
late-imperial orientalist rhetoric to cast Hitler as “a sort of Mahdi” whose
followers demonstrate “an allegiance so absolute that it induces a fanati-
cism comparable with that of Dervishes.”43 Despite the biblical allusion in
the title of his book, the secular religions Voigt described in Unto Caesar
were strictly bounded by modernity.
The ideas of Voegelin and Voigt have one fundamental thing in
common; as with Voigt, Voegelin’s theory is a “religious theory rather
than a theory about religion” in the sense of being an expression of
normative “anti-modern Christianity.”44 As Stanley Stowers argues, mid-
century theories of political religion were typically built on a normative
Christian foundation which identified as religious many aspects of fascist
political practice that fascists themselves saw as secular or metaphorical.45
Under fascism, the state may have been raised up on a plinth, an object
worthy of sacrifice, but it could only be interpreted as a God-like object
by those who saw such gestures as idolatrous. This symbolist approach to
theorizing the relationship between religion and fascism found expression
in Voigt’s work.
But Voigt’s closest intellectual peers in the late 1930s and early 1940s
were Catholic thinkers such as Csato or the English historian Christo-
pher Dawson, a contemporary who “[brandished] the label of ‘political
religion’ as a descriptor, and as a moral warning.”46 Dawson had a reputa-
tion for “cool and detached” analyses that belied his devout conservative
Catholicism.47 Still, his work was indelibly stamped with his faith; of the
42 Voegelin, Political Religions, 17–28.

44 Stanley Stowers, “The Concepts of ‘Religion’, ‘Political Religion’ and the Study of
Nazism”, Journal of Contemporary History 42.1 (2007): 20.
45 “There is no substitute for God in the totalitarian ideologies”, writes Hannah Arendt:
Hannah Arendt, “A Reply to Eric Voegelin”, The Portable Hannah Arendt, ed. Peter
Baehr (New York: Penguin, 2003): 162; Stowers, “The Concepts of ‘Religion’, ‘Political
Religion’ and the Study of Nazism”, 10–12.
46 Barry, “Political Religion”, 624.
47 James Hitchcock, “Christopher Dawson”, American Scholar 62.1 (1993): 111.
Spanish Civil War, for example, maintained that Franco was motivated
above all by Christianity in his effort to protect Spain from the godless
Communists.48
Outspoken in his beliefs, Dawson was at the vanguard of those
Catholic intellectuals of the mid- to late 1930s who came to regard
Nazism and Bolshevism together as the “apotheosis” of the modern
age.49 He understood secular religions to be “symptoms of a spiritual
and psychological void in Europe combined with the disastrous results of
the Great War.”50 Humanity had a deep and abiding need of God, but
liberalism had excised the spiritual from daily life. It was inevitable that
something would come to fill that God-shaped hole in society. Stephen
G. Carter’s analysis of Dawson’s interwar commentary demonstrates that,
to Dawson’s mind, National Socialism’s “reactionary elements… show up
the weaknesses of liberalism and therefore its demonstration by its very
existence of the new era of European politics.”51 Dawson, like Voegelin,
often wrote in the objective style of the social scientist, but he made
no effort to disguise his beliefs. “The claim of politics to organize the
State as a mass community,” wrote Dawson in one of his more polemical
moments, “would mean the end of thought and the end of history.”52
So why did the Calvinist Voigt turn to a Catholic and not a Protestant
tradition? As Hanebrink writes, European Protestants were not exactly
ignorant of the crisis but, “divided by national traditions, they found it
far more difficult to agree upon a common understanding of the new
transnational secular threat.”53 While dismissive of the potential for a
Protestant rebellion against the German state, British Protestant commen-
tators nevertheless reasoned that an attack on Nazism’s more vulgar
heresies would at least have the advantage of being non-denominational.
Voigt’s thinking on Nazism and his ultimate invocation of a Catholic
48 Stephen G. Carter, “The ‘Historical Solution’ versus the ‘Philosophical Solution’:

The Political Commentary of Christopher Dawson and Jacques Maritain, 1927–1939”,
Journal of the History of Ideas 69.1 (2008): 104.
49 Chappel, “The Catholic Origins of Totalitarian Theory”, 581.
50 Joseph T. Stuart, Christopher Dawson in context: A Study in British Intellectual
History between the World Wars, PhD Thesis, University of Edinburgh (2009), 266.
51 Carter, “The ‘Historical Solution’ versus the ‘Philosophical Solution’”, 109.
52 Dawson, “The Claims of Politics”, 140–141.
53 Hanebrink, “European Protestants Between Anti-Communism and Anti-
Totalitarianism”, 623.
200 K. R. GRAHAM
tendency are indicative of this fragmentation. And, in fact, quite a few

Protestant intellectuals took up the Catholic critique of secular, total-
itarian states, particular after the 1937 Oxford World Conference on
Church, Community and State, where Karl Barth proved to be a leading
light.54 Like the Catholic Dawson and the Calvinist Voigt, Barth held
that “a dictatorship which is totalitarian and radical, which not only
surrounds and determines mankind and men in utter totality, in body and
soul, but abolishes their human nature, and not merely limits freedom,
but annihilates it.”55 Dawson, Barth and Voigt each inhabited this milieu
in which a critique of secular religions turns on the inchoate Catholic
political theory around “totalitarianism.”
Contemporary to Italian Fascists’ own claims to be totalitarian, critical
Catholic totalitarian theory originated with intellectuals like Waldemar
Gurian who worried in the 1920s that Weimar’s liberal democracy was
out-dated, its collapse imminent, and that, failing the advent of an
enlivened Catholic spirit entering the political sphere, “‘secularized reli-
gions’ like Nazism and Communism” would arise to satisfy the new “age
of belief.”56 Over the course of the interwar period, this idea developed
into a distinct theory of a peculiarly modern form of politics, distinguished
from the earliest iterations of “totalitarianism” by its insistence on the
fundamental similarities between Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia.57 It
was not twentieth-century liberal democracy that stood in opposition to
totalitarianism; rather, traditional Christianity (non-sectarian, for the time
being) was the natural enemy of modernity’s hegemonizing forces. While
the idea may have seemed fresh in the late 1930s, it had a well-established
heritage; as Stowers observes, “the charge that liberal secular politics and
54 Hanebrink, “European Protestants Between Anti-Communism and Anti-

Totalitarianism”, 636.
55 Barth, The Church and the Political Problem of Our Day, 37–38.
56 Chappel, Catholic Modern, 47.
57 Chappel provides a rigorous account of the distinction between Catholic totalitarian
theory, which places the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany under the same umbrella, and
other contemporaneous totalitarian theories that examine Germany independently, such
as that of Herbert Marcuse: Chappel, “The Catholic Origins of Totalitarian Theory in
Intewar Europe”, 565; Marcuse describes instead the advent of a “heroic völkish realism”,
a reactionary Weltanschauung that emerged from liberalism premised on universalism and
naturalism, which coalesced into a variety of “political existentialism”: Marcuse, “The
Struggle against Liberalism in the Totalitarian View of the State”, Negations: New Essays
in Critical Theory, trans. Jeremy J. Shapiro (London: Mayfly Books, 2009): 1–30.
culture were false religion is the rhetoric of largely Christian anti-modern

discourses that began to develop after the French Revolution.”58
Catholic intellectuals were not the only interwar critics to observe
totalitarianism as a new form of politics. By the mid-1950s, a version
of the theory had become a key element in the mental landscape of the
Cold War. Interestingly, during the interwar period and particularly from
the mid-1930s, theories of totalitarianism were also developing among
left-wing anti-fascists—including members of German exile groups like
Neu Beginnen—theories which were honed in the debates around how
to characterize the Soviet Union in the wake of the Spanish Civil War and
the Moscow show trials.59 This uneasy commingling of anti-fascism and
anti-Communism placed figures like Franz Borkenau and George Orwell
in the same camp as proponents of secular totalitarian theory familiar to
the early Cold War.60 Neu Beginnen’s London head and PWE clandestine
broadcaster Richard Löwenthal was integral to the group’s engagement
with anti-totalitarianism and the subsequent rightward shift in its posi-
tion in exile, which saw it move from Leninist cadre to what William
David Jones describes as an organization “committed to developing a
democratic and pluralist socialist movement in postwar Germany.”61 But
these left totalitarian theories had a different genealogy to the vision Voigt
brought to subversive propaganda.
Naturally, Catholic opinion was hardly unanimous. By and large, the
Church of the late nineteenth century was an anti-modern institution
that greeted the dawn of modernity with sullen contempt. The rise of
secularism and the turmoil of the Great War, however, demonstrated to
a significant portion of Catholics the need to modernize the Church
or risk extinction. Chappel’s research into Catholic intellectual history
demonstrates two distinct modernizing tendencies that go some way to
explaining the mid-century relationship between Catholicism and fascism;
58 Stanley Stowers, “The Concepts of ‘Religion’, ‘Political Religion’ and the Study of
Nazism”, Journal of Contemporary History 42.1 (2007): 11.
59 Jones stresses that Neu Beginnen did not equate Nazi Germany and the Soviet
Union, but did characterize their policies as “totalitarian”: William David Jones, The Lost
Debate: German Socialist Intellectuals and Totalitarianism (Chicago: University of Illinois
Press, 1999), 85–93, 115.
60 William David Jones, The Lost Debate: German Socialist Intellectuals and Totalitari-
anism (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1999), 101.
61 Jones, The Lost Debate, 117.
202 K. R. GRAHAM
as he argues, “[t]he two forms of Catholic modernism… were not fascist

and Communist but antifascist and anti-Communist.”62 Voigt’s attack on
Nazism as a secular religion does not necessarily suggests that a Catholic
anti-fascist tendency had taken root among the propagandists. Rather,
the manner in which Voigt described the relationship between Catholics
and the Nazi State suggests that the issue was not one of the Third
Reich’s criminality but rather its failure to safeguard those institutions
of the private sphere (such as the patriarchal family unit) valued most
highly by what Chappel calls the anti-Communist “paternal Catholic
modernists.”63 Certainly, Voigt’s writing at times blurs the distinction
between these two tendencies. In reading Nazism as a negative ideology
threatening the foundation of all faiths, he hints at the “pluralism” of “fra-
ternal Catholic modernists,” such as Jacques Maritain, who demanded
not protection of the patriarchal family but rather state support and
protection for “all of the associational activities of the private sphere.”64
Importantly, however, as Chappel points out, the fraternal tendency
in Catholic modernism was fundamentally anti-racist; as will become
apparent, incidental references to race in Voigt’s writings suggest that
he was likely at odds with Catholic anti-fascists. Indeed, the anti-fascist
Catholic tendency placed Catholics and socialists of all stripes together
in a pluralist resistance against Nazism—hardly a relationship that fits
with Voigt’s anti-Bolshevik barracking and his hostility to Neu Beginnen’s
subversive broadcasts discussed in Chapter Two.
Recent research suggests that Nazism’s anti-Christian sentiment was
almost certainly overstated by contemporary observers.65 In discussing
the vanguard of Nazi spirituality, Richard Steigmann-Gall argues that even
among avowed anti-Christian Nazis, such as those neo-pagans of the SS
who pursued their own idiosyncratic rites, “their opposition to Chris-
tianity was characterized by tension and ambiguity.”66 Steigmann-Gall’s

63 Chappel, Catholic Modern, 61–64.
64 It is of course possible that Voigt was simply writing to satisfy a non-denominational
audience; Chappel, Catholic Modern, 112–113.
65 Doris L. Bergen, “Nazism and Christianity: Partners and Rivals? A Response to
Richard Steigmann-Gall, The Holy Reich. Nazi Conceptions of Christianity, 1919–1945”,
Journal of Contemporary History 42.1 (2007): 25.
66 Richard Steigmann-Gall, “Rethinking Nazism and Religion: How Anti-Christian were
the ‘Pagans’?”, Central European History 36.1 (2003): 76; see also: Steigmann-Gall, The
arguments have been the subject of much debate, prompting a special

issue of the Journal of Contemporary History. Discussing Steigmann-
Gall’s The Holy Reich and the ensuing debate, Doris L. Bergen suggests
that the nature of the relationship between Nazism and Christianity
has been clouded because the Nazis were not “ideal representatives” of
any extant Church; while denying scripture and canon, “they remained
self-consciously Christian, members of Christian Churches whose fellow
Church people, inside and outside Germany, accepted them as such.”67
Superficially at least, Voigt recognized this element to the new faith,
writing that Hitler would “establish his secular religion in the place
of Christianity, although the outward forms of Christianity may be
preserved.”68 But Voigt repudiated the syncretic character of fascism,
instead seeing an independent, if composite, other; “Hitler would
preserve the altar while replacing the Cross of Christ by the Swastika,”
he argued, but in this it is an artifice rather than an organic appropriation
of Christian tropes.69
The antipathy between Nazism and Christianity on spiritual terms was
the basis for Voigt’s conception of modern Germany. Both Nazism and
Christianity made a claim on the soul. A soul subject to totalitarianism was
enslaved; a soul subject to Christianity was free, and it was this freedom
that had given birth to western civilization. An individual’s faith could not
be divided between such oppositional forces, which necessitated a struggle
such as the Kirchenkampf. Voigt was unequivocal. “It is in its character
of a false religion,” wrote Voigt, “that the chief and most intractable
evil of National Socialism resides. If it is paralysed or even weakened in
the exercise of this character it cannot survive.”70 With Voigt providing
the intellectual compass, British propaganda would eschew direct reli-
gious propaganda, but would poke holes in heretical Nazi hubris at every
opportunity.
It is possible that the introduction of “totalitarianism” to subversive
propaganda was a cynical attempt to play on the intellectual fashions
Holy Reich: Nazi Conceptions of Christianity, 1919–1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP,

2003).
67 Bergen, “Nazism and Christianity”, 28.
68 Voigt, Unto Caesar, 66.
204 K. R. GRAHAM
of the target audience. However, Voigt had adopted these ideas well
before the war. He was by the time he had published Unto Caesar in
1938 a deeply committed Christian whose faith had a profound bearing
on his worldview. Markus Huttner writes that, while Voigt had been
liberal-minded for much of his career, by 1933 he had become “dis-
illusioned with the German left” who had failed to stem the rise of
fascism, and as a result came “to regard Christianity as the only effective
counter-force against the overwhelming power of a regime founded on
a pseudo-religious ideology.”71 In describing Nazism’s materialist escha-
tology, Voigt drew out the concept of utopia in explicitly Christian—and
even Calvinist—terms. Taking his analogy from Jonathan Swift’s Gulliv-
er’s Travels, Voigt wrote that the land of the Houyhnhnms “embodies the
truth that Utopia is impossible amongst men, but only amongst creatures
which, like the gentle horses, are free from sin.”72 Nazi and Commu-
nist utopias alike were doomed to fail because they were ontologically
impossible. Political fanatics were blind to this problem, which was only
apparent to Christian observers. Voigt made no mention of his own faith
in his wartime writings or in Unto Caesar, but his arguments around
secular religions are shot through with this belief. Stowers argues that
in considering Nazism as a political religion “the implied lesson is to
return to traditional forms of Christian piety and authority.”73 Recon-
figuring the German religious opposition as a “call to obedience,” first in
Unto Caesar and again in his wartime propaganda memorandum, Voigt
articulated the normative Christian perspective that would inform British
subversive propaganda to Germany.
The anti-liberal and anti-modern roots of much Catholic opinion
during this period pointed to an affinity between fascism and reactionary
Catholicism that gave credence to Voigt’s ideas. According to the PWE’s
religious advisors, this attitude was not solely the result of Europe’s revo-
lutions following the Great War, nor the tradition of German enmity
directed at Russia. The baroque facade of Nazism, with a focus on “Blut
und Boden – the restoration of the family – the abolition of contra-
ception,” meant that “many Catholics, not only German, have been
71 Huttner, “Voigt, Frederick Augustus (1892–1957)” Oxford Dictionary of National

Biography.
73 Stowers, “The Concepts of ‘Religion’, ‘Political Religion’ and the Study of Nazism”,
24.
taken in by the apparently Catholic character of certain National-Socialist

reforms.”74 For much of the 1930s, even Dawson’s stance on fascism
was marked by ambivalence; as Carter observes, the influential histo-
rian was open to “the possible benefits of the reactionary elements of
fascism.”75 He recognized that fascism held innate appeal to the Chris-
tian mentality even as Christians resisted its idolatry of the state. Even
churchmen who later spoke out against the regime such as Faulhaber had,
nevertheless, praised Nazism for ridding Germany of Weimar decadence
and democracy.
Warnings against direct religious propaganda to Germany were built on
an interpretation of Nazi ideology through which Nazism and Commu-
nism were equivalent “materialistic creeds” standing in opposition to
Christianity.76 Unsurprisingly then, boosting for religious propaganda
was often coupled with scepticism towards secular workers’ movements.
While disagreeing with Voigt on the value of direct religious propa-
ganda, the opinion of the Catholic advisors to the Ministry of Information
argued that propaganda promoting the preservation of traditions would
be more effective among Catholics than any talk of a democratic counter-
revolution against National Socialism; the fear, as Michael Stenton
observes, was that Catholics who had praised the Nazis for dismantling
the Weimar Republic would see such rabble-rousing as a backdoor for
Bolshevism.77 Csato reasoned that Britain might be able to exploit a divi-
sion between the middle-classes (who were, of course, innately moralistic
and Christian) and the anti-Christian Nazis. Steering around the problem
of moral authority, he argued that subversive propaganda could demon-
strate the deep similarities between Nazism and Bolshevism, which would
“be invariably effective in certain social strata.”78 Meanwhile, Depart-
ment EH advisor A.W.G. Randall of the Foreign Office understood that
74 TNA FO 898/99, Sedgwick, “Plan for Catholic Broadcasts to Germany”, (c.

1943/1944); of course, there were also parallels between Catholic and fascist corporatist
ideas as alternatives to both socialism and liberal capitalism.
75 Carter, “The ‘Historical Solution’ versus the ‘Philosophical Solution’”, 104.
77 Michael Stenton, Radio London, 64.
206 K. R. GRAHAM
“the core of resistance now dominated by Germany will be largely Chris-

tian and democratic.”79 He downplayed the significance of a workers’
resistance, citing the personal confession of
a Soviet diplomat with a thorough knowledge of Germany [who] told me

some time before the outbreak of war that in his opinion the Catholic
resistance to Hitler was likely to be a more important factor in his over-
throw than Communism because the latter was less well-informed and had
struck roots much less deep than those of religion.
Like the Catholic ex-Nazi Hermann Rauschning (who advised Depart-

ment EH during the first months of the war, as discussed in Chapter
Three), the Catholic Randall regarded German social democracy as a dead
duck from the moment the Nazis came to power. And then, in 1944
students of PWE’s political warfare school learned that “Communists,
many Socialists and other materialists have no fundamental objection
to National Socialism,” citing the “conversion of Belgian and French
socialist and communist leaders to Hitler’s Neuordnung” as evidence
of the capricious materialist mentality.80 The religious question thus
marks an ideological demarcation among propagandists. For Crossman
and Dalton, who rose to prominence at the moment Voigt penned his
memorandum, the German Left still represented a very real and potent (if
temporarily cowed) entity. Nevertheless, Crossman agreed with Randall in
general terms that German Catholics had been under-utilized as a political
force.81
For witness theorists, cultural critics, and theologians alike, the concept
of a political religion was overwhelmingly conditioned by anxiety about
the recent history of the Soviet Union. As a consequence, the foreign
policy relationship between the Third Reich and the USSR presented
an interesting problem for totalitarian theory, not to mention advo-
cates of religious propaganda. The German-Soviet Non-aggression Pact
encouraged the proliferation of totalitarian theory among Allied war
departments. Nazism’s uneasy alliance with the USSR was a potential
wedge between the people and the Party. In early 1940, even secular
79 TNA FO 898/177, A.W.G. Randall, Memorandum (21 December 1940).

80 TNA FO 898/99, Sedgwick, “Plan for Catholic Broadcasts to Germany”.
81 TNA FO 898/177, Crossman to Valentine Williams, Letter (13 January 1941).
critiques equating Nazism and Communism were circulating in propa-

ganda circles, such as “Communazism,” a clunky portmanteau advocated
by E.H. Carr.82 Of this, however, Department EH experts were not
convinced; according to a report, “the Catholic Press was far ahead of
the secular press in seeing Russia as the twin evil of Nazi Germany and
that Mr. Carr’s points are constantly being made in the Catholic news-
papers.”83 The German declaration of war against the Soviet Union in
June 1941 ought perhaps to have undermined any perceived affinity
between fascism and communism. Once again, the Nazis could affirm
themselves as the natural enemy of the hated Bolsheviks. As Kershaw
argues, “even those sharply critical of the regime’s anti-Church policies
were ready to offer their public support for the Führer’s ‘fight against
Bolshevism’.”84 From the Party’s inception, the Nazis had depicted them-
selves as defenders against the threat of Bolshevism, an image “blown up
by Nazi propaganda in extensive campaigns following the outbreak of the
Spanish Civil War in 1936.”85 But the British position drew on an older
critique that did not need the German-Soviet Non-aggression Pact to see
Nazism and Bolshevism as equivalent secular religions in the service of
totalitarianism.
A commitment to religious propaganda, whether conditioned by the
problem of hypocrisy or not, was more common among politically conser-
vative elements in British foreign propaganda and correlated with a
broader suspicion of socialist and communist activities. Predicated on the
idea that liberal Britain lacked the moral authority to command Euro-
pean Christians, the problem of hypocrisy and its subsequent resolution
reflected the influence within propaganda circles of a peculiar genealogy of
Catholic ideas. Liberal European states such as Britain no longer adhered
to a “Catholic vision of society – of an overlapping set of hierarchies
legitimized in the last instance by natural law, its organizing principle,
and God, its supreme leader,” and it was just this vision of society
82 TNA FO 898/5, “Minutes of Meeting of the Executive Committee of Foreign

Division” (21 February 1940).
83 TNA FO 898/5, “Report to Foreign Division Executive Committee on suggested
list of authors of articles on Communazism.” (c. January/February 1940).
84 Kershaw, The Hitler Myth, 111.
208 K. R. GRAHAM
that, according to Chappel, was “incarnated in totalitarianism theory.”86

As Britain’s answer to modernity, liberalism necessarily compromised
propagandistic arguments that suggested Christians had a moral imper-
ative to resist Nazism; indeed, for many interwar Catholic conservatives,
the turbulent and permissive Weimar Republic represented a corrupted
British—or at least Anglo-American—import. Naturally enough, the
department’s religious experts, and especially Catholic intellectuals like
Dawson, were inclined to confirm Voigt’s analysis, even if they resisted
his warning against direct religious propaganda.
Writing after Stowers, Dan Stone points out that many liberal and
secular writers have inadvertently used the concept of political religion
oblivious to the explicitly Christian, anti-modern discourses from which
it derives.87 Voigt was not one of those writers. Voigt’s totalitarian theory,
premised on a concept of Ersatzreligion commensurate with contempo-
rary Catholic anti-Communism, was not an expression of conservative
anti-fascism. It was, instead, a reactionary and restorative vision of the
world that rejected both Nazism and Communism as well as liberalism,
the calamitous and corrupt ideology of modernity that had given rise to
the age of extremes.
Black Sabbath
Arguments in favour of expanding religious propaganda were persistent.
The scarcity of accurate, first-hand intelligence on German belief and
opinion likely contributed to the department’s conservatism, but what
little evidence existed in the first years of the war certainly seemed to
support the propaganda value of apolitical religious broadcasting. In
March 1941, for example, a report “[analysing] the mails coming from
Germany” for example, had determined “that over 50% of the corre-
spondents are open to Catholic religious appeals.”88 Rather than revise
policy, however, then German section chief Richard Crossman, in consul-
tation with Christopher Dawson, undertook instead to “ensure that those
86 Chappel, “The Catholic Origins of Totalitarian Theory in Interwar Europe”, 565.

87 Dan Stone, “The Uses and Abuses of ‘Secular Religion’: Jules Monnerot’s Path
from Communism to Fascism”, The Holocaust, Fascism and Memory: Essays in the History
of Ideas (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 127.
88 TNA FO 898/4, “Record of Meeting of the German Regional Committee” (11
March 1941).
parts of our propaganda which dealt with our general Weltanschauung…

were not out of harmony with Catholic doctrine.”89 Ivone Kirkpatrick,
the Foreign Office advisor to the BBC, likewise suggested that religion
could enter propaganda most effectively as a part of the projection of
Britain, depicting “a living Christian Church in this country.”90 The
implementation of direct religious propaganda inched forward.
But even as Department EH was denying the possibilities of religious
propaganda, the Foreign Office specifically requested the Department’s
rumour-mongering Underground Propaganda Committee “to influence
the Catholic populations of Europe against acceptance of the German
thesis that Nazi Germany is the protector of the Catholic world.”91 Black
propaganda, with its use of clandestine broadcasting and underground
propaganda distribution networks, radically altered the environment in
which debates about religion took place because it offered a poten-
tial solution to the problem of hypocrisy. A number of propagandists,
including Frederick Voigt, were vehemently opposed to black propaganda
but the natural limitations of conventional propaganda made clandes-
tine subversion a seeming inevitability.92 As discussed in Chapter Two,
the obstinate Voigt’s relationship with the rest of Department EH was
marked by conflict because his opinions on a number of key issues were
soon outpaced by events.93 Indeed, the circumstances of his termina-
tion—involving a clash of ideas between Crossman and Voigt following
which, apparently, only one of the two could remain on the staff—serve
to illustrate the direction in which propaganda had developed. Voigt
was determined to think of religion in political terms and in this he
was instrumental in developing the department’s religious policy and
89 TNA FO 898/4, “Record of Meeting of the German Regional Committee” (11

March 1941).
90 TNA INF 1/788, Hugh Martin, “Note of conversation between Mr. Kirkpatrick…
and Messrs. Hope and Martin” (19 April 1941).
91 TNA FO 898/9, “Leaflet report for the week Saturday November 30th to Saturday
December 7th 1940”.
92 According to intelligence staff, the BBC could not address discrete audiences and
“[t]he repercussions [of sectional appeals] on the wrong section may be disastrous”: TNA
FO 898/190, Walmsley to Crossman, Letter (2 January 1942).
93 The sincerity of Voigt’s intellectual commitments, including his resistance to the use
of lies in propaganda, is evidenced by his continued meddling with the department after
his position was terminated. He was the prime suspect for a leak (discussed in Chapter
Five) that saw Stafford Cripps complain about the department’s use of “pornography.”.
210 K. R. GRAHAM
an important aspect of its understanding of fascism, but, in the end,

he found himself out of step with the doxa. Where religious convic-
tions were fundamental to Voigt’s worldview, Richard Crossman and
Sefton Delmer were more inclined to think of faith as merely another
social division to be exploited. Detached from official policy, black propa-
ganda offered a highly plastic means of addressing a diverse German
audience. Indeed, with the advent of black propaganda, the problem of
hypocrisy—and the totalitarian theory introduced to resolve it—ought
to have become a moot point. Interestingly, however, ideas established
early in the war lingered on. With regard to the religious question at
least, British propagandists had committed to a conservative Catholic
conception of Germany and National Socialism.
One of the earliest clandestine religious propaganda plans, devel-
oped months before the first British-based freedom stations went to
air, involved broadcasting what was essentially a black operation via the
supposedly objective BBC. Department EH’s Intelligence Division was
keen to provoke friction between the Nazis and the Protestant opposi-
tion epitomized by anti-Nazi Lutheran pastor Martin Niemöller. The plan
entailed a historical re-enactment in which “an eminent Swiss theologian
of the Protestant faith should be requested to prepare an indictment on
the National Socialist regime as he imagines Martin Luther would have if
he had lived today” and then, under cover of night, “have it nailed up on
the door of the parish church at Wittenberg.”94 It is probable that the
Swiss theologian they had in mind was Adolf Keller, then General Secre-
tary of the European Central Office for Inter-Church Aid.95 A Swiss,
rather than English, theologian was nominated “so as to free us from
the charge of political partisanship in a publication on the situation of
the Church in Germany.” Having conveniently come into possession of
94 TNA FO 898/177, Colvin to Shaw, Memorandum (30 January 1940); while it is

more likely that Luther nailed his theses to the door of the Schlosskirche, the sentiment
is much the same.
95 A month earlier, Ralph Murray wrote of Keller that “[f]or reasons of our own we
wish to obtain publication of such a supplement or a re-rewritten book as I suggested
in my original memorandum – not for the sake of reaction of the neutrals, but for the
indirect reaction of the Germans”: TNA FO 898/177, Murray to Carton, Memorandum
(27 December 1939); Keller’s Church and State on the European Continent (London:
Epworth Press, 1936) was considered to have great propaganda value regarding “the
position of the Churches, both Protestant and Catholic, in the Totalitarian states”: TNA
FO 898/177, Murray to Carton, Memorandum, “Dr. Adolf Keller” (December 1939).
the indictment, the BBC was to broadcast its contents to the German
faithful that same night. The author of this plan was anxious that the
indictment be seen to represent the sentiments of all German Protes-
tants, and not just the anti-Nazi Bekennende Kirche “as that would cause
more persecution.” This new Luther, as we might expect, was to front a
provocative argument. Rather than “praise the magnificent resistance of
the Lutheran church,” the department wanted to “rebuke it for offering
subservience to the anti-Christ.” While this particular attempt to stir the
coals of the Kirchenkampf does not appear to have gained final approval,
it offers some insight into propagandists’ agility when their thinking was
untethered from the charge of hypocrisy to which open propaganda was
vulnerable.
Plans for subversive Catholic broadcast propaganda independent of the
BBC began to circulate towards the end of 1940, only a few months
after Britain had made its first tentative clandestine broadcasts. Having
already established a revolutionary workers station, Crossman was among
the first senior propagandists to profess his interest in “the possibilities
of an international Catholic station.”96 On the advice of Christopher
Dawson, however, Crossman put an end to these plans; the problem,
it seems, was that Dawson determined the Church hierarchy would need
to be involved in any such station, effectively curtailing the freedom that
clandestine broadcasting promised.97 Rather than act independently of
the Church, or seek Church approval, the department puts its resources
behind another proposed station. While certainly not Christian in any
meaningful sense, Delmer’s black station Gustav Siegfried Eins gave voice
to a similarly conservative segment of the political spectrum.98 In the
meantime, Crossman supported limited open religious programming on
the BBC.
In April 1941 Voigt’s position within the department was terminated
owing to his escalating rivalry with Crossman. A few months later, in
July 1941, Crossman revised his plans for a “serious Right Wing station,
96 The archive is patchy here. The original proposals are elusive but elsewhere Crossman
implies that a German-language international Catholic station had initially been planned
in 1940 sometime between July and the New Year: TNA FO 898/177, Crossman to
Leeper, Memorandum (5 July 1941).
97 TNA FO 898/177, Crossman to Leeper, Memorandum (5 July 1941).
98 Crossman himself writes that Gustav Siegfried aired in the place of the Catholic
station: TNA FO 898/177, Crossman to Leeper, Memorandum (5 July 1941).
212 K. R. GRAHAM
one of whose members might well be a Catholic layman.”99 Once again,

however, the launch of a Catholic station was delayed. The excuse offered
by propagandists at the time was “the work of such a unit had been
rendered less urgently important by the Soviet war.”100 The fact of
the Eastern Front had undermined any perceived resemblance between
fascism and communism, proof-positive that Hitler would defend Chris-
tian Europe from the Bolsheviks. PWE found itself in a difficult position.
The department had committed to the Catholic notion of totalitarianism
in which Nazism and Soviet Communism were indistinguishable in their
threat to Christianity. All planning had hinged on a conflict not between
the rival secular religions but against Christianity. But now the Nazis and
the Churches shared a common enemy, an echo of the circumstances that
had won the NSDAP the Churches’ (provisional) support a decade earlier.
At a moment when promoting ideological divisions between Church and
State was arguably at its most important, the department found it easier
to delay the launch of a new Catholic station rather than rethink their
strategy.101
By mid-1942, when Gustav Siegfried Eins had been broadcasting for
a year and victory still eluded Germany in the east, the departmental atti-
tude to religious opposition had changed significantly. With Crossman
concerned primarily with open propaganda and collaborations with Amer-
ican intelligence, and Voigt out of the picture altogether, Delmer was able
to exert considerable influence on the outlook of British foreign propa-
gandists. Meanwhile, intelligence circles were increasingly drawn to the
idea that a rebellion of conservatives against Hitler was entirely possible
should the German forces on the eastern front collapse. And in this, the
role of oppositional religious sentiment was seen as vital. “Quite distinct
from these hard-headed schemers,” argued PWE,
are those circles which have a genuine moral disgust of National Socialism.
Such Germans are not confined to the Churches, though the Catholic
99 TNA FO 898/177, Crossman to Leeper, Memorandum (5 July 1941).

100 TNA FO 898/4, “Minutes of Meeting of German Regional Section” (15 July
1941).
101 On this point, it is interesting to note that the German section had not yet found
“[a] clear principle of distinction between its [the proposed clandestine station] output
and that which could be undertaken by the B.B.C.”: TNA FO 898/4, “Minutes of
Meeting of German Regional Section” (15 July 1941).
Church is the chief mouthpiece of their cause, but are to be found in

the services, judiciary, the Professions, civil service etc. A few of them are
already prepared to see Germany defeated in order to get rid of National
Socialism; but these are a small minority.102
This revised plan for religious propaganda introduced a number of special

campaigns, key to which was a new clandestine station that, in this early
iteration, would “appeal directly to Catholic priests.”103 British propa-
gandists sought to take advantage of the supposedly widespread moral
outrage garnered by “revolutionary” Nazism and bind it to a cohesive
and ready-made political body, namely the Catholic Church. This time
around it appears the department did not feel compelled to consult with
the Church hierarchy.
In its planning stage, the cover story for PWE’s clandestine German-
Catholic station was baroque. The station was supposed to have been
run by “one or two monks who had been actually driven out of their
monasteries in Germany by the Gestapo.”104 The monks were to act
as propaganda surrogates for the most well-known god-fearing thorn in
Hitler’s side, Bishop von Galen. But even here, planners remained vigilant
about the charge of hypocrisy:
It should be seriously considered whether this station may not be too

dangerous to run in that the whole of our Christian propaganda will fall
to the ground if German Christians are ever given cause to believe that
this is an English station. They would be revolted by our hypocrisy and
blasphemy in exploiting Jesus Christ for such purposes.105
Despite the danger, Delmer ensured these plans would develop into a
workable solution. In fact, it seems that as the department came to
embrace Delmer’s unique brand of professionalism (such as his conviction
102 TNA FO 898/13, “Revised Plan of Political Warfare Against Germany” (19 June
1942).
103 TNA FO 898/13, “Revised Plan of Political Warfare Against Germany” (19 June
1942).
104 TNA FO 898/182, “German Campaign No. 3” (15 January 1942).
105 TNA FO 898/182, “German Campaign No. 3” (15 January 1942).
214 K. R. GRAHAM
that British propaganda would only ever lie deliberately and never by acci-
dent), the problem of hypocrisy weighed less heavily on propagandists’
minds.
Finally going to air in September 1942 and broadcasting until the
final days of the war in Europe, clandestine station Deutsche Priester
aimed “[t]o widen the breach between the German Catholics (numbering
roughly 40 million) and their Nazi rulers by making clear to them the
profound antithesis between Christian principles and National-Socialist
practices.”106 The station praised the Church for its defence of tradi-
tion with an emphasis on the Pope’s peace-making efforts. In the end,
Delmer found not a monk but a genuine Austrian priest. Father Eisen-
berger of the Order of St John of Malta was, according to a fellow
exile employed in broadcasting, an “ardent Catholic” who was “unset-
tled” by some of PWE’s work.107 A 1943 report states that Eisenberger
was broadcasting five or six days with a week, employing a combina-
tion of prayers and sermons woven together with subversive rumours
and outright moral condemnation of Nazi radicalism in order to attack
“the chaos of Party-organised evacuation and… [expose] Nazi attempts
to ‘proletarise’ the German middle class.”108 Echoing the ideas of promi-
nent anti-Nazi clerics including Galen’s condemnation of Aktion T4,
Eisenberger related stories of the sick and the elderly being euthanized,
of seriously injured soldiers being denied treatment, of women’s lives
being destroyed through factory labour, all because of the “materialistic
calculation [of] the heathenish rulers.”109
Deutsche Priester maintained PWE’s conservative Catholic perspec-
tive on National Socialism as a secular religion akin to Bolshevism. In
fact, the department communicated just this argument to their audience;
conceived as a reflection of the Kirchenkampf, the station used Eisenberg-
er’s sermons to “[trace] the origin of the Nazi anti-Christian movement to
Bolshevist sources.”110 Deutsche Priester began broadcasting as a Catholic
106 TNA FO 898/51, “List of R.U.s” (1943).

107 IWM 5132/02/01–02, Audio Recording by Ellic Howe, “Frank Lynder” (1981).
108 TNA FO 898/51, “Report on the Operation of RU’s” (11 October 1943).
109 National Archives and Records Administration USA (NARA) RG 262, Foreign
Broadcast Intelligence Service, “Transcript of Short Wave Broadcast - Catholic Clandestine
- March 5, 1943” (3 June 1943).
110 TNA FO 898/67, Wilson to Barman and Leeper, “Notes on Propaganda to
Germany” (7 November 1942).
station meant broadly to address German-language speakers but with no

specific regional agenda. As Allied policies changed, however, Eisenberg-
er’s Austrian heritage came to play an increasingly significant role in the
station’s political programme. Indeed, it is conceivable that the station’s
Austrian character was crucial to its getting off the ground after so many
months of vacillating.
Towards a Catholic Donauraum

At this point, it is worth taking a brief detour into PWE’s perspective
on Austria. In formally recognizing the 1938 Anschluss, Britain had offi-
cially accepted the Großdeutsch idea that Austria was a part of the Nazi
Greater German Reich. This was a dissatisfying stance for many members
of the propaganda community who, by personal conviction, saw Austria
as a state with an identity distinct from Germany and was thus a potential
weakness for the Nazi regime. In fact, the Special Operations Execu-
tive’s Austria experts were so committed to Austrian separatism that they
promoted the Austrian Social Democrats (SPÖ) as a party “still capable
of resistance and ready to unite with bourgeois and Catholic opponents
of the Nazis to form a national front against what they termed Prus-
sian dominion in Austria” (this, despite often-violent pre-war animosities
between Austria’s different political factions).111 SOE was determined
to put its weight behind nationalist Austrian separatism, but this was
not the only Austrian future in circulation. As Andreas Gemes observes,
Churchill and his Cabinet supporters opted instead for the idea of an
alliance between Bavaria and Austria, touting this first at the Tehran
conference and again at Yalta.112 Initially proposed by Arnold Toynbee’s
Foreign Research and Press Service in the autumn of 1941, the idea of
the Donauraum (a Danubian federation that encompassed the largely
Catholic regions of southern Germany and Austria) found favour with
sections of the British Cabinet. A Danubian federation was seen as an
alternative means of isolating “Prussian” Germany by dividing the Third
111 According to Pirker, SOE leant on the Foreign Office to shift its policy towards
an independent Austrian state from November 1941: Pirker, “British Subversive Politics
towards Austria”, 324–326.
112 Andreas Gemes, “Donaukonföderation statt Eigenstaatlichkeit? Die Donaukonföder-
ationsidee in den alliierten Nachkriegsplanungen für Österreich” East Central Europe 37
(2010), 78.
216 K. R. GRAHAM
Reich in two.113 It rivalled separatist nationalism as a policy option for

many months. Among British planners, sympathy with the idea of a
Danubian Federation correlated strongly with pessimism about the settle-
ment that came of the Treaty of Saint Germain and the foundations of
Austrian national identity.114 And in fact, the idea of a Danubian feder-
ation between Austria and Bavaria was quite popular in certain Catholic
circles during the Weimar Republic, imagined as “a way to dilute the
influence of Protestant Prussia and pursue a more Catholic form of
German politics and culture.”115 While these ideas obviously offered a
pragmatic political wedge, such a positive disposition towards Austrians
was partly a reflection of widespread anti-German, or more specifically
anti-Prussian, sentiment that dominated British foreign policy circles after
Churchill’s election. This was particularly true of SOE where, according
to Pirker, distaste for the Anschluss was complemented by a variety of
Austrophilia.116
As Robert Keyserlingk writes, by April 1943 “the Foreign Office and
War Cabinet had accepted FRPS’s [Foreign Research and Press Service]
suggestion of a multi-national Danubian state or some similar federative
structure as the ‘most attractive solution to the region’s problems.’”117
The eventual change in policy, however, made official with the Moscow
Declaration on Austria in October 1943, determined that Austria would
once again become a sovereign state. Recent research has shown just how
complicated this new position was. For a long time, historians viewed
the Moscow Declaration as merely a propaganda ploy; by asserting that
Austria was Nazi Germany’s “first victim,” Austrians could shrug off war
guilt and assert a national identity distinct from the Third Reich. As
Martin Kitchen writes, for example, “it was widely believed that the decla-
ration would have a profound effect on German morale, which in 1943
the Allies deemed to be weak.”118 This idea is largely attributed to Robert
113 Robert H. Keyserlingk, “Arnold Toynbee’s Foreign Research and Press Service,
1939–1943 and its Post-war Plans for South-east Europe” Journal of Contemporary
History 21 (1986): 549; Pirker, “British Subversive Politics towards Austria”, 326.
116 Pirker, “British Subversive Politics towards Austria”, 323–324.
118 Martin Kitchen, “Review: Austria in World War II: An Anglo-American Dilemma
by Robert H. Keyserlingk.” The American Historical Review 95.4 (1990): 1170.
Keyserlingk’s research into Allied policy on Austria and its relationship to

the origins of the Cold War. It is certainly true, as Keyserlingk argues,
that the Moscow Declaration “cannot serve as a clean bill of health for
the Austrians between 1938 and 1945, or as a legal basis for a restored
Austria.”119 But this is not conditional on the Moscow Declaration (or
any other Allied Austrian policy) being exclusively a means of propaganda.
Pirker has recently challenged a number of Keyserlingk’s ideas, arguing,
for example, that the Moscow Declaration represented “on the level of
propaganda a well-thought-out paradigm shift in British policymaking
towards that country, which by no means had begun in 1943 but
rather the previous year.”120 Pirker resists Keyserlingk’s insistence on
the separation of political planning from propaganda. The formation
and development of Deutsche Priester affirms Pirker’s critique. The most
controversial element to the debate around the Moscow Declaration has
been the clause asserting that Austrian independence was conditional on
active anti-Nazi resistance in Austria. PWE agreed with SOE about the
value of this idea, while the Foreign Office remained sceptical about
such an eventuality. The debate was resolved with the inclusion of the
clause in the Declaration, but, as Pirker observes, this did not mean
the authors recognized “an already extant separatist nationalism; quite
the contrary. Separatist nationalism was to be externally stimulated and
offered long-term assurances – a classic example of subversive policy-
making in opposition to an empire.”121 With this end in mind, PWE’s
Catholic propaganda was to have a key role.
The promotion of Austrian separatism was not wholly a cynical political
manoeuvre. Many propagandists and policy-makers alike were convinced
of the profound difference between the “Prussian militarism” of Germany
and their civilized Austrian neighbours (happily ignoring the Austrian
roots of Nazism). In plans for the Austrian Service of the BBC, docu-
ments suggest a marked distinction in the conception of Germans and
of Austrians. In March 1943, PWE reminded the BBC Austrian Service
“that the Austrian audience is on the whole more sophisticated, but
also more easily bored than the German. While therefore we need not
119 Robert H. Keyserlingk, Austria in WWII: An Anglo-American Dilemma (Kingston

and Montreal: McGill-Queen’s UP, 1988), 9.
120 Pirker, “British Subversive Politics towards Austria”, 327.
218 K. R. GRAHAM
be afraid of intellectually difficult subjects, they need lighter treatment

for Austria than they do for Germany.”122 Another report that survives
among PWE’s files describes the morale of Austrian prisoners of war in
Tunisia as being remarkably distinct from that of their German comrades:
“The Austrians,” recorded the interrogator, “are like beings from another
world. They can think, laugh, criticise, argue and discuss. They are almost
all convinced that Germany has lost the war.”123 British Austrophilia rein-
forced an Austrian national stereotype measured against the German type,
enthusiastically erasing problematic elements in Austria’s recent history in
order to praise these laudable, cosmopolitan Europeans.
In the spring of 1941 SOE (which then also encompassed PWE)
favoured a nationalist, anti-German policy of Austrian separatism. But
there was dissension even within SOE, with the propagandists leaning
towards a more reserved line that reckoned with the demonstrable popu-
larity of the Anschluss.124 Austrian exile politics played an important role
here. Unlike the exiled SPÖ, the Austrian Communists (KPÖ) already
fostered nationalist ambitions (in line with the USSR’s Austrian policy).
Pirker suggests, however, that the KPÖ’s politics made it untenable for
the British intelligence community. This is at odds with Lothar Kettenack-
er’s writings on the Foreign Office in the developments that led to the
policy of re-education. Kettenacker argues, rather, that the Foreign Office
maintained a relatively disinterested, liberal attitude to the possible future
internal composition of other states, only considering after the failed coup
of 20 July 1944, for example, whether Germany might “go Communist
after the war.”125 It speaks to the differences of opinion between so many
foreign policy concerns that SOE, instead, pushed hard for the SPÖ to
122 CAC NERI 3/4, “Long-Term Directive for B.B.C. Austrian Service” (13 May
1943).
123 PWE’s proponents of anti-totalitarian Catholic propaganda were surely disheartened
to learn from these interviews that “[t]hey do not, good Catholics though they are,
share Germany’s horror of Russia and Bolshevism.” Nevertheless, the station continued
to weave together a Catholic moral worldview with more immediate, secular concerns in
order to underpin a regional identity on which separatist hopes might be pinned: TNA FO
898/178, “Psychology and Morale of German Troops (Notes from the Tunisian front,
April 1943)”.
124 Pirker, Subversion deutscher Herrschaft, 193–194.
125 Lothar Kettenacker, “The Planning of ‘Re-education’ during the Second World
War”, The Political Re-education of Germany and Her Allies After World War II , ed.
Nicholas Pronay and Keith Wilson (London: Crook Helm, 1985): 65.
drop their pan-German and pan-European ambitions (which they eventu-

ally did in 1942) so that they might constitute “a strong democratic leftist
alternative to the... [KPÖ] that, it was feared, would play a major role in
Austrian postwar politics.”126 The result Pirker rightly describes as “an
inter-Allied tragedy – those who were ready and willing to put up anti-
Nazi resistance according to the Moscow Declaration were precisely the
ones who were suppressed by the British postwar occupation authorities
on account of their divergent political aims.”127 PWE’s records suggest
that this tragedy was, at least in part, a product of SOE recalcitrance
running ahead of policy. When PWE attained independence from SOE,
the propagandists were quite willing to engage in a less strictly bounded
mode of separatism than SOE would have liked.
Interestingly, PWE’s first Austrian clandestine station went to air in
September 1941, the month that PWE broke away from SOE. Like
PWE’s first German stations, this station was voiced by dissident commu-
nists and loosely affiliated Social Democrats including Marie Jahoda,
Walter Wodak, and Stefan Wirlander. Launched in the wake of the
German invasion of Russia, clandestine station Rotes Wien was an early
attempt to foster a common identity among a broadly Danubian audi-
ence. Evidence supports Pirker’s assertion that Rotes Wien was a failure
because the station’s Austrian editors would not agree to the anachro-
nistic anti-Prussian line advocated by conservative British officials so long
as the Foreign Office vacillated on war aims for the country.128 As a
consequence, Rotes Wien was a muted trumpet.
While it seems propagandists had been reconsidering the Austrian
strategy as early as 1941 when they began broadcasting Austrian mate-
rial via the BBC as an element in the German Service, significant policy
changes were only initiated in February 1942 following Churchill’s
first concrete political statement on Austria in which he described the
Austrians as the “first victims of Nazi aggression.”129 In the months
that followed PWE reformulated their Austrian policy. Following a deci-
sion made in June 1942, the department began to develop the BBC

128 Pirker, Subversion deutscher Herrschaft, 193–194.
129 Churchill, as quoted in Steven Beller, A Concise History of Austria (Cambridge:
Cambridge UP, 2006), 245.
220 K. R. GRAHAM
Austrian Service, which finally went to air in March 1943.130 However,

true separatist programming on the BBC had to wait until the Moscow
Declaration of November 1943.131 This delay was far from satisfactory for
many PWE officials including Richard Crossman. Having ruled out both
pan-German and Austrian nationalist propaganda in May 1943, PWE
determined to promote Austrian social democracy by affirming British
resolve to play a larger part in Europe.132 However, PWE’s directions
to the BBC on Austria give the impression that they were avoiding an
emphatically nationalist line only because of a lack of defined policy.
“We should attempt to cover the absence of any precise foreign policy
for Austria,” wrote the planners, “by addressing Austria as a Danubian
country and being careful to dissociate it in all possible ways… from
Germany.”133 In this sense, the Austrian Service would satisfy the inter-
ests of all German speakers “implicitly, but not explicitly… in the whole
region of the Middle Danube.” PWE’s response to the Austrian question
here was typically pragmatic and cautious.
Of course, clandestine propaganda followed a different tack. Signifi-
cantly, after Churchill’s February 1942 statement on Austrian victimhood,
PWE’s plans for its clandestine Catholic station switched from parroting
Galen as a mouthpiece of Church moralism and condemning Nazi total-
itarianism to a production with much richer regional colour. Against a
backdrop of heightened interest in Austria, the PWE approach to reli-
gion had to meet an unusual challenge. The area encompassed by the
Donauraum was ethnically and culturally diverse. Any kind of political
unity would depend on a homogenizing force that went beyond that of
130 Richard Dove, “’It tickles my Viennese humour’: Feature Programmes in the BBC
Austrian Service, 1943–1945”, ‘Stimme der Wahrheit’: German-Language Broadcasting by
the BBC: The Yearbook of the Research Centre for German and Austrian Exile Studies 5,
ed. Charmian Brinson and Richard Dove (New York: Rodopi, 2003), 57–58.
131 Charmian Brinson, “’Patrick Smith bei den Österreichern’: the BBC Austrian
Service in Wartime”, ‘Stimme der Wahrheit’: German-Language Broadcasting by the BBC:
The Yearbook of the Research Centre for German and Austrian Exile Studies 5, ed.
Charmian Brinson and Richard Dove (New York: Rodopi, 2003), 3–6.
132 The report states that “[n]o opportunity should be missed, therefore, of pointing
out any tangible evidence of such determination, e.g. the Keynes’ plan for an international
currency union.”: CAC NERI 3/4, “Long-Term Directive for B.B.C. Austrian Service”
(13 May 1943).
133 CAC NERI 3/4, “Long-Term Directive for B.B.C. Austrian Service” (13 May
1943).
nation-state. Even before the launch of Deutsche Priester, the department

was entertaining proposals for open broadcast programmes addressed
to “German-speaking Catholics, especially in Austria and Bavaria” that
would “show the incompatibility of the religious beliefs of Austrian
Catholics with the ideology of the Nazi Regime.”134 As the Allies’
Austrian policy developed over the course of 1942 and 1943, Deutsche
Priester’s broadly Catholic complexion developed its regional identity
further. Crucially, PWE’s religious experts understood that Catholics
embraced a “federalist tradition” and opposed “Prussian and National
Socialist centralisation.”135 Within a year of going to air, Deutsche Priester
had evolved; no longer content to needle Catholics over the morality of
indifference in the face of German atrocities, it also “[encouraged] sepa-
ratist movements in Bavaria and Austria.”136 Here, Catholicism and the
Donauraum found common ground: Catholicism offered a super-national
identity in opposition to the supposed German national character that
had found its apotheosis in anti-Christian, secular Nazism. As one BBC
planner wrote:
Is there not an internal conflict between the call, deep and recurrent
through German history, to seek discipline and love it, to be strong and
then domineer and, by contrast, the instinct powerfully nourished among
Protestants and Catholics to recognise in those courses not virtue but
temptation and disasters?137
In line with British officialdom’s prejudices against “Prussia” and in

favour of Austria, Catholicism was politicized in line with a broader
separatist narrative.
134 TNA FO 898/177, “Religious Broadcasts to Germans: policy 1939–1942” (8

November 1941); demonstrating yet another complication involved in politicizing religion
for propaganda purposes, Crossman and R.L. Sedgwick struggled, in their discussions of
these proposals, to find a way in which they might address conservative Catholics in
Austria, “to whom one could not speak politically, without giving the impression of being
pro-Hapsburg”: TNA FO 898/12, “Meeting of Executive Committee held at Country
Headquarters” (8 November 1941).
135 TNA FO 898/99, R.L. Sedgwick, lecture notes, “Plan for Catholic Broadcasts to
Germany”.
136 TNA FO 898/51, “List of R.U.s” (1943).
137 TNA INF 1/788, John Tudor Jones, “Religious Broadcasts to Europe”, (6 March
1941).
222 K. R. GRAHAM
In the week following the Moscow Declaration, Delmer even proposed

expanding Deutsche Priester’s ambit from simply being a Catholic dissi-
dent station to an explicitly separatist station with a broader base that
could address the question of Austria’s future. “I suggest adding to the
priest’s voice two other voices,” wrote Delmer,
one of them an Austrian working class voice which would deliver instruc-
tions of a go-slow passive resistance type, the other that of an intellectual
layman who would speak on news topics of the day, and whose chief
emphasis would be on the need for Austria to separate from Germany.138
Neither the extant PWE files nor post-war testimonies suggest that this
expansion progressed beyond the planning stage, but it is enlightening
to read Delmer’s ideas in the context of broader discussions on Austrian
policy. With post-war plans for Austria made public, the department had
the opportunity to exploit regional identities along religious lines in a far
more aggressive manner than they had previously.
As mentioned above, PWE’s files suggest that the Donauraum was
initially adopted in lieu of a more precise Allied policy on Austria.
According to Pirker, British officials abandoned the idea of a Danubian
federation in March 1943, after which the Foreign Office increas-
ingly emphasized the need to foster an Austrian national conscious-
ness.139 Interestingly, however, even after this date, planning documents
continued to reprise the Donauraum. PWE’s propagandists kept the
Danubian idea alive as it could attract audiences who, for ideological
reasons, were reluctant to join with nationalist causes. Although their
plans never came to fruition, there was even discussion among propa-
gandists of a clandestine station to be voiced by the captured German
General Wilhelm Ritter von Thoma, a Bavarian-born Catholic conserva-
tive with marked anti-Nazi leanings. In a 1944 memorandum delivered
to Anthony Eden and Brendan Bracken, PWE pitched the idea for this
new station as a voice that would speak to German army officers, encour-
aging them to “break with Hitler and the politicians and to rally Germany
to the Western Powers under the leadership of the best elements of the
138 TNA FO 898/51, Delmer to DDG, “Expansion of G.7” (4 November 1943).

army.”140 The idea stemmed from conversations with Thoma, whose own
hopes were “to protect Germany from Communism” and “to see Bavaria,
Austria and the South Tyrol united… [as] a democratic constitutional
monarchy.” PWE’s enthusiasm for this project was a reflection of the
propaganda value that they placed on the idea of a Danubian federation
rather than a tangible commitment to the idea at odds with the Foreign
Office.
Delmer’s proposed expansion of Deutsche Priester in the wake of the
Moscow Declaration was not a response to a change in Allied policy;
rather, he was responding to a change in his audience’s understanding of
Allied policy. As Pirker argues, this policy was hardly a novelty for British
officialdom, who had adopted the idea in 1942. The fact that PWE was
entertaining plans for another conservative station in 1944, which dupli-
cated both Deutsche Priester’s moral outrage towards Nazism and its call
for a Danubian federation, demonstrates just how entwined these ideas
had become in the field of subversive propaganda. The promotion of a
Danubian federation asserted in opposition to Prussian hegemony only
bolstered a conservative Catholic political identity asserted in opposition
to the Nazis’ secular religion.
The totalitarian model embraced by PWE saw Nazism as a rebellion
against natural law, and reconfigured religious opposition as a restora-
tion of order. The Moscow Declaration’s rejection of the Anschluss
achieved in political terms much the same thing. Whether or not PWE
was entirely conscious of the fact, evidence suggests that Deutsche Priester
was promoting the rather vague terms that would later constitute the
Moscow Declaration from as early as September 1942. Certainly, nothing
in its earliest broadcasts was at odds with its broadcasts after the Moscow
Declaration, nor were those early broadcasts in disagreement with the
1944 proposal for Thoma’s station. We may speculate that, after two
years of inertia, PWE plans for clandestine Catholic propaganda only got
off the ground in 1942 thanks to renewed interest in the Austrian ques-
tion. Indeed, it seems that clandestine Catholic propaganda and Austrian
politics went hand in hand.
140 TNA FO 898/51, Lockhart to Eden and Bracken, “Proposal for a German R.U.”
(16 March 1944); there are parallels here with the Soviet use of the Nationalkomitee
Freies Deutschland, encouraging captured officers such as Friedrich Paulus and Walther
Kurt von Seydlitz-Kurzbach to engage in anti-Nazi propaganda.
224 K. R. GRAHAM
Conclusion
This chapter has argued that the tacit admission to a lack of moral
authority among PWE planners conditioned the development of religious
propaganda by guiding perspectives towards an intellectually conser-
vative outlook aligned to what James Chappel calls paternal Catholic
modernism. Wary of the charge of hypocrisy, propagandists initially
eschewed religious propaganda entirely until, under Frederick Voigt’s
guidance, the British understanding of the relationship between Chris-
tianity and National Socialism was reformulated. Borrowing concepts
from the writings of Catholic intellectuals, Voigt argued that Germany
was a revolutionary totalitarian state. Attacking Nazism as such equated
to the preservation of Christian civilization. Vindicating Voigt’s argu-
ment to a certain degree, Ian Kershaw writes of how the Churches
engaged in “considerable efforts and energies consumed in opposing Nazi
interference with traditional practices and attempts to ride roughshod
over Christian doctrine and values,” but their defence of tradition did
not extend to a “defence of humanitarian rights and civil liberties.”141
The apparent affinities between fascism and communism lingered on,
even as these propagandists reckoned with the new eastern front. In
September 1942, when they finally launched a clandestine Catholic
station, the department continued to promulgate the idea that the Nazis
and Bolsheviks were of a kind. Despite the German invasion of Russia,
religious-themed propaganda preserved the associations between Nazism
and Bolshevism to the end of the war.
With a pressing need to promote further divisions in the Reich, PWE
turned increasingly to clandestine propaganda. It was not until the Allies
began to make positive statements on Austria’s future, however, that
PWE was finally able to launch its Catholic clandestine station. While
PWE recognized a degree of religious oppositional sentiment to Nazism,
they saw occasion to build this sentiment into a political consciousness.
At the earliest opportunity, the department began to associate Catholic
dissent with a regional political identity. A sincere, if misguided, belief in
the distinction between Austrian and “Prussian” national character, rein-
forced by Catholicism’s ideological distinction from Nazism, supported
the pragmatic turn towards Austrian separatism both as an Allied policy
141 Kershaw, The Nazi Dictatorship: Problems and Perspectives of Interpretation, fourth
edition, (London: Arnold, 2000), 211.
for Austria’s future and as a weapon of political warfare. Pirker is right

to criticize Keyserlingk for his insistence on a demarcation between polit-
ical planning and propaganda. As the PWE files suggest, an independent
Austria, in whatever form that may have taken, crystalized into policy
because it was effective anti-Nazi propaganda.
The manner in which PWE engaged with religious propaganda
suggests that the department played no small part in contributing to
the legitimacy of otherwise dubious Christian politicians in the post-
war era. Asserting an innate distinction between Catholicism and Nazism
allowed for striking continuities among German Catholic elites during
and after the war, granting Konrad Adenauer’s Christian Democratic
Union a dubious moral authority. In Austria, too, Christian Social politi-
cians were able to resume governance under the new Austrian People’s
Party. But more importantly, the myth of Austria as Nazi victim directly
contributed to the ideological contours of the Second Republic. As Sonja
Niederacher writes in her analysis of the effects of this myth on the disci-
pline of exile studies, “[t]he definition of ‘Austrianness’ was to emerge
from the degree to which Austria dissociated itself from Germany.” 142 In
this context, Catholic identity became as valuable to citizens of the new
republic as any anti-fascist socialist identity. Consequently, the mythology
of Austrian victimhood minimized the country’s long and violent history
of anti-Semitism, its role in the Holocaust, and the anti-democratic nature
of the pre-1938 Christian Social government.
142 Sonja Niederacher, “The Myth of Austria as Nazi Victim, the Emigrants and the
Discipline of Exile Studies”, Austrian Studies 11 (2003), 16.
CHAPTER 7
The Logic of Subversive Propaganda
The broad strategy of morale subversion was premised on the idea that
the Nazi regime could be brought to heel by a widespread collapse in
ordinary Germans’ will to resist the Allies. Recent studies point to the
dubiousness of this idea. Developments in the historiography around
the related Allied strategy of area bombing German civilian targets are
particularly illuminating.1 Bomber Command believed that a sustained
attack on German cities would make the Germans crack; however, the
devastation of cities such as Hamburg and especially Dresden brought
this strategy into disrepute, particularly in the post-war era. Interest-
ingly, contrary to the arguments of a number of wartime researchers and
post-war critics, it seems that area bombing did in fact have a marked
detrimental effect on the German civilian population’s morale. Allied
strategists were indeed correct about the efficacy of bombing, but only
in one sense. Their mistake, argues Ian Kershaw, “was in imagining that
such a regime could possibly be brought to a state of collapse by a
1 For a recent survey of the relationship between area bombing and political warfare,
see: Richard Overy, “Making and Breaking Morale: British Political Warfare and Bomber
Command in the Second World War”, Twentieth-Century British History 26.3 (2015):
370–399.

Switzerland AG 2021
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-71664-6_7
228 K. R. GRAHAM
decline in popular morale.”2 Following the lead of Martin Broszat in the

1980s, a historiographical tendency developed that placed more emphasis
on terroristic Nazi violence and the influence of charismatic authority in
explaining consensus and dissent under the Third Reich, factors which
influenced German wartime morale and made group cohesion difficult.
Subsequently, as Kershaw argues, morale collapse led not to opposition
but to “[a]pathy and a ‘retreat into the private sphere’”.3 This narrative
has been complicated by the work of social historians such as Nicholas
Stargardt, raising doubts about the capacity of Germans to retreat into any
kind of inner safe zone; rather wartime crises “were cause simultaneously
for individual withdrawal and for commitment” which expressed through
intimate diaries and letters the “often profoundly dissonant qualities of
individual subjectivity.”4 Even as so-called apolitical Germans grumbled
about their Nazi leaders and despaired at the prospects of victory, their
sense of patriotism and their individual hopes for the future kept them
in the fight. A widespread phenomenon by war’s end, PWE took the
apparent atomization of German society as confirmation of propaganda
efficacy. Of course, British propagandists encoded this phenomenon with
the prejudices of a British elite.
As previous chapters suggest, British subversive propaganda was not an
inevitable wartime activity. Rather, it was the expression of a coalescence
of various tendencies conditioned by the affinities of British liberal-
conservatism, including interwar political and intellectual developments,
popular discourses on psychology and national character, and the recent
history of Anglo-German relations. Inherited from British experiences in
the First World War and fostered by a cadre of like-minded foreign service
personnel, the strength of belief in the power of propaganda was variable
and often qualified by the idea that morale subversion was a particularly
effective weapon only so long as the enemy was suffering hardships and
military defeats. Of course, as previous chapters demonstrate, the Polit-
ical Warfare Executive’s worldview was hardly settled, and was frequently
2 Ian Kershaw, The Hitler Myth: Image and Reality in the Third Reich (Oxford: Oxford
UP, 2001), 207.
4 Nicholas Stargardt, “Beyond ‘Consent’ or ‘Terror’: Wartime Crises in Nazi Germany”,
History Workshop Journal 72 (2011): 200–202.
7 THE LOGIC OF SUBVERSIVE PROPAGANDA 229
challenged both by alternative perspectives and by the changing fortunes

of the war. Nevertheless, many British politicians, planners, and propa-
gandists remained convinced that morale subversion was a key to victory
in Europe and that Germans were especially susceptible to this most
devastating weapon.
Until recently, historical considerations of wartime propaganda have
too often left unanswered important questions about both the propagan-
dists and their intended audience. In examining why British propagandists
were so enthusiastic about morale subversion, this chapter will return to
a number of historiographical questions about the relationship between
propaganda, morale, and resistance. If a German sailor aboard a U-
boat in 1943 listens knowingly and enthusiastically to illegal foreign
broadcasts, what can we truly say about his politics, about his morale?
Definitive answers are elusive, but the question is nevertheless central to
any consideration of British political warfare as a historical phenomenon.
Jo Fox’s research into the history of British domestic propaganda and
the Ministry of Information opens up new possibilities in this arena.5 Fox
tracks MoI’s notorious attempts to modify British public opinion over
the course of the Second World War, attempts which were plagued by
distortions in meaning between propagandists and audience. She argues
that “for a fuller understanding of the nature of wartime propaganda,
these campaigns must be considered together, since this was how the
public received them, and this created the environment in which mean-
ings were established.”6 The relationship between audience and text is
never simply pedagogic or transparent, and remains open to the possibility
of what Umberto Eco might call an aberrant decoding. In one study, Fox
regards the MoI’s campaigns as well as the (often negative) audience reac-
tions to these campaigns not individually but holistically, demonstrating
that the MoI’s many missteps paradoxically fostered solidarity in their
British audience, albeit of a kind at odds with that which the propa-
gandists intended. The Fougasse-illustrated “Careless Talk Costs Lives”
campaign, for example, saw officialdom promoting a culture of “distrust,
suspicion, and fear” in which ordinary people were cast as potential fifth
5 Jo Fox, “Careless Talk: Tensions Within British Domestic Propaganda During the
Second World War”, The Journal of British Studies 51.4 (2012): 936–966.
230 K. R. GRAHAM
columnists or undisciplined gossips.7 In a more recent study, Fox asks

important questions about the effect of German subversive propaganda
in Britain (such as the Lord Haw-Haw broadcasts), the appeal or effect
of which has been roundly dismissed by historians blinded by the notion
of British exceptionalism and the benign patriotism of the “people’s war.”
Complicating wartime British reactions, Fox examines an extensive cache
of letters sent from members of the public to MoI’s Anti-Lies Bureau
which reveals much that may have otherwise been obscured by patrio-
tism or complex and conflicting emotions.8 Her research has led her to
conclude
that historians should look for new, more complex ways of understanding
the dynamics of wartime propaganda that take account of the unforeseen
outcomes of specific campaigns and place more emphasis on public agency
in constructing their own meanings from official communications.9
The distance between PWE’s conception of Germany and our contempo-

rary understanding of life in the Third Reich gives scope for an approach
along the lines Fox advocates.
This chapter will draw on a variety of German and British sources to
assess how PWE’s propaganda was received by the German public and
speculate on its effect. In developing a more nuanced understanding of
the relationship between propaganda and morale, it is important to keep
in mind Nazi ambitions for the “transformation of subjective conscious-
ness” and, ultimately, the limits of Nazism’s societal penetration.10 As
a subject of historical research, the German public’s engagement with
propaganda under the Third Reich is certainly more difficult to assess than
the British. Kershaw’s distinction between “popular opinion” and “public
opinion” is useful here to a degree. While public opinion after 1933 was
“almost wholly that of the Nazi regime”, the attitudes and opinions of
so-called ordinary Germans may still be glimpsed (and even “impres-
sionistically” reconstructed, as Kershaw demonstrates) through surviving
7 Fox, “Careless Talk”, 937–938.

8 Fox, “Confronting Lord Haw-Haw: Rumour and Britain’s Wartime Anti-Lies
Bureau”, Journal of Modern History 91 (2019): 74–108.
10 Kershaw, Popular Opinion and Political Dissent in the Third Reich: Bavaria 1933–
1945 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983), 1.
sources.11 Stargardt takes Kershaw’s idea further; achieving a depth of

nuance and analytical insight that eluded earlier histories, he teases out
the myriad—frequently confused and contradictory—subjective experi-
ences of ordinary Germans during their Manichean war.12 While German
opinion was subject to close monitoring by the Nazi authorities, the
record that has been left in such forms as the SS security service (Sicher-
heitsdienst, or SD) reports are incomplete and inconsistent. Stargardt
manages to stitch together a more comprehensive picture by bolstering
SD reports and other regime sources with more intimate material. Gaps
in the record abound, but there remains the potential for new revelations.
After the war, many propagandists remained convinced that they had
done fine work and were hampered only by the Allied demand for
Germany’s unconditional surrender, announced at the 1943 Casablanca
Conference. This argument functions as an unacknowledged counterfac-
tual that presupposes the effectiveness of PWE’s output. Following a close
examination of the way that PWE understood the logic of subversion, this
chapter will consider German popular engagement with propaganda in
light of recent historiographical developments to suggest that PWE likely
contributed to a functional opposition to the regime. However, the nature
of that opposition did not impede most Germans’ willingness to fight on
to the end and so was by no means the outcome that British propagan-
dists intended. This chapter will examine a number of unusual features
that underpinned the rationale for morale subversion, such as liberal-
conservative beliefs about tyranny and rebellion and the department’s
tendency to minimize Nazi anti-Semitism, which further complemented
British propagandists’ deterministic or essentialist ideas about the German
national character. This chapter will also consider PWE’s use of music,
humour, and rumour as tools for subversion, examining their wartime use
in light of contemporary theory and historical research. By historicizing
the propagandists’ own perspective alongside the environment in which
11 Kershaw, Popular Opinion and Political Dissent in the Third Reich, 4–6.
12 Stargardt has written extensively on this topic, culminating in The German War:
A Nation Under Arms, 1939–45 (London: Vintage, 2016), which informs much of
this chapter. Also very enlightening: Stargardt, “Beyond ‘Consent’ or ‘Terror’: Wartime
Crises in Nazi Germany”, History Workshop Journal 72 (2011): 190–204; Stargardt, “The
Troubled Patriot: German Innerlichkeit in World War II,” German History 28.3 (2010):
326–342.
232 K. R. GRAHAM
they communicated with their German audience, it is possible to develop

a more complex understanding of the dynamics of wartime propaganda,
as Fox suggests.
A Contested Legacy
Did British subversive propaganda help to shorten the war? Certainly,
this question has intrigued military and political historians. Significantly,
however, it also preoccupied the propagandists themselves even decades
after the German surrender. A very public conversation about PWE’s effi-
cacy began in 1973 when Richard Crossman (then a senior Labour MP)
penned a commentary on the Watergate scandal for The Times.13 While
sniping at the clumsiness of American skulduggery, Crossman claimed
that “subversive operations and black propaganda were the only aspects
of the war at which we [the British] achieved real pre-eminence.”14 What
followed was a substantial and heated exchange of views in The Times’ s
editorial section.
George Martelli, erstwhile chief of PWE’s Italian section, was first to
weigh in with a damning appraisal of PWE activities. Despite the relatively
easy task they had (“because the Italians were opposed to the war the
market for our wares should have been easy to break into”), he claimed
never to have seen evidence of significant success.15 “Although I cannot
speak for the German section, run by my esteemed colleague Sefton
Delmer,” he wrote, “in spite of the exceptional talent he showed for the
work, I very much doubt that its real effectiveness was much greater.”
Martelli’s letter was the cause of much ire, casting doubt on Crossman’s
self-mythologizing tendencies and indicting the propaganda departments
for amateurism.
13 Richard Crossman, “Letter”, The Times (16 May 1973).

14 Crossman, “Letter”, The Times (16 May 1973). This idea—that Britain was highly
accomplished in the “black arts”—has a grain of truth but has been heavily mythologized
in the endless retellings of the war, a peculiar expression of nationalism that reflects
Britain’s diminished position in global affairs. In a fascinating essay on the appeal spy
novels, Nicholas Dames writes that “If the British became identified with spy fiction in
the twentieth century, it is not because, as some have it, of a native tendency toward
deception and secrecy” but rather because the genre has a natural affinity with imperial
decline: “Coming in from the Cold: On Spy Fiction”, n + 1 issue 31 (2018).
15 George Martelli, “Letter”, The Times (4 June 1973).
Propagandist Erik Nissen vehemently defended subversive propaganda

against Martelli’s criticism, citing a Nazi reward of 100,000 Kroner
offered in Norway to anyone who would deliver pirate broadcasters to
justice.16 W.H.C. Frend lamented that PWE was closed down before it
could be put to use in the cold war.17 Alec Bishop, who relieved Robert
Bruce Lockhart as PWE Director-General during a bout of illness in
1945, was not so quick to reject Martelli’s assessment: “I doubt whether
the morale of the enemy forces was much affected by our activities,”
wrote Bishop, “though I think we did have a considerable influence
on the populations of occupied countries, and to a lesser extent on the
civilian population of Germany.”18 To this, he credited the veracity of
the BBC European Service, rather than any clandestine work. Meanwhile,
Peter Ritchie Calder “never believed that we could effectively divide the
Germans after the announcement of ‘unconditional surrender’… but we
did confuse and disturb them and ‘soften them up’.”19
In a subsequent letter, Martelli was dismissive of Calder’s claim that
clandestine station Radio Livorno was decisive in keeping the Italian Navy
out of German hands after the fall of Mussolini. “This is a typical example
of the capacity for self-deception and wishful thinking that characterized
the whole ‘black’ operation”, wrote Martelli,
I was one of the first British officers to on board the flagship when the
Italian fleet was lying off Malta, and one of the first questions I asked the
Italian admiral was what he thought of our propaganda. The answer was
that except for the BBC he had never heard of it.20
Despite Martelli’s strong criticism, however, the balance of the commen-

tary agreed that propaganda contributed to Allied victory, if only in an
oblique and unquantifiable manner.
16 Martelli’s claims seem to have endangered a few reputations. Tellingly, Nissen felt
compelled to cite his address as the Special Forces Club: Erik Nissen, “Letter”, The Times
(7 June 1973).
17 W.H.C. Frend, “Letter”, The Times (7 June 1973).
18 Alec Bishop, “Letter”, The Times (21 June 1973).
19 Peter Ritchie Calder, “Letter”, The Times (11 June 1973).
20 Martelli, “Letter”, The Times (18 June 1973).
234 K. R. GRAHAM
This exchange in The Times was reprised only a few years later when
the PWE files were made public for the first time. Predictably, disagree-
ments about the efficacy of British subversive propaganda survive into
the historical literature. Cruickshank’s speculations are fairly dismissive,
rooted in his criticism of Britain’s cult of the amateur. White propaganda,
he argues, “probably had no effect at all on the German civilian popu-
lation… Black propaganda probably had more bite in it, so far as the
German civilians were concerned; but once again it is difficult to believe
that it changed the course of the war at all.”21 Cruickshank speculates that
rumours spread better among civilian populations than military; even so,
he notes “the German High Command found it necessary to take special
measures to control rumour-mongering.”22 But, for Cruickshank, this is
not proof that PWE was achieving its mission.
In 1978, Jesuit historian Robert Graham claimed that “British ‘autho-
rized lies’ radioed to Europe during the Second World War had a perma-
nently distorting influence on the true version of events.”23 Lingering
concerns about the Catholic Church’s complicity in fascism disturbed
many clerics in the post-war period. Father Graham sought to rescue the
Church’s reputation by placing blame on PWE’s irresponsible rumour-
mongering. Cruickshank baulked at this claim in an interview: “I find it
difficult to take seriously the suggestion that false rumours put out by
PWE in the last war had any real influence on the course of events then,
and I certainly cannot believe that they had any lasting effects.”24 But
Cruickshank’s dismissal of PWE’s work is no more the historiographical
consensus than Martelli’s is the veterans’ consensus.
Writing a short time later, Michael Balfour argues with some surety that
black propaganda “spread rumour and suspicion… and thus helped to
separate leaders from the led and to create an atmosphere of war weariness
21 Charles Cruickshank, The Fourth Arm: Psychological Warfare 1938–1945 (London:

Davis-Poynter, 1977), 167.
23 Peter Henessy, “British Wartime Lies”, The Times (20 January 1978).
24 Henessy, “British Wartime Lies”, The Times (20 January 1978). Father Graham
published extensively in defence of the Vatican, also claiming that Communist propa-
ganda had tarnished Pope Pius XII’s reputation: Robert A. Graham, The Vatican and
Communism During World War II: What Really Happened (San Francisco: St Ignatius
Press, 1996); Robert Mcg. Thomas Jr., “Robert A. Graham Dies at 84; Priest Defended
Wartime Pope”, New York Times (17 February 1997).
and defeatism.”25 Meanwhile, independent historian Ellic Howe opens

his 1982 study with an overview of the above-mentioned exchange in
The Times, arguing that “[i]n retrospect Mr Martelli got it all wrong.”26
Proud of the department’s work, Howe concedes that the outcomes
are immeasurable but only holds reservations regarding the department’s
output before Sefton Delmer began to consolidate his position within the
German Section in 1941.27 It is worth remembering that both Howe and
Balfour were themselves veterans of the propaganda war.
There might a hope to resolve this debate with reference to German
wartime records, but conclusive answers are not forthcoming. It would be
illuminating, for example, to uncover statements from Nazi or Germany
military leaders regarding the trouble caused by British propaganda. But
in Hitler’s conferences with the Kriegsmarine leadership only occasion-
ally were references made to British propaganda. Sometimes Hitler would
discuss BBC propaganda, such as those programmes describing the details
of British ship-building outputs, broadcasts which were certainly a strand
in the larger web of morale subversion.28 However, in the surviving
record, only a single reference is made to the long-running station
Deutscher Kurzwellensender Atlantik/ Soldatensender Calais , observing
that the station had anticipated a German plan to blow up a bridge.29
Hitler did blame enemy propaganda for the civil unrest in occupied
25 Michael Balfour, Propaganda in War, 1939–1945 (London: Routledge, 1979), 99.

During the Second World War (London: Michael Joseph, 1982), 5; Pauline Elkes also
briefly comments on this exchange to demonstrate the way in which the historical
consensus sidelines PWE intelligence work: Elkes, “The Political Warfare Executive: A
Re-evaluation Based upon the Intelligence Work of the German Section”, PhD Thesis,
University of Sheffield (1996), 7–8.
28 “Report of the Commanding Admiral, Submarines at Fuehrer Headquarters on 14
May 1942”, Fuehrer Conferences on Matters Dealing with the German Navy (Washington,
DC: U.S. Navy Department, 1947), 488; “Report of the Conference with the Fuehrer in
the Reich Chancellery on Monday, 28 September 1942”, Fuehrer Conferences on Matters
Dealing with the German Navy, 523; the published record of Hitler’s conferences with
the Wehrmacht command is no more enlightening: Helmut Heiber (editor), Hitler and
His Generals: Military Conferences 1942–1945, trans. Roland Winter, Krista Smith, and
Mary Beth Friedrich (New York: Enigma Books, 2003).
29 “Conference of the Commander in Chief, Navy with the Fuehrer on the 12 March
1945”, Fuehrer Conferences on Matters Dealing with the German Navy, 79.
236 K. R. GRAHAM
Denmark that led Germany to scuttle the Royal Danish Navy.30 But in
these reports made to Hitler, the connection between enemy propaganda
and the morale of German servicemen and civilians was at best tenuous.
In the weeks after the Allies’ devastating fire-bombing of the port city
of Hamburg, Großadmiral Karl Dönitz—then supreme commander of the
German Navy—visited the city to assess the extent of the damage. He
reported that in order to maintain war production, “the most impor-
tant thing is to keep up confidence, and with that the will to work,
and the spirit of the worker.”31 In identifying the danger to morale,
however, he made no mention of enemy propaganda; instead, he decried
the “intelligentsia” who “[b]y senseless chatter… help to bring about the
destruction of the very things which are dear to them.”32 As Stargardt
notes, the bombing of Hamburg was a uniquely terrible event in the
minds of ordinary Germans, precipitating a period of crisis in which angry
civilians spoke openly of regime change and even “tore party insignia
from the clothes of officials,” a crisis in which rumour ascribed the scale
of destruction to an act of revenge for what Germany had done to the
Jews.33 With regard to German morale, rumours ranked high among
Nazi leaders’ concerns but, as the Führer conferences indicate, this does
not mean that Nazi officials necessarily connected them with foreign
propaganda.
In the surviving Nazi SD reports on popular opinion and behaviour
in the Third Reich, it is unusual to see a comment on foreign propa-
ganda mentioned alongside its reception by Germans. While enemy leaflet
propaganda was obviously a concern enough for the regime for it to
feature regularly among SD observations, these reports rarely discuss how
such propaganda affected German morale. Where morale was discussed,
early reports often stated merely that enemy propaganda had no effect.34
30 “Afternoon War Situation Report”, Fuehrer Conferences on Matters Dealing with the
German Navy (entry dated 29 August 1943),133.
31 Karl Dönitz, “Conversations with the Fuehrer”, Fuehrer Conferences on Matters
Dealing with the German Navy (entry dated 19 August 1943), 127.
32 It is of course possible that this chattering cohort was a partial product of, or
allusion to, foreign propaganda. And the destruction of Hamburg would certainly have
shaken popular confidence in Nazi propaganda.
33 Stargardt, “Beyond ‘Consent’ or ‘Terror’”, 197–199.
34 “Bericht zur innenpolitischen Lage (Nr. 5)” (18 October 1939), Meldungen aus
dem Reich: Die geheimen Lageberichte des Sicherheitsdienstes der SS 1938–1945, vol. 2, ed.
In one case, a report even mentioned that school authorities gave permis-
sion for teachers and their students to collect and dispose of recently
dropped British leaflets, suggesting some fairly innocuous material.35
In early 1940, the reports began to address changes in the morale
(die Stimmung) of certain sections of the population alongside discus-
sions of enemy propaganda, but they drew no correlation between the
two.36 In March 1940, a report mentioned that leaflets including aerial
photographs of German cities left an impression on the German public,
but in the same month another report was dismissive of enemy propa-
ganda in general.37 Reports became increasingly detailed over the course
of 1940 and 1941, but links between enemy propaganda and German
morale remained exceptions. More often these reports simply recorded
where leaflets were dropped, and usually included a verbatim account of
their content.
In discussions of radio propaganda, meanwhile, the SD reports
revealed the uneven and confused way in which prohibitions on foreign
broadcasting were imposed. And anecdotal reports on broadcast propa-
ganda sent to Goebbels’s propaganda ministry expressed similar frus-
trations and were typically concerned with radio jamming rather than
propaganda’s effect on a population. Exceptions tended to concern
enemy propaganda directed at foreign nationals working under German
authority.38 A report from 1942 suggested that British propaganda was
having a troublesome effect in France where German counter-propaganda
Heinz Boberach (Herrsching: Pawlak Verlag, 1984), 364; “Bericht zur innenpolitischen
Lage (Nr. 5)” (6 November 1939), Meldungen aus dem Reich, vol. 2, 421; “Bericht zur
innenpolitischen Lage (Nr. 15)” (13 November 1939), Meldungen aus dem Reich, vol. 3,
449.
35 “Bericht zur innenpolitischen Lage (Nr. 16)” (15 November 1939), Meldungen aus
dem Reich, vol. 3, 456.
36 “Meldungen aus dem Reich (Nr. 39)” (12 January 1940), Meldungen aus dem Reich,
vol. 3, 634–635; “Meldungen aus dem Reich (Nr. 43)” (22 January 1940), Meldungen
aus dem Reich, vol. 3, 667.
37 “Meldungen aus dem Reich (Nr. 61)” (4 March 1940), Meldungen aus dem Reich,
vol. 3, 833; “Meldungen aus dem Reich (Nr. 65)” (13 March 1940), Meldungen aus dem
Reich, vol. 3, 875–876.
38 Bundesarchiv R55/1253, Reichsministerium für Volksaufklärung und Propaganda,
Angelegenheit der Abhördienste, Memorandum, “Betrift: Abhörmaterial für den Chef des
Kommandos der Waffen-SS” (26 March 1942); Bundesarchiv R55/1253, Angelegenheit
der Abhördienste, Memorandum, “betr. ‘Soldatensender Calais’” (6 December 1943).
238 K. R. GRAHAM
was being ignored.39 Another report from the same period suggested that
PWE’s clandestine station Wehrmachtsender Nord was causing trouble for
Nazi propagandists trying to steer popular opinion in Norway.40 Unfor-
tunately, the SD reports covering the later period of the war, in which
British clandestine propaganda was at its most prolific, were destroyed by
the SS in the attempt to cover up Nazi crimes.
Winning the Peace

In an essay written shortly after the war, Richard Crossman suggested
that the dialectical nature of a world in which “two propaganda machines
are fighting it out… automatically releases at least a minority from the
enslavement of the mind.”41 By this reasoning, the simple dissonance
instilled by foreign propaganda was, in Crossman’s eyes, enough to keep
“occupied Europe intellectually alive.” In reflecting on his experience with
PWE, Balfour similarly writes that “it looked at the time like nothing so
much as a dog’s dinner,” but later recognized that this “confusion is the
by-product of plurality and that in plurality lay a seed of success.”42 Ordi-
nary Germans were news-starved and desperate so it is unsurprising that,
in the final months of the war, with Nazi propaganda’s credibility eroded
by daily experiences, as Marlis Steinert writes, “more and more Germans
tuned to foreign radio stations.” 43 If nothing else, PWE’s optimists could
boast that they managed to sow confusion, corrupt the party line, and
perhaps even cultivate a seed of pluralism so important to the ideology of
liberal democracy.
39 “Meldungen aus dem Reich (Nr. 331)” (2 November 1942), Meldungen aus dem
Reich, vol. 11, 4406–4407.
40 Bundesarchiv R55/1253, Angelegenheit der Abhördienste, report Gez. Stache f.d.R.
to Herrn Chefingenieur Dominik, “Ihre Mitteilung vom 14. Okt. – Feindeinspruch.” (21
October 1942).
41 Crossman, “Supplementary Essay”, Sykewar: Psychological Warfare Against Germany,
D-Day to VE-Day, ed. Daniel Lerner (New York: George W. Stewart, 1949), 329. The
gesture to Cold War rhetoric is not a coincidence. Crossman was by this point a dedicated
anti-communist, editing in 1949 a collection of essays by prominent ex-communists under
the title The God That Failed (New York: Harper Colophon, 1949).
42 Balfour, Propaganda in War, 101–102.
43 Marlis G. Steinert, Hitler’s War and the Germans: Public Mood and Attitude During
the Second World War, ed. and trans. Thomas E.J. de Witt (Athens, OH: Ohio UP, 1977),
276.
For most British commentators, the question of subversive propa-

ganda’s efficacy is complicated by the problem of war aims. Robert Bruce
Lockhart later described the limitations this placed on subversion: “For a
long time”, he wrote, “there was not official policy about the future of
Germany, and we were left to grope our way as best we could.”44 During
the early phase of the war, Department EH protested that their propa-
ganda deliberately did not “[appeal] to the Germans to revolt against
Hitler & Co.” because the propagandists lacked a clear mandate and
the Allies had not yet conceived of an alternative future to offer the
Germans.45 Written in the turbulent period following Churchill’s rise
to power, this defence of the department’s work argued that concrete
outcomes would only be possible once policymakers had decided on a
course of action. Without some post-war future to strive for, propaganda
could never hope to compromise the enemy’s will to resist, let alone win
the peace. “Generalities,” in such a situation, were “worse than useless –
just fodder for the enemy propaganda machine.”46 One could not ask
so-called good Germans to lay down their lives for vague assurances.
When, in January 1943, a definite pronouncement was finally made by
the Allied leaders from Casablanca, the form it took—a demand for
Germany’s unconditional surrender—seemingly limited the options for
propaganda even more. Without a “hope clause,” Lockhart reasoned,
there was nothing propaganda could offer other than mischief.47
Many propagandists and historians alike have interpreted the Allies’
demand for unconditional surrender as the reason that subversive propa-
ganda did not make more significant headway following Germany’s loss
at Stalingrad. After the Casablanca Declaration, the self-evidently talented
British propagandists could only make the best of a bad situation. Indeed,
the problem of war aims and the demand for unconditional surrender
are defining features of the historiography around PWE. In his extensive
work on British propaganda in the twentieth century, Philip M. Taylor
identifies the absence of clear war aims in Allied European policy as a
major detriment to the efficacy of propaganda: “PWE failed to emulate
44 Robert Bruce Lockhart, Comes the Reckoning (London: Putnam, 1947), 158.
45 TNA FO 898/3, Monsignor Vance, “What Has E.H. Attempted?” (2 June 1940).
Given the general thrust of the Department’s thinking up to then, it is likely Vance was
either withholding information or being excessively defensive.
46 TNA FO 898/3, Monsignor Vance, “What Has E.H. attempted?” (2 June 1940).
47 Lockhart, Comes the Reckoning, 158, 229.
240 K. R. GRAHAM
the experience of 1918” in the final months of the war, according to

Taylor, because of “the policy of Unconditional Surrender” which “placed
all Germans in the Nazi boat.”48 Without any definite future to point to,
propagandists were limited to vague gestures and protracted attempts to
encourage self-interest against the benefit of the Nazi Party. Balfour, too,
argues that the policy of unconditional surrender forestalled any chance
of success in propaganda.49 Consequently, he suggests, “the failure of
propaganda must be attributed to it and not to any lack of forensic or
technical skill on the part of the propagandists.”
The demand for unconditional surrender may well have reduced
PWE’s flexibility, particularly with regards to open broadcasting. Beyond
this, a lack of clear war aims meant that British propagandists “had
to resort to statements about the inevitability of Germany’s defeat, the
prolonging of German agony by continued resistance, and the corruption
of the Nazi regime by way of contrast to the democratic and increas-
ingly victorious Allies.”50 As previous chapters suggest, however, these
broad themes were only a part of a complex array of ideas broadcast
from Britain. There is no reason to doubt that PWE felt the effect of
the Casablanca Declaration, but they felt it in ways that the Germans
did not. Kershaw’s study of the Third Reich’s final months demonstrates
the complexity of reasons for why Germany was compelled (and even
willing) to fight until the very end. Of those arguments pointing towards
the Casablanca Declaration, he has no illusions: “The Allied demand
for ‘unconditional surrender’, often seen as ruling out any alternative to
fighting on to the end, provides no adequate explanation.”51 These histo-
riographical developments make room for a reconsideration of the way
that historians and propagandists have understood the effect of policy on
propaganda.
There is reason to question this abiding emphasis on the policy of
unconditional surrender. Besides the fact that Hitler had no interest in a
48 Philip M. Taylor, “Introduction”, Allied Propaganda in World War II: The Complete
Record of the Political Warfare Executive (FO 898): from the Public Records Office London,
Microfilm Collection, ed. Philip M. Taylor (Woodbridge, CO: Primary Source Microfilm,
2005), 11; Taylor, Munitions of the Mind: A History of Propaganda from the Ancient
51 Kershaw, The End: Hitler’s Germany, 1944–45 (London: Allen Lane, 2011), 386.
negotiated peace—even if ordinary Germans and Wehrmacht elites enter-

tained such fantasies—these arguments do not account for the common
German fear of the Soviet menace (whipped up by Goebbels’s propa-
gandists) and public complicity in National Socialist crimes, nor do they
properly consider the terroristic character of Nazi repression against
the German population. Significantly, in recent decades, research into
German attitudes to the war has shifted to take German subjectivity seri-
ously; among the wartime crises that punctuated German experience, it
seems that the Casablanca Declaration was ultimately a very minor blip
on the cognitive radar of the Third Reich.52 However, even Marlis Stein-
ert’s research on German popular opinion, published contemporary to
the earliest academic histories of PWE, demonstrates that “[the Nazi]
proclamation of total war,” which supposedly impeded British propaganda
efforts, “was not a consequence of the Allied statement on ‘unconditional
surrender’ of January 24, 1943, and had been prepared well prior” with
Nazi propaganda to this effect escalating from the 4th of January; in fact,
Steinert’s research suggests that total war had long been “anticipated by
Goebbels, by certain elements of the armed forces, by Albert Speer… and
by a large majority of the working population.”53 As David Welch writes,
Goebbels only used the policy of unconditional surrender, coupled with
the German defeat at Stalingrad, as a foil to rally popular support for
the idea of total war throughout the first months of 1943.54 As German
servicemen and workers saw it, they were already fighting a millenarian
battle.
For commentators already convinced of the quality of British efforts
in morale subversion, counterfactual arguments have proved invaluable.
If it were not for subversive propaganda, propagandists like Crossman
reasoned, the war would have dragged on longer. And if it were not
for the complication of war aims, Balfour and Taylor argue, subver-
sive propaganda would have been more demonstrably effective. Even
Cruickshank employs a counterfactual question, although his research
52 Stargardt’s intricately detailed The German War omits discussion of the Casablanca
Declaration, suggesting that it was a non-issue among ordinary Germans. Ian Kershaw
affirms this view, discussing the way that the regime’s unique structures invested the Third
Reich with the peculiar dynamism of its final months, a context in which “unconditional
surrender” was little more than a stimulus for Nazi propaganda: Kershaw, The End, 7–8.
53 Steinert, Hitler’s War and the Germans, 187.
54 Welch, “Today Germany, Tomorrow the World”, 99–101.
242 K. R. GRAHAM
leads his conclusions in the opposite direction: “The devices thought

up by black propagandists were ingenious, and they were implemented
with infinite patience and skill”, he writes, “but if it is asked, would the
war have been prolonged by a single day if these black games had not
been played it is difficult to justify any answer but no.”55 The use of
counterfactuals in such arguments presents an interesting situation. As
Richard J. Evans argues, counterfactual historical arguments—in recent
years, almost exclusively the preserve of methodologically and politically
conservative historians—“[t]oo often… fall prey to wishful thinking.”56
Enthusiasm for these “what ifs” reflects an overriding concern with almost
mechanical models of causality that are often prejudiced against compli-
cated and dynamic social factors. Certainly, such research has produced
insightful scholarship, but it has also entrenched significant blind spots.
In addressing the theoretical problems around the history of subversive
propaganda, this book attempts to get away from the implied counter-
factual here to speculate about the effects that British propaganda might
have had despite the problems apparently caused by Allied policy.
Even while acknowledging the limitations placed on propaganda by
policy, Lockhart was convinced that British “secret propaganda had a
very considerable effect in sapping and undermining the efficiency of the
Nazi war-machine.”57 Where did this enthusiasm for subversive propa-
ganda come from, and how was it sustained? As detailed in Chapter
Two, PWE’s political culture had considerable bearing on British faith
in the propaganda. On touring the facilities at the PWE’s country head-
quarters in Bedfordshire, for example, Brendan Bracken was reportedly
“impressed by the quality of the voices and of the various announcers
which he pronounced as much more virile and effective than those of
the B.B.C.”58 Hugh Dalton was not interested in the nitty–gritty of
propaganda but his fervour for subversion in general led him to a heated
conflict with Duff Cooper, then Minister of Information, over control

56 Richard J. Evans, Altered Pasts: Counterfactuals in History (Waltham, MA: Brandeis
UP/Historical Society of Israel, 2013), 123.
57 Robert Bruce Lockhart, Comes the Reckoning, 373.
of open broadcasting.59 Anthony Eden was ambivalent about propa-

ganda when he became Foreign Secretary, but declared in June 1944
that “to give up all control of Political Warfare would mean to cease
being Foreign Secretary.”60 Michael Stenton writes that propaganda was
a relatively inexpensive weapon of war; “[l]ike Bletchley,” he observes,
“PWE had a logical potential that made past results beside the point.”61
Also pertinent is Martelli’s cynical observation that “like other tempo-
rary government departments the PWE had become a vast vested interest
which it was politically impossible to liquidate [sic].”62 Precipitated by
staff re-shuffling, certain reforms of outlook were possible, but continu-
ities persisted. Under these conditions, it is perhaps predictable that weak
evidence of propaganda efficacy would be inflated in value.
Evidence of reception reports, or “comebacks,” were a regular
feature of PWE memoranda and figured prominently in justifications
of the department’s work. A “comeback” was propagandist lingo for
a report that demonstrated the enemy had encountered a piece of
propaganda. Examples might include German newspaper articles repro-
ducing rumours of British origin, or discussions among recently captured
German servicemen that suggested familiarity with British broadcasting.
Curiously, these reports rarely gave consideration as to how the audi-
ence was interpreting British propaganda. Given its scarcity and tenuous
nature, the value of this evidence was also almost invariably overstated.
In fact, the nature of these comebacks impelled Ivone Kirkpatrick—in
his capacity as Controller of the BBC European Service—to complain
that PWE’s monthly reports “dealt with little except output and imme-
diately prompted the question as to whether the output was in fact
reaching anybody.”63 To this end, Rex Leeper’s 1942 memorandum on
the methodology of black propaganda is illuminating. He insisted that
comebacks were among the best means of gauging the effectiveness of
59 Stenton writes that “[subversive propaganda] was spicy enough to be tempting to

Dalton though only indirectly useful”, Radio London, 18.
60 Anthony Eden, quoted in Pronay, “Introduction: ‘To Stamp Out the Whole
Tradition…’”, 22.
62 Martelli, “Letter”, The Times (4 June 1973).
63 TNA FO 898/13, Minutes “Meeting of the Propaganda Policy Committee” (19
March 1942).
244 K. R. GRAHAM
propaganda. “Many pages of such evidence are in the files of P.W.E.,” he

wrote,
and not a week passes without further evidence arriving. But one must not
judge purely by evidence, reassuring as it may be to those engaged upon
the actual work. There is only one sound standard for judgment, viz. is
there a carefully thought out plan for the work, are the various aspects
of the work properly coordinated, is the execution deftly handled with an
adequate background of information and understanding?64
By this model, comebacks merely provided confirmation that the propa-

ganda had found its audience. Anticipating post-war technocratic gover-
nance, only by thorough planning may the propagandist presume that the
desired outcome had been achieved.
As this discussion suggests, documents arguing for the efficacy of
subversion often framed the audience as passive in its encounter with
propaganda. While a great deal of time and energy went into ensuring that
the audience’s interpretation of material accorded with the aims of the
propagandists, the audience itself was granted little agency in the equa-
tion. An example illustrates the point. The proposal put to Eden for a new
subversive station hosted by the captured German General Wilhelm Ritter
von Thoma argued that PWE’s clandestine broadcasts were “so demon-
strably popular with the rank and file that there are grounds for hope that
the virus they contain will work to the advantage of the United Nations
on and after D-day of OVERLORD.”65 PWE knew that they had an audi-
ence willingly engaging with their propaganda at great personal risk. But
there is an assumption here that this audience’s attitude would comply
with the propagandists’ objectives—a large audience for anti-Nazi propa-
ganda must surely translate to a respectable segment of the Wehrmacht
willing to throw down their arms, no? In reality, the paradox perplexed
(and roused) wartime researchers. “In Normandy, where the relatively
small front was blanketed with printed material, up to 90 per cent of the
Ps/W reported that they had read Allied leaflets,” as OSS sociologists
64 TNA FO 898/63, Rex Leeper, Memorandum “Black Propaganda” (18 July 1942).
65 TNA FO 898/51, Memorandum “Proposal for a New German R.U.” (16 March
1944); evidence suggests that this station never eventuated because Thoma was “rabidly
anti-Russian” and an accord at the time meant that the Foreign Office would have to
consult with their Soviet counterparts: TNA FO 898/51, Robert Bruce Lockhart to
Anthony Eden, “I Think We Shall Have to Think Again” (7 April 1944).
Edward Shils and Morris Janowitz demonstrated in their post-war anal-

ysis of the Wehrmacht, “yet this period was characterized by very high
German morale and stiff resistance.”66 Even in highly nuanced propa-
ganda campaigns, which anticipated the potential for multiple discrete
interpretations, the expected audience response was essentially mechan-
ical. By 1944, for example, Catholic-oriented black leaflets were no longer
just meant for Catholics. PWE determined that on picking up such a
leaflet even a non-Catholic reader would learn “of a militant Catholic
opposition printing its own leaflets” while being “given a piece of demor-
alizing information, e.g. concerning the spread of epidemics from South
Eastern Europe into the Reich, on which he will be prepared to believe
the Catholic Church has credible sources of information.”67 So long
as the leaflet appeared sufficiently authentic, an appropriately subver-
sive message would be conveyed. This late-war attitude to propaganda
may have granted more scope to public agency but audience response
remained prescriptive.
The evidence used to demonstrate British subversive propaganda’s effi-
cacy was flimsy. In concert with the propagandists’ own preconceived
ideas about Germany, however, it was more than enough to affirm the
logic of morale subversion. It was perhaps inevitable that the Casablanca
Declaration would concern propagandists who were otherwise convinced
of the quality of their work. More surprising is the fact that some
later historians would continue to present the demand for unconditional
surrender as a substantive answer to the question of propaganda’s efficacy.
Of course, the relationship between propagandist and audience was more
dynamic than could possibly be conveyed in a simple comeback. This issue
becomes especially pertinent when considering some of the elisions and
prejudices that made up the propagandists’ perspective on Germany and
underpinned the broad campaign of subversive propaganda.
66 Edward Shils and Morris Janowitz, “Cohesion and Disintegration in the Wehrmacht
in World War II”, The Public Opinion Quarterly 12.2 (1948): 311.
67 TNA FO 898/61, Memorandum: “Briefly, What We Are Aiming at in Our Political
Warfare to Germany Is the Reduction of Germany to a State of Non-Combattance” (c.
1944 or early 1945).
246 K. R. GRAHAM
Anti-Semitism and the Morality of Resistance

In parsing the archival material pertaining to British foreign propaganda,
the Nazi persecution of the Jews hardly emerges as the defining attribute
of the Third Reich. Michael Fleming suggests that the reason Foreign
Office archives generally are not brimming with Holocaust-related liter-
ature is because these files were systematically collated during the final
months of the war in preparation for war crime trials.68 It is entirely
likely that PWE’s documents around the Holocaust have been simi-
larly repurposed. Nevertheless, as previous chapters intimate, for the
most part British propagandists’ understanding of Nazism placed little
emphasis on anti-Semitism. One might even suspect that (relatively
moderate) anti-Semitism fostered a lamentable blind spot for British offi-
cials. Walter Laqueur writes that PWE played down the murder of the
Jews because the propagandists believed exploiting the “Jewish theme”
was “quite pointless” and that “such declarations would only result in
increased maltreatment.”69 This is certainly an argument made at times
by the propagandists themselves. But there may be a more complicated
explanation.
Among the early calls to include reportage of German atrocities in
British propaganda, the argument ran that this was “the only way to
neutralise the enemy’s tales of ‘allied atrocities’.”70 A contemporary
critical stocktake of British propaganda was dismissive of this strategy,
however, suggesting that
It is no good expressing horror at German disregard for the rights of

small nations and German treatment of Poles, Czechs and Jews: the Nazis
and most other Germans of the elements now running the Reich like
oppressing minorities.71
68 Michael Fleming, Auschwitz, the Allies, and Censorship of the Holocaust (Cambridge:
Cambridge UP, 2014), 11.
69 Walter Laqueur, The Terrible Secret: An Investigation into the Suppression of Infor-
mation about Hitler’s ‘Final Solution’ (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1981),
92.
70 TNA FO 898/3, “Memorandum—Part II Themes of Propaganda” (archival context
suggests, c. October or November 1939).
71 Emphasis in the original: TNA FO 898/3, Memorandum (6 December 1939).
Similarly, in the early drafts for the PWE-produced British soldiers’ guide
to Germany, Foreign Office representative Neville Montagu Butler made
some unusual remarks: “the Germans take a sort of sneaking pride in
their robust treatment of the Jews,” he wrote in May 1943, “it is most
desirable that our troops should take them up sharply on this.”72 Butler’s
comment—written at a time when British intelligence was well aware of
the scale and nature of the Holocaust—is striking. Butler rationalized the
German reaction to this monumental transgression as if Germany were
the disciplinarian schoolmaster to an unfortunate student. In the propa-
gandists’ papers, German atrocities were often spoken of in general terms
but, as these documents suggest, the character and significance of Nazi
anti-Semitism—not to mention its intimate association with the broader
tendencies of modern European anti-Semitism—tended to be obscured.
Archival evidence suggests that this conflation led to, or exacerbated,
ambivalence towards the persecution of the Jews. In the months before
the war, as discussions were underway for the proposed Ministry of Infor-
mation, a planning committee convened to discuss religious propaganda
and decided it was necessary to leave the Jewish question to one side.
According to SIS liaison Valentine Williams, one of the committee’s reli-
gious experts had “manifested some reluctance to include Jewry in his
proposals for propaganda among the different religions, saying he felt
this was a problem affecting many different countries.”73 With an eye on
the international situation, Williams disagreed, recognizing that “this was
one of the most important questions to be dealt with as in any conflict,
Palestine notwithstanding, the whole of international Jewry would be
solidly on the side of Hitler’s enemies.” Evidently, Jewish opposition
to Nazism was not immediately obvious to British planners. But it was
not until mid-1941 that the Jewish section of the Ministry of Informa-
tion’s Religious Division was finally established. Its purview was limited,
however; according to Ian McLaine, the Section “was not allowed to
touch on ‘political problems’ – chiefly because of the Zionist controversy
– and was therefore confined to disseminating propaganda to the Jewish
72 Neville Montagu Butler, quoted in Edward Hampshire, “Introduction”, Germany

1944: The British Soldier’s Pocketbook (Kew: The National Archives, 2006), xi.
73 TNA FO 898/2, Valentine Williams, Report “Ministry of Information. Publicity
Division. Planning Section”, Weekly Meeting (27 June 1939).
248 K. R. GRAHAM
community and explaining Jewish religious life to [British] Christian citi-

zens.”74 Compared to the Catholic and Protestant sections advising PWE
on religious matters, this was a paltry mandate.
In his research into the Allied knowledge of Auschwitz, Fleming
discusses a Ministry of Information planning document that excluded
simultaneously both Jews and “violent political opponents” from inclu-
sion in propaganda as victims of atrocity, restricting such stories instead
to “indisputably innocent people.”75 The implication here—that Jews
were somehow complicit in their own persecution—is grotesque but not
far removed from the contemporary views of many liberals. As Fleming
writes, “[t]he rationale behind this policy was that highlighting what was
happening to Jews in Europe might accentuate the antisemitic sentiment
pervasive in Britain.”76 While they may not have shared such preju-
dices, British officials’ considered anti-Semitism an issue to be navigated
rather than opposed. Tony Kushner demonstrates that British govern-
ment attempts to counter Nazi ideology led officials to “deny consistently
that Jews were in any way a separate entity” but rather “were simply
foreign nationals of a different religion.”77 Affirming Kushner’s argu-
ment, Stephanie Seul’s recent research into the relationship between
mid-century anti-Semitism and British press and propaganda organiza-
tions demonstrates that the BBC German Service was especially reluctant
to single out Jews as victims because they were concerned that this would
be interpreted as a validation of Nazi race science.78 Here, it was under-
stood that empathy with Jewish suffering would play directly into Nazi
propaganda, aligning an imagined Jewish conspiracy with a hostile foreign
power i.e. Britain. For myriad reasons, knowledge of Nazi anti-Semitism
74 Ian McLaine, Ministry of Morale: Home Front Morale and the Ministry of Information
in World War II (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1979), 168.
75 Michael Fleming, “Allied Knowledge of Auschwitz: A (Further) Challenge to the
‘Elusiveness’ Narrative”, Holocaust and Genocide Studies 28.1 (2014): 37; this document
has been widely cited, also featuring in Laqueur’s work, The Terrible Secret, 91.
76 Fleming, “Allied Knowledge of Auschwitz”, 37.
77 Tony Kushner, The Persistence of Prejudice: Antisemitism in British Society During the
Second World War (Manchester: Manchester UP, 1989), 135.
78 Stephanie Seul, “The Representation of the Holocaust in the British Propaganda
Campaign Directed at the German Public, 1938–1945”, Leo Baeck Year Book 52 (2007):
283–284.
was channelled by propagandists into atrocities directed more generally

against civilians to reflect the barbarousness of the regime.
PWE was hesitant to use their platform to openly describe atrocities
in general, and the persecution of Jews in particular, but they did not
demur from propagandizing on genocide in the form of rumours. One
such rumour, which travelled from PWE to Europe and back again (at
least according to PWE “comeback” research), suggested that “[c]ases
weighing 70–100 kilos and containing grease rendered from human
fat (smelling of decomposition) have been passing through Wroclaw,
addressed to ‘Chemische Fabrik’, Breslau. They are sent from the camp
at Oswiemcim [sic].”79 Another rumour suggested that the “[s]hortage
of blood for transfusion is so great that SS medical units are draining
blood from all Jews executed in Poland, which is bottled and sent to
the East Front.”80 The composition of these rumours was not neces-
sarily a reflection of Foreign Office policy and, in fact, the Foreign Office
and the Ministry of Information may have been ignorant of them. At
the time they were composed, the Foreign Office dictated the broad
parameters of policy, and frequently insisted on direct oversight (partic-
ularly when the BBC overstepped its mark), but evidence suggests that
a substantial part of PWE rumour-mongering was left to the judgement
of the propagandists themselves.81 In general, however, Delmer and his
colleagues continued to eschew talk of the persecution of Jews in German-
language propaganda. The surviving catalogue of rumours disseminated
via the clandestine broadcaster Soldatensender Calais (amounting to some
nine hundred pages covering most days from July 1943 to April 1945)
contains practically no mention of Jews. In a vanishingly rare direct
mention of the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp, Soldatensender Calais instead
described the escape of “500 Polish [rather than Jewish] prisoners”
during an air raid.82
Jews were subject to persecution throughout the years of Nazi rule,
but these horrors escalated dramatically once Germany was at war as “the
79 TNA FO 898/71, Osborne to Harrison, Memorandum (2 October 1943).

80 TNA FO 898/71, Rayner (NID) to Chambers (SIS), Report (4 September 1943).
81 In March 1943 a committee on rumour-mongering met to discuss rumours that
explicitly would not be vetted by the Foreign Office and the Services. Instead, these
rumours were to be compiled by direct consultation between Sefton Delmer and secret
service representatives: TNA FO 898/71, “Special Meeting on Sibs” (25 March 1943).
82 TNA FO 898/72, “G9 Report” (8 November 1944).
250 K. R. GRAHAM
culmination of a dynamic murderous process, propelled by increasingly

radical initiatives from above and below.”83 As Nazi Germany conquered
nations across Europe, Jews had their property confiscated, they were
ghettoized, and many were sent to forced labour camps. From June 1941,
the German army marched east into Soviet Russia, with paramilitary death
squads called Einsatzgruppen following in its wake. By the end of that
year, six hundred thousand Jews had been murdered by the Einsatz-
gruppen and the Wehrmacht who, together, were ultimately responsible
for the mass shootings of more than two million civilians, a majority of
whom were Jews who had been falsely identified as partisans. With the
German advance finally stalled by the Soviets at Moscow, a new phase
in the killing began. With Jews already being deported to concentration
camps from around Europe in late 1941, the machinery for industrial
murder was finally settled over the first months of 1942: “European
Jews would be concentrated in the occupied east and murdered there,
either straightaway or by working them to death.”84 Mass exterminations
began in the Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka, Auschwitz-Birkenau, Lublin and
Chelmo concentration camps shortly thereafter.
It was not until December 1942 that coverage of the Holocaust finally
began to escalate in open British domestic and overseas broadcasting,
partly as a result of public statements by Allied leaders regarding the
mass murder.85 “The reason for this belatedness,” Seul argues, “was
that the PWE had believed it still had not received absolutely reli-
able information.”86 Not until the end of the year in which three
million Jews were murdered did PWE—an organization which interpreted
oblique references in the foreign press as confirmation of its own subver-
sive potency—finally speak on this unprecedented atrocity because they
believed they lacked credible intelligence. For a brief period towards
the end of 1942, the BBC’s Holocaust coverage did markedly increase.
83 Nikolaus Wachsmann, KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps (London:

Little, Brown, 2015), 292.
84 Wachsmann, KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps, 295.
85 In Britain, the joint declaration regarding the German systematic mass murder of
the Jews was read by Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden during a sitting of the House
of Commons: House of Commons Debate, 17 December 1942, Hansard vol. 385
cc2082-7, Retrieved at: http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1942/dec/17/
united-nations-declaration#S5CV0385P0_19421217_HOC_280.
86 Seul, “The Representation of the Holocaust”, 293.
However, as Seul writes, this coverage was wound back again in early
1943 because PWE wanted the BBC “to stress that in all countries the
persecution of Jews had been the prelude to the persecution of other
populations.”87
As Laqueur argues, British observers were aware of the Nazi perse-
cution of Jews, but they appeared reluctant to admit the character of
this persecution.88 Fleming’s research demonstrates that senior propa-
ganda staff from PWE, the BBC and the Foreign Office, were well-
informed about the radicalization of German anti-Semitism; as he argues,
“Auschwitz was not elusive – it was an open secret. The British, it seems,
worked to ensure that the news from the camp did not threaten their
restrictive refugee policy or stimulate civil-society activity.”89 Fleming
points to a letter intercepted in May 1943 by the Postal and Tele-
graph Censorship Office, which detailed mass murder by gas chamber at
Auschwitz. While this letter had wide circulation at PWE and the Foreign
Office, news of Auschwitz did not prompt official interest; rather, “the
fact that the letter highlighted general conditions and sentiment in Poland
attracted FO and PWE attention.”90 Another report from Auschwitz that
arrived in Britain in the summer of 1943 likewise described industrial
murder by gas. “The scale, the method of killing, and the identity of the
victims all challenged the PWE’s narrative of the war,” writes Fleming;
but the report from Auschwitz ultimately changed little because “[t]he
information was not compatible with the way in which British propa-
ganda officials wished to report the war to both foreign and domestic
audiences.”91 Early planning had marginalized the issue of anti-Semitism,
a problem that was not easily remedied. Evidence of the Holocaust did

88 Laqueur’s arguments were affirmed in part by the British National Archives’ release
of documents relating to the Holocaust in the mid-1990s, detailed by Barbara Rogers
and later Michael Fleming, which indicate the Allies were in possession of credible intel-
ligence about Auschwitz and the Final Solution from late 1942. The document release
also included wartime radio intercepts, which reveal that Britain was able to decipher
detailed first-hand reports of the Einsatzgruppen’s genocidal activities within days of those
reports being sent to Berlin: Laqueur, The Terrible Secret, 90–100; Barbara Rogers, “Bri-
tish Intelligence and the Holocaust: Auschwitz and the Allies Re-examined”, The Journal
of Holocaust Education 8.1 (1999): 99–105; Fleming, “Allied Knowledge of Auschwitz”,
31–32.
90 Fleming, Auschwitz, the Allies, and Censorship of the Holocaust, 11.
252 K. R. GRAHAM
have some effect but after that brief escalation in reportage in the winter
of 1942/1943, Seul demonstrates that “the mass murders were [once
again] absorbed into the larger context of Nazi crimes committed in
occupied countries.”92
Many British propagandists were of course cognizant of racism’s
centrality to Nazism. Dan Stone places Frederic Voigt, the Department
EH German section chief, alongside Karl Polanyi and Aurel Kolnai as one
of those prescient interwar writers who “recognized that ‘the doctrine of
race and nationhood… is the main content of the Hitlerite myth’.”93
Voigt was an impassioned and sensitive critic of Nazism, more so at least
than many of his contemporaries, but even he demonstrated a marked
ambivalence about the place of the Jews in European society. He argued,
for example, that Jewish racial differences were demonstrably real and
that “[t]here is a case against the Jews as there is against the English,
the Germans and French.”94 In his analysis, Nazi anti-Semitism was thus
diffused into a more general nationalism, in which the fear of otherness
provoked by Jews was, at least in the case of Mein Kampf , “the projection
of Hitler’s self.”
As Stone argues, Voigt wanted to put to bed the vulgar Marxist critique
of Nazism that saw Hitler as a stooge of the bourgeoisie and so he
was compelled “to place more stress on the antinomies of modernity, a
more anthropological stress on the role of the sacred in modern life.”95
As discussed in the previous chapter, Voigt read Nazism and Bolshe-
vism alike as secular religions of the modern age. These views make for
an interesting comparison with Franz Neumann’s contemporary analysis.
Neumann, a Jewish Marxist from the exiled Frankfurt School, recognized
that the development of nationalism in Germany had long fostered a
racial identity, marking a distinction from states that had more readily
embraced “the democratic principle and popular sovereignty.”96 Particu-
larly sensitive to Europe’s history of anti-Semitism, Neumann nevertheless

93 Dan Stone, Responses to Nazism in Britain, 1933–1939 (Hampshire: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2003), 36.
94 Frederick Voigt, Unto Caesar (London: Constable and Co., 1938), 128–129.
95 Stone, Responses to Nazism in Britain, 37.
96 Franz Neumann, Behemoth: The Structure and Practice of National Socialism, 1933–
1944 (New York: Harper, 1966), 102–104. First published in 1942, and then expanded
in 1944, Neumann’s Behemoth became “a kind of bible” for OSS researchers, according
conceded as it existed in contemporary scientific thought; in line “with

the large majority of anthropologists,” however, he denied that there
were superior or inferior races (a concession that Voigt did not make).
PWE’s focus on the immediate and obvious political function of the Jews
in Nazi ideology encouraged instead a perspective in which the Jews were
merely a convenient scapegoat for the Nazis, rather than the bête noire of
a long-maturing völkisch ideal. The propagandists thus ranked the Jews
alongside all other enemies of the Reich, according them no special status.
Questions about the role of anti-Semitism in National Socialist
ideology were not resolved by the propagandists despite their rapidly
accumulating knowledge of the genocide. As with the issue of hypocrisy
conditioning the development of religious propaganda, Nazi anti-
Semitism was instead seen as a practical issue; British foreign propagan-
dists understood that they merely had to be sensitive to the perceived
prejudices of their German audience. Self-aggrandizing reactionary and
sometime propagandist John Baker White recounted a story in which he
was trying to find some German speakers for broadcasting. “On this I
had very strong ideas,” he writes,
I knew it was fatal to have a German Jewish refugee, of whom there were
plenty available, not because I was in any way anti-Jewish but because their
intonation would be detected by the listeners, and the Germans as a whole,
I knew, were allergic to what they called ‘refugee voices’.97
That Baker White—a BUF sympathizer and amateur anti-communist

spy—expressed some irregularities in his prejudices is hardly surprising.
As a guest of the German government at the 1937 Nuremberg party
rally, his hobnobbing would no doubt have given him a sympathetic view
of such nonsense.98 But his ideas about “refugee voices” were hardly
unique. In late 1941, Ernst Heinrich Buschbeck, an exiled conservative
Viennese Kunsthistoriker, made a similar observation, which found its way
to PWE by way of Ivone Kirkpatrick. “German ears are very sensitive
to this [Jewish] accent even when an English ear would not detect the
to Felix Gilbert: Barry M. Katz, Foreign Intelligence: Research and Analysis in the Office
of Strategic Services 1942–1945 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1989), 69.
97 John Baker White, The Big Lie (London: Evans Brothers, 1955), 56.
98 Angela Schwarz, “British Visitors to National Socialist Germany: In a Familiar or in
a Foreign Country?” Journal of Contemporary History 28.3 (1993): 491–492.
254 K. R. GRAHAM
difference. It is always unpleasant,” wrote Buschbeck, adding incongru-

ently that “[t]his has nothing to do with anti-Semitism.”99 As Seul points
out, the idea that the “refugee voice” provoked an adverse reaction in
the German listener was remarkably widespread.100 The propagandists
believed that they were only giving their audience what it wanted.
British propagandists’ pragmatism placed audience reaction at the
centre of all programming choices. However, the distance between propa-
gandist and audience necessitated presumptions about the audience’s
worldview which were in turn distorted by the propagandists’ own preju-
dices. The narrow role ascribed to anti-Semitism in British propagandists’
discussions of Nazi atrocities was not just the product of British igno-
rance. Nor can it be reduced to a reflection of British anti-Semitism
and ambivalence towards the victims of the Holocaust. Long-held beliefs
and prejudices about both Germans and Jews preceded PWE’s thinking
on Nazi anti-Semitism and genocide, curtailing a greater appreciation
for the realities of the Holocaust and the place of anti-Semitism in the
Nazi Weltanschauung. The proliferation of new intelligence had at best a
modest impact.
In an essay on oppression, resistance, and the radical potential of the
imagination, Ursula Le Guin writes:
If it were true that superior people refuse to be treated as inferiors, it would

follow that those low in the social order are truly inferior, since, if they
were superior, they’d protest; since they accept an inferior position, they are
inferior. This is the comfortably tautological argument of the slave-owner,
the social reactionary, the racist, and the misogynist.101
This position “appeals also to the idealist,” she contends, as “[m]any

liberal and humanely conservative Americans cherish the conviction that
all oppressed people suffer intolerably from their oppression, must be
ready and eager to rebel, and are morally weak, morally wrong, if they
do not rebel.” By this reasoning, the victims of the Holocaust became
morally culpable in their own persecution, a feature that indeed marked
99 Emphasis in the original: TNA FO 898/182, Ernst Heinrich Buschbeck, “Remarks

on the B.B.C. German Transmission” (October 1941).
101 Ursula K. Le Guin, “A War Without End”, Verso Books (24 January 2018): https://
www.versobooks.com/blogs/3585-a-war-without-end-by-ursula-k-le-guin.
the muted post-war discourse on the Holocaust up until the trial of

Adolf Eichmann. From a liberal-conservative perspective, the question
of whether a group is capable of resistance to oppression has an over-
riding moral dimension.102 This goes some way to account for seemingly
ambivalent attitudes towards Nazi anti-Semitism among British elites.
But this idea also has implications for the relationship between resis-
tance and subversive propaganda. As previous chapters have intimated, the
PWE perspective on Germany was rooted in this ideological orientation,
which deterministically reconciled the appeal of Nazism with pathologies
inherent to the German national character.
Early in the war, there was a vague hope that Nazism would be toppled
by a revolution and that subversive propaganda could work to that end.
In May 1940, Voigt sought to reorient the department’s German output
by reminding the senior staff that while it was not yet “time to promote
open revolt and revolution in Germany… [t]he ultimate purpose of every
news item, of every broadcast, of every word addressed to the Germans
is revolution.”103 But the anti-communist Voigt’s imagined revolution
was certainly no populist uprising: “The revolution will be started not by
cowards,” argued Voigt, “but by heroes, not by the German scum but
by the German elite. Our propaganda must help the armed forces in the
field by promoting the collapse of the German home front and, therefore,
the revolution.” Here we see an echo of exactly that tautology Le Guin
describes.
As the rationale behind propaganda campaigns shifted, PWE was,
by 1942, downplaying the relationship between morale subversion and
German anti-fascist resistance. PWE Deputy Director Rex Leeper now
argued, for example, that even when propaganda directly attacked the
Nazi regime, “the immediate object is not to lead a revolt but to stimu-
late certain forms of discontent which are most likely to lead to revolt.”104
Five months later, a report on “Morale Factors and the German War
102 British wartime thinking did not restrict this idea to the Germans. As Stenton
argues, the famous 1941 “V for Victory” campaign was a response from BBC editors
Douglas Ritchie and Noel Newsome to the “troubling idea in 1940 that the democracies
had lost because the masses were cynical and dispirited.” The campaign was intended
for Europeans to make a show of moral rectitude, thus demonstrating their capacity for
resistance: Stenton, Radio London, 99–100.
103 TNA FO 898/3, Frederick Voigt, “Memorandum by Mr. F.A. Voigt” (May 1940).
104 TNA FO 898/63, Leeper, Memorandum “Black Propaganda” (18 July 1942).
256 K. R. GRAHAM
Effort” delivered by PWE’s intelligence section claimed at the outset that

“[i]t is more difficult to assess the manner in which morale factors affect
the war effort than to assess the morale-factors themselves.”105 Based on
analysis of the Nazi press and propaganda output, as well as German
medical journals and accounts from foreign travellers and refugees, this
report asserted that “any study of morale-factors in Germany today must
pay attention to Stimmung, no matter whether the character of the Stim-
mung has any effect on actual production or supply.” By December 1942,
British propagandists had reconceptualized the role of morale subversion
in light of the German people’s political and moral inertia. Reports from
early 1943 indicated this change in understanding. “The accepted weak-
ness of the German people and their failure to resist the Nazi regime from
the beginning when it was physically fit and able,” argues Pauline Elkes,
“now led the intelligence officers to conclude that in their extremely
weakened state these people would be unable or unwilling to do anything
to stop the Nazi regime.”106
Delmer’s concept of the innere Schweinehund and his enthusiasm for
malingering propaganda adhere to this politically inhibited vision of ordi-
nary Germans.107 Delmer himself later wrote that the Kiel Mutiny was the
direct inspiration for radio station Deutscher Kurzwellensender Atlantik;
however, such references to the German Revolution of 1918–1919 may
be better understood as rhetorical gestures, broad analogies that helped
to guide plans through the gauntlet of executive and ministerial commit-
tees necessary for the approval of large-scale operations.108 Disquiet about
revolutionary politics was not merely a product of anti-communism, but
also reflected grave doubts about the capacity of the German people to
rebel, doubts which in part prompted (and accompanied) the expansive
programme of re-education in the later occupation of Germany.
The post-war debate about PWE’s successes hinged in part on how
different parties understood the German people’s capacity for rebellion
against the Nazi regime. For those convinced of Delmer’s perspective, the
105 TNA FO 898/190, Memorandum “Morale Factors and the German War Effort”
(4 December 1942).
106 Elkes, “The Political Warfare Executive: A Re-evaluation Based Upon the Intelli-
gence Work of the German Section”, 190.
107 Such a view was no doubt encouraged by the fractures in the German left during
the Weimar Republic, and the dissolution of the KPD and SPD under Nazism.
108 Delmer, Black Boomerang, 77–79.
Germans could be expected to offer a very different kind of rebellion to

other Europeans. The popular embrace of Nazism during the 1930s, and
the German masses’ seeming quiescence in the face of Nazi barbarism,
only confirmed what British propagandists already knew of the German
mentality.
Significantly, the debate that played out in The Times and in the early
published research on PWE took place prior to a number of important
historiographical developments, which have reconceptualized the under-
standing of resistance and complicity in the Third Reich. Early West
German resistance historiography held “that resistance under Hitler had
been, of necessity, ‘resistance without the people’, that in the context
of a totalitarian state there had been no popular resistance as such.”109
Even if one were to make a leap and suggest that subversive propaganda
contributed inexorably to popular resistance inside Germany, the post-war
landscape renders this stance meaningless because no such resistance was
recognized. In this context, Cruickshank and Martelli appear vindicated
while PWE’s defenders become the victims of wishful thinking.
Historiographical conceptions of resistance changed significantly in the
late 1970s. In his pioneering and controversial work of Alltagsgeschichte,
Martin Broszat revises the concept of “resistance,” separating it “from
the previously prevailing linkage with ethical motivation and organiza-
tional framework.”110 Broszat’s typology made a distinction between
Widerstand (resistance of the kind embodied, for example, by the White
Rose) and Resistenz, a controversial concept encompassing sections of
society that remained seemingly immune to Nazism’s societal penetra-
tion as expressed by non-conformity and political alienation. Kershaw
summarizes this new understanding of resistance as a functional outcome
of the regimes totalitarian aspirations, observing that “the regime itself
turns behaviour and actions into resistance which would not be so in the
‘symmetrical’ rule of a pluralist democratic system.”111 After outlining
some of the conceptual and linguistic problems precipitated by the Bavaria
Project’s methodology, Kershaw introduces a modified typology. “Oppo-
sition” encompasses the active mode of resistance, which includes the
109 Ian Kershaw, The Nazi Dictatorship: Problems and Perspectives of Interpretation,
Fourth Edition (London: Arnold, 2000), 189–190.
110 Kershaw, The Nazi Dictatorship, 192.
111 Kershaw, The Nazi Dictatorship, 193–196.
258 K. R. GRAHAM
term in the traditional sense, but is not necessarily anti-fascist in that

it “[embraces] many forms of actions with partial or limited aims”.
“Dissent,” meanwhile, serves as Kershaw’s “umbrella term to cover the
passivity of ‘oppositional’ feeling.”112 This area of the historiography
has progressed, particularly since the end of the Cold War, so that now
both resistance and collaboration can be understood as interconnected
social processes with deep roots in civil society, a development that has
prompted scholars to question the utility of what Vesna Drapac and
Gareth Pritchard identify as the resistance/collaboration paradigm.113
In his extensive research on the social history of the Third Reich,
Nicholas Stargardt points to the many ambiguous and seemingly contra-
dictory ways in which individuals responded to Nazism. As he argues,
“models of consent and/or coercion presuppose a society which was far
more united (for or against the regime) then was the case.”114 Over-
turning the spuriously teleological idea that Germans experienced the
war as a bloc with a general and irreversible deterioration in morale
from 1943, Stargardt points instead to the importance of specific crises—
such as the retreat from Moscow and the bombing of Hamburg—which
were “plural, dynamic and transformatory.”115 Hamburg’s destruction in
particular seems to have precipitated a nadir in morale and in German
civilian attitudes to the regime, sparking open conversation about Nazi
corruption, injustice, and a belief that the city’s devastation was revenge
for the Holocaust. But even when coupled with the German defeat at the
Battle of Stalingrad—long assumed by somewhat parochial scholarship
to have been the determining factor in sparking defeatism—the bombing
of Hamburg does not appear to have precipitated the morale collapse
and alienation anticipated by scholars such as Broszat; as Stargardt writes,
“[t]he non, or delayed, arrival of the calamity foreseen in early August
1943 gave a breathing space for expectations to be rethought and hopes
recalibrated.”116 Diving deep into a variety of individual subjectivities to
112 Kershaw, The Nazi Dictatorship, 207.

113 Vesna Drapac and Gareth Pritchard, Resistance and Collaboration in Hitler’s Empire
(London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 132–135.
114 Nicholas Stargardt, “Beyond ‘Consent’ or ‘Terror’: Wartime Crises in Nazi
Germany”, History Workshop Journal 72 (2011): 192.
115 Stargardt, “Beyond ‘Consent’ or ‘Terror’”, 196–197.
116 Stargardt, “Beyond ‘Consent’ or ‘Terror’”, 199.
compose a pluralist account of the German experience of the war, Star-

gardt reveals the often surprising and even disturbing manner in which
people’s efforts to mediate discordant responses—such as patriotism,
racism, antipathy to local NSDAP bosses, and an emergent conviction
that German deserved punishment for its treatment of the Jews—ulti-
mately transformed and radicalized long-held social values and beliefs.
There is no place for a clean typology of resistance and collaboration in
this vibrant approach to social history.117
Many propagandists who later boasted of PWE’s success were expressly
concerned with resistance from the perspective of the Nazi regime. British
propaganda was demonstrably popular in Germany, and the Nazi govern-
ment took active measures to prevent its people from engaging with it,
including signal jamming and sometimes severe punishment for infrac-
tions. Certainly, as Steinert points out, Goebbels blamed unrest and
defeatism on “[f]oreign broadcasts and the information services of various
organizations.”118 From the point of view of the regime, then, the weight
of evidence suggests that British propaganda certainly contributed to
functional opposition in the sense that it challenged the Third Reich’s
monopoly on the German mind during the intense, radicalizing environ-
ment of the war. PWE’s defenders are vindicated, at least in so far as this
severely delimited mode of resistance accords with the abiding moralized
image of the German character. But, if it’s conceded that PWE’s subver-
sive propaganda fostered something akin to Kershaw’s notion of dissent
(acknowledging the concept’s shortcomings as illustrated by Stargardt),
this still leaves open the question of its reception by the German audience.
Sowing Dissent?
British propagandists tended to imagine that their German listeners had
limited agency. This conception of the German audience rightly reflected
the conditions of a terroristic police state, but it was over-determined by
nascent totalitarian theory as well as interwar beliefs about the capacity
117 Stargardt’s The German War provides a great deal of compelling evidence to this
end. Enlightening, too, is his case study of the wartime diaries of August Töpperwien,
a deeply religious protestant and a patriot in the German army who became increas-
ingly disturbed by the massacres being perpetrated around him: Stargardt, “The Troubled
Patriot: German Innerlichkeit in World War II”, German History 28.3 (2010): 326–342.
118 Steinert, Hitler’s War and the Germans, 153–155.
260 K. R. GRAHAM
of propaganda to influence belief and opinion.119 As far as PWE was

concerned, revolution was beyond the reach of the torpid German masses,
but the propagandists nevertheless maintained a long-standing belief that
their audience could be compelled to act against the interests of the
Nazi regime. As Ellic Howe insists, the propagandists working under
Delmer considered “clandestine propaganda… a complete waste of time
unless it persuaded its recipient to ‘do something.’”120 While such an act
need not entail armed rebellion, black propaganda was certainly meant
to incite a direct response in its audience. That same liberal-conservative
tautology which promised German quiescence in the face of Nazi tyranny
also suggested that Germans would be especially responsive to Delmer’s
preferred mode of propaganda. PWE may have become a vast vested
interest, as Martelli later complained, but the German section remained
convinced of its ability to move its audience. Delmer himself wrote
despairingly of early hopes “to convert the Germans to rebellion against
Hitler by argument and appeal.”121 He maintained that such supplica-
tions would only have an effect when the Germans believed the war was
lost. Nevertheless, he was convinced that Britain could still “stimulate the
Germans into thoughts and actions hostile to Hitler before this stage had
been reached”; to accomplish this, however, the German audience “would
have to be tricked.”
After some initial false starts under Department EH, propagandists
came to believe that clandestine radio stations needed elaborate covers in
order trick their audience into tuning in. Only a sufficiently well-planned
and executed cover could attract unwitting listeners. Delmer’s first station,
Gustav Siegfried Eins, was purportedly voiced by a dissident Prussian
General who was part of a network of conservative German patriots
opposed to the “Bolshevisation” of Germany being enacted by the SS.
And Deutsche Priester, PWE’s clandestine Catholic station, was ostensibly
the voice of Germany’s Catholic underground broadcasting from within
the Reich. Black leaflets were no less elaborate than broadcasts. In his
119 As Pauline Elkes demonstrates, PWE recognized by November 1943 that German
popular morale had soured substantially, but they did not believe a revolution from below
was likely given the Gestapo’s seemingly iron grip on the population: Elkes, “The Political
Warfare Executive: A Re-evaluation Based Upon the Intelligence Work of the German
Section”, 128.
memoir, Delmer recalled a leaflet designed to stimulate desertion, which

exactly duplicated the format, paperweight and tone of language of the
German High Command’s Mitteilungen für die Truppe, and was purport-
edly issued to officers detailing the problem of increasing desertions. “A
leaflet like this,” he claimed to have told the assembled SOE agents who
would distribute it, “will be a hundred times more effective in stimu-
lating desertion than any propaganda of manifestly allied origin.”122 The
clandestine speaker’s authority and persuasive power thus hinged on their
authenticity.
Some of the strategies followed in pursuit of authenticity offer room
to speculate about the German audience’s reaction to British subver-
sive propaganda. As demonstrated above, the small place afforded to
Nazi anti-Semitism in British foreign propaganda was not the product
of British ignorance but rather a reflection of their understanding of the
German audience conditioned by the idealism of a liberal-conservative
political orientation. Understanding the treatment of anti-Semitism as
such, we can see that it functioned as part of a broader trend in which
normative and often-reductive assumptions about Germans were trans-
lated into propaganda strategy. Propaganda was a performance in which
every conscious element was considered so as to have predetermined
cumulative effect on the audience. A brief examination of the methods
propagandists used to build up verisimilitude in their clandestine opera-
tions reveals much about their understanding of the logic of subversion,
simultaneously demonstrating just how dubious was the assertion that
audience reaction would follow mechanically from propagandist’s intent.
British leaflets dropped by aircraft over Germany in the first months
of the war—the origins of which could not be mistaken—incongruously
used a Fraktur typeface under the impression that only as such would
Germans be inclined to read them.123 This misconception appears to have
emerged in the pre-war planning stages.124 Even at the BBC, praised for
its objectivity, the performative element of that truthfulness cannot be

123 This, according to the man who later took charge of the department’s prolific print
and forgery sections: Howe, The Black Game, 24.
124 Stephen Tallents, the chief architect of British propaganda in the months following
the Munich Agreement, argued that leaflets directed at Germany needed an experienced
British author, with a German to act as assistant, and “a good range of up-to-date enemy
type faces”: TNA FO 898/1, Memorandum (c. November 1938).
262 K. R. GRAHAM
forgotten. The students of the political warfare school, for example, were
reminded that “an accomplished broadcaster, like a good actor, can play
upon the feelings of his audience, inducing moods of excitement, gloom
and so on as required.”125 There was nothing so simple as a straight
broadcast, particularly in the period 1938–1940 when, as Seul argues,
the BBC demonstrated that “’truth’ and ‘objectivity’ were rather flexible
paradigms that served different purposes.”126
Of course, clandestine broadcasting was a different matter. Gustav
Siegfried represented a novelty for the department when it aired in mid-
1941 because its “broadcasts resembled small-scale theatrical productions
and even minor details of presentation were discussed and rehearsed.”127
One short-lived station, Astrologie und Okkultismus , meant to exploit
occultism’s supposed flourishing in Nazi Germany, remained on the air
for less than a month; this programme was hosted by actress Margit
Maas playing “a spiritualist medium who had received messages from
deceased members of the German armed forces – their names and home
addresses supplied – for transmission to their bereaved families.”128
Under Delmer, propaganda was ostentatiously performative. OSS agent
Elizabeth Macdonald’s sensationalist memoir of her wartime career relates
the details of Operation Pancake, which involved the recruitment of
musicians and entertainers by the OSS to staff PWE’s Soldatensender
Calais ; the protracted roster included an Irish boogie-woogie musician,
a German POW violinist, and “Corporal Manny Segal, a former sound-
effects man, [who] was the Most Indispensable Man in the cottage, filling
in with everything from bird calls to an imitation of a bass viol.”129 In
125 TNA FO 898/99, Major AE Maschwitz, Lecture notes “Weapons of Political

Warfare—Broadcasting” (c. 1943/1944).
126 Stephanie Seul’s fascinating study demonstrates the ways in which the BBC fell short
of its own internal standards as it attempted to adhere to Whitehall’s propaganda policy,
particularly in the context of the German invasion of Norway: Seul, “‘Plain, Unvarnished
News’: The BBC German Service and Chamberlain’s Propaganda Campaign Directed at
Nazi Germany, 1938–1940”, Media History 21.4 (2015): 389–390.
128 Howe speculates that the station was abandoned partly because Maas “found it
difficult to read the scripts without occasionally laughing and thus spoiling the record-
ings.” She was more successful as a host of the German Workers’ Station: Howe, The
Black Game, 140.
129 Elizabeth P. Macdonald, Undercover Girl (New York: Macmillan, 1947), 34.
discussing Soldatensender Calais, Michael Balfour admits that the “pre-

tence of being a German station cannot have fooled many listeners for
long”.130 Balfour’s supposition is supported by archival evidence, with
a number of clippings from the Swedish press collected by the German
Foreign Office in the months after D-Day claiming that Soldatensender
Calais was broadcasting from England. One article even mentioned both
Gustav Siegfried and Soldatensender Calais in the same paragraph.131
This station—an elaborate variety programme in the style of an offi-
cial German Wehrmachtsender—broadcast live nightly from March 1943
until the war’s end. One argument PWE used to justify Soldatensender
Calais ’s elaborate cover was that it offered German listeners an excuse
should they be caught in the act: they could pretend that they thought
it was a genuine German Nazi Wehrmachtsender. However, this argu-
ment does not appear to have entered into PWE justifications for their
work until October 1943, when German prisoners of war revealed this
secondary advantage.132 Certainly, the conspiratorial and expressly anti-
Nazi line of most British black propaganda did not lend itself to such an
advantage.133
Music was central to the identity of Soldatensender Calais and many
other clandestine stations. In fact, one report on British propaganda
claimed that prisoners of war “have paid tribute to the quality and popu-
larity of ‘Atlantik’s’ musical programmes.”134 The variety programmes
of Soldatensender Calais and clandestine station Wehrmachtsender Nord
frequently used servicemen’s favourite songs or new American jazz and

131 Politisches Archiv des Auswärtigen Amts R67500, “Auszug aus ‘Kurzwellenbriefkas-
ten’”, Nya Dagligt Allehanda, (originally published 31 October 1943, filed 27 July
1944).
132 TNA FO 898/51, Report “G.9. Deutscher Kurzwellensender Atlantik” (1 October
1943).
133 This may not always hold true for clandestine Wehrmacht broadcasters; a Nazi
memorandum on enemy broadcasting reported: “Die heute fühlen sich sowohl die privaten
Hörer wie auch die Dienststellen berechtigt, die Deutschen Kurzwellensender abzuhören,
wobei die Gefahr, unbeabsichtigt Feindsender zu hören, sehr gross ist”: Bundesarchiv
R55/20854, Reichspropagandaleitung Hauptamt Rundfunk Amt Sendewesen der NSDAP,
“Empfangsspiegel—Atlantik-Sender” (25 September 1943).
134 TNA FO 898/51, “Report on the Operation of RU’s” (11 October 1943).
264 K. R. GRAHAM
swing, dubbed over by German-speaking singers with occasionally subver-

sive or ribald lyrics.135 One of PWE’s left-wing stations opened its
broadcasts with the immensely popular “Lili Marleen” as its signature
tune.136 Even the Catholic station began its broadcasts variously “with
organ music or a Gregorian plain chant.”137 In an era when radio broad-
casting was still finding its feet as a communication medium, the speed
with which now familiar broadcasting models crystalized is impressive.
In a landscape defined by ideological crisis, music figured promi-
nently both as a means of attracting an audience and as a tool for
subversion. “Music, like wit,” declared a report on resistance activi-
ties in the Netherlands, “is a kind of propaganda for which the Nazis
have no answer ready.”138 Jazz was particularly important in this regard.
Supported by a broader anti-Jazz discourse in Europe, Nazi polemics
against jazz “were vaguely aligned with and influenced by official racial
policy.”139 In March 1933, jazz disappeared from German radio but
the German public’s appetite for it never faded, becoming a trouble-
some pebble in Goebbels’s shoe.140 In June 1941, the Reichsminister for
Public Enlightenment and Propaganda acknowledged the need for light
music broadcasting as a means of boosting morale, particularly for front
line soldiers. Interestingly, as Will Studdert points out, German forces
stations long appreciated the musical tastes of young servicemen and were
already getting around the prohibitions on jazz issued by the government
because “their geographical and political distance from Berlin allowed
them to ignore domestic guidelines”.141 “The BBC understood full well
135 Exiled Weimar-era luminaries such as Kurt Weill were among those talents the OSS
brought in to help “arrange American compositions ‘to suit the German personality’”:
Lawrence Soley, Radio Warfare: OSS and CIA Subversive Propaganda (New York: Praeger,
1989), 125.
136 TNA FO 898/52, Report, “German Workers—G8”.
137 TNA FO 898/51, “Report on the Operation of RU’s: G.7. German Priest” (11
October 1943).
138 TNA FO 898/97, “Europe Fights On: A Diary of Resistance in Europe” (1943).
139 Michael Kater, “Forbidden Fruit? Jazz in the Third Reich”, The American Historical
Review 94.1 (1989): 14.
140 Horst J.P. Bergmeier and Rainer E. Lotz, Hitler’s Airwaves: The Inside Story of Nazi
Radio Broadcasting and Propaganda Swing (New Haven: Yale UP, 1997), 138–140.
World War II (London: I.B. Tauris, 2019), 73–75.
that jazz was repressed in Nazi Germany,” writes Toby Thacker, “and
that there was an enormous appetite there for jazz particularly among
younger German people and in the armed forces.”142 The later Allied
policy of German re-education introduced during the occupation even
included a dedicated strategy for the denazification of music, based in
part on the experiences of the BBC German Service during the war. As
Thacker argues, the Allied occupation afforded the British music coordi-
nators of the Control Commission the opportunity to supplant Nazi racial
ideology with “a discourse which treated modernist musical idioms as a
language of antifascism.”143
This was not how jazz was understood by PWE in 1943. As Studdert
demonstrates, the war created a new type of audience for radio and with
it a new style of broadcasting: in January 1940, the BBC launched their
Forces Programme after learning that young servicemen were listening to
broadcasts in groups as a result of their close living situation, “an environ-
ment where… majority taste ruled.”144 Accurate news and upbeat jazz
and dance music were major drawcards. It is hardly surprising that the
model created to appeal to the British was soon applied to clandestine
German-language broadcasting. The musical programmes of Deutscher
Kurzwellensender Atlantik and Soldatensender Calais were initially meant
only to garner the interest of the German listener “with pleasant enter-
tainment in the form of good dance music – such as he is no longer given
by the Reich Radio.”145 Fully aware that musical genres had been territo-
rialized by Nazi ideologues, Delmer and his colleagues embraced modern
or “degenerate” musical forms such as jazz, which naturally appealed to
the German people for whom such music was proscribed. Of course,
British broadcasters’ musical choices were never merely entertainments,
142 Toby Thacker, “‘Liberating German Musical Life’: The BBC German Service and
Planning for Music Control in Occupied Germany 1944–1949”, ‘Stimme der Wahrheit’:
German-Language Broadcasting by the BBC The Yearbook of the Research Centre for
German and Austrian Exile Studies 5, eds. Charmian Brinson and Richard Dove (New
York: Rodopi, 2003), 83.
143 Thacker, “Liberating German Musical Life”, 88.
World War II (London: I.B. Tauris, 2019), 1, 14–15.
145 TNA FO 898/51, “Report on the Operation of RU’s: G.9. Deutscher
Kurzwellensender Atlantik” (October 1943).
266 K. R. GRAHAM
even if that had been PWE’s rationale; jazz was politicized, fundamen-
tally at odds with the “revolutionary” role ascribed to art by National
Socialist Kulturpolitik.
Nazi policy maintained that modernist aesthetics had become “associ-
ated with ‘decadent’ Jewish-Liberal culture,” an alien cultural expression
rather than a product of the Volksgemeinschaft.146 Beyond the simple
fact that it attracted listeners to illegal foreign broadcasts, jazz had an
ideological component at odds with Nazism. From the perspective of
Nazi authorities, then, jazz was inherently subversive both in its content
and in its alien character. And, in fact, as Michael Kater demonstrates, an
appreciation for jazz, coupled with oppositional sentiment, even brought
together different elements of society in conspiratorial jazz clubs.147
The association between jazz appreciation and oppositional sentiment
is a clear example of dissent arising as a function of the overarching
political system, and one in which PWE likely played a significant role,
whatever the propagandists’ own rationale. The popular appetite for jazz
even forced compromises in the already uneven prohibitions imposed by
Goebbels’s ministry. As Michael Kater argues, the Nazi party ultimately
allowed (denuded) jazz to be broadcast on German radio partly because
they did not want to lose popular support and partly because, even in the
early years of the regime, “German radio stations were competing with
foreign broadcasts that regularly featured jazz.”148 “Better light music,”
Goebbels wrote, “than alien propaganda.”149 If German jazz appreciation
is considered from the perspective of the regime, PWE’s musical program-
ming can be said to have eroded Nazi authority. On the other hand, if
German listeners sought out British broadcasts for their delightful music,
this raises doubts about the capacity of such propaganda to undermine
German morale. The relationship between jazz, propaganda and social
behaviour points to the shortcomings of the resistance/collaboration
paradigm.
146 David Welch, “Restructuring the Means of Communication in Nazi Germany”,

Readings in Propaganda and Persuasion: New and Classic Essays, eds. Garth S. Jowett
and Victoria O’Donnell (London: Sage, 2006), 125.
147 Kater, “Forbidden Fruit?”, 38–42.
148 Kater, “Forbidden Fruit?”, 16.
149 Joseph Goebbels, Die Tagebücher von Joseph Goebbels, Teil I, Band 9, ed. Elke
Fröhlich (Munich: K.G. Saur, 1998), 226–227.
While music was politicized by the Nazis, the role of humour as an

element of British propaganda was more ambiguous. PWE was convinced
that humour had a subversive function, and that it could even lend
further authenticity to British operations. A 1941 report on Germany
derived from interviews with American consular staff in Lisbon (one of
the roundabout ways in which PWE sourced intelligence) claimed that
among Germans little was thought of British leaflets but that “Russian
leaflets, on the other hand, have given rise to wide comment. They are
written very much in the language of the people and seem to have wide
understanding of the jokes that are circulating in Germany.”150 Not to
be outdone, British propagandists began to take jokes very seriously.
In memoirs and recollections from the propaganda war, humour
figures strongly in the propagandists’ work. Delmer wrote, for example,
that when Naval Intelligence suspected some German merchant ships in
the Gironde Estuary would try to sneak past the British blockade and
make for Japan, he had Soldatensender Calais put together a tribute
to the brave sailors on board featuring “the most cacophonous jumble
of Japanese and Chinese records to be found in the archives of His
Master’s Voice.”151 “Sometimes I was allowed to make jokes,” wrote
cabaret performer Agnes Bernelle, one of the comperes who vamped for
Soldatensender Calais: “Once I told the good German citizens to put
their samples of morning urine into small bottles and post them to the
Ministry of Health in Berlin.”152
“Black propaganda was fun for those who dispensed it,” argues Cruick-
shank, “but it achieved very little.”153 Less scathing, Michael Balfour
concedes that “it had a fascination for those from the Prime Minister
downwards who retained something of the mischievous schoolboy’s
approach to life.”154 For the Americans, too, a good sense of humour
was important in dealing with the social stresses and existential horrors of
the work; as Barry Katz writes of the OSS Research and Analysis Branch,
150 TNA FO 898/182, Minutes, Planning Committee (2 August 1941).

151 Delmer, Black Boomerang, 100–101.
152 Agnes Bernelle, The Fun Palace: An Autobiography (Dublin: Lilliput, 1996), 95.
268 K. R. GRAHAM
The recurrently ironic tone of their weekly reports suggests that the
German émigrés of the Central European Section may have derived some
satisfaction from dreaming up such exercises in black propaganda, and their
frequent reviews of so-called "Dachau jokes" – anti-Nazi humor that could
land a German or Austrian in a concentration camp – suggests that they
seized every opportunity to have the last laugh themselves.155
Ellic Howe writes fondly of the good fun to be had working for PWE, but
is careful to add a caveat: “the ‘jokes’,” he writes, “were strictly private
and unknown to any outside a very small circle.”156 This is demonstrably
not the case. Humour was no less important to subversive propaganda
than it was to the people making it.
For a time, in fact, researchers actively sought out funny stories—“jokes
about Hitler and Goering, stories playing up German stupidity, cracks
about Italian cowardice… no objection if certain of these funny stories
were somewhat on the ‘raw’ side”—for propaganda purposes.157 In late
1940, Rex Leeper convened a committee to address criticism of “leaflets
with an ironical trend.”158 At a moment when dissemination of printed
propaganda was limited for practical reasons, some of the department’s
detractors believed that the propagandists ought to have been concen-
trating their limited resources on less “flippant” work. Leeper’s committee
was adamant, however:
In propaganda work ridicule is by no means the least of our weapons... And

to make the Nazi Bosses ridiculous in the eyes of the German people, or
the German invader ridiculous in the eyes of the inhabitants of the Occu-
pied Territories, must be regarded as an effective contribution towards our
work of disrupting the enemy front.
The implication is clear: humour was understood as inherently subversive

by British propagandists. The German audience would naturally accept
anti-authoritarian humour as such, weakening the Nazi grip on their
155 Barry M. Katz, Foreign Intelligence: Research and Analysis in the Office of Strategic
Services 1942–1945 (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard UP, 1989), 39.
157 TNA FO 898/70, Wintle to Rayner, Memorandum (13 October 1942).
158 TNA FO 898/9, “Leaflet Position for the Week Saturday 7th December to Saturday
14th December 1940” (December 1940).
consciousness. But the relationship between humour and power is never

so simple.
Rudolph Herzog’s analysis of jokes in the Third Reich offers an illumi-
nating perspective on the way that civilians coped with the antinomies of
daily life. Contrary to PWE’s view, Herzog sees anti-Nazi jokes circulating
in wartime Germany less as politically subversive and more as “a release
valve for pent-up popular anger… The vast majority of political jokes
during Hitler’s reign were basically uncritical of the system, playing on
the human weaknesses of Nazi leaders rather than on the crimes they were
committing.”159 If humour made life more tolerable for Germans at war,
it may be that jokes, like jazz, had something other than a demoralizing
effect on British propagandists’ audience. This is not to say, however, that
such jokes actually bolstered the regime.
Presenting a nuanced analysis of political humour through a discussion
of Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of carnivalesque laughter, Jan Rüger describes
a critical impasse in which “[t]he debate about laughter and power
has thus become fixed into a ‘subversive’ versus ‘supportive’ dichotomy,
which has arguably stifled rather than inspired new questions.”160 This
situation prompts Rüger to consider the work of Peter Stallybrass and
Allon White, leading him to suggest instead that we look at “how power
was negotiated through public laughter, rather than to presuppose a
particular function from the outset.”161
Dissatisfied with the idea of laughter as a “‘safety valve’…, which
stabilized rather than subverted the status quo,” Rüger suggests that
“this static notion has tended to miss the main point about laughter:
its inherent ambiguity and resistance to institutionalization.”162 Rüger
develops a theory of ambivalent laughter in relation to his study of the
culture of Imperial Berlin during the First World War. “In giving more
space to ambivalent forms of laughter,” he writes,
the Berlin authorities acknowledged that they could not impose the
Kaiser’s demand for seriousness on the city’s population. Symbolically, this
159 Rudolf Herzog, Dead Funny: Humour in Hitler’s Germany (New York: Melville
House, 2011), 6.
160 Jan Rüger, “Laughter and War in Berlin”, History Workshop Journal 67 (2009): 25.
161 Rüger, “Laughter and War in Berlin”, 25; Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, The
Politics and Poetics of Transgression (London: Methuen, 1986).
162 Rüger, “Laughter and War in Berlin”, 26.
270 K. R. GRAHAM
concession signalled that power was shared... Aspects that were supportive
of the authorities leading the war effort could not be isolated from those
that were potentially subversive.”163
Obviously, PWE understood laughter to be emphatically subversive.

Indeed, the tone of PWE humour appears to have been a deliberate
attempt to reproduce the Berliner Schnauze under discussion in Rüger’s
essay. This supposedly anti-authoritarian posture would have been inti-
mately familiar to the cosmopolitan Delmer, growing up as he did the son
of Berlin University English Professor.164 Rüger’s theory of ambivalent
laughter encourages a reconsideration the relationship between propa-
ganda, morale and dissent, raising further questions about how British
propagandists understood their German audience.
Alongside humour and music, the proliferation of rumour was a funda-
mental element of British subversive propaganda, which was disseminated
via print, radio, and agent-provocateur. The effect of British rumour-
mongering, is particularly difficult to measure, not least because the
spread of rumours is a natural consequence of dictatorships. The wartime
SD reports are replete with rumours as well as official efforts to quell
them.165 But the spread of rumours is also a phenomenon of democra-
cies, particularly during moments of crisis when reliable sources of news
are scarce. Building on the work of sociologist Tamotsu Shibutani, Jo
Fox argues that “[r]umors sate the desire for information, becoming
a platform for ‘improvised news’ where official confirmation does not
or cannot exist.”166 Repeating and embellishing rumours then becomes
163 Rüger, “Laughter and War in Berlin”, 37.

164 Delmer held a second role as a BBC speaker, responding to Hans Fritzsche’s broad-
casts in ribald language with an authentic Berliner accent each Tuesday two hours after the
Nazi propagandist had spoken. In one notorious incident, he denounced Hitler’s peace
offer of July 1940 even before the British government could make an official response.
Of the incident, Delmer wrote that he “reckoned a little earthy vulgarity in answer to
the Führer’s cant would be just the thing to shock my German listeners out of their
complacency”: Delmer, Black Boomerang, 17; Stephen Tallents, Letter “What the B.B.C.
Is Doing”, The Times (15 September 1941).
165 “[Germans] were particularly susceptible to rumours,” argues Donald D. Wall,
“[b]ecause Germans knew well enough that the regime falsified the news”; Wall, “The
Reports of the Sicherheitsdienst on the Church and Religious Affairs in Germany,
1939–1944”, Church History 40.4 (1971): 449–450.
166 Fox, “Confronting Lord Haw-Haw”, 79.
a meaning-making activity, a coping mechanism that flourishes under

trying or turbulent circumstances; pieces of information are stitched
together to form a narrative, an activity that can even serve as a point
of social cohesion rather than fracture—as indicated by Fox’s research
on wartime Britain—becoming a space in which group morality and
values are asserted, and the relationship between individuals and the
state is negotiated.167 Indeed, this function is discernible in the prolif-
eration of rumours about Jewish vengeance for the Holocaust following
Hamburg’s destruction. It is unsurprising then that PWE’s “comebacks”
ratified their rumour-mongering strategy. And PWE also learned from
interrogations of German prisoners of war that while the BBC enjoyed by
far the greatest audience among the German armed forces, black propa-
ganda was the subject of much more barrack room gossip.168 Free of
any self-imposed duty to objectivity, black propaganda could provide all
the suggestive and subversive information a news-starved and crisis-prone
German population could possibly need to make sense of their collapsing
world. Rumour-mongering was another avenue for functional dissent,
but—like the popular taste for jazz and the persistent enthusiasm for anti-
authoritarian jokes—its social function is too ambiguous, too multivocal,
to support any kind of direct link with defeatism.
Once upon a time, it was possible to imagine the Third Reich as a truly
totalitarian society, in which the tremendous powers of the modern state
were leveraged into a violent political apparatus that all but succeeded
in suffocating dissent and compelling obedience. Countless volumes have
pointed to the shortcomings of such an overly simplistic view. But there
is another side to this. Drapac and Pritchard observe that as totalitarian
theory has fallen out of favour with historians in recent decades, so too has
an appreciation for “the extent of the assault on norms of behaviour and
daily life in totalitarian regimes.”169 It is important, then, that in consid-
ering the German audience’s possible reaction to British propaganda,
167 In discussing this aspect of rumour, Fox draws on the work of social anthropologist
Max Gluckman: Fox, “Confronting Lord Haw-Haw”, 101.
168 Interrogations “found that 88% of those questioned had listened to the BBC, 21%
to clandestine stations. While only 1% had heard what the BBC said quoted in conver-
sation, 17% had heard ‘black’ stations quoted and commented on.” TNA FO 898/65,
CSDIC, “German Morale” (21 July 1943).
169 Drapac and Pritchard, Resistance and Collaboration in Hitler’s Empire, 94.
272 K. R. GRAHAM
speculation does not fall prey to what Timothy Snyder calls “agency infla-
tion,” i.e. “an exaggerated sense of the options that were available to
people in Hitler’s Europe.”170
“Germans did not have to be Nazis to fight for Hitler,” argues
Nicholas Stargardt, “but they would discover that it was impossible to
remain untouched by the ruthlessness of the war and the apocalyptic
mentality it created.”171 The agency of ordinary Germans was placed
under severe limitations by the Nazi regime, limitations that were only
intensified by the millenarian war. What little freedom they had extended
into ambiguous spaces like music, humour, and rumour, where seeming
contradictions abound. Expressions of anti-Nazi sentiment do not provide
evidence of opposition to the regime nor of creeping defeatism. Indeed,
many Germans who criticized Nazi blunders did so out of a sense of patri-
otism. While individuals did occasionally suffer extreme punishments for
activities as banal as joking about the death of Hitler, such instances were
relatively rare, the penalties inconsistent. If they are to be read as acts
of dissent, their political significance—like jazz appreciation—arises as a
function of the totalitarian regime’s prohibitions and not from within the
subjectivity of the individual.
A thought experiment (rather than a counterfactual): imagine a U-
boat surfacing at night to recharge the boat’s batteries. The crew tunes
their radio to Deutscher Kurzwellensender Atlantik, which appeals to them
because of its raunchy humour, good music and its relatively comprehen-
sive war reportage, all things lacking in official Nazi broadcasts. The crew
knows that listening to such a station is illegal, and that the news this
station broadcasts is other than that which their government wants them
to hear. The sailors listen anyway; they may even have their commander’s
blessing.172 On this night, the broadcast alternates between up-tempo
Dixieland jazz and news bulletins. The music is good but the news is bad.
170 Timothy Snyder, as quoted in Drapac and Pritchard, Resistance and Collaboration
in Hitler’s Empire, 94.
171 Stargardt, The German War, 7.
172 PWE had reports of at least one U-boat commander who insisted his crew listen to
“English dance music broadcast from the B.B.C… because it was good for them”: TNA
FO898/190, “German Propaganda and the German” (12 October 1942); research into
U-boat crews affirms these reports, and also suggests that in cases where the Komman-
danten did not approve of these foreign influences, the crew needed only wait until he
slept: Mulligan, Neither Sharks nor Wolves, 17.
They hear of another U-boat sunk by a British destroyer earlier that day,
of many comrades drowned and a lucky few who were captured. Deutscher
Kurzwellensender Atlantik then reports the names of residential streets in
Hamburg, Bremen and Kiel—all German Navy towns—that have been
flattened by Allied bombs. Sailors’ friends and families are surely dead or
homeless. Very bad news indeed. But there is no mutiny. Rather, the next
day these sailors resume their cruise, and again risk their lives.
Might this imaginary broadcast have functioned simply as a vent for
the sailors’ frustration, a Bakhtinian carnival? Or does Rüger’s theory of
ambivalent laughter suggest an alternative interpretation? In their socio-
logical analysis of surveillance protocols from POW camps in Britain and
North America, Sönke Neitzel and Harald Welzer remind us that
To believe that a modern dictatorship like National Socialism integrates a

populace by homogenizing them is to mistake the way it functions socially.
The reverse is the case. Integration proceeds by maintaining difference, so
that even those who are against the regime... have a social arena in which
they can exchange their thoughts and find intellectual brethren.173
Selfton Delmer demanded that propaganda compel the audience to do

something. But the distance between the audience’s actual response and
that which British propagandists anticipated suggests that they did not
consider the experiences of their audience within a “total institution” in
which the range of activity is severely limited.174
While U-boat morale rapidly deteriorated from May 1943 leading to
spike in the rate of desertions as the U-boats’ technological and strategic
obsolescence translated into dramatic losses and many sailors became
convinced that Germany would lose the war, the demoralized sailors’
behaviour did not generally meet the propagandists’ expectations.175
Timothy Mulligan points to a British Naval Intelligence assessment
of captured U-boatmen which demonstrates that, despite “an adroit
[British] radio propaganda policy” designed to exploit this collapse in
morale, research had “found ‘no marked deterioration in the fighting
173 Sönke Neitzel and Harald Welzer, Soldaten: On Fighting, Killing, and Dying; The
Secret World War II Transcripts of German POWs (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2012),
29.
174 Neitzel and Welzer, Soldaten, 16.
175 Mulligan, Neither Sharks nor Wolves, 188–189.
274 K. R. GRAHAM
spirit of either officers or men while still engaged in war,’ nor ‘any proven
cases of refusal to carry out orders.’”176 It must be remembered that the
Kriegsmarine dealt ruthlessly with anything approximating sedition or a
collapse in discipline, so demoralized or disgruntled sailors tended to seek
out other avenues of dissent.
It becomes necessary at this point to ask whether the simple act of
listening to an illegal broadcast was itself enough to satisfy the needs of
those who recognized in themselves disquieting or transgressive beliefs. If
a U-boat commander believed that listening to dance music on a foreign
station was permissible for the good of his crew’s morale, it is likely that
PWE’s propaganda achieved something other than its intended effect.
Such an act of listening—necessarily a group act on board a cramped
boat—might promote scepticism about the regime, but it would also
stabilize the group cohesion of these sailors as a crew, paradoxically
sustaining their will to fight. An unfortunate outcome for PWE’s propa-
gandists, it is possible to imagine that while subversive propaganda may
have challenged Nazism’s monopoly over the German mind, in doing
so, it may also have sublimated oppositional sentiment into what were
ultimately harmless modes of dissent.
As Fox’s research into the Ministry of Information suggests, British
officials tended to assume a fancifully direct relationship between propa-
ganda and audience reaction, a relationship which did not take into
account the public’s capacity for an aberrant decoding. Even in a terror-
istic police state, popular opinion is an important factor contributing to
the milieu in which meaning is made. PWE may well have contributed
to dissent in a functional sense, but the nature of that dissent was far
removed from the morale collapse the propagandists intended.
These speculations may appear to muddy the waters, but the intention
here is quite the opposite. As Drapac and Pritchard argue, the resis-
tance/collaboration paradigm leads to “superficial assessments [which]
are made on the assumptions that people’s behaviour is one-dimensional,
that they experienced the war in the same way simultaneously, and that
they had the same understanding of its nature in all its military, moral
and ethical dimensions as it unfolded.”177 By framing social behaviour,
176 Mulligan, Neither Sharks nor Wolves, 193; Mulligan refers here to Naval Intelligence
Officer Donald McLachlan’s Room 39: Naval Intelligence in Action, 1939–1945 (London:
Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1968), 175–176.
177 Drapac and Pritchard, Resistance and Collaboration in Hitler’s Empire, 103.
or behavioural expectations, in terms of resistance and collaboration, a

teleology is imposed which makes it impossible to reconcile the diverse
ways in which ordinary Germans experienced the war. This simplification
in fact conceals the realities of life in Nazi Germany, making it difficult to
appreciate the place of subversive propaganda within a complicated and
dynamic milieu. Rather than asking whether British propaganda helped to
shorten the war, a more enlightening question might be: what did British
propaganda contribute to the experiences of Germans living under the
Third Reich? To that question, there are no simple answers.
Conclusion
For decades after the war, propagandists and historians alike felt
compelled to ask whether British subversive propaganda had been
successful. If recent developments in the historiography around anti-Nazi
resistance and collaboration are taken into account, there are certainly
grounds to suppose that subversive propaganda contributed to a mode of
popular dissent in Germany. As Steinert observes, in the period following
Stalingrad, “denunciations for tuning in to foreign radio stations became
more rare, and there were fewer people who considered it a punishable
offence, in contrast to the start of the war, when long prison sentences
had been considered just.”178 When dissent is considered in this limited,
functional sense, the evidence is compelling. But this narrative is at odds
with the propagandists’ own ambitions for their work, and it tells us little
about how subversive propaganda was actually interpreted by its German
audience. In this sense, the question that motivated so much of the early
speculation about the propaganda war is itself misleading.
While previous chapters have examined in close detail British subversive
propaganda’s dominant underlying ideas, this chapter has instead consid-
ered the way that the propagandists understood their mission and the
consequences of that mission. In doing so, it has raised yet further ques-
tions regarding the relationship between British subversive propaganda
and its German audience. The underlying logic of British morale subver-
sion was determined by British ideas about their German audience. These
ideas were further conditioned by an abiding belief in the power of propa-
ganda, and a moralized understanding of anti-authoritarianism bound
178 Steinert, Hitler’s War and the Germans, 208.

276 K. R. GRAHAM
to mid-century liberal conservatism. Even as they abandoned revolution

from below as a possible outcome of morale collapse, many propagan-
dists maintained the belief that they could undermine the Nazi regime by
nurturing the selfishness that they saw as innate to the German national
character.
In one sense, this conclusion is rather anti-climactic. In the final anal-
ysis, it is impossible to say with whether PWE did or did not contribute
anything to the Allied victory in Europe. Where evidence ought to
point to a state of defeatism and alienation—a state to which PWE
might well have contributed—there appears instead a world in which
Germans’ multivalent and contentious responses to crises helped them
to negotiate and renegotiate their relationship with the state. For any
reader seeking certainty, this is surely dissatisfying. However, this chapter
does demonstrate the value in taking seriously those ambiguities and
sites of negotiation that mark the relationship between individuals and
the state, concerns that are fundamental to the history of propaganda.
While acknowledging the value of concepts such as dissent, this chapter
has attempted to move past the resistance/collaboration paradigm, and
in doing so has demonstrated the advantages that might come from
eschewing those old canards that weigh on contemporary understandings
of mid-century Europe and the Second World War.
CHAPTER 8
Epilogue: Breaking Hearts and Minds
In the last few years, ordinary people across the globe have found them-
selves coming to terms with the fact that they live in hypermediated
and heavily propagandized world. Instruments of mass communication
are more powerful and pervasive than ever. With the advent of social
media, control of information has shifted from governments to individual
users and, alarmingly, powerful and nefarious mercenary agents. Organi-
zations like Cambridge Analytica pilfer social media platforms for user
data, which they then sell to political campaigns and marketing firms
to develop targeted advertising. Since the 2016 US presidential election,
reactionaries in politics and in the media have cried “fake news!” when-
ever their claims have been challenged. In Britain, highly emotive and
frequently dishonest propaganda swung the Brexit vote, catching many
pundits off guard. Subversive and clandestine propaganda has been instru-
mental in far-right efforts to smear anti-fascist and civil rights activists;
this propaganda, which amplifies grievances and anxieties, has grown the
support for radical right-wing movements to the point where even law
enforcement agencies have begun to take the threat seriously. In Gabon
in January 2019—in a disturbing hint at things to come—the military
attempted a coup d’état after the release of a video recording that was
meant to quell suspicions that President Ali Bongo was dead but which

Switzerland AG 2021
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-71664-6_8
278 K. R. GRAHAM
was widely suspected of being a “deepfake.” Today, anybody with a smart-

phone and a pulse can offer a definition of propaganda supported by a
dozen examples that they have personally encountered in the preceding
month. In this hypermediated world in which black propaganda is a
daily experience, trust in figures of authority has plummeted, conspiracy
theories are rife, and radical right-wing extremism is on the rise.
As David Welch argues, “[o]ne of the most striking means by which
propaganda has influenced social attitudes – changing or reinforcing opin-
ions – has been through the use of stereotypes.”1 This book has argued
that, at least from 1940, when British officialdom had been purged of
its “guilty men,” the dominant tendency within PWE and its antecedent
departments was to view Nazism as the natural consequence of the
German national character; alternative views had the potential to raise
uncomfortable questions at the height of an ideological war. Indeed, the
tangle of ideas expressed by concepts such as Sefton Delmer’s “innere
Schweinehund” suggested not only that a German anti-Nazi resistance
was unlikely, but that it was congenitally impossible.
With the benefit of hindsight, it is easy for the twenty-first century
historian to feel exasperated at British officialdom’s inclination to down-
play the seriousness with which fascists took their own ideas. Of course,
it seems only natural that intellectuals would fall back on a stereotype—
itself sharpened by the previous generation’s war propaganda—in order
to make sense of the Third Reich. But then that frustration returns
when it is remembered that Britain was also home to thousands of
intellectually engaged and insightful anti-Nazi refugees whose warnings
and analyses were too often ignored by the British authorities during
the 1930s. Instead, PWE determined that the roots of the barbarism
which had propelled the Nazis to power could be exploited to compel
ordinary Germans to act against the interests of the regime—a strategy
that could only ever pay limited dividends. When invited to contribute
to propaganda, anti-Nazi refugees were able to temper this attitude,
but they could never surpass it entirely. Nevertheless, planning for the
occupation of Germany demanded a different orientation. As joint Anglo-
American operations expanded and the imagined contours of a European
peace began to take shape, the shortcomings of Germanophobia became
Wikileaks, ed. David Welch (London: I.B. Tauris, 2014), 38.
8 EPILOGUE: BREAKING HEARTS AND MINDS 279
evident. Many of PWE’s personnel and ideas were carried over into the
Control Commission and the Allied occupation of Germany. In that
encounter, as Anthony J. Nicholls writes, “the obsession with peculiar-
ities of national character began to wane quite rapidly.”2 Having already
asserted an alternative basis for thinking about Germany and Nazism,
advocates for re-education maintained a hope of transforming German
civil and political life. While many senior policymakers resisted the new
epistemology, the social orientation did much to justify for the Allies a
future in which Germany might exist. Of course, it is difficult to imagine
that the reforms imposed on Germany during the occupation went far
enough to satisfy those who hoped to scrub fascism from the face of the
earth; in the post-war period, PWE’s anti-fascists and Vansittartists alike
must have looked cynically upon Germany’s “Stunde Null.”
Central to PWE’s understanding of the German mentality was the
question of Hitler’s historical uniqueness. These debates continued into
the post-war period and, in fact, closed-door discussions among British
propagandists presaged key political, philosophical, and historical debates
concerning Germany and Europe in the decades after the war. And
those wartime attitudes reinforced and reproduced by PWE fed directly
into the early post-war writing on fascism. “Historians of the victorious
powers were only too anxious to find in Nazism a confirmation of all
the worst traits in Germans present throughout the centuries,” writes
Kershaw, “and from the evident mass support for Hitler in the 1930s
deduced a peculiarly ‘German disease’ and an easy equation of Germans
and Nazis.”3 Despite a minority tendency that remained sceptical of this
German disease, or at least its aetiology in the German national character,
PWE’s mandate was internalized by many of those involved in the propa-
ganda war, and was reproduced by a generation of intellectuals in the
post-war era.
There is ample reason to be sceptical of the influence that PWE’s
more progressive tendencies had on senior policymakers and the gener-
ally conservative political establishment. The case of Prussia is illustrative

Jordan (London: I.B. Tauris, 1997), 37–38.
3 Ian Kershaw, The Nazi Dictatorship: Problems and Perspectives of Interpretation (Fourth
Edition) (London: Arnold, 2000), 16.
280 K. R. GRAHAM
here. Anti-Prussian Germanophobia had deep roots in Britain, partic-

ularly among the generation that had fought in the First World War.
Socially oriented, or neo-Freudian, interpretations of Nazism ought to
have displaced these anachronistic ideas. Instead, as the social orien-
tation of PWE’s psychological turn suggests, new ideas were adopted
only when they promised immediate and practical results, and then
often only tentatively, so that they supplemented rather than replaced
older Germanophobic arguments. Even as Heinz Koeppler worked to
re-educate German prisoners of war, Winston Churchill hounded his
Prussian bête noire to the ground.
The history of PWE and its antecedent departments is significant
because they were at the vanguard of British thinking on Germany. In
detailing British attempts to understand the German national character
and the Nazi mind, this book has delved a little deeper into the intellectual
preoccupations of the mid-century British elite than have previous studies.
Whatever its failures and successes, PWE was an important wartime orga-
nization with far ranging influence. In preparation for the occupation,
PWE liaised with military and intelligence organizations at all levels,
and, while the propagandists did not always see eye-to-eye with White-
hall, they maintained close ties with the Foreign Office and Churchill’s
War Cabinet. The BBC’s European Service has long been lauded as a
powerful medium of cultural transmission. PWE’s other activities are just
as culturally significant, although measuring their effect presents a terrific
challenge.
During the interwar period, Germanophobic prejudices had been
paired with a broader ambivalence towards Germany, bound to a
popular support for appeasement and hostility to Communism. In the
post-war period, one might better understand the pitch of lingering
Germanophobia by looking to Britain’s diminished status as a great
power, and the shaky grounds upon which is built the myth of “the
people’s war.” After the turbulence of the 1930s, the war itself gave
Britain the common experience on which to found a new national myth,
an important element of which was the nation’s dogged resistance to
Nazi Germany’s aggression. In the post-war period, the Second World
War was incorporated into a new post-imperial British identity. In the
popular imagination (and in the writings of figures like Churchill) the
war became a heroic, Manichean struggle that depended upon an image
of Germany as a perennial evil, Vansittart’s “brazen horde.” The idea of an
ahistorical German national character persisted throughout the twentieth
century, kept alive through popular culture and is periodically resusci-

tated by the British Establishment (even today British press coverage of
England-Germany football matches drips with tawdry wartime rhetoric).
The Germanophobic language and the air of ressentiment that marked
the 1990 Chequers Affair, for example, not to mention the Eurosceptic
language of the Brexit furore, is characteristic of a tendency in British
conservatism going back at least to the First World War (and arguably
even to the 1870s). Frustrated by this tendency, Antony Beevor observes
that “the British are not trying to keep a flame of memory alive, so much
as fostering national stereotypes based on a lamentable ignorance.”4 And
“common among Brexiteers,” writes Richard J. Evans, “has been the
idea that the European Union represents Hitler’s Third Reich in a new
form.”5 A better understanding of the way in which British propagan-
dists understood Germany, and how that understanding changed over the
course of the war, goes some way to displace unproductive and dangerous
tropes of national character, while simultaneously contextualizing some of
the earliest contributions to the study of fascism.
Some of the political consequences of PWE’s work are ephemeral,
though no less significant. While there is reason to be sceptical of Jesuit
historian Robert Graham’s argument that PWE was responsible for the
Catholic Church’s poor reputation after the war, there are other cultural
shifts in which PWE may certainly be said to have had a hand. By
adopting certain facets of a nascent Catholic totalitarian theory, PWE and
its antecedent departments sought to foster a distinction between Catholi-
cism and Nazism. These efforts to make use of conservative Catholic
anti-Communist sentiment that glossed over many of the accommoda-
tions made between political Catholicism and Nazism. In the post-war
era, the Christian Democratic Union invoked these ideas in order to claim
a perhaps dubious moral authority. In Austria, too, Christian Social politi-
cians were able to resume governance under the new Austrian People’s
Party. Of course, the myth of Austria as Nazi victim—the formation and
propagation of which PWE was integral to—is also significant here as it
directly contributed to the ideological contours of the Second Republic.
As late as 1986, Kurt Waldheim won the Austrian presidency on the
4 Antony Beevor, “Tommy and Jerry”, The Guardian (16 February 1999).
5 Richard J. Evans, “How the Brexiteers Broke History”, New Statesman (14 November
2018).
282 K. R. GRAHAM
People’s Party ticket despite his service to the Nazis; the scandal around
the election reflected a broader acrimony regarding Austria’s refusal to
acknowledge its role in the Holocaust. Only in 2016 were the Austrian
Social Democrats finally able to secure funding for the House of Austrian
History, the first contemporary history museum to concern itself with
Austrian identity and the myth of victimhood.
Certainly a factor in the direction of post-war British historiography,
British propagandists’ critical engagement with German history had a
lingering influence on the broader British historical imagination. Many
enterprising young historians cut their teeth in propaganda and intel-
ligence; in time, their exposure to new modes of thought helped to
change the outlook of the profession. Wartime encounters with social
history legitimated the field, while a deep and passionate engagement with
Europe brought an appetite for continental history to the centre of the
British academy for the first time.
In other less obvious ways, the wartime experiences of British propa-
gandists influenced the post-war world. Despite prolonged resistance to
the idea of propaganda informed by “pure psychology,” PWE ultimately
helped psychoanalysis and psychology to develop a post-war social role
as vital contributors to “changing procedures for child hospitalization,
ideas about juvenile delinquency, the roles of parents, and the perception
of the child in the emerging welfare state.”6 As Ellen Herman argues,
the broader experiences of the war gave “psychological experts’ faith in
themselves and increased their confidence that even shaky psychological
theories could guide public policy better than popular will or the conven-
tional wisdom of diplomats.”7 Planning for the occupation of Germany
was deeply informed by the research and observations of figures instru-
mental to the propaganda war such as psychiatrist Henry Dicks. British
officialdom was undergoing something of an intellectual revolution as
“planning” entered Whitehall’s lexicon. This approach to governance
reached a kind of maturity with the advent of the welfare state. Here too,
PWE’s history is illustrative of the diverse and contested ways in which
social scientific approaches won favour in what was often an intellectually
hostile or indifferent environment. In these surprising ways, the history
6 Michal Shapira, “The Psychological Study of Anxiety in the Era of the Second World
War”, Twentieth Century British History 24.1 (2013): 55.
7 Ellen Herman, The Romance of American Psychology: Political Culture in the Age of
Experts (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1995), 38.
of PWE sheds light on the emergence of technocratic governance and the

concern for social welfare that characterized the post-war era. A richer
understanding of this history can only help us to make sense of the world
that we’ve inherited.
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Index
A appeasement policy, 33, 73

Adenauer, Konrad, 225 opposition to, 35, 42–44, 74, 77,
Adler, Alfred, 115, 133 83, 101
aliens, 36 Area Bombing, 129, 142, 158, 227
Allied occupation of Germany, 60, Astrologie und Okkultismus , 59, 262
177, 265, 279, 282 astrology, 59, 158, 262
anti-Communism, 37, 41, 74, 76, Austria, 179, 188, 225, 281
186, 187, 191, 199, 202, 207,
260, 280
antifascism B
anti-Nazi resistance, 14, 41, 50, Bakhtin, Mikhail, 269
160, 184–187, 189, 202, 206, Barman, Thomas, 87, 89
215, 217, 219, 229, 255, 257, Barth, Karl, 200
259, 275, 278 Bartlett, Vernon, 35, 37
Catholic, 187, 210 behaviourism, 108, 119, 123, 124
conservative, 13, 37, 60, 74, 185, Bekennende Kirche, 186, 197, 211
194, 210 Bell, George, Bishop of Chichester,
Marxist, 14, 40, 41, 55, 57, 59, 69, 32, 184
75, 92, 96, 148, 169, 184, 201 Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute (BPI),
anti-Semitism 115
British, 36, 46, 93, 171, 173, 246 Borkenau, Franz, 75, 201
German, 59, 114, 136, 155, 171, Bracken, Brendan, 31, 50, 184, 222,
187, 231, 246, 253, 261 242
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive 303
license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-71664-6
304 INDEX
Brandt, Willi, 104 D

Braun, Heinz, 57 Dalton, Hugh, 45, 47–50, 56, 57, 78,
Braun, Max, 57, 58, 95 83, 206, 242
British Broadcasting Corporation Dawson, Christopher, 71, 198, 200,
(BBC), 31, 32, 37–39, 45, 54, 208, 211
55, 63, 86, 127, 166, 177, 184, degeneration theory, 137, 148, 156,
192, 209–211, 217, 219–221, 157, 173, 174
233, 235, 243, 248–251, 261, Delmer, Sefton, 30, 38, 62–64, 89,
262, 264, 265, 271 95, 106, 125–127, 140, 141,
German Service, 50, 72, 99, 248, 155, 158, 159, 161, 164, 171,
262, 265 172, 174, 175, 179, 180, 214,
222, 223, 232, 235, 249, 256,
British fascism, 42, 46, 85, 253
260–262, 265, 267, 270, 273
Brooks, Dallas, 131 denazification, 70, 98, 142, 179, 181,
Burns, Thomas Ferrier, 195 265
Department EH (Electra House),
39, 42, 43, 56, 64, 184, 194,
205–207, 209, 210, 239, 252,
C 260
Deutsche Priester, 168, 188, 214, 217,
Cadogan, Alexander, 46, 85, 90
221–223, 260
Calder, Peter Ritchie, 53, 129, 233
Deutscher Kurzwellensender Atlantik,
Carr, E.H., 70, 84, 191, 207 140, 152, 235, 256, 265, 272
Carsten, Francis Ludwig, 59, 98, 100, de Wohl, Louis, 59
102, 153 Dicks, Henry, 106, 131, 132, 142,
Casablanca declaration, 31 160, 165, 178, 282
Chamberlain, Neville, 33, 39, 68, 74, Dönitz, Karl, 236
75, 77, 262
Churchill, Winston, 39, 43, 69, 77,
138, 143, 150, 178, 280 E
Clark, Kenneth, 86, 89 Eden, Anthony, 50, 85, 150, 153,
222, 243, 244, 250
Communist Party of Austria (KPÖ),
émigrés, 36
218, 219
Erikson, Erik, 117, 139
Communist Party of German (KPD),
40, 58, 75, 93
Cripps, Stafford, 150, 152, 153, 155, F
171, 174, 209 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, 85
Crossman, Richard, 4, 13, 30, 32, 39, First World War, 30
41–43, 50, 53–57, 63, 64, 95, Foreign Office (FO), 30, 31, 33,
98, 121, 131, 206, 212, 220, 35, 36, 42, 43, 46, 53, 56, 61,
232, 238, 241 63, 71, 77–79, 85, 106, 120,
Csato, Tibor, 36, 192, 198, 205 123, 130, 178, 196, 205, 209,
INDEX 305
216–219, 222, 223, 244, 246, H

247, 249, 251 Herder, Johann Gottfried, 83, 85
Frankfurt School, 92, 95, 108, 113, Hess, Rudolf, 106, 131, 137
117, 124, 252 Hirschfeld, Magnus, 154, 156, 174
Freud, Sigmund, 110, 111, 114, 134, Hitler, Adolf, 7, 45, 51, 75, 78, 83,
138 92, 97, 122, 134–136, 143, 151,
Fromm, Erich, 95, 139 153, 158–160, 170–172, 176,
179, 189, 198, 203, 206, 212,
235, 240, 252, 257, 268, 272
Holborn, Hajo, 95
G Holocaust, 145, 225, 246–251, 254,
Germanophobia, 10, 11, 13, 43–45, 258, 271
54, 55, 69, 80, 81, 90, 96, Howe, Ellic, 34, 38, 39, 50, 53, 56,
97, 102, 108, 136, 147, 148, 61, 125, 214, 235, 260, 262,
153–155, 172, 173, 175, 181, 268
278, 281
anti-Prussian, 73, 79, 81–83, 91,
102, 174, 216, 280 I
Labour Party, 47, 49 innere Schweinehund, 50, 52, 88,
172, 179, 180, 256, 278
Vansittartism, 22, 30, 45–49, 53,
Italian Fascism, 76, 200
60, 69, 79, 84, 85, 88–90, 92,
Italy
98, 103, 156, 159
propaganda to, 152, 175, 176, 233
German prisoners of war, 70, 98, 119,
130–132, 157, 160, 176, 218,
262, 263, 271, 273 J
Gestapo, 41, 114, 177, 213, 260 jazz, 8, 152, 266, 269, 271, 272
Gilbert, Felix, 95, 96 Jones, Ernest, 116, 119, 120, 127,
Gleichschaltung , 114, 115, 183, 194 130
Goebbels, Joseph, 6, 7, 16, 51, 60, Jung, Carl, 114, 135, 136, 138
61, 89, 137, 158, 168, 184, 190,
237, 241, 259, 264, 266
K
good Germans, 11, 30, 34, 38, 42,
Keller, Adolf, 210
49, 68, 74, 76, 77, 79, 87, 89,
Kirchenkampf , 183, 203, 211, 214
90, 99–101, 150, 153, 183, 239,
Koeppler, Heinz, 72, 97, 100, 102
267
Göring Institute, 115
Greene, Hugh Carlton, 49 L
Gröber, Conrad, Archbishop of Langer, Walter C., 117
Freiburg, 184 Le Bon, Gustave, 109–112
Gustav Siegfried Eins , 51, 57, 59, 88, Leeper, Rex, 46, 53, 56, 64, 80, 101,
155, 158, 162, 164, 168, 174, 103, 120, 121, 125, 126, 130,
211, 212, 260, 263 155, 214, 243, 255, 268
306 INDEX
Lockhart, Robert Bruce, 15, 31, 38, Neumann, Franz, 95, 252
42–44, 56, 64, 105, 107, 109, Niemöller, Martin, 210
125, 130, 142, 154, 155, 175,
233, 239, 242
Loeb, Walter, 48, 49, 57, 80 O
Loewenheim, Walter, 41 Office of Strategic Services (OSS), 12,
Löwenthal, Richard, 57, 95, 201 18, 69, 95, 117, 119, 121, 122,
124, 132, 133, 139, 141, 267
Office of War Information (OWI), 69
M Orwell, George, 40, 52, 201
MacCurdy, J.T., 106, 125, 130, 132,
135, 136, 138, 140, 142, 173
Marcuse, Herbert, 91, 200 P
Marxism, 32, 37, 39, 41, 43, 55, 64, political warfare school, 82, 96, 97,
92, 113, 116, 139, 252 127, 157, 170, 173, 177, 206,
Mass Observation, 167 262
Meinecke, Friedrich, 73, 75, 95, 98 propaganda
Ministry of Economic Warfare leaflet, 7, 17, 33, 37, 38, 59, 88,
(MEW), 33, 38–40, 42, 43, 46, 125, 140, 153, 159, 162, 163,
78, 126 192, 236, 237, 244, 245, 260,
Ministry of Information (MoI), 5, 9, 261, 267, 268
16, 31, 33, 36, 79, 83, 108, 118, malingering, 125, 159–161, 180
123, 166, 183, 184, 196, 205, radio, 7, 40, 51, 59, 60, 88, 140,
229, 242, 247–249, 274 151–153, 155, 158, 159, 162,
Morton, Desmond, 121–123, 138, 168, 174, 175, 184, 263
143 rumour, 7–9, 18, 121, 126, 158,
Moscow Declaration, 188, 216, 217, 164, 168, 234, 249, 270
219, 220, 222, 223 psychoanalysis, 108, 110, 116, 119,
Mosley, Oswald, 42 123, 124, 128, 130, 131, 179
Münzenberg, Willi, 39, 58, 75 Psychological Warfare Division of
Murray, Ralph, 63, 87 the Supreme Headquarters
Allied Expeditionary Force
(PWD/SHAEF), 96, 119,
N 131–133, 139–142, 144
Nachrichten für die Truppe, 140 psychopathology, 108, 128, 134, 139
Naval Intelligence (NID), 59, 127,
267, 273
neo-Freudianism, 108, 112, 115, R
116, 132, 139, 147, 149, 159, Rauschning, Hermann, 36, 76, 92,
176–179 95, 136, 193, 206
Neu Beginnen, 40, 41, 48–50, 57, re-education, 70, 72, 90, 97, 100,
59, 69, 93–95, 98, 104, 114, 104, 178, 179, 181, 218, 256,
201, 202 265
INDEX 307
refugees, 13, 30, 32, 36, 40, 48, 88, 89, 153, 164, 192, 215–219,
56–58, 104, 116, 153, 192, 251, 261
253, 254, 256 SO1, 33, 39, 42, 43, 45, 64, 164,
contributions to propaganda, 30, 218
69, 95, 117, 148, 184, 189 Stalingrad, 239, 241, 258, 275
hostility towards, 36, 46, 61, 93 Stuart, Campbell, 30, 32, 43, 54, 56,
Reich, Wilhelm, 113, 116, 124 63, 120
Rotes Wien, 219
Russia, 37, 98, 100, 101, 150, 151,
158, 166, 197, 200, 204, 207, T
218, 219, 224, 250 The Tablet , 32, 193
Tallents, Stephen, 5, 6
Taylor, A.J.P., 71, 90, 93, 94, 96,
S 102, 103
SD Reports, 82, 231, 236–238, 270 Tennant, Eleonora, 46, 47, 80, 93
Section D, 41 totalitarian theory, 37, 75, 139,
secular religion, 37, 186, 187, 194, 186–188, 200, 201, 206, 208,
195, 197, 202, 203, 214, 223 210, 218, 223, 224, 257, 259,
Sedgwick, R.L., 96, 127, 136, 157, 271, 272, 281
173, 191 Toynbee, Arnold, 39, 215
Sender der Europäischen Revolution, Trotter, Wilfred, 105, 112, 129
40, 41, 49, 50, 54, 57
Shils, Edward, 132, 139, 245
SIS (Secret Intelligence Service: MI6), U
34, 35, 41, 51, 56, 58, 60, 121, unconditional surrender, 1, 15, 16,
247 27, 31, 90, 98, 231, 233, 239,
Smith, Rae, 121, 123, 127, 140, 143, 240, 245
175, 176, 179 United States, 74, 92, 95, 101, 103,
Social Democratic Party of Austria 116, 118, 121, 132, 139
(SPÖ), 215, 218, 282
Social Democratic Party of Germany
(SPD), 41, 48, 57, 58, 93, 95, V
104, 171 Vansittart, Robert, 49, 53, 55, 60, 64,
Soldatensender Calais , 140, 152, 235, 78, 79, 81, 83–86, 90, 141, 280
237, 249, 262, 263, 265, 267 Black Record, 45, 46, 49, 78–80,
Soldatensender West , 140 84, 85, 92
Sonderweg , 70, 91, 92, 98 Vatican, 32, 189, 234
Sopade, 41, 58 Versailles Treaty, 78, 216
Spanish Civil War, 58, 59, 199, 201, Voegelin, Eric, 197, 198
207 Voigt, Frederick, 30, 39, 41–44, 49,
Spark, Muriel, 62, 63 55–57, 63, 71, 72, 80, 100, 166,
Special Operations Executive (SOE), 185–188, 194, 195, 210–212,
33, 38, 39, 41, 44, 56, 59, 83, 224, 252, 253, 255
308 INDEX
von Faulhaber, Michael, Archbishop White, John Baker, 41, 253

of Munich, 192, 205 Williams, Valentine, 32, 35, 36, 75,
von Galen, Clemens August, Bishop 121, 247
of Münster, 184, 191, 192, 213, Winner, Percy, 122, 126, 143
214, 220 Woodruff, Douglass, 32, 193
von Knoerringen, Waldemar, 57 World War One, 5, 30, 75, 79, 84,
von Thoma, Wilhelm Ritter, 222, 107, 111, 112, 118, 128, 133,
223, 244 136, 156, 162, 169, 171, 269
propaganda, 34, 37, 77–80, 87,
120, 228, 240
W
Walmsley, Robert, 29, 36, 38, 51, 56
Wehrmachtsender Nord, 151, 152, Z
158, 238, 263 Zech-Nenntwich, Hans, 61

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BRITAIN AND THE WORLD

British Subversive Propaganda

Kirk Robert Graham

More information about this series at

Britain and the World

Cover image: © National Library of Scotland

“Kirk Graham’s book is a valuable contribution to the origins and

1 Introduction: British Propagandists and the German

Introduction: British Propagandists

This is a study of Britain’s intelligentsia and political elite, working

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1

This book was conceived as a kind of double helix—two thematic

from Britain to enemy and occupied Europe. This included open, or

subversive propaganda’s broader context. Professional exchanges such as

McLaine suggested that inspiration came instead from Joseph Goebbels’s

Propaganda is, in essence, ethically neutral, a method of persuasive

14 Welch, “‘Opening Pandora’s Box’”, 11.

‘people’s receiver’.”17 The Volksempfänger was designed to be too weak

Steinert writes, “[m]ore and more Germans began listening to foreign

stations, meanwhile, adopted the letter W denoting “Wop.”26 However,

Richard Scully demonstrates the value in taking seriously this predilection

26 Communications chief Edward Halliday blamed this unfortunate choice on “technical

behaviour was rooted in “history, culture, and collective psychology.”29

PWE’s image of Germany was by no means inevitable. The Third Reich

33 Angela Schwarz, “British Visitors to National Socialist Germany: In a Familiar or in

While this book touches on a number of important themes, perhaps

35 Stone, Responses to Nazism in Britain, 20.

as bulwark against the growth of British fascism thus entailing “anti-

39 Philip Williamson, “The Conservative Party, Fascism and Anti-Fascism, 1918–1939”,

different wartime ministries were a near constant feature of the propa-

By this reasoning, the policy of unconditional surrender undermined any

outcomes of specific campaigns and place more emphasis on public agency

46 Fox, “Careless Talk”, 966.

49 It seems likely that Macdonald, listening to a recording of a subversive broadcast,

This book is certainly not the first history of British subversive

Two monographs form the foundation of this PWE historiography.

54 Charles Cruickshank, The Fourth Arm (London: Davis-Poynter, 1977).

of instrumentalist approach to the practice of history that characterized

Germany; he is, however, among the first historians to properly appre-

61 Taylor, Munitions of the Mind, 8.

British Subversive Propaganda during the Second World War builds

The View from Woburn Abbey:

including recently declassified personnel files, in order to develop a more

The Brazen Horde: British Propagandists

Germany on the Couch: The Role

preferred the judgement of journalists and civil servants with “prac-

No Man so Lecherous as the German:

A Rebellion Against the Divinely Appointed

developments in PWE knowledge of, and attitudes to, German resistance

The Logic of Subversive Propaganda

The View from Woburn Abbey: The Political

1 TNA FO 898/547, Robert Walmsley, “E.H/P.I.D/P.W.E. German and Austrian

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 29

2 Charles Cruickshank, The Fourth Arm: Psychological Warfare 1938–1945 (London:

other (not an infrequent occurrence), something of a doxa was preserved

7 TNA FO 898/177, Crossman to Valentine Williams, Memorandum (13 January

Gentleman Amateurs and “the Other Germany”

12 This analysis translated into a military strategy in which, as Robert H. Keyserlingk

Whitehall’s initial ambition to win over so-called good Germans, the

world,” one of whom “knew nothing of Germany.”22 From the outset,