media regulation

Article

Forbidden Words, Banished Voices: Jewish Refugees at the Service of BBC Propaganda to Wartime Germany

Sheer Ganor University of California, Berkeley, USA

Abstract

During the Second World War, the BBC operated a German Service, which was tasked

with broadcasting propaganda programs into Nazi Germany and occupied Europe.

Psychological warfare was transmitted through radio waves to spread defeatism on the

fighting front and amongst civilians, and to convince the German people that there was no

future for the Third Reich. Dozens of German-speaking Jews who fled Central Europe

and arrived in England as refugees found employment in the German Service. Many of

these individuals worked as journalists, actors, comedians or authors in their previous

homelands, some had even earned a degree of fame and recognition before the perse-

cutory policies of National Socialism restricted their lives and forced them into exile.

From the perspective of BBC officials, these refugees’ experience in the press and in the

performing arts, as well as their intimate knowledge of German society and culture, set

them in a unique position to create effective and powerful propaganda. This paper

explores how, branded as unwelcome outsiders by their native societies, it was precisely

their familiarity as ‘insiders’ that paradoxically primed them to perform the task.

Keywords

BBC, Germany, Jews, propaganda, refugees, Second World War

In October 1940, German listeners across the Third Reich and occupied Europe covertly tuned their radios to catch a rousing political speech.

Members of the party, German men and women, a strange fate had brought us here

together, in this simple yet tidy German air-raid shelter. Here I again stand shoulder

Journal of Contemporary History

2020, Vol. 55(1) 97–119

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DOI: 10.1177/0022009418773485

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Corresponding author:

Sheer Ganor, 3229 Dwinelle Hall, Berkeley, CA 94720, USA.

Email: [email protected]

to shoulder with a modest German worker, here I warmly shake the hand of a

German mother, here I look in the loyal eyes of a white-haired senior, here I embrace

a small child in my arms. And here I declare that I shall serve as godfather and

guardian to every German child born in a German shelter – be it boy or girl.

And from here I, as Führer of the German nation, extend words of greetings and

ask that we take a moment to ask: How did we reach this destination? Solely thanks to

my steady politics, the politics of the National-Socialist Party, that relentlessly and

ferociously pursued this goal ever since its accession to power in 1933.1

This broadcast did not reach its audience through the official radio transmissions orchestrated by Propaganda Minister, Josef Goebbels. Nor were these words spoken by the actual Führer of the German nation. In order to hear it, listeners had to illegally tune into the wartime German language programming of the British Broadcasting Corporation. If they pressed their ears close enough to their Volksempfänger2 to hear past jamming noises transmitted by the Nazi regime, they would detect the voice of Martin Miller, who, from inside a studio in the BBC’s London Broadcasting House, was imitating Adolf Hitler.3

Miller was one of many émigré actors, writers and other professionals recruited to create German-language propaganda broadcasts during the Second World War. These improbable psychological warriors, living in England as refugees from Nazi Germany, made a unique contribution to the British war effort – their ability to captivate a German audience. Like most émigrés employed by the BBC’s German Service, Miller fled to England to escape anti-Jewish persecution. Born Rudolf Müller in Kremsier (now Kroměřı́ž) in Moravia, he and his family moved to Vienna in 1912. In 1936, Miller joined the Viennese Jüdisches Kulturtheater, which employed dozens of Jewish actors and theater professionals who had fled persecution in Germany. When authorities banned the organization in the aftermath of the Anschluss, he took the unexpected step of seeking work in Berlin with the Jüdischer Kulturbund, the only institution employing Jewish per- formers and artists throughout the Reich.4

His increasingly precarious existence under Nazi rule led Miller to seek escape: in early 1939 he managed to join the dozens of thousands of Central European

1 ‘Hitler spricht in einem Luftschutzkeller.’ Miller 1/1/2. Senate House Library, London Translated from German. All translations, unless mentioned otherwise, are by the author. 2 The Volksemfänger, the ‘Nation’s Set’, was an affordable radio device, produced at Goebbels’ initiative in order to increase the reach of Nazi propaganda into every German household. W. König, ‘Der Volksemfänger und die Radioindustrie. Ein Beitrag zum Verhältnis von Wirtschaft und Politik im Nationalsozialismus’, Vierteljahrschrift für Sozial-und Wirtschaftsgeschichte, 90, 3 (2003), 69–85. 3 A live recording of one of Miller’s Hitler speeches broadcast by the BBC is available online through the School of Advanced Study at the University of London: available at: http://sas-space.sas.ac.uk/ 5814/ (accessed July 2017). 4 R. Dove, ‘A Tale of Two Cities: The Actors Lilly Kann and Martin Miller in Berlin and London 1933–1945’, in I. Wallace (ed.), Voices from Exile: Essays in Memory of Hamish Ritchie (Leiden 2015), 26–7.

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refugees in England.5 In London, he helped to found the émigré theater Das Laterndl, where he first developed his Hitler sketches under the title Der Führer Spricht [‘The Führer Speaks’].6 The mocking words that Miller placed in his far- cical Führer’s mouth resonated with the propaganda strategy developed by the BBC’s German Service. The agency recruited him to record the speeches as well as write scripts and voice announcements. Reviewing Miller’s Hitler performances, BBC editors informed the Ministry of Labour and National Service: ‘He is the only man in London we have been able to find to do this’.7

While Miller’s ability to mimic Hitler may have been singular, he was far from the only Jewish performer in British propaganda broadcasting. German-speaking émi- grés in England – Jews and non-Jews alike – produced the most effective anti- German propaganda material aimed at German listeners in the lands from which they had recently escaped. And so it became possible for an actor like Miller, ban- ished from the stage in Germany and its annexed territories, to once again find a German audience. Indeed, through radio signals sent from his land of refuge, he reached German masses with an alternative personification of Adolf Hitler himself.

The escalating dangers crafted by the Nazi regime pushed Jewish performers and writers out of Third Reich territory. To purge Jews from the German public sphere, discriminatory legislation targeted actors, journalists, authors, artists, and entertainers.8 National-Socialism deemed their cultural production a corrupt- ing foreign element to be extirpated from the nation. Performing and writing for German audiences could hardly have seemed a realistic expectation for the near future. Yet war and the British radio propaganda machine brought exactly this turn of events, enabling them to again reach a German-speaking public. Paradoxically, the very same people who were deemed antithetic to the German spirit possessed not only the language skills but also the professional experience and deep cultural familiarity with German society that were essential for conducting psychological warfare. Only as immigrants, looking from outside, could these Jewish refugees regain insider positions that had been forcefully taken from them.

This article recovers the crucial role played by German-speaking Jews in the German Service’s designated Features Program, where the contradictions inhering

5 An estimated 80,000 Jewish refugees from Germany and its annexed territories arrived in the UK between 1933–1941. M. Berghahn, Continental Britons. German-Jewish Refugees from Nazi Germany (Oxford, Hamburg and New York, NY 1988), 75; H. Lavsky, The Creation of the German-Jewish Diaspora: Interwar German-Jewish Immigration to Palestine, the USA, and England (Berlin and Boston, MA 2017), 25. 6 R. Dove, ‘Theater of War: The Austrian Exile Theater Laterndl’, in A. Grenville (ed.), German- Speaking Exiles in Great Britain Vol. II (Amsterdam, New York, NY 2000), 209–213. 7 Letter from the BBC German Service to the German and Austrian Labour Exchange at the Ministry of Labour and National Service. 6 October 1942. Miller 2/16, SHL. 8 The first legal measure taken to ensure the removal of Jewish actors, artists and musicians from the German realm of culture was the Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service, enacted in 7 April 1933, which barred Jews from all public employment, including state-run radios, theaters, orches- tras, etc. On 22 September 1933, the establishment of the Reich Chamber of Culture continued to remove all Jews from private cultural institutions.

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in their contribution manifested most lucidly. The Features Program produced humorous and entertaining segments aimed at the ears of average German listeners, loyal to Volk and Führer but not ardent Nazi ideologues. Such broad- casts reflected the BBC’s position that a steady mixture of warning and satire could prize open the gap between these listeners and the German leadership, arousing opposition to the war and the Nazi party. Studying two of the most prominent shows produced by the Features Program department, this article discusses the decisive role of German-speaking Jews in their inception, their production and, eventually, to their popularity. But the story of the Jewish members of the German Service is not simply one of celebrated service. Biases derived from popular German antisemitism influenced the Service’s position towards their Jewish employees and towards content seen as too ‘Jewish.’ Aspiring to court German- speaking audiences, the BBC feared that echoing pro-Jewish sentiments would impede their psychological warfare and alienate the average German from the British agenda. While these prejudices were at no point so dominant as to dictate an anti-Jewish posture, their imprint appeared in broadcasting policies and admin- istrative discussions both during the war and the immediate postwar years.

Scholars who studied the BBC’s German Service have largely focused either on its role in British psychological warfare efforts or on the cultural production of the literary exiles it employed.9 Their work offers an important analysis of broadcast content, influence and shortcomings, but it pays little attention to the participation of Jewish émigrés in the Service’s operations and the entangled conditions under which they performed their duties.10 Connecting the history of the German Service with the mass displacement of German-speaking Jews who escaped Nazi

9 K. Moorehead, Satire als Kriegswaffe. Strategien der britischen Rundfunkpropaganda im Zweiten Weltkrieg (Marburg 2016); B. Wittek, Der britische Ätherkrieg gegen das Dritte Reich. Die deutschspra- chigen Kriegssendungen der British Broadcasting Corporation (Münster 1962); C. Brinson and R. Dove (eds), ‘Stimme der Wahrheit’. German-Language Broadcasting by the BBC (Amsterdam, New York, NY 2003); J. Taylor, ‘The Propagandists’ Propagandist: Bruno Adler’s ‘‘Kurt und Willi’’ Dialogues as Expression of British Propaganda Objectives’, in C. Brinson, R. Dove and J. Taylor (eds), ‘‘‘Immortal Austria’’? Austrians in Exile in Britain (Amsterdam and New York, NY 2007), 19–31; R.W. Williams, ‘‘‘Frau Wernicke’’ at the BBC. Wartime Satire and Propaganda’, in M. Gillespie and A. Webb (eds), Diasporas and Diplomacy: Cosmopolitan contact zones at the BBC World Service (1932–2012) (London and New York, NY 2013), 57–79; U. Naumann, ‘Kampf auf Ätherwellen: die Deutschsprachigen Satiren der BBC im Zweiten Weltkrieg’, in C. Brinson, et al. (eds), Keine Klage über England? Deutsche und österreichische Exilerfahrungen in Großbritannien 1933–1945 (Munich 1998), 31– 8; J. Taylor, ‘The Endsieg as Ever Receding Goal. Literary Propaganda by Bruno Adler and Robert Lucas for BBC Radio’, in I. Wallace (ed.), German Speaking Exiles in Great Britain (Amsterdam, Atlanta, GA 1999), 43–57; S. Seul, ‘‘‘Plain, Unvarnished News’’? The BBC German Service and Chamberlain’s propaganda campaign directed at Nazi Germany, 1938–1940’, Media History, 21,4 (2015), 378–96; J.F. Slattery, ‘‘‘Oskar Zuversichtlich’’: a German’s response to British radio propaganda during World War II’, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, 12, 1 (1992), 69–85. 10 A notable exception is S. Seul’s ‘‘‘Any Reference to Jews on the Wireless Might Prove a Double- edged Weapon’’: Jewish Images in the British Propaganda Campaign towards the German Public, 1938–1939’ in M. Liepach, G. Melischek and J. Seethaler (eds), Jewish Images in the Media (Vienna 2007), 203–32, which analyzes the BBC’s choice to avoid direct engagement with anti-Jewish persecution during the first years of the German Service. Seul’s article shows how biases against Jews have influ- enced the German Service’s content strategy, but it does not directly touch on the Jewish émigrés that were employed at the Service.

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persecution not only sheds new light on the priorities of BBC propaganda broadcasts during the Second World War. In exposing the contradictions that characterized the émigrés’ work for the German Service, it also illustrates the gap between the experience of forced migrants and the capacity of the society into which they entered to recognize and address that experience.

The BBC’s German language radio broadcasting originated not as a response to the Second World War, but as part of Britain’s desperate attempts to prevent it. When Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain delivered his famous appeasement speech on 27 September 1938 at the height of the Sudeten Crisis, his government wished to communicate directly with the German people. Chamberlain requested that the BBC simultaneously translate his words into German and transmit them to radio sets across Hitler’s Reich, hoping they would resonate with the German public and thus discourage the Nazi regime from aggression towards Czechoslovakia.11

From that moment until September 1939, BBC broadcasts in German pursued this conciliatory strategy on the air while preparing for the possibility of war behind the scenes.12

The ethos of the German Service shifted dramatically once Britain and Germany were at war. In cooperation with the Foreign Office’s Political Intelligence Department [PID], the German Service engaged in direct propaganda broadcasts that aimed to undermine support for the Nazi regime. From its institutional onset, officials devised a clear strategy of differentiation between the broad German population and the Nazi leadership, party apparatus, and committed followers. Broadcast content freely and remorselessly targeted the latter group, while addressing the former as misguided allies.13 ‘Any trace of peevish reproach, moral superiority or other variations of ‘‘anti’’ feelings are inappropriate in announcers or writers of the broadcasts’, instructed an internal memorandum outlining the operation’s principles.14

To support the operation, the BBC employed dozens of native German speakers residing in England, the numbers of which had been in flux since 1933 and increasingly so after the annexation of Austria and the events of Kristallnacht in 1938. Of the approximately 80,000 refugees who arrived in England from Germany and its annexed territories between 1933 and 1941, it is estimated that about 90 per cent were Jewish.15 As the war advanced, the German Service grew in staff. Born-and-raised Englishmen occupied the leading positions. The BBC kept

11 Seul, ‘‘‘Plain, Unvarnished News’’?’, 380–1. 12 They were, for instance, wondering about the status of those refugees already employed by the service if war were to break out. Confidential letter from the Aliens Department of the Home Office to the Assistant General, Establishment Officer of the BBC, 18 May 1939. R49/11/1 – 1937–June 1939, BBC Written Archives, Caversham. 13 Wittek, Der britische Ätherkrieg, 98–9. 14 Undated, unsigned. E1/753/1, File 1, 1939-1949, BWA; See also: Moorehead, Satire als Kriegswaffe, 66–7. 15 C. Holmes, ‘Immigrants and Refugees in Britain’ in J. Carlebach, G. Hirschfeld, A. Newman, A Paucker and P. Pulzer (eds) Second Chance. Two Centuries of German-speaking Jews in the United Kingdom (Tübingen 1991), 15; L. London, ‘British Government Policy and Jewish Refugees 1933– 45’, Patterns of Prejudice, 23, 4 (1989), 3.

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high managerial posts in the hands of trusted British citizens who supervised their foreign colleagues in a friendly but careful manner. Access to the microphone was restricted for the émigré announcers, whom the Service employed only as actors and readers of news or scripts. The senior role of commentators, who interpreted news and delivered messages on behalf of His Majesty, was performed by British natives fluent in German. This policy reflected British authorities’ general, formal suspicion against all German-speaking immigrants. BBC officials understood that ‘M.I.5 proceeds on the assumption that all German refugees are still loyal to their Fatherland, i.e. in the event of the Nazi regime cracking up they would be perfectly loyal Germans’.16

Propaganda strategy also determined the hierarchy that structured the Service’s operation. The BBC worked under the not unreasonable assumption that German listeners would regard native announcers with mistrust, if not with contempt. An internal memorandum from March 1942 explained that ‘Germans might be distrusted in Germany because they would be regarded as renegades’.17 Leonard Miall, one of the Service’s leading editors, recalled in 1988 that ‘[i]n talking to Germany about what we were doing, or thinking or hoping, it became important to emphasise [sic] this really meant ‘‘we the British’’ rather than ‘‘we the refugee Germans’’’.18 Lindley Fraser, one of the most prominent commentators recruited to the German Service during the war (who went on to become its director in 1947), underscored that any native German promoting a pro-British agenda on the air- waves would be considered a traitor and ‘automatically be labelled a Jew’ by many listeners, and ‘would therefore arouse more mental resistance and resentment than an obvious foreigner’.19 Journalism scholar, Bernhard Wittek, suggested that as a result of this policy, the refugees’ influence on the German Service’s output remained largely unrecognized both by the British colleagues and by the refugees themselves.20 While British commentators like Fraser, Sefton Delmer, and Charles Richardson used their names on the air and became known personalities in wartime Germany, refugee script-readers, whose all-too native Germanness exposed them, so it was feared, as undesirables to listeners in Germany, necessarily remained anonymous voices.21

16 ‘Employment of Aliens of Enemy Nationality’, Letter from W.St J. Pym to DSA, 17 May 1940. R49/11/2 – July–December 1939. BWA. On the MI5’s approach towards refugees from Nazi Germany see C. Brinson and R. Dove, A Matter of Intelligence: MI5 and the Surveillance of Anti-Nazi Refugees (Manchester 2014). 17 ‘BBC German Service’, 25 March 1942. E1/758/2: German Service. Programme Arrangements File 1b, 1942–1949, BWA. 18 British Broadcasting Corporation Radio, Hier Ist England – Live Aus London: Das Deutsche Programm D. British Broadcasting Corporation 1938–1988 (London 1988), 99. 19 L. Fraser, Propaganda (London 1957), 101–2. Fraser himself spoke German in a heavy Scottish accent, which in this context was considered an advantage rather than an obstacle. R. Hewlett, ‘Fraser, Lindley Macnaghten (1904–1963), broadcaster and economist’, in: Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford 2004) http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/65419, accessed September 2016. 20 Wittek, Der britische Ätherkrieg, 60. 21 A notable exception was Thomas Mann, whose value as commentator lay in his celebrity status as author and quintessential German.

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The distinction between native and foreign staff members was further exacer- bated by the Enemy Aliens policies, which were particularly restrictive during the initial war years.22 Like all Axis country nationals in Britain, German Service refugee employees were subjected to curfews and mobility restrictions, required special permissions to own radio sets, and even faced the threat of internment. These measures caused understandable distress amongst the refugees, and the BBC administration was well aware of it. ‘[T]he German staff were very dissatisfied because they were being subjected to the Enemy Aliens restrictions’, reported an administrator to the Director of European Operations in December, 1939. ‘They felt the position very keenly . . . that they, who were friends of England and disliked the Nazi regime extremely and were doing confidential work of national importance for us, should be treated as enemy aliens’.23 Not everyone in the BBC was as sensitive to the refugees’ concerns. An internal memo titled ‘German Jitters’, which circulated in the European Language Services shortly after the German military victories on the western front, stated that:

[t]he ‘refugee’ mentality has tended to view matters in the worst possible light and

some members of the Section have not concealed their belief that our victory is at the

most extremely doubtful. In one or two cases translators have endeavoured to make

plans for rapidly transferring themselves and their belongings to South America.24

Fundamentally different experiences of the Nazi regime separated British staff members from their predominantly Jewish refugee colleagues, who had reasons to fear the worst in the face of a possible German invasion. A shared work environment and a common goal could not bridge that gulf. Nevertheless, the BBC often intervened on the refugees’ behalf in petitioning for exemptions from Enemy Aliens restrictions that, besides causing personal distress, also impeded employees from properly fulfilling their duties.

The refugees’ work for the German Service contained an inherent tension. Nazi persecution had interrupted their professional careers and threatened their very safety, forcing them to piece together new lives in a foreign land. Yet the Nazi incitement of war created circumstances that placed great value on the skills and cultural knowledge they possessed. British government authorities not merely permitted but invited the refugees to practice their talents against the Nazi regime. From the distance of exile, they crafted psychological warfare that depended on their deep familiarity with German language, culture, and history. Meanwhile, their intended audience listened from inside the continental cities that

22 On the designation of Jewish refugees as Enemy Aliens during the Second World War, see L. London, Whitehall and the Jews, 1933–1948: British Immigration Policy, Jewish Refugees and the Holocaust (Cambridge 2003), 169–90; T. Kushner, ‘Clubland, Cricket Tests and Alien Internment, 1939–40’, in D. Cesarani and T. Kushner (eds), The Internment of Aliens in Twentieth Century Britain (London 2009), 79–101. 23 Letter from Ambler to DEO. 9 December 1939. R49/11/2 – July–December 1939, BWA. 24 ‘German Jitters’. 31 May 1940. R 13/148/1 File 1A 1938–1940, BWA.

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the refugees had once inhabited, in spaces where they had worked, lived, and entertained, the places from which they had been forcefully ejected. The German Service thus increased and intensified the intangible proximity between its displaced employees and the homeland that had banished them.

Nowhere was such inherent tension more present than in the German Service’s Features Program, whose everyday propaganda operations depended on refugee experience and talent in writing and performance. The BBC established the Features Program in late 1940 with the intention of introducing new content to buffer and supplement the news and information transmissions that dominated the German Service schedule.25 While implementing propaganda directives, it would inject dramatized shows and sketches authored as creative, even entertaining, broadcasts. When the administration began searching for personnel to fill this section’s positions, the Director of European Services suggested an advertisement outlining the characteristics of ideal candidates, including the imperative: ‘must have experience of the writing and production of dramatic performances in German and an intimate knowledge of German life and culture’.26 As it happened, the vast majority of individuals who could fulfil these requirements in England were German-speaking Jews. Indeed, it was their remarkably ‘intimate knowledge’ that soon enabled the Features Program to achieve wide resonance with German-speaking audiences behind enemy lines. The highly popular broadcasts, Frau Wernicke and Die Briefe des Gefreiten Adolf Hirnschal [The Letters of Lance-Corporal Adolf Hirnschal], illustrate the Features Program’s propaganda techniques and its achievements.

While many Jewish exiles with a professional background in writing and perform- ance hoped to resume their careers after fleeing their home countries, the notion of continuing to entertain citizens of the Third Reich while taking refuge in foreign lands would have seemed more than unlikely. For those who lived this scenario, the experience was defining: employment at the BBC and participation in British propaganda efforts deeply shaped the refugees’ experience of exile and often had life-long implications for their careers.

This was the case for Annemarie Hase, born Annita Maria Hirsch in Berlin. Before the Nazis came to power, Hase’s name was well-known in the cabaret scene of the German capital and throughout the country. She performed works by Brecht, Tucholsky, and Kästner, and was thoroughly embedded in the cultural milieu that these names represented during the so-called Golden Twenties. Hase came from a heavily assimilated Jewish family and was even baptized at birth. Her baptism mattered little to Nazi authorities in their pursuit of cleansing Germany of racially undesirable elements. She was banned from appearing on German stages in 1933 and joined the Jüdischer Kulturbund to continue her

25 A. Briggs, The History of Broadcasting in the United Kingdom. Vol. III, The War of Words (London 1970), 276–8. 26 Letter from D. Eur. S. to F. Ex.,15 November 1940. R 13/148/1. File 1A. 1938–1940. BWA.

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career, this time appearing in front of Jewish audiences only. In 1936, she decided to immigrate to England. Hase first sustained herself through odd jobs as a cook or maid, all the while performing with German-speaking émigré theater groups that sprouted in London at the time.27

In the summer of 1940, Hase received a phone call from Christina Gibson, director of the German Service’s broadcasting designed for female audiences. Gibson invited her to record a voice test for a new series.28 Hase would try for the role of Frau Gertrude Wernicke, a brazen Berlinerin who spoke in a heavy dialect that echoed the blue-collar environment she was meant to represent. The creator of this character was, unlike Hase, not an original Berliner. Bruno Adler was a native of Carlsbad, still a part of the Austrian-Hungarian Empire when he was born in 1888. Adler studied in Vienna and Munich before moving to Weimar, where he established himself as an art historian, author, and as a lecturer at the famous Bauhaus Institute. National Socialism forced the Jewish Adler to leave Germany, first departing to Prague in 1933 and then to England in 1936. In addition to Frau Wernicke, Adler created another hit series that ran on the German Service titled Kurt und Willi. According to chief editor, Hugh Carleton Greene, Kurt und Willi was Konrad Adenauer’s personal favorite amongst the German Service’s broadcasts.29

Adler understood his wartime writing for the BBC as ‘propaganda soothed by humor, or intensified by satire’.30 This logic characterized the Wernicke broadcasts from the inception of the character until the series ran its course in 1944. Frau Wernicke was a subversive protagonist who openly protested against what she saw as the exploitation of the German population by Nazi ‘party bosses’ and their cadre of opportunistic profiteers. Wernicke’s political engagement took the subtle form of fretting and yammering. Her vocal grievances got her into serious trouble. Sent to a concentration camp, she was released upon the condition that she help disseminate Nazi indoctrination in her neighborhood. But Wernicke continued to voice her resentment, hardly disguised by repetitions of Nazi propaganda slogans; her supposed enthusiasm for Hitler’s Reich always came seasoned with bitter cynicism. ‘I know almost no family where at least one’s dead’, she offered in comfort to a friend who lost her son on the front, ‘and often I think, is it a good thing or a bad thing that there’s no family Hitler’.31

27 Williams, ‘‘‘Frau Wernicke’’ at the BBC’, 58–9. 28 Ibid.; Moorehead, Satire als Kriegswaffe, 114. 29 H.C. Greene, ‘Forward,’ in: C. Brinitzer, Hier Spricht London. Von einem der dabei war (Hamburg 1969), 14. 30 Letter from Bruno Adler to George Barnes, 31 May 1947. Talks. Dr. Adler Bruno. File I, 1940– 1962. BWA. 31 ‘Ich kenne fast keene Familje mehr, wo nich eens den Tod jefunden hat, entweder den nasen oder den trocknen Tod, und oft denk ick mir, ist det nu’n Glück oder’n Unglück, det et keene Famlije Hitler jibt’. Broadcast from 20 September 1941, in B. Adler and U. Naumann, Frau Wernicke. Kommentar einer Volksjenossin (Mannheim 1990), 31. Wernicke’s saucy Berlinerisch is sadly but inevitably lost in translation.

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This overtly gendered form of propaganda was conceived especially for female listeners. Wernicke’s scripts thematized hardships that the PID con- sidered as unique to the female experience of the war.32 Adler regularly received ‘dramatization’ instructions based on intelligence findings.33 Issues like food and clothing shortages, the destruction of housing in air raids and the diminishing male population – which often featured in British intelligence reports concerning the German home front – became constant fodder for Wernicke’s animated monologues. The introduction of an additional character also arose from such guidance delivered by British intelligence. A report disseminated within the German Service in January 1942 determined ‘depravation of men folk’ to be a dominant factor in German women’s lives and concluded that ‘foreign work- ers and Po/W are and will continue to be extremely popular with German women’.34 A few months thereafter, a new character named Iwan joined Wernicke’s circle of acquaintances. Iwan was a Ukrainian who performed forced labor in the depleted restaurant where Wernicke was also involuntarily assigned to work. ‘You listen to me, you eastern Untermensch, you’re not some kind of sniper, are you?’ was Wernicke’s way of greeting her new colleague.35

Although the two eventually were on good terms, Wernicke never stopped referring to Iwan in the vocabulary of Nazi racial hierarchies, a vernacular commitment in full accordance with the broadcasts’ objective to further ridicule and deflate their power.36

This language reveals an important and deliberate characteristic of the Features Program broadcasts. Wernicke’s casual adherence to the racist ideology of the Nazi party, as expressed in discussions with Iwan and on other occasions, was written not as a jab at German listeners but rather as an appeal to them. Wernicke was supposed to speak for the German ‘silent majority’ as the BBC imagined such a population. Her hatred of the Nazi regime was not rooted in humanist ethics; it stemmed from ordinary, everyday suffering under the conditions of total war. Frau Wernicke’s practical, non-ideological opposition was one of her virtues as a propagandist, and the series often reiterated the point. When her husband, Gustav, was sent to the eastern front, she feared not only for his life. Knowing all-too-well that the German military bore responsibility for the murder of millions of civilians,

32 In addition to targeting female audiences, the German Service designated specific programs for the German working class, the German navy and air force, and special broadcasts for Austrian listeners, which in 1943 even expanded to become a separate Austrian Service that operated in close cooperation to but separate from the German Service. 33 K. Meier, ‘The German Service of the BBC during the Second World War. Attitudes towards Satire as a Weapon of War,’ in C. Hart, G. Hodgson and S.G. Roberts (eds), World War II and the Media (Chester 2014). 71–3; Taylor, ‘The Propagandists’ Propagandist’, 20. 34 ‘Women in Germany’, 6 January 1942. E1/758/2. German Service. Programme Arrangements, File 1b, 1942–1949. BWA. 35 Broadcast from 1 August 1942, in Adler and Naumann, Frau Wernicke, 72. 36 On the use of satirical literary methods in Frau Wernicke, with the purpose of enhancing the force of the propaganda material, see Taylor, ‘The Endsieg as Ever Receding Goal’, 50; U. Naumann, ‘Frau Wernicke im Ätherkrieg’, in Adler and Naumann, Frau Wernicke, 165.

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Wernicke warned Gustav that ‘not participating is not enough’. She hoped he could avoid appearing on ‘black lists’ of perpetrators with the help of:

one of the oppressed and wiped out people, a Pole or a Jew or a Russian, someone

lucky enough to escape the whole extinction mess, someone who could give testimony

and say: ‘Gustav, he was a decent guy who acted like . . .well, like a normal person’.37

Whether this was a problematic position for Adler and Hase to articulate is difficult to ascertain. But it definitely contributed to the show’s propaganda value and eventual success. Wernicke’s popularity with listeners across enemy lines could only be confirmed once the war was over; however, intelligence reports and letters sent from neutral countries gave the BBC reasons for optimism. In a memo supporting a raise request for Annemarie Hase, editor Leonard Miall explained that Frau Wernicke ‘is one of the very best of the regular features of our German Service and evidence from inside Germany shows us that her propaganda value is enormous. Hence Miss Hase is, for us, an extremely valuable person’.38

The show even garnered media attention inside Britain itself: ‘In Germany she’s known as Frau Wernicke, the shrill-voiced, truculent, irrepressibly fearless Berlin housewife who Speaks Her Mind’, announced the Daily Express in a September 1941 article. ‘At the B.B.C., [. . .] she’s known as a gifted German ex-actress whose real name must remain a secret. To Dr. Goebbels she’s a major headache, because Frau Wernicke’s monologues are rapidly becoming the rage among German listeners’.39 While BBC Archives do not directly confirm that Hase’s identity was to be kept secret, other wartime reports published in England about the series emphasize the point. It is not unlikely the BBC feared that revealing her true identity as a Jewish refugee would compromise Wernicke’s appeal with German listeners who thought of her as a fellow German.

That Hase was to remain anonymous throughout the broadcasting years epitomizes the extraordinary position of Jewish employees in the BBC’s German Service. Their background and history made them unparalleled experts for produ- cing content that could resonate with the German population. But it was precisely their invaluable backgrounds that required they remain as far removed from their audience as possible – once by the ruthless antisemitism of Nazi Germany and then again by the forces trying to defeat it. It is difficult to assess the damage that disclosing Hase’s true identity would have inflicted on Frau Wernicke’s reception. Would the BBC still have received a letter from the ‘true and good Berlinerin’ who, writing from Switzerland, professed love for her fictional compatriot?40 Or from the professor of meteorology in Windhoek, South West Africa, who inquired

37 Broadcast from 27 March 1943, in Adler and Naumann, Frau Wernicke, 101. 38 Quoted in Williams, ‘‘‘Frau Wernicke’’ at the BBC’, 58. 39 ‘Frau Buggins speaks her mind. And all Germany listens’, The Daily Express (17 September 1941). Hase 85, Archiv der Akademie der Künste, Berlin. 40 ‘Comments from Berlin’, 2 Febuary 1944. E1/755 – 1943–1945. BWA.

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whether Wernicke was not, by any chance, the daughter of the school-keeper at the Humboldt Gymnasium in Berlin?41

Frau Wernicke was the brainchild of Bruno Adler and became a mature, defined character thanks to Hase’s persuasive performance.42 The same violent historical developments that banished the two from the German public sphere later created the conditions that allowed them to invent a ‘real’ German whom German audi- ences could recognize as one of their own. They successfully crafted her as a likable person, despite her myopic understanding of the crimes committed by Germany and their consequences for Jews like themselves. Frau Wernicke was not alone in this position. On the air, she was joined by other fictional characters who embodied the use of humor and sympathy as weapons against Nazism. Perhaps the most iconic of these was Lance-Corporal Adolf Hirnschal, whose warfront letters to his wife Amalia are considered a landmark of British propaganda efforts. The BBC, Hugh Carleton Greene recalled, wanted ‘a broadcast for the German Wehrmacht in the West’ to ‘unmask the real essence of National-Socialism’ but ‘also have entertainment value’. During a December 1940 air raid that forced BBC staff to take cover, author Robert Lucas proposed the Hirnschal character.43

Once on air, Hirnschal’s reach extended far beyond Wehrmacht barracks. Unlike Frau Wernicke, whose gender, speech, and class situated her within an identifiable environment, Hirnschal represented an attempt to encompass as much of non- ideological Germany as possible. The main character was played by the Viennese Jewish actor Fritz Schrecker. While Annemarie Hase’s native command of the berli- nerisch dialect made her an asset to the Service, Schrecker carefully trained to speak a neutral German dialect that would not echo any particular region.44

The series followed a fixed format. Hirnschal read aloud letters sent from the front to his wife in their fictional hometown of Zwieseldorf. His letters revealed the war experiences of Hirnschal’s Wehrmacht battalion, characterized by horror, boredom, and absurdity. ‘Lieutenant Krickwitz called us all in to say: ‘‘Comrades, Sebastopol has been conquered’’’, Hirnschal wrote in July, 1942 from the Russian village his company was occupying.

Then he paused and waited for us to say something like ‘Siegheil’, or ‘we thank our

Führer’ or some other spontaneous thing. But no one is making a sound, except Fritz

Ziegenbart who’s scratching the seat of his pants because he has boils.

41 ‘Hamsptead Woman is Goebbels’ Headache. ‘‘Frau Wernicke’’ Celebrates Her Third Birthday,’ Hampstead and St. John’s Wood News and Golders Green Gazette (17 June 1943). Hase 85, AdAK. 42 Williams notes that Hase occasionally added corrections to Adler’s scripts, amending small dialect errors, showing that her role in the production extended beyond the mere delivery. Williams, ‘‘‘Frau Wernicke’ at the BBC’, 67. Considering the evidence for the series’ success accumulated during the war, it is surprising to learn that the German Service canceled it in January 1944 and terminated Hase’s employment. Kristina Moorehead could not find any documents at the BWA to explain the decision and she raises the assumption that during this final phase of the war, the BBC wanted more focus on military action and less on the home front. Moorehead. Satire als Kriegswaffe, 245–7. 43 H.C. Green, ‘Geleitwort’, in R. Lucas, Teure Amalia, Vielgeliebtes Weib!: Die Briefe Des Gefreiten Adolf Hirnschal an Seine Frau in Zwieselsdorf (Zürich 1946), 5. 44 Taylor, ‘The Endsieg as Ever Receding Goal’, 51.

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As the company continues to stand there awkwardly, they all of a sudden hear a rooster calling. ‘We couldn’t imagine how a rooster could survive in this destroyed village, and Fritz Ziegenbart whispers to me that he would take a roasted chicken over ten Sebastopols right now’. When Lieutenant Krickwitz caught up with what was happening he quickly declared: ‘‘‘And now moving forward, towards even greater causes!’’’, leading the entire company to storm after the poor rooster, who again survived the German offensive.45

Hirnschal was written as a naive, somewhat dimwitted but likable character. His attempts to encourage exhausted comrades took the seemingly unintentional form of denigrating and ridiculing Nazi leadership. In January 1944, Hirnschal recalled helping Lieutenant Hanke compose a New Year’s speech because the company’s broken radio set would not permit them to tune in to hear the Führer’s oration. Considering the accumulated losses that Germany had suffered in the previous year, Hanke worried that he could not deliver an optimistic speech to his soldiers. Hirnschal was quick to offer a solution: ‘‘‘Herr Lieutenant, I’ve got it. It was betrayal. Sabotage! Our beloved Führer had everything planned in advance but he was betrayed. Now we just need to find a traitor’’’. When Hanke wanted to blame the Jews, Hirnschal suggested he consider the Italians. ‘Then he says to me: ‘‘For God’s sake, what do the Italians have to do with Stalingrad?’’ And I ask him: ‘‘What do the Jews have to do with it?’’ And he tells me, the Italians are good enough’. After writing the speech Hanke got cold feet, declaring it to be ‘‘‘an obvious scam’’’ that no German soldier should put up with. At that very moment the radio started working again, just at the right moment to broadcast Hitler’s speech to the nation. It delivered the exact same deceptive message they had crafted, ‘only with much, much nicer words’.46

These frontline farces came from the pen of Viennese author Robert Lucas, born Robert Ehrenzweig.47 Though Jewish, Lucas’ migration to England was not propelled directly by Nazi racial persecution but by the assault led by Engelbert Dollfuss’ dictatorial regime against the Austrian left-wing. Lucas, a leading figure in the socialist press and theater organs, and an affiliate of the Social-Democratic Party, faced increasing threats under these conditions. In 1934, following the brief February Civil War and the violent suppression of pol- itical opposition that ensued, he decided to escape his homeland. Decades later, when scholar and journalist Uwe Naumann corresponded with Lucas while researching the BBC German Service, Lucas reviewed one draft in which his Jewish background was mentioned in relation to his immigration. He wrote: ‘My immigration was a protest against the Dollfuss-Putsch (February 1934). It had nothing to do with me

45 ‘Hirnschal letter 41’, script from 4 July 1942, RLU 2/2, SHL. 46 ‘Hirnschal letter 72’, script from 3 January 1944, RLU 2/2, SHL. 47 He had been using the pseudonym Lucas already in Vienna, and after arriving to England sought to legally change his name permanently, since his original name was so difficult for the English to spell, pronounce, and remember. Lucas had to wait until 1945, since name changes for so-called Enemy Aliens were prohibited during the war.

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being Jewish’.48 While insisting on the significance of his own agency in determining his life story, Lucas acknowledged that, even in exile, he had experienced the con- sequences of Nazi racial persecution. Before the Anschluss, he held a position in London as an editor for the Austrian newspaper Die Neue Freie Presse. In postwar recollections, Lucas emphatically highlighted the letter he received from the Austrian Journal Corporation, shortly after Austria’s annexation into Germany, which imme- diately terminated him from his position for being a Jew.49

Recruited to provide the simultaneous translation of Chamberlain’s appease- ment speech, Lucas was one of the very first members of the German Service. After the war, he remained employed by the Service as a full-time scriptwriter until retiring in 1967. On his last day there, he confided to Hugh Carleton Greene, previously his supervisor and then BBC General Director, that:

[N]othing I have done in the past fills me with greater pride than the fact that I worked

under you during the war. For me it meant participation in greatness, a sense of

mission, the feeling that I was on the side of the angels . . ..50

To one of his friends he revealed that his postwar work at the BBC had somewhat ‘lost its purpose’.51

Lucas’ enduring sense of accomplishment as a psychological warrior was rooted in his authorship of the Hirnschal letters. Though he had continuously created various scripts, Hirnschal became his most memorable contribution to the BBC. His colleague at the Service, Carl Brinitzer, recalled how astounded the staff felt when they learned, upon the war’s end, that ‘Hirnschal was not merely a popular but a legendary figure in Germany’.52 Years after the war had ended, Lucas still received letters and inquiries about the Lance-Corporal’s adventures on the front. ‘A large crowd would gather in my small house on each Hirnschal evening’, wrote one listener in 1945. ‘It was a comfort and a relief to all of us, and may God bless you for that’.53 A theater group from the Netherlands informed Lucas that during the war they had made Hirnschal the star of their underground anti-Nazi puppet- show.54 Many listeners sought to reconnect with Hirnschal after the war. ‘I have had several letters from Germany with the request to send them ‘‘Briefe von Gef. Hirnschal’’. Has there been any publication of these letters?’ one correspondent writing to the BBC wondered in 1946.55

48 Robert Lucas to Uwe Naumann, 2 November 1983, RLU 2/1/3/3, SHL. 49 Lucas mentions the letter in several instances, for example in an undated autobiographical sketch, RLU 11/19, SHL. The letter from the Österreichische Journal Aktien Gesellschaft, 25 April 1938, is also preserved in Lucas’ collection, RLU 11/3. SHL. 50 Robert Lucas to Hugh Carleton Greene, 21 April 1967, RLU 11/17, SHL. 51 Robert Lucas to his friend Gustav (surname unknown), 16 October 1949, RLU 10/2, SHL. 52 Brinitzer, Hier Spricht London, 117. 53 Letter from Dr. Hans Mueller, 15 November 1945, RLU 2/1/2/1, SHL. 54 R. Lucas, Teure Amalia, Vielgeliebtes Weib!: Die Briefe D. Gefreiten Adolf Hirnschal an Seine Frau in Zwieselsdorf (Zuürich 1946), 6. 55 Letter from George M. Imberger to the German Service, 24 June 1946, RLU 2/1/2/1, SHL.

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Due to the large demand, Lucas released the letters in book form. He received several offers from German publishers and chose the Swiss publishing house Europa, which released the book in 1946. Konrad Adenauer received a dedicated copy from Lucas. The Chancellor responded: ‘I thank you for your kindness. The letters bring back memories. In those difficult days they were always a source of joy’.56 The publication was accompanied by press coverage in Germany, Austria, Switzerland, and Denmark. Requests for translations into Hungarian and Czech followed. The book seems to have sold out quite quickly, since many readers contacted Lucas during the postwar decades to inquire where they might obtain a copy, including one who expressed his regret that ‘my father who passed away too early, and who used to listen to the BBC broadcasts almost until the end of the war, did not get to enjoy reading the letters in peace’.57

Publishers continued to ask about reprinting the letters. ‘As a regular listener to your series during the war, the undersigned would have liked to have a printed version of the delightful and insightful letters by Lance-Corporal Hirnschal in his library’,’’ wrote one agent.58 In 1960 Lucas was in contact with a publishing house in Cologne that hoped to adapt Hirnschal for the theater,59 and a similar request came from Prague in 1965.60 Eventually, a second German publication of the Hirnschal letters appeared in 1984 shortly after Lucas’ passing,61 and was reprinted in 1994.62 A third publication of edited Hirnschal letters appeared in 2007,63 and most recently, an audio-book version was released in 2008.64

How did Lucas come to understand the popularity of his Hirnschal letters? In 1983, speaking to the London chapter of the PEN Club,65 Lucas explained that his task

[W]as to project the daily problems, irritations, anxieties and suspicions experienced by

Germans during those years, to increase them by giving expression to them, and convey

to the listener the impression: ‘We in England know exactly how you feel about the Nazi

regime which has dragged you into this war, we are really on your side.66

56 Letter from Konrad Adenauer to Robert Lucas, 23 February 1952. Ibid. 57 Letter from Dr. Erich Hebekus to Robert Lucas, 12 December 1965. Ibid. 58 Letter from Kurt Sellin of Freiheit-Verlag to Robert Lucas, 24 May 1947. Ibid. 59 Letter from Klaus Riehle of Verlag Kiepenheuer & Witsch to Robert Lucas, 22 April 1960, RLU 2/1/3/1, SHL. 60 Letter from Dilia Literature and Theater Agency to Robert Lucas, 17 February 1965, Ibid. 61 R. Lucas and U. Naumann, Teure Amalia, Vielgeliebtes Weib!: Die Briefe Des Gefreiten Adolf Hirnschal an Seine Frau in Zwieselsdorf (Frankfurt am Main 1984). 62 R. Lucas and U. Naumann, Teure Amalia, Vielgeliebtes Weib!: Die Briefe Des Gefreiten Adolf Hirnschal an Seine Frau in Zwieselsdorf (Vienna 1994). 63 R. Lucas, Die BBC gegen Hitler: Die Briefe des Gefreiten Adolf Hirnschal an seine Frau in Zwieseldorf (Zurich 2007). 64 R. Lucas, Die BBC gegen Hitler. Die Briefe des Gefreiten Adolf Hirnschal an seine Frau in Zwieseldorf (Daun 2008). 65 The PEN Club, today PEN International, is a worldwide society for writers that was founded in London in 1921. 66 Typescript of a talk to the PEN Club, undated (the talk took place as part of a conference that was held on May 5–7, 1983), RLU 2/1/4/2, SHL.

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Lucas, an established journalist, author and cabaret playwright prior to his immigra- tion to England, was perfectly situated to speak to those listeners from ‘their side’. Yet so long as the war was ongoing and the Nazi regime pursued its policies of extermin- ation, he could only do so while standing on the opposite one. He was proud to be standing there as an émigré. Lucas ended his PEN lecture with a quote from a 1948 book on Nazi press and propaganda: ‘Hitler and Goebbels not for nothing raved again and again against the emigrants, for their expulsion equaled a permanently lost battle in the psychological warfare’.67 Looking back at his own wartime experience with the German Service, Lucas saw himself and other German-speaking immigrants participating in that project as a strategic asset. They could wage a war of words against Hitler and Goebbels because they too knew how to address the Nazis’ captive audience. Ultimately, Adolf Hirnschal could not and did not defeat National Socialism. But he was heard, and his popularity in German-speaking Europe outlasted the regime that had previously abolished his author from its public sphere.

A stranger entering the cantina at the BBC Bush House in London, where the German Service operated from 1941 onwards, may have felt as if transported to a foreign land. Robert Lucas recalled that ‘for the Viennese immigrants it was an equivalent of ‘‘Café Central’’ or of ‘‘Herrenhof’’, for the Berliners a substitute for ‘‘das Romanische Café’’’.68 Together, the Central-European refugees produced a recognizable social-cul- tural milieu that recreated their familiar environments. The immigrants’ cultural ‘authenticity’ on display in the cantina was simultaneously perceived by officials as an advantage and a risk. On one hand, the BBC had ideal emissaries of persuasive propa- ganda written with an insider’s touch. On the other, their ‘Germanness’ easily revealed them as refugees who were not to be trusted by the general public in Germany and its territories. That many immigrants were Jewish proved in several cases to further strain this contradiction. The BBC feared that any perceived close association with Jews would hinder the effectiveness of their propaganda. The German Service was, after all, pursu- ing the favor of an audience that, while not necessarily pro-Nazi, was – from the BBC’s perspective – presumably hostile towards Jews.

To an extent, this apprehension stemmed from the Nazi establishment’s habitual labeling of all British propaganda as Jewish sabotage. Intelligence reports tracking this counter-propaganda were well-known at the BBC. One example preserved in the BBC archives documents a speech by Hans Fritzsche, head of radio broadcast- ing in Goebbels’ Ministry of Propaganda. ‘In the political sniper warfare, the Jew is king’, Fritzsche declared in October 1943.

One cannot deny that the English have adopted not only the idiocy of the chosen

people, and not only ridiculously flexible and opportunistic morality and religiosity

67 Ibid. The book Lucas was quoting from is W. Hagemann’s Publizistik Im Dritten Reich: Ein Beitrag Zur Methodik der Massenfuührung (Hamburg 1948). The excerpt is quoted here in Lucas’ own translation. 68 R. Lucas, ‘Über den Gefreiten Hirnschal und seine Briefe’, in Lucas and Naumann, Teure Amalia, 255.

112 Journal of Contemporary History 55(1)

from the Jews, but also this addiction to war with poisoned weapons . . .The English

uses these methods, which we consider to be dirty, in various forms.69

The BBC did not issue an official policy to tackle this matter, but everyday direct- ives indicate that it was a concern during and immediately after the war.70 Writing in 1943, Edward Tangye Lean affirmed that if their voices betrayed indignation, émigré announcers had to be reminded of ‘the virtues of objectivity’ and of ‘the charges brought by Goebbels about refugee stations’.71

To discredit the accusation that their broadcasts were dominated by Jewish interests, the BBC found it necessary to disassociate its work from Jews almost entirely. First was the question of staff member identities. Hiding the names of émigré employees did not always resolve the matter sufficiently. A report reviewing a week of broadcasts to Austria raised another means of revealing aspects of identity better left undisclosed. The anonymous reviewer evaluated that one of the announcers ‘is certainly a Jew and one of the squashy kind at that’. A few days later: ‘Again a most unpleasant Jewish voice with guttural accent’. And the day after that: ‘Soft squashy pronunciation, certainly a Jew. Such pronunciations as e.g. ‘‘Reserven’’, ‘‘in den Kampf geworfen’’, ‘‘durchbrochen’’, ‘‘kilometer südlich von Benghazi’’ were almost Yiddish’.72 Attached to the circulated review was a note from the PID expressing concern about the ‘very bad Jewish announ- cer’, and pointed out that ‘the writer of the notes having, like most Viennese, some Jewish blood himself is pro rather than anti-Semitic, so that he must be exempt from suspicion of racial prejudice’.73

The BBC administration all of a sudden found itself debating the existence of the so-called ‘Jewish voice.’ One response to the review suggested that ‘Jews are apt to be unduly critical of so-called Jewish accents since they feel that, if a Jew is to speak, they should have been engaged themselves’.74 The response of the European Language Supervisor also tried to curtail the issue: ‘Austrians are apt to make wild criticisms regarding the Jewish voice’. The note added that both news announcers currently employed for the Austrian broadcasts were indeed Jews (one of whom the unnamed reviewer declared with certainty to be not Jewish), and that ‘the ‘‘soft,

69 Regional Intelligence report, 23 October 1943. R34/680/1 – File 1A, 1942–1943, BWA. 70 See also See J. Harris, ‘Broadcasting the Massacres: An Analysis of the BBC’S Contemporary Coverage of the Holocaust’, in D. Cesarani (ed.), Holocaust: Responses to the persecution and mass murder of the Jews, Vol. VI (London 2004), 317. 71 E.T. Lean, Voices in the Darkness. The Story of the European Radio War (London 1943), 44. 72 ‘Critical notes on Austrian Broadcasts’, the document is undated but the reviews refer to the week of 23-29 January 1942. R13/148/3 – File 1C – 1942, BWA. 73 Letter from David Stephens to Ivone Kirkpatrick, 5 February 1942. R13/148/3 – File 1C – 1942, BWA. 74 Unsigned letter to David Stephens, 10 February 1942. R13/148/3 – File 1C – 1942, BWA. While the author of the letter was probably unaware of it, acculturated Jews in Germany and Austria were, in fact, particularly concerned with a perceived Jewish vocality, but for entirely different reasons. John Efron has shown that ‘sounding’ Jewish was a threat to the project of assimilated Jewry and considered an undesirable identifier with Eastern European Jews. J. Efron, German Jewry and the Allure of the Sephardic (Princeton, NJ 2015), 21–52.

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squashy Jewish pronunciation’’ is traceable to . . .Herlitschka, and it is not impos- sible that his manner may convey a Jewish impression to someone on the watch for these things’. Yet the supervisor had another theory to explain Herlitschka’s defi- ciency as an announcer: ‘He is, as you probably know, the well-known translator of Virginia Woolf, Charles Morgan and other stylists, and there is something aesthetic and perhaps non-virile about his approach to things’. The anonymous reviewer, this implied, was mistaking a feminine voice with a Jewish one.75 In any case, the supervisor concluded, ‘[a] third Austrian announcer of Aryan origin is about to join the team and perhaps he will solve our problem’.76

The responders’ reservations notwithstanding, the BBC seemed to have inter- nalized an anxiety around vocalized Jewishness on the wavelengths of its German Service.77 In a memo announcing the recruitment of new announcers, it was explained that ‘[m]ost of the Germans in this country have unsuitable local accents – e.g. . . . a more or less defined Jewish twang which may express itself in pronunciation or in intonation. This renders them hopeless from our point of view’.78 Voices of émigré announcers could easily turn from invaluable propaganda tools to perils of war. One of the great ironies in the history of the German Service, it appears, was that in order to effectively battle National Socialism by means of propaganda, the BBC thought it necessary to incorporate elements of its racist and discriminatory tenants. While these assumptions took root within a state of emer- gency brought about by war, they continued to influence the Service’s immediate postwar operations as well.79

By late 1944, the German Service had commenced preparing a postwar strategy. Planning peacetime broadcasting required careful consideration of the proposed content. In January 1945, for example, Overseas Music Director, Steuart Wilson, expressed his vision. ‘I do not like the idea of direct propaganda in music and I believe that it would entirely prejudice our objects’, he asserted. ‘Those composers, performers and the music which has been banned solely on

75 The association of male Jews with femininity was a recurring concept in modern antisemitic thought. See M. Biberman. Masculinity, Anti-Semitism and Early Modern English Literature: From the Satanic to the Effeminate Jew (Aldershot, Burlington, VT 2004), 71–100; S. Gilman, Freud, Race and Gender (Princeton, NJ 1994), 49–92; G. Mosse, The Image of Man: The Creation of Modern Masculinity (New York, NY 1996), 56–76. 76 Letter from European Language Supervisor to the Controller of the European Services, 9 February 1942, R13/148/3 – File 1C – 1942, BWA. 77 Seul, ‘‘‘Any Reference to Jews’’’, 216. Harris notes a similar anxiety that existed in the BBC’s Polish Service, where an assessor tasked with filtering out announcers with ‘Jewish accent and manner’ was employed during the Second World War. Harris, ‘Broadcasting the Massacres’, 309. 78 Letter from German Manager to Director of European Operations, 23 January 1943, R13/148/4 – File 1D – 1943-1952, BWA. 79 As late as in 1996, historian Arnold Paucker – himself a former Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany – complained about the ‘BBC’s tiresome habit of having a radio actor play a Jewish role with an echo of the lisping speech of the traditional stage Jew’. Paucker was referring to English- language broadcasts, not those of the German Service. Yet his statement draws attention to the perse- vering myth of the Jewish voice in BBC productions. A. Paucker, ‘Speaking English with an Accent’, in C. Brinson, et al. (eds), ‘England? Aber wo liegt es?’ Deutsche und österreichische Emigranten in Großbritannien 1933–1945 (Munich 1996), 22.

114 Journal of Contemporary History 55(1)

account of anti-German, anti-Fascist or Jewish relationship must on no account be put forward unless the works themselves have the highest quality of programme value’.80 Two months later, in a ‘Report on Preparatory Work Done for Post-War Service to Germany’, Marius Goring laid out an extensive content plan for recom- mended cultural works. Among the plays that he endorsed was ‘Minna von Barnhelm’ by Gotthold Ephraim Lessing. He qualified his selection by adding: ‘I feel it would be ‘‘propaganda plugging’’ to start off with such a play as Lessing’s Nathan der Weise, the hero of which is a jew [sic], though such plays should certainly be done later’.81 Concerned that some works would rub the defeated German population up the wrong way, the German Service hoped to avoid, at least temporarily, promoting artists declared ‘degenerate’ by the Nazi regime, and controversial issues such as Lessing’s plea for religious freedom and tolerance.

The realignment of the German Service’s strategy developed further after the war officially ended and the Allies established transitional administrations in divided Germany. In a meeting held between BBC officials and the PID just weeks after German capitulation, officials decided that

[B]roadcast programmes on the Allied-controlled German radio and those originating

from Russian and American stations might be expected to approach the Germans with

entertainment and open propaganda. PID felt that the BBC should refrain from com-

petition with them in these respects and maintain its reputation for objectivity . . ..82

From then onwards, the German Service implemented a broadcasting policy designed to support British efforts to guide German society into peaceful democracy. To this end, the Service sought to cultivate a connection with German audiences based on the trustworthiness of English objectivity – a quality the Service hoped to communicate through voices and ideas to which Germans could presumably relate.

Now the composition of the Service’s staff appeared to present a potential obs- tacle to fostering trust and familiarity. ‘[C]an we start recruiting Germans from Germany?’ wondered Ian Jacob, Controller of European Services, in May 1947. ‘I am perfectly prepared . . . to consider any candidates that App. O. can put for- ward but I am against continuing to recruit exiles’.83 Several days later, Jacob articulated his position more explicitly:

[I]t is necessary that our new recruits should be Germans with recent experience of life

in Germany . . .The point which should not be overlooked is that in general our

80 Letter from O.M.D Stuart Wilson to A.C. of European Services, Grisewood and to Marius Gornig of German Productions, 12 January 1945, E1/758/2, File 1b, 1942-1949, BWA; T. Thacker, Music after Hitler, 1945–1955 (Aldershot and Burlington, VT 2007), 20. 81 M. Goring, ‘Report on Preparatory Work Done for Post-War Service to Germany’, 3 March, 1945, E1/739, Folder A-Z, 1938–1954, BWA. 82 Meeting minutes, 28 May 1945, E1/758/2, File 1b, 1942–1949, BWA. 83 Letter from Controller of European Services to H.S.A., 10 May 1947, R13/148/4 – File 1D – 1943–1952, BWA.

Ganor 115

recruits should not be Jewish. For obvious reasons we have a large number of these in

our German Service now, and I am anxious to reduce the proportion.84

Jacob may have harbored anti-Jewish sentiments, but his own position is of lesser importance here. More interesting is that the BBC promoted an anti-Jewish hiring policy on the basis that Jews were deemed too removed from the ‘German experi- ence.’ During the war, Jacob seems to imply, their employment was a necessary compromise. But peace brought with it the possibility to obtain ‘real’ Germans, staff members who could stimulate identification between those who broadcasted and those who listened, a trust that Jacob and others in the BBC doubted that German audiences could grant to Jews.

The policy that Jacob promoted not only affected new hires. As the German Service searched for recruits in Germany, two staff members received notices of termination and two more were downgraded to lesser positions. When these four employees – all former Jewish refugees – protested the decisions, European Services’ Establishment Officer, Giles Borrett raised concerns about the fair con- duct of the Service. ‘It is against the law and not anything to do with the Corporation to terminate anybody in order to replace him with someone from abroad or with a foreigner temporarily resident in this country’, Borrett insisted. In any case, such transactions ‘will have to be kept entirely separate’ to avoid any appearance of misconduct.85 As a compromise, hires from Germany were put on temporary hold, but the German Service terminated the four staff members whose positions were in question (Jacob agreed to try to find a different role for two of them).

The BBC, it should be made clear, was not guided by antisemitic prejudice in its treatment of Jewish staff members.86 A large number of Jewish immigrants remained in the German Service well into the postwar decades, including Robert Lucas, Bruno Adler, Martin Miller, and others. Their yearly employee evaluations attest that their experience and contributions were greatly appreciated by their superiors. The extent to which they identified as Jews mattered little to the majority of their British colleagues, who, in fact, may not have given much thought to the individual circumstances of persecution that propelled their coworkers’ arrival into their country. What did matter to the architects of BBC radio propaganda was the deference of the German audience towards the British agenda. Jewish names, Jewish voices, and Jewish themes, so it was thought, could damage the broadcasts’ effect.

84 Letter from Controller of European Services to H.S.A., 3 June 1947. R13/148/4 – File 1D – 1943– 1952, BWA. 85 Letter from Establishment Officer of European Services to German Service Director, 24 September 1947, R13/148/4 – File 1D – 1943-1952, BWA. 86 Harris argues as well that antisemitism was not a decisive factor in the BBC’s deficient reporting on the mass murder of Jews during the Second World War, though some individuals employed with the Corporation certainly harbored antisemitic beliefs. Harris, ‘Broadcasting the Massacres’, 317.

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This suspicion was not entirely elevated with the destruction of the Nazi regime. As the reservations against Lessing’s play or the instructions for musical content indicate, the German Service administration was acutely aware that Germany sans Hitler was not free of the assumptions and ideologies that allowed National Socialism to assume the monstrous dimensions it had recently possessed. The fact remains, however, that during the immediate postwar period, the BBC considered and adhered to guidelines that prolonged the discrimination inflicted upon victims of Nazi persecution. This was done to uphold a vague, constructed standard of objectivity, one threatened by too much, or too explicit, proximity to these victims, their works or their cultural representation.

When the Cold War reshuffled western political commitments and the German Service initiated propaganda broadcasts to East German listeners, editors hoped to replicate the success of wartime radio satires. The program was ‘stodgy and dull’, recalled one of the staff members years later. ‘It was time to lighten it with satirical humour; and there were only two men capable of this: Robert Lucas . . . and Bruno Adler’.87 The German Service valued the contribution of individual Jewish employ- ees to the quality of its output. Yet while the labor and talent of artists like Lucas and Adler was respected, that was not sufficient to dispel doubts about Jewish capacity to author authentic German language content.

By the 1950s, hiring young journalists from the newly established West German state became the priority employment policy. As the remaining émigré employees aged and retired, this was a matter of necessity rather than choice. Decades into the postwar era, those journalists recruited from the Federal Republic of Germany would be the ones to note the historical significance of the émigré workforce assembled by the German Service. In 1988, when the Service celebrated its fiftieth anniversary with a retrospective publication, several German journalists imported after the war reflected on their encounter with the existing staff made primarily of former Jewish refugees, ‘an entire German-speaking academy of homme de lettres,’ as Peter Fischer described them. Fischer, who started working for the German Service in 1956, likened the work environment of his early years to a ‘unique literary-academic hothouse, almost like a Viennese Café or the Berlin salon of Rahel Varnhagen von Ense’.88 Hans Peter Weymar shared this impression. ‘One could choose, pending on one’s leaning or mood,’ Weymar recalled, ‘to listen to reminisces from Vienna, Prague or Berlin, at the table of the Kraus-fans or that of the Kerr-followers’. His work at the BBC, which began in 1962, revealed to him ‘[t]he intellectual and artistic bleeding that Germany suffered during the depraved years of 1933-1945’.89 Dieter Franck’s recollections of his work with the émigré staff also emphasized ‘how poor Germany had become in losing these people. It’s a dearth that has not yet been overcome’.90 Roland Matschke, arriving in London from Vienna in 1965, concluded: ‘I had the good fortune to meet people from a

87 British Broadcasting Corporation Radio, Hier Ist England 38–9. 88 Ibid., 163. 89 Ibid., 174. 90 Ibid., 166.

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group who, for most members of my generation, existed only in books: the Jewish intellectuals of Germany and Austria who were expelled or murdered by the Nazis’.91 These German BBC journalists reminisced in the late 1980s, when an awareness of and a sensitivity to the experiences of Jewish victims of Nazism had begun to shape public discourse on National Socialism and the Second World War. Writing during this ‘era of the witness’, and likely influenced by con- temporary debates on the duties, burdens or accomplishments of the German ‘cul- ture of remembrance’, their statements may reveal more about the emergent symbolic meaning of Jewish survivors than they do about the work atmosphere of the BBC German Service in the early postwar years.92

The Jewish refugees that found employment at the BBC German Service were products of the strenuous path that Jews in German-speaking Central Europe had tread in the era of emancipation. Without undoing all ties to their Jewish milieu, they had fulfilled the demands of assimilation and acquired the aesthetics, the attributes, and the cultural sensibilities that allowed them to traverse in the non-Jewish sphere. The notable ‘hyphenated identity’ of these German-speaking Jews, embodying the struggle to balance Germanness and Jewishness and, argu- ably, pitting these elements against each other, manifest itself in exceptional form throughout their service at the BBC. As Jews, they had been banned from the public sphere of their homelands and forced to seek refuge in a foreign country. As natives of territories constituting the Third Reich, they were invited to practice their intimate knowledge of the societies that banished them and to facilitate an elaborate propaganda campaign against Nazi tyranny. While rendering this con- tribution to the war effort, their nationalities and their genuine identification with German culture, nevertheless marked them as Enemy Aliens; and their Jewishness lurked as a potential threat to the success of psychological warfare against their compatriots. The suspicion that Jewish individuals, Jewish themes and even ‘Jewish voices’ might deter German audiences, while not dominating the German Service’s general strategy, influenced content guidelines and hiring decisions throughout the war and immediate postwar period.

Writers like Robert Lucas and Bruno Adler, and actors like Martin Miller and Annemarie Hase, had the rare experience and insight to produce satirical propa- ganda that resonated with the listeners that the BBC was hoping to reach. Some of their works even gained a surprising popularity with that distant audience. British authorities instructed these émigrés to approach German listeners from a position of affinity at a time when their personal connection to them was violently denied.

91 Ibid., 181. 92 A. Wieviorka, trans. J. Stark, The Era of the Witness (Ithaca, NY 2006). On shifts in the German culture of memory in the postwar era see A. Assmann and U. Frevert, Geschichtsvergessenheit – Geschichtsversessenheit: Vom Umgang mit Deutschen Vergangenheiten Nach 1945 (Stuttgart 1999); C. Maier, The Unmasterable Past: History, Holocaust, and German National Identity (Cambridge, MA 1998); R.G. Moeller, War Stories: The Search for a Usable Past in the Federal Republic of Germany (Berkeley, CA 2001), 171–98; J.E. Young, ‘The Counter-Monument: Memory against Itself in Germany Today,’ Critical Inquiry, 18, 2 (Winter 1992), 267–96.

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Their colleague, Edward Tangye Lean, saw it as ‘their personal tragedy that they can find no direct expression for their anger at what has been done to them’. Yet, he asserted, ‘the facts [the BBC] gives are merely facts, and the views mostly English. If the voice which speaks them would like to say more, it must temporarily forget’.93 From radio studios in England, they broadcast to old neighbors and old colleagues, to people who may have previously watched their performances or read their prose. War had made them intermediaries between two enemy nations and made their cultural intimacy a weapon; but their participation ultimately reiterated their perceived foreign-ness in both societies.

Acknowledgements

I wish to thank Ian Beacock, Maelia DuBois, John Efron, Timon de Groot, Benjamin Hein, Stefan Ludwig Hoffmann, Elena Kempf, Thomas Laqueur, Tehila Sasson, Edith Sheffer, Julia Wambach, and Tara Zahra for their invaluable advice on earlier drafts of this essay. I am grateful to both anonymous readers at the Journal of Contemporary History for their insightful comments. Hannah Ratford from the BBC Written Archive and Clare George from the School of Advanced Study have been tremendously helpful in locating archival material, without which the article could not have been written. I also wish to thank Marius Zenker and Lunghi Zondi for opening their Cape Town home to me, where the first draft was written.

Biographical Note

Sheer Ganor is a PhD candidate in the Department of History at UC Berkeley. Her dissertation examines the German-Jewish diaspora that emerged following the rise of Nazism. In the dissertation, she analyzes everyday experiences of displacement and their significance in shaping and affirming cultural identities. She is currently a doctoral fellow at the Leo Baeck Programme of the Studienstiftung des deutschen Volkes.

93 Lean, Voices in the Darkness, 44–5.

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