Sefton Delmer

Denis Sefton Delmer (24 May 1904, Berlin, Germany – 4 September 1979, Lamarsh, Essex) was a British journalist of Australian heritage and propagandist for the British government. Fluent in German, he became friendly with Ernst Röhm who arranged for him to interview Adolf Hitler in the 1930s. During WWII he led a black propaganda campaign against Hitler by radio from England, sufficiently successful he was named in the Nazis' Black Book for immediate arrest after their invasion of England.

Denis Sefton Delmer, known familiarly as "Tom", was born in Berlin, Germany, but was registered as a British citizen with the British Consulate. His parents were from Australia. His father, Frederick Sefton Delmer, born in Hobart, Tasmania, was Professor of English Literature at Berlin University and author of a standard textbook for German schools. On the outbreak of the First World War his father was interned in Ruhleben internment camp as an enemy alien. In 1917, in a prisoner exchange between the British and German governments, the Delmer family was repatriated to England.

Delmer was educated at Friedrichwerdersches Gymnasium, Berlin, St Paul's School, London and Lincoln College, Oxford, where he obtained a second class degree in modern languages. He was brought up to speak only German until the age of five and as late as 1939 spoke English with a slight accent.

The Reichstag fire in Berlin, 1933

After leaving university, Delmer worked as a freelance journalist until he was recruited by the Daily Express to become head of its new Berlin Bureau. Whilst in Germany, he became friendly with Ernst Röhm, who arranged for him to become the first British journalist to interview Adolf Hitler.

In the 1932 German general election, Delmer travelled with Hitler aboard his private aircraft. He was also present when Hitler inspected the aftermath of the Reichstag fire. During this period, Delmer was criticised for being a Nazi sympathiser and, for a time, the British government thought he was in the pay of the Nazis. Perversely, Nazi leaders were convinced Delmer was a member of MI6; his denials of any involvement only served to strengthen their belief that he was not only a member, but also an important one.

In 1933, Delmer was sent to France as head of the Daily Express Paris Bureau. In 1935, Delmer married Isabel Nichols. Delmer covered important stories in Europe including the Spanish Civil War and the invasion of Poland by the Wehrmacht in 1939. He also reported on the German western offensive in 1940.

Delmer returned to Britain and worked, for a time, as an announcer for the German service of the BBC. After Hitler broadcast a speech from the Reichstag offering peace terms, Delmer responded immediately, stating the British cast the terms in "your lying, stinking teeth". Delmer's instant, and unauthorised rejection produced a great impact on Germany, where Goebbels concluded it had to have come from the government. That gave an impact any authorization would have prevented and produced consternation in Whitehall. The effect was desirable, but it was unclear whether such a spokesman would again happen to say what the government wanted.

Gliwice Radio Tower, site of the Gleiwitz incident by the SS in 1939

In September 1940, Delmer was recruited by the Political Warfare Executive (PWE), to organize black propaganda broadcasts to Nazi Germany as part of a psychological warfare campaign. Leonard Ingrams gained clearance for Delmer to work for the Political Intelligence Department of the Foreign Office. Based at Wavendon Towers in what is now Milton Keynes new town, the operation joined a number of other "Research Units" operating propaganda broadcasts.

The concept was that the radio station would undermine Hitler by pretending to be a fervent Hitler-Nazi supporter.

Delmer's first, most notable success was a shortwave station: Gustav Siegfried Eins (Gustav Siegfried One), G3 in the Research units. It was “run” by the character "Der Chef”, an unrepentant Nazi, who disparaged both Winston Churchill ("that flatfooted son of a drunken Jew") and the "Parteikommune", the "Party Communists" who betrayed the Nazi revolution. The station name, "Gustav Siegfried Eins" (abbreviated "GS1", left a question in listeners' minds – did it mean Geheimsender 1: (Secret Transmitter 1) or Generalstab 1 (General Staff 1)? The station was broadcast from nearby Gawcott.

GS1 went on the air on the evening of 23 May 1941. Der Chef, played by Peter Secklemann, a former Berlin journalist, was (then) the only member of the team to have arrived at the discreet house known as "The Rookery" in Aspley Guise, Bedfordshire. Another journalist, Johannes Reinholz, played an adjutant to Der Chef.

When Stafford Cripps discovered what Delmer was involved with (through the intervention of Richard Crossman) Cripps wrote to Anthony Eden, then Foreign Secretary: "If this is the sort of thing that is needed to win the war, why, I'd rather lose it." Delmer was defended by Robert Bruce Lockhart, who pointed out the need to reach the sadist in the German nature. GS1 ran for 700 broadcasts before Delmer killed it off in late 1943 with gunfire heard over the radio intimating the authorities had caught up with Der Chef. The dramatic ending may have been deliberately based on the Gleiwitz incident, when the Nazis staged the capture of a German radio station by Polish forces, an operation which Hitler used to justify the invasion of Poland and the start of WWII. Owing to an error by a non-German-speaking transmitter engineer, the programme was accidentally repeated and Der Chef's dramatic on-air murder was broadcast twice.

Delmer created several stations and was successful through a careful use of intelligence using gossip intercepted in German mail to neutral countries to create credible stories. Delmer's credit within the intelligence agencies was such that the Admiralty sought him out to target German submarine crews with demoralizing news bulletins. For this, Delmer had access to Aspidistra, a 500 kW radio transmitter obtained from RCA in the US (their largest off-the-shelf-model), which Section VIII bought for £165,000. Use of Aspidistra, which began in 1942, was split between PWE, the BBC, and the RAF. Delmer's creation was Deutsche Kurzwellensender Atlantik (or popularly Atlantiksender). This station used US jazz (banned within Germany as decadent) and up-to-date dance music from Germany (extracted via Sweden and RAF courier) as well as an in-house German dance band. Important details on naval procedures came from anti-Nazis identified in POW camps, and mail was sifted to create personalized announcements. Agnes Bernelle "played" the seductive "Vicki" and announced news bulletins.

Christ the King (G.8) broadcast an attack on the conscience of religious Germans, telling of the horrors of the labour and concentration camps, through a German priest.

Soldatensender Calais ("Calais Armed Forces Radio Station") was another clandestine radio station directed at the German armed forces by Delmer. Based in Milton Bryan and transmitting from Crowborough, Soldatensender Calais broadcast a combination of popular music, "cover" support of the war, and "dirt" - items inserted to demoralize German forces. Delmer's propaganda stories included spreading rumours that foreign workers were sleeping with the wives of German soldiers serving overseas. The station, broadcast by Aspidistra, was popular on the German home front also. Delmer oversaw the production of a daily "grey" German-language newspaper titled Nachrichten für die Truppe ("News for the Troops"), which first appeared in May 1944, much of its text being based on the Soldatensender Calais broadcasts. Nachrichten für die Truppe was written by a team provided to Delmer by SHAEF and was disseminated over Germany, Belgium, and France each morning by the Special Leaflet Squadron of the US Eighth Air Force.

As the fighting progressed into Germany itself, black propaganda was used to create an impression of an anti-Nazi resistance movement. Delmer criticised this later as the "black boomerang", with Nazis claiming they had been allied to this fictitious movement. With the end of the war in Europe, Delmer advised his colleagues to say nothing of the work they had been in lest, as the Nazis did after the First World War, the Germans could claim they had not been beaten militarily but by underhanded means.

After WWII, Delmer became chief foreign affairs reporter for the Daily Express. Over the next fifteen years Delmer covered nearly every major foreign news story for the newspaper. Sacked by Lord Beaverbrook in 1959 over an expenses issue, Delmer retired to Lamarsh in Essex, near to Little Sampford where his ex-wife Isabel lived with her third husband. He wrote two volumes of autobiography, Trail Sinister (1961), Black Boomerang (1962) and several other books including Weimar Germany (1972) and The Counterfeit Spy (1971). David Hare based his play Licking Hitler on Black Boomerang, and his plot included the faked, on-air discovery and shooting of the broadcaster, in the same way as Delmer had finished the career of "Der Chef".

He was the subject of This Is Your Life in 1962 when he was surprised by Eamonn Andrews outside the Caprice restaurant in London’s Mayfair.