Review of “How to Win an Information War” by Peter Pomerantsev
How to Win an Information War: The Propagandist Who Outsmarted Hitler recalls the black art of propaganda from the Second World War. It is also a bombshell against the credulity of today’s audiences raised in England, narrated by Peter Pomerantsev, the son of a Kiev dissident and leading expert on disinformation.
In 1941, a German-language shortwave radio station called Gustav Siegfried Eins went on the air. It began with the same theme music as the main Nazi news, but it sounded strange – it was played “on a weird-sounding piano”. Then it announced that “The Boss” would now speak.
The audience was showered with a torrent of insults: “Yankee pigs, stinking Japs, Russian Bolshevik pigs, Italian lemon faces.” Churchill was “a filthy, Jew-loving drunkard.”
However, the boss went on to describe the NSDAP as little more than a bunch of opportunists and secret Bolsheviks. Göring and Himmler were attacked for being far too lenient towards Great Britain, while the Luftwaffe did nothing to protect the German people.
Who was the mysterious The Boss?
The army was praised, but the SS was accused of occupying monasteries for debauchery and orgies. Many listeners believed much of this, as very specific information was revealed. They concluded that the radio station must be broadcasting from Germany and that it was the work of disgruntled insiders.
As the station grew in popularity, the future Queen Mother’s brother was sent to Washington to assure then-President Franklin D. Roosevelt that it was not the work of a secret anti-Nazi resistance group, but a covert British operation by the Political Warfare Executive, recorded in the billiard room of an English country house in Bedfordshire.
It was all the work of journalist Sefton Delmer, with the active support of German Jewish refugees who wrote the script and performed it on television. Jews played anti-Semites and Nazis.
Delmer was born in Berlin. The son of an Australian professor of English literature who taught at one of the city’s universities, Delmer spoke German fluently and without an accent. He felt at home in this country until one day, at the outbreak of the First World War, his schoolmates and teachers called him an “Englishman”.
After finishing school in England, Delmer returned to Berlin as a correspondent for the Daily Express, a major British newspaper. In February 1929, he heard Adolf Hitler – whom he considered a “nutcase” – speak for the first time, arguing that Germans should not eat oranges, which were imported, but only domestic fruit.
Delmer soon began to cultivate the SA chief Ernst Röhm, who in turn wanted to convey a positive image of Germany to the British public. He was happy to invite Delmer to a transvestite bar where one of his leading officers was performing.
Delmer used Röhm to get close to Hitler and became the only non-Nazi journalist asked to accompany Hitler during the April 1932 election campaign, flying him from city to city. When Röhm was slaughtered by Hitler’s men on the Night of the Long Knives in 1934, Goebbels, “the poisonous dwarf,” refused to publish the names of the dead. Delmer did so instead – and was expelled from Germany.
When World War II broke out in 1939, Delmer was suspicious of British intelligence. He was asked to speak on the BBC’s German program. He quickly realized that its war strategy was inadequate. He argued that it was better to convince the Germans that the war was lost and that they should abandon Hitler.
Delmer had no qualms about using the work of Magnus Hirschfeld, the German sexologist who had documented the sadomasochistic habits of his fellow citizens – and elevated the SS to a “secret society of sexual depravity”. The British Lord Privy Seal, Sir Stafford Cripps, was outraged and protested that “such filth” should not be broadcast on the radio.
In 1941, at the height of Nazi military strength, the BBC’s German service attracted one million German listeners. In 1945, an estimated 10 to 15 million listeners tuned in.
During the Battle of Britain in 1940, the Nazis had rounded up British prisoners of war to send to Britain on broadcasts, playing them as East End Cockneys chatting in a pub and calling on British workers to revolt against their bosses. Only eight British POWs agreed to take part, and were given better conditions, as well as cigarettes, alcohol and a weekly visit to the local brothel. Thousands of POWs turned down the Nazis’ offer.
The author of How to win an information war claims that his book has contemporary resonance as millions of people today are duped into believing falsehoods. He points to the many Russians who refused to believe the 2022 massacre in Bucha, Ukraine; how Fox News continued to falsely preach that Donald Trump lost the 2020 US presidential election because the voting machines were rigged; and how the Chinese celebrated the centenary of the “great, glorious and right” Communist Party in 2021 amid Xi Jinping’s assembly-line speeches.
Pomerantsev is right. His insightful book about the sophisticated deceptions of World War II is definitely timely.
- HOW TO WIN AN INFORMATION WAR: THE PROPAGANDIST WHO OUTFIGHTED HITLER
- By Peter Pomerantsev
- Faber
- 267 pages; $25
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