The role of propaganda in Hitler’s rise to power, and the influence of his minister of propaganda Joseph Goebbels, are well-chronicled aspects of the 1933-1945 German Third Reich.
The Allies’ psychological warfare counterefforts during World War 2 are less well-known. How to Win an Information War, a new book by Peter Pomerantsev, senior fellow at Johns Hopkins University, reveals the work of Britain’s leading propagandist, Sefton Delmer, as part of the clandestine Political Warfare Executive (PWE) division.
Pomerantsev is Ukrainian by birth, his dissident parents having fled the Soviet Union when he was young. It is sadly appropriate, then, that How to Win an Information War was written as Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. Ukraine isn’t a real country, claimed Russia’s President Vladimir Putin; it has no right to exist. This was propaganda at its zenith. “What should we do to fight this?” Pomerantsev asks in the book’s preface.
He hasn’t set out to write a biography of Delmer. By focusing on his work — delving into goals for specific aspects, and analysing it intricately — Pomerantsev hopes to learn more about the nature of propaganda.
Delmer was born in Berlin to Australian parents, and grew up there until midway through World War 1, when his family managed to escape to England. He returned to Germany as correspondent for the UK Daily Express in the 1930s. As a journalist he met Goebbels and studied his campaigns — including close up as the propaganda minister’s VIP guest at Hitler’s mass rallies.
The PWE recruited Delmer in 1940. From a secret location just north of London he was mandated to gear up “black” propaganda, the form which masquerades as information communicated by the enemy, thereby enhancing its believability.
Satisfying the ‘inner pig-dog’
Even for black propaganda, Delmer had a radically different approach within the PWE. For one, he believed in the power of radio as a mass medium able to create theatre of the mind and emotional resonance. Further, unlike colleagues running other stations such as the BBC’s German service, Delmer felt it was pointless to appeal to reason, morality or religious values. Rather, he wanted to capitalise on what Hitler had told him in an interview for the Daily Express: “There is an inner schweinehund [pig-dog] in every man.”
So Delmer’s first major play was a station intriguingly called Gustav Siegfried Eins (GS1). Broadcasts were foul-mouthed, patriotically racist, and replete with stories of obscene sexual conduct by Nazi apparatchiks. GS1 hinted at a code name for an informed senior military leader, “der Chef”, acted by Delmer himself. The strategy was to tap into people’s self-interest, the crutch of resentment, their innate curiosity for scandal and salaciousness — not their idealism. (Eighty years later this echoes in the communication strategy of Donald Trump as he seeks the US presidency again despite facing multiple criminal charges and civil cases.)
It’s no flaw of the book that measuring Delmer’s success is near impossible. During GS1’s first year on air the PWE assessed 40 “poll comebacks” conducted against German prisoners of war, the opened letters of journalists in Germany, and information from British spies — what we’d today call dipstick market research. Thirty-six responses assumed GS1 was based in Germany, the other four considered the station could be a hoax but concluded not. Delmer’s black propaganda methodology, at least, was working.
By 1943 his operation comprised hundreds of staff, encompassing researchers, writers, technicians, former actors and voice artists working across a portfolio of stations each aimed at a defined attitudinal or demographic segment. One, Soldatensender Calais, targeted German troops directly by purporting to be an official station for them. Using intercepted messages and a range of other sources, Sender blended truth and fake information designed to slash morale or misdirect efforts. Pomerantsev has discovered anecdotal mentions of a German U-boat commander who heard on Sender’s family messages bulletin that his wife had given birth. He hadn’t been home for two years, so the news outraged him and — in a case of home truths being more effective than lies — triggered his decision to surrender his submarine and crew.
Another apocryphal episode concerns German General Karl-Wilhelm von Schlieben, surrounded by the 9th US Infantry Division at Cherbourg but ordered to hold out. He had heard that the Americans had a phosphorous superweapon. Calling out, he asked them to prove it, which would give him a reason to deem his position hopeless and thus overrule orders. A plain shell was fired, enough for Von Schlieben to surrender. The superweapon was a fabrication — but the rumour had spread to senior German military ranks via Sender.
A wider assessment would be how many German civilians regularly tuned into Delmer’s various stations’ broadcasts. The PWE itself estimated a number between 1-million and 3-million. This correlates with records from the Nazi Party’s SS and the Gestapo, indicating that they believed up to 3-million Germans were listening to the BBC in 1943.
This very small proportion is understandable given the severe punishment if a German was caught, or even suspected of, listening to a foreign radio station. Delmer knew this barrier, and the limitations of what he was doing. In his 1961 autobiography he wrote that he saw his task as being “to corrode with a steady drip of subversive news and ‘evidence’ the iron system of control in which Hitler’s police state had locked the body and soul of the German people”.
Pomerantsev vacillates in giving his own opinion as to whether it worked. Many Germans fought to the end, but there was corrosion of their will, he believes; a few paragraphs later he writes that, unequivocally, it was the Allies’ superior military and economic power that won the war, and Delmer’s work was a very minor and unmeasurable footnote.
The battle for truth
Still, many sections of the book are unnervingly informative about human psychology and the nature of propaganda in all its forms. My overall takeout is that there are two critical questions surrounding the issue of propaganda. “How does a propaganda battle get won?” has some kind of answer, towards which Pomerantsev’s book meanders. Successful strategies, perhaps like those Delmer pursued, amount to fighting like with like; propaganda can only be beaten with counterpropaganda of at least the same scope and scale.
The second question is more important in today’s context of rampant disinformation spread by troll- and bot-farms, and outrageous lies spouted by leaders even in liberal democracies. Can truth prevail? Therein lies the real information war, and though the author crafts Delmer’s story intriguingly — as smartly as any propagandist — it doesn’t illuminate a pathway for 21st-century societies to discern truth.
Indeed, in a recent interview on CNN, Jelani Cobb, dean of journalism at Columbia University, acknowledged the scale of the problem and that it’s getting worse. “We have not figured out the formula we need to operate in a disinformation ecosystem. This issue is coming to a head,” he said.
And pioneering AI organisation OpenAI recently acknowledged its tools have been used by “covert influence operations which attempt to manipulate public opinion or influence political outcomes without revealing the true identity or intentions of the actors behind them.” China, Iran, Israel and Russia are named in its report as having used OpenAI models to run interference on a range of issues affecting billions, including the wars in Gaza and Ukraine, news and information in China, and the recent Indian elections.
The disclosure is welcome in terms of transparency. It also confirms that AI has blown open the Pandora’s Box on propaganda. Just as in 1930s Germany, the target of today’s propaganda avalanche is democracy itself. In this context it is unrealistic to evaluate How to Win an Information War based on whether it genuinely gives answers. Unfortunately, it can’t.
* How to Win an Information War: The Propagandist who Outwitted Hitler by Peter Pomerantsev, Faber & Faber, 2024