From How to Win an Information War (Peter Pomerantsev, 2024 ) pp159-60
So here was a radio programme pretending to be Nazi, which understood that its listeners knew that it wasn’t, and whose listeners tuned in because they needed the emotional and physical safety of play-acting as if they thought it might be Nazi after all.
But in this sense, can what Delmer was doing with the Sender even be classified chiefly as “disinformation” in the sense of trying to throw the wool over people’s eyes? Instead, it is almost the opposite: Delmer was not so much deceiving his audiences as offering them a safe passage towards (if not quite to) reality. Delmer had overcome the risk of a covert station being exposed by not insisting on deceiving the audience in the first place. He made the camouflaged nature of the radio its attraction.
Imagine the process of tuning in to the Sender. If the principle of Goebbels’s propaganda, and those like him, was to treat you like passive putty, to attempt to entrance and hypothetically to even hypnotise you, then here was a station that required you to make a series of autonomous, conscious steps when you listened to it. You put on a series of disguises, and in that very process, you were active and self-aware. The contorted mental gymnastics that people went through helped them bend their minds out of the passive mental state that Goebbels wanted.
The music on the Sender played a similar game with the audience, Vicki, the forces’ darling,” would open each show with her trademark “This is Vicki with three kisses for you.”
She played plenty of jazz banned by the Nazis: Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Glenn Miller. These represented the sort of “cacophonous instrumental squawk”, in Goebbels’s words, that the Nazis disapproved of yet was popular among young soldiers.” But this American music never had any English lyrics. Any songs with words had to be in German, as with the big-band crooners you could also find on the Reich’s radio. So someone listening to the radio could always point to the “approved” Nazi tunes while enjoying the banned music too.
In between tunes, Vicki would give anxious wives and mothers news of their loved ones at the front, and worried soldiers were given information about the whereabouts of their families after a heavy air raid, which the Sender knew the location of as soon as it happened, thanks to the RAF. She also indulged in the odd trick:
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. The German postal service was clogged for weeks. If we wanted to lower the morale of the soldiers, I would simply tell a certain battalion that, although it was surrounded and possibly trapped, all was not lost, and I would play them a cheerful tune.”
Delmer compared Vicki to Circe in the Odyssey, tempting Nazi sailors and soldiers to grow despondent: “The treacle in her voice would never let you suspect that this Circe had lost half her family in the gas chambers of Auschwitz.”
Vicki’s real name was Agnes Bernelle. She was twenty and had come to England with her father, Rudolf Bernauer, a Jewish playwright and cabaret impresario who had started his career in the original cabaret of Max Reinhardt. It was Bernauer’s idea that Agnes should take on the role of Vicki, and he created her persona, wrote her scripts and later wrote the songs that she would perform herself. The Delmer—Reinhardt connection, which had started all the way back in World War I, was sealed at Woburn.
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