The Fake News Campaign Against the Nazis

The Fake News Campaign against the Nazis Most people know about German and Japanese propaganda during the Second World War. Joseph Goebbels and Tokyo Rose were only two people in a well-oiled propaganda machine aimed at the Allies. But fewer people know about the major British effort to undermine German morale by creating friction between the Nazi Party and the army, and between civilians and the military. Denis Delmer was born in Berlin to Australian parents. In 1917, the family moved to England where he eventually became a journalist and headed the Berlin bureau of an English newspaper. He was allowed to travel with Hitler and to interview him. In the process, he became virulently anti-Nazi. He returned to England in 1940 and was recruited to head a propaganda unit tasked with creating false news, or black propaganda, as it was then known. The goal was to sabotage the German war effort. When the situation became dire for England in 1940, after the Battle of Dunkirk, Delmer created several radio stations that portrayed themselves as loyal to Germany and Hitler while simultaneously exposing the corruption and incompetence of the German hierarchy and the Nazi party. In 1941, under Delmer's direction, one radio program, in particular, went on the air with devastating effect. The show's host, who went by the name Der Chef, spoke as a fellow German, but diminished confidence in the regime. He told stories of Nazi officials sleeping with wives of soldiers on the battlefield, troop mutinies and disease spreading at home. German troops scoured the country in a vain attempt to track down the radio station that successfully broadcast 700 programs, sapped the troops' will to fight and caused many solders to distrust the Nazi hierarchy. The reason the Germans never found the radio station and Der Chef is because Der Chef was a German exile named Peter Seckelmann and the programs were all being broadcast from England. While the British were breaking German military codes at Bletchley Park, Seckelmann and a team of German speakers hatched scripts that blended fact and fiction, real news and deception -- what they called "believable lies". Seckelmann's fictional character, Der Chef, claimed to be a loyal, high-ranking Nazi who was devoted to Hitler, but increasingly disillusioned with the leadership and the war effort. There is an exquisite irony in this story. Delmer learned how to undermine the Germans by observing Nazi success with propaganda and fake news about Jews. Using the Nazi's own methods against them, Delmer proved that propaganda is a double-edged sword: "Hitler was always called Der Chef by those in his inner circle, so I decided to call my veteran hero Der Chef", Delmer said. No one knows with certainty the extent of the mission's success, but what is known is that many soldiers and police in Germany were engaged in trying to find Der Chef, block broadcasts, round up newspapers and leaflets, and counter the propaganda that was being disseminated by the British. When captured German soldiers were interrogated, it was determined that more than half had listened to the Allied radio stations. When Churchill was asked to define his policy, he responded: "to wage war against a monstrous tyranny, never surpassed in the dark, lamentable catalogue of human crime". It was Churchill who consolidated the "black propaganda" under Delmer's authority, a tactic that constituted a lesser-known achievement in the strategy to win the war. The first casualty of war, wrote American politician Hiram Johnson, is truth. However, all means possible, including the dark art of propaganda, were needed in that struggle for civilisation itself. As Alexis de Tocqueville so presciently wrote: "There are two things which will always be very difficult for a democratic nation: to start a war and to end it." Dr. Paul Socken is Distinguished Professor Emeritus and founder of the Jewish Studies program at the University of Waterloo