How to Win an Information War - Peter Pomerantsev

Last updated Apr 16, 2024

• Author: Peter Pomerantsev
• Full Title: How to Win an Information War
• Category: #books

Sefton Delmer would admit decades later, “I enjoyed singing the German victory songs. Their lift and lilt gave me a thrill of exultation of which I felt quite ashamed. (Location 165)

For Delmer, this strain, this splitting of the self, will go on to become the source of his strength and skill. (Location 170)

Ever since they came to power, the Nazis have seen radio as the great force that can bind the country; break down the old divisions, the rifts among classes and regions; unite all Germans; and make real the grand claim of Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels that with the arrival of the Nazis, “the individual will be replaced by the Community of the People”: (Location 181)

Even cheaper medium-wave radios could, with the help of a few choice wires acting as improvised antennas, be used to travel beyond the official stations of the Reich. (Location 195)

The Nazis knew this vulnerability. Tuning in to foreign broadcasts, and especially to the hated BBC, was a crime punishable by hanging. (Location 197)

He respected Hitler, who was the sort of man he had fought next to in World War I, but he accused Himmler, Göring, and the rest of being soft on Britain. (Location 213)

Der Chef was not a renegade Nazi. He was being played by a mild-mannered German novelist of Jewish descent. His adjutant was played by a German journalist, the son of one of Berlin’s greatest cabaret impresarios, who had fled the Nazis with his Jewish wife. (Location 246)

Gutsy fact-checkers who, sometimes at great personal risk, strive to establish the truth— but are ignored by the millions of people who don’t want to hear the truth. (Location 258)

The propagandists see this as a war in which information is a weapon you use not to win an abstract argument but to confuse, dismay, demoralize, and distract. It is a tool to tap into human fears, vulnerabilities, and secret, often violent and cruel desires and twist them to the benefit of the powerful forces they serve. (Location 260)

Delmer gathered around him artists, academics, spies, soldiers, astrologists, and forgers. (Location 269)

Delmer was convinced that his German experience meant he could understand the power of their propaganda— and its weakness. After the war, he tried to create a new type of media that could withstand the hate and lies he had seen dominate Germany, and he worried that despite the introduction of democracy, old propaganda habits could return. (Location 285)

Ultimately, propaganda and its influence over us pose the question of whether we can be truly free. When are you yourself, and when are you a being who has been manipulated by others? (Location 292)

The lessons Delmer has for us are positive, negative, and urgent. (Location 307)

Russians are in an “informational bunker,” Zelensky said— psychological as much as technological— refusing to accept responsibility and reality. (Location 328)

Delmer’s parents were from Australia, (Location 348)

World War I was the first time the wireless would be used by an army, and Delmer describes its noise as “the first echo of 20th century war.” (Location 351)

Sitting inside the cinema tent, pleasant villagers and well-bred holiday makers were transformed in the light of the screen, all suddenly baying for war. (Location 356)

In 2010 a leading German historian of World War I, Gerd Krumeich, studied other photos of the scene on the square and couldn’t find Hitler in any of them. He concluded that the image had been cut and pasted by Nazi propagandists in 1932, (Location 378)

When the war began, Professor Delmer’s Rektor had offered him a chance to naturalize and become a loyal subject of the kaiser. Delmer refused. (Location 388)

Frederick Delmer made Sefton and his sister speak German at home in order to understand the country that they lived in. (Location 407)

In the Prussia Sefton Delmer describes growing up in, people glorified and imitated the army. (Location 415)

letters between soldiers and their loved ones: letters about love, sacrifice, and bravery. These were intimate letters that real people had written, blurring the line between the private and the public, creating the sense that this was truly a people’s war. (Location 439)

with every new victory, Kantstraße would resound with celebration. Flags were unfurled from every window. Not just German flags but also Danish, Greek, Swiss, and American ones: even the foreigners wanted to join in Germany’s great triumphs. (Location 462)

The real power of propaganda is not to convince or even to confuse: it’s to give you a sense of belonging. (Location 475)

As Ellul wrote, “Propaganda is the true remedy for loneliness.” And the more we live in a society where we have little control over our lives, the more we need propaganda that gives us a sense of (ersatz) agency: (Location 493)

when Delmer would plot his response to Nazi propaganda, as with any counterpropaganda we may plan today, he knew that no effort would work unless it took into account this need to belong that propaganda satisfies, a need that he knew from his own vulnerability to it. (Location 518)

His urge to join in with the German songs, to unfurl the flag to celebrate German victories, is not in contrast to his being bullied, spurned, alienated— it’s the consequence of it. (Location 520)

“Reinhardt was convinced that in most people, and most actors, the real personality is buried deep inside under a thick layer of shyness, mannerisms and convention…. Accordingly, his conception of the actor’s task was never based on the idea that the actor is an impersonator who should assume another human being’s personality. For him the actor’s task was to use his own personality to the fullest possible extent to express the essence of the character he was portraying.” (Location 532)

Puns and word slippages are trapdoors out of the prison of propaganda— and Delmer would always be obsessed with them. (Location 562)

We have two ways of having a relationship with the language all around us, Delmer seems to be telling us. We can either be defined by it or rebel and re-create it. (Location 562)

A committee for refugees put them up in a greasy bedsit in a street of stuccoed houses whose white facades were grimy and stained with soot. (Location 613)

Frederick Delmer’s portrait of unhappy Germans went against the image of the enemy that had been cultivated in the British press. Ever since 1914, the British papers had evoked the image of a dreaded, unified, all-powerful Hun. (Location 627)

How do you deliver truth to people who are resistant to it? (Location 636)

I then headed out to Moscow because I had the freedom there to define my own way of being British— much as Delmer could in Berlin. (Location 685)

Max Reinhardt and Arthur Kahane were putting on plays that used the whole city as their stage, with performances in train stations and cathedrals, so that the borders between life and theater, between real and unreal, were ever more blurred. (Location 721)

Unlike during his wartime childhood, being English was now in demand: “I used to allow quite a bit of English accent to peep through in my German— in the hope that it would make me seem more romantic.” (Location 729)

The Berlin masquerade itself masked how the old desires for domination still lurked just below the surface, ready to be seduced by a more wild and malign performance. (Location 763)

The poster was ringed in red and black bands— the colors of the banned German imperial flag, which the Nazis had smuggled back in to public view on their innocent-seeming swastika banner. (Location 767)

“miracle man.” Berlin teemed with these salesmen-cum-saviors promising to restore German pride while also peddling financial pyramid schemes or magical food supplements that would make your muscles stronger and the nation invincible. Hitler was peddling another “miracle cure”: pure racial identity as a solution to all ills. (Location 776)

IT’S TEMPTING TO DISMISS leaders and movements with “crackpot” ideas. (Location 790)

The Nazis’ evidence-free claim to “purity” could be alluring in a time of disorienting change. In Weimar Germany, where social roles and norms were transforming as rapidly as new acts in a cabaret review, it promised a simple way of knowing who you were. (Location 798)

its very fragility provoked aggression against anyone who questioned it. (Location 800)

In the propaganda to justify the 2022 Russian invasion, this old myth was given a new twist: any Ukrainians who did not admit to being “one people” with Russia had to be eliminated so that only Ukrainians who understood that their “true” identity lay with Russia could remain. (Location 813)

Soon he would want to integrate the storm troopers into the official German army, and that would need approval from the victorious powers in World War I. (Location 836)

The Nazis’ aim would be to forge a unified Volksgemeinschaft (people’s community) from this fractured rabble. Delmer’s goal would become to divide them. (Location 851)

I would put a question. He would reply, and his reply would swell out into an oration, as more and more ideas flowed into his imaginative and highly articulate mind. Before anyone could pull him up, he would be shouting as though he had the Sports Palace crowd before him, not just a solitary British reporter.” 19 But as quickly as the oration swelled with passion, it was shut down, almost like a machine whose power is switched off, (Location 885)

Röhm, Delmer had by now realized, thought he was a British spy, and however much he tried to explain that he was not, the more Röhm was convinced he was: (Location 912)

To compensate for not being on the radio, Goebbels organized three thousand party meetings per day. Millions of handbills, brochures, and special editions of party newspapers were printed across the country. Goebbels filmed a ten-minute speech, which was projected in the open air in big cities and cinemas. He made a gramophone recording of his speech and printed fifty thousand copies. (Location 934)

Hitler would fly across the country giving forty-six speeches in ten days. (Location 943)

TO THE EXTENT THEY had a coherent theory of how propaganda works, Goebbels and Hitler were informed by the writing of the French sociologist Gustave Le Bon. (Location 947)

We often wonder why people follow leaders who are wildly self-centered, greedy, and hateful. But that can be the very essence of their power: they allow their followers to indulge in their most cruel and hateful impulses, even as they foster the illusion that they are part of a noble and courageous spiritual mission. “They legitimize, surface, articulate, and elevate all the horrid things we yearn to indulge in.” (Location 969)

Hitler himself, like other evangelists before and after him, lived on the emotion and mass hysteria he produced in his audiences, sucking it into himself as he orated, then spewing it out again at them with compound interest. (Location 1010)

We are all, Money-Kyrle argued, more than ready to embrace the language of grievance because it gives us the chance to blame external forces for all the things we don’t like about ourselves. (Location 1045)

Hitler’s power stemmed not so much from his ability to win people over with clever arguments, but from his articulating the feelings that already lay within them and taking them on an emotional journey from feeling humiliated to humiliating others. (Location 1048)

Viewed in an unfavourable light, propaganda often seems to be a method of inducing a series of temporary psychoses, often starting with depression and passing, via paranoia, to a state of manic bliss.” (Location 1051)

The great paradox is that the Kremlin is the cause of many Russians’ historical and current humiliations— just as the Chinese Communist Party has been for the Chinese. (Location 1068)

In the logic of this political psychology, the “strong hand” first humiliates, that humiliation is then celebrated as necessary and even ennobling, and the humiliation is then taken out on others. (Location 1079)

The pose of victimhood is a mask under which to hurt others. When the powerful claim they are being humiliated, they’re stating what they actually want to do to you. (Location 1083)

A few weeks before the invasion, he casually invoked a Russian rape joke to explain what he would do to Ukraine. (Location 1091)

From his seat inside the airplane, Delmer could observe Hitler in his moment of transformation from tired traveling salesman to the Führer who channeled the nation’s darkest feelings. (Location 1111)

“As I see it, Hitler’s personal tragedy and through him that of his country was that he came to believe in his act. He accepted as truth his own skilfully built propaganda myth that he was the miraculously infallible Führer Lightgod.” (Location 1117)

Delmer’s view of our relationship to propaganda. We’re always somehow parroting it. We’re rarely completely hypnotized, or not for long. We are not just brainwashed “zombies” but conscious actors in a performance. People are slightly faking their fanaticism— and their fascist leaders are also somewhat fake. (Location 1138)

Did you hear that click in the receiver now after I started talking to you? That click is the reason why so many people in Berlin will not talk candidly over the phone. Little birds, they say, are clicking in and listening to all they say. (Location 1164)

I retained special permission from the police that everyone should be allowed to place loudspeakers in the open windows of their houses. Germany will be forced to hear Hitler. (Location 1190)

The Nazis spread the story that the fire was part of a vast left-wing conspiracy. The country, they cried, was in mortal danger. They prompted the aging Hindenburg to pass the Reichstag Fire Decree: the government now had the right to arrest anyone without charge, dissolve political organizations, ban publications, and overrule local laws. Germany was a dictatorship. (Location 1194)

“This was a story,” he writes of his approach, “and a reporter will shake hands with the devil himself on a story.” (Location 1215)

He would return in summer 1934 to catch the “Night of the Long Knives”: Hitler’s bloody purge of Röhm and the storm troopers, (Location 1226)

Bruce Lockhart’s judgment was important: in World War II he would become director of the Political Warfare Executive. He was the sort of man Delmer needed to win over if he was to make full use of his experience. (Location 1278)

Goebbels, who had planned the speech’s strategy along with Hitler’s diplomats, wanted Hitler’s peace offer to split the British government and the British public. (Location 1324)

All of his past was coming together to have meaning, purpose, patriotism. When Cooper asked him to lecture on the German BBC, it felt “like being given a knighthood.” (Location 1382)

Instead of him being welcomed in as “one of us,” stool pigeons were sent to test him. Random minor officials reached out to ask whether he knew how to get in touch with fascist leaders (Location 1413)

From the late 1930s, the official British propaganda policy was to engage “the Good German”: appeal to the supposed mass of democratically minded, decent, upstanding, peace-loving ordinary citizens who resented Hitler. (Location 1426)

You needed to tackle people’s connection to the Nazis at its root: the need for belonging, the sadism and the simplified identity that the Nazis offered. (Location 1437)

The Kremlin could employ different narratives for different groups: from the more aggressive “military might” angle for active war supporters to the more vague “my country right or wrong” approach for loyal neutrals. (Location 1459)

In democracies we have none of the censorship or danger that truth-telling media in dictatorships face, and we have far less excuse not to reach audiences under the sway of propaganda preaching lies and hate. (Location 1465)

Such “media are about identity, not information.” Trust, in this environment, becomes partisan: viewers trust the media that represent their political identity, and they distrust the others. (Location 1474)

what happens when leaders and their followers actively reject the truth if it undermines their political identities? When the powerful are no longer frightened of the truth? Do we need a new type of media dedicated to understanding and overcoming that? (Location 1483)

adapting to different audiences is something that the enemies of democracies do all the time. (Location 1485)

Hitler, unable to defeat the RAF after months of air raids, had turned the Luftwaffe’s firepower toward British cities, his aim to break the British will. (Location 1495)

To ease the “listening tension,” Londoners huddled around their wireless sets. (Location 1508)

In 1940 the Workers’ Challenge station was one of four “British” stations run by the büro. (Location 1549)

Should they jam the stations? This went against government policy, and in any case the German stations were on wavelengths too close to British stations to jam easily, and the Germans had far more transmitters than the British. (Location 1579)

The director general of the BBC, Sir Frederick Ogilvie, already regretted that by having used the BBC to attack Lord Haw-Haw’s broadcasts, he had given the “traitor” a vast amount of free advertising. (Location 1582)

He was the sort of man who made you feel good by laughing with you— until you realized, thought Delmer, that he was also getting you to open up and unmasking you at the same time. (Location 1609)

His MI5 file has been declassified, but there are few documents in there from 1940. However, there are many more from 1941, which give some sense of the sort of information collected on him. (Location 1622)

You can’t control your own story: it’s always partly created by others. (Location 1625)

American journalists were broadcasting about how courageous the British seemed in facing down the Blitz, but as he passed along platforms crowded with subterranean refugees, Delmer wasn’t quite so sure about the “Blitz spirit.” (Location 1679)

Once a month he would meet with a carrot-headed young Oxford graduate from what Delmer assumed was MI5 (it was actually MI6), who would ask him to do the odd sordid job: go drinking with other journalists to see which of them might be a German spy, check out which German journalists might be ready to betray the Reich. (Location 1681)

Lisbon in 1940 did not suffer from blackouts. The city’s casinos and restaurants were teeming. Neutral Portugal was awash with spies, playboys, refugees, more refugees, gamblers, weapons smugglers, war profiteers, and writers. The abdicated king of England, Edward Windsor, along with his retinue, occupied a set of suites overlooking the Atlantic. (Location 1708)

The Abwehr trained prostitutes to extract information from English sailors and hatched a scheme to abduct the former king, a Nazi sympathizer, and bring him to Germany to broadcast pro-Hitler speeches to the British. (Location 1711)

For Delmer, Lisbon was the next best thing to being in Germany itself: What could the refugees tell him about the state of the nation under Hitler? (Location 1724)

You can usually tell that an English person, or someone who knows how to act like an English person, is doing well when they are being so self-deprecating. (Location 1750)

Research units, Ingrams explained to an increasingly huffy, puffy Delmer, had nothing to do with research. This was the code name for “freedom radios”: French, Italian, Danish, and other anti-Nazi resistance radio stations that seemed to be transmitting from occupied Europe while actually being run by émigrés based in England, all working under the auspices of the intelligence services. (Location 1765)

“We want you to start a right-wing RU and suggest you take charge of it with full editorial and political control,” Ingrams instructed. (Location 1773)

The Nazis mass-produced a cheap, sleek radio set, a Volksempfänger, to summon this Volksgemeinschaft into being. By 1941, 65 percent of Germans owned one of these “people’s receivers.” (Location 1816)

Goebbels’s propaganda sought to put Hitler above politics, on a plane both parental and almost divine. (Location 1831)

If writing and reading books made you sit and think in more formally rational debate, then radio could appeal to something more instinctive. (Location 1855)

People began owning cameras en masse, and the newspapers encouraged them to photograph themselves taking part in the Nazi festivities— early versions of selfies. (Location 1879)

Working first with the British government and later the Americans, two exiled academics, the Austrian psychoanalyst Ernst Kris and the German sociologist Hans Speier, were tasked with analyzing wartime Reich’s radio hour by hour and detailing how Goebbels tried to achieve his aims. (Location 1886)

When the Wehrmacht invaded a new country, there was often a radio team with its armory of microphones traveling with the most forward-surging troops. You were with the soldier as he moved into Czechoslovakia and France, clearing mines with sappers, capturing foreign forces and shooting down their planes. (Location 1893)

Little was told about the soldiers’ past apart from their home region (to show how the whole country fights together). (Location 1899)

The “Front Report” reversed the accusations of atrocities that had so damaged Germany in World War I— now it was the Allies who were the monsters. (Location 1903)

Soldiers’ deaths were rarely mentioned. The “Front Report” described SS men and party members as bearing the brunt of the fatalities: (Location 1910)

It signaled the celebration of some great victory. Radio presenters would spend the whole week heralding that there was a “special announcement” pending. When it came, almost always on a Sunday, the radio emitted a tremendous blast of trumpets. (Location 1928)

It was there to reflect the “spiritual foundation of National Socialism,” to conjure a great battle between dark and light and to give you a place within it. Nazi news was not part of a “public sphere” where evidence, information, or even disinformation was weighed and debated, proven and disproven. Its aim wasn’t an encounter with reality— but an escape from it. (Location 1947)

The totalitarian mass leaders based their propaganda on the correct psychological assumption that, under such conditions, one could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood… they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness…. (Location 1959)

He struggled to take in the scene at Bucha: “The nation has degraded. They’ve been fed so much brain-destroying propaganda. (Location 1983)

Polls in Russia concluded that Putin’s supporters thought that “the government is right, solely because it is the government and it has power.” Truth was not a value in itself; it was a subset of power. (Location 2004)

The propaganda allowed you to both relinquish responsibility and enjoy dominance. (Location 2011)

The Russian commander had said he would give out medical supplies only if the prisoners sang the Russian anthem. No one did. Some of the older people had gone mad. Anyone who tried to resist was shot. When the villagers buried them, the Russians shot at them for fun, and they had to jump and hide in the graves where they were burying their friends. (Location 2018)

by labeling Ukrainians Nazis, the Kremlin made them beyond the pale, subhuman, and allowed for their mass murder. And at the same time, it took away the original power of the term. (Location 2023)

The language that defined evil, that was meant to help lock it up in the prison of the past, had grown weak with repetition, so now the worst of the past was here, taunting us by using the very language that was meant to hold it at bay. (Location 2026)

the newer propaganda has also made naked the underlying mindsets that were always lurking under the ideology of the old, like a skin that’s been taken off to reveal the bloody pulp and pulsating muscles underneath: the needs it feeds and the pleasures it provides, the way it delivers a remedy for loneliness, stills a spinning world, feeds you a simpler, superior identity, consumes your potential to be you, burns away the humanity of others, makes murder ordinary. (Location 2036)

The staff could dress in civilian clothes, and they lived in small houses across the estate. Different groups of émigrés were forbidden from communicating with each other. (Location 2071)

Garnett would later write the official history of the PWE, which the government would then block from publication for fifty years because it revealed far too much about the blunders and backstabbing at Woburn. (Location 2077)

It was the lack of idealism, rather than other virtuous ideals, that Delmer wanted to tap into. (Location 2104)

Instead of democratic aspirations, Delmer wanted to target this German pigdog: “We must appeal to the inner pigdog inside every German in the name of his highest patriotic ideals, give him a patriotic reason for doing what he would like to do from self-interest, talk to him about his Führer and his Fatherland and all that sort of thing, and at the same time inject some item of news into his mind which will make him think, and if possible act, in a way that is contrary to the efficient conduct of Hitler’s war.” (Location 2106)

Wehrmacht soldiers were seen as heroes— partly thanks to how they were portrayed by Goebbels’s radio propaganda— but people’s ire was taken out on the party members, who stayed safe on the home front while soldiers risked their lives. (Location 2115)

Delmer’s purpose in complaining of elite corruption was not to end it, but to further encourage this practice so detrimental to the Nazi system. (Location 2137)

news which tends to show directly, or (preferably) indirectly, that every man for himself is the axiom every intelligent German should be following. (Location 2152)

instead of pushing content onto audiences aggressively, Delmer was allowing them to feel they had stumbled onto something quite by chance: (Location 2157)

Delmer thought that the Nazis’ propaganda grip was not quite total. One needed to kindle the audience’s desire to think for themselves again, to fall in love with finding facts. (Location 2164)

The station, in fact, would seek to be a nightly demonstration of a growing split between the conservative elements of the army and the radicals of the Nazi party.” (Location 2170)

When the war began, Seckelmann joined the Pioneer Corps, the military unit open to émigrés, where he rose to the rank of corporal and risked his life digging up and defusing unexploded German bombs. Not content with this job, he volunteered to be parachuted behind the German lines with Special Operations 2 (SO2), where he caught the attention of Leonard Ingrams, who passed him on to Delmer, (Location 2203)

One imagines Delmer and Seckelmann rehearsing: Delmer goading, coaxing, forcing, despairing, and becoming more irritated as he tries to squeeze Seckelmann’s innate gentleness into his vision of der Chef. (Location 2231)

Delmer’s approach in miniature: acting appalled at something that was actually titillating to his audience, while at the same time breaking the taboo on insulting the SS and deepening the rift between the party and the army, the party and the people. (Location 2249)

Der Chef’s Germany was an inverse of the cohesive Volksgemeinschaft: a world where different government departments fought against each other and forgot about the people, and where the healthy Nazi body, and by extension its body politic, was infected by burst sewage systems spreading disease and margarine made out of rotten fish. (Location 2254)

Reinholz, this son of kinky cabaret and Prussian militarism, now took on the writing of the scripts. (Location 2263)

Howe wrote that “working with Reinholz gave the corporal a confidence he had lacked when he was on his own with Delmer.” (Location 2271)

In midsummer 1941 Delmer’s team had been joined by Max Braun as head of intelligence. Braun had been the leader of the Socialist Party in Saarland, where he had resoundingly lost a referendum to Hitler in 1935. He had fled to France, where he led the Socialist Party in exile, then to Casablanca, and on to Britain, where he joined Delmer’s team. He still dreamed of a better Germany. (Location 2283)

The more facts Delmer amassed, the more truthful der Chef’s screeds were. (Location 2297)

“Never lie by accident, only deliberately” was the creed of his operation. (Location 2299)

After German prisoners were taken captive by the British, they were imprisoned in camps where microphones hidden in the walls recorded their conversations. The intelligence agencies thus gleaned important information about military operations. They then passed the transcripts to Delmer, who would plunder them for the latest gossip, details of daily life, and turns of phrase and attitudes. (Location 2306)

He believed in propaganda that changed behavior. “[ GS1] has never incited directly to action,” Delmer explained to his superiors. “It has spoken only in such a way that the idea of action is planted in the mind of the subject without letting him see that he is being influenced at all.” (Location 2323)

Most people, Delmer reckoned, want to stay in the collective rather than stand out and take personal risks. (Location 2335)

One of the reports from the “SIBS” (rumors) department from the same year explains that “the following SIBS are designed to encourage suicide…. Suicide is notoriously catching, and reports of particular methods used lead to imitation.” (Location 2340)

A German business man described recently how its bulletins are spread. Nobody is willing to admit he listens to GS1, but one is constantly being asked by acquaintances “have you heard the story that…” and then follows the news that GS1 broadcast the previous morning. (Location 2369)

it wasn’t meant as pure satire. The German Service of the BBC had shows with absurd Nazi characters who openly poked fun at the regime. But with der Chef the listeners were meant to consider him to be genuine and indeed often did so. (Location 2386)

“First to prevent collaboration with the enemy, next to reawaken French morale and inspire resistance.” Sutton’s four French stations each targeted different sections of society: (Location 2401)

The anger gains its power from being constantly restrained, with the odd swear words erupting like little violent geysers, just the way that the truth about the bombings and feelings toward the party are bursting through censorship and repression. (Location 2428)

Der Chef’s aim, Delmer explained to the king, was to subvert Nazi propaganda by carrying “Nazi ideology just one phase further into the ridiculous, where it is harmful to Germany.” (Location 2431)

Delmer describes how his aim was to reverse engineer the language of Nazi anti-Semitism back onto the Nazi leadership themselves: (Location 2435)

the honky-tonk piano tune that served as the introductory music to der Chef’s program. This signature tune took the official intro music of the news program on the official Nazi radio station and then continued it slightly out of tune. (Location 2440)

Have you ever experienced that sense when you suddenly become aware of the artificial, constructed, mannered nature of the way you speak, the language you are using, how you use that language? (Location 2444)

One of Delmer’s insights was how people perform their propaganda roles, how they are acting even when they might seem to be full of passion and “hypnotized.” (Location 2450)

If Le Bon (and Freud) compared mass psychology to hypnotism, a state of mind where you stop being aware of what you’re doing or saying altogether, and Goebbels and Hitler’s aim was to put that theory into practice, then Delmer’s method was to prick you awake by making you aware that there was an element of artifice in everything you do. And in that moment of sudden self-awareness, you could, if you had enough motivation, depart from the power of their propaganda. (Location 2457)

Satire can reduce people’s fear of an intimidating enemy, make the monster look small and pitiful. This can embolden an opposition that feels weak. But it can also belittle those who, for whatever reason, followed that leader in the first place. (Location 2461)

this subtle subversion was being performed by Jews, the victims of the rhetoric, more of whom were joining Delmer’s team. (Location 2464)

The German staff members were never allowed to leave the Woburn estate without permission, not even to go to the local pub or to visit the others’ houses, as it might compromise their security. (Location 2488)

Fritzsche’s aim was to dig a moat of doubt between the British and their German audience. (Location 2511)

the Nazis didn’t just wait for the British to make a mistake. Goebbels liked to plant false stories: that the Nazis had executed ten thousand people in Prague, for example, or that Foreign Minister von Ribbentrop had been fired in a purge. He would then feed these to newspapers in neutral countries, wait for the BBC to pick them up, and then have Fritzsche scold the BBC for telling lies. (Location 2516)

He repeats the sentence, rolling the words into his mouth, until at last he achieves the right rhythm. (Location 2524)

The BBC, unlike the Reich’s radio, was honest about Britain’s setbacks, a deliberate editorial policy to win trust. (Location 2535)

The Reich’s minister for propaganda was stuck in the classic dilemma: debunk Delmer directly, and he augmented his stature; ignore him, and he let his messages proliferate unopposed. He chose the latter. Goebbels ordered “that the name of Sefton Delmer… is not to be mentioned again in the German press or on the foreign language service. (Location 2546)

as the invasion of Russia went from bad to catastrophic. In order to prepare the nation for a long struggle, the “Front Report” adapted the image of the soldier. (Location 2553)

The BBC could deliver the dry news about RAF bombardments, but Woburn could give stories that took Goebbels’s heroic soldier image and turned it against the party. (Location 2561)

Under the guise of celebrating German heroism, Delmer’s aim was to underline heavy losses in the Russian campaign and stimulate desertion. (Location 2569)

as the promise of quick victory melted, Hitler was appearing on the radio ever more rarely. When he did, he was more subdued than usual: (Location 2577)

Goebbels needed scapegoats. The Reich’s radio blamed the military setbacks on the generals, whereas Hitler’s inspiration helped German soldiers endure the Russian winter. Der Chef, by contrast, defended generals, (Location 2581)

All the pigs of the Waffen SS should be sent there. There everything else but their penis would get stiff. (Location 2591)

The Nazis were fixated on athletic, Aryan bodies, their movies, posters, and communal exercises celebrating physical health as a metaphor for the pure Aryan body politic— while all disease was expelled outward, associated with the “dirty Jews,” who, in Nazi propaganda, were portrayed as carrying illnesses, as vermin or maggots. Der Chef was bringing the disease back inside, forcing Germans to face their own ugliness and to see the Nazis as its source. (Location 2603)

The message was simple: while you are on the front, your girl is sleeping with foreign workers back home. The artist was Isabel Delmer. (Location 2623)

An SOE note stated that “in order to ensure its automatic circulation, it has been given a definite onanistic value.” (Location 2627)

With its combination of death, jealousy, and arousal, the leaflet appears to have been designed to get into the minds of German soldiers through a swirl of strong, contradictory yet interconnected feelings. (Location 2628)

The Greek resistance members, who had been slipping Isabel’s pamphlet under the doors of German soldiers, considered it such a success that they ordered thousands more: (Location 2630)

[From transcriber: the end of the sentence is unintelligible because der Chef speaks with such indignation that the words choke in his throat].” (Location 2636)

The Immaculate Community was a fiction. But it was true that the Nazis were so obsessed with racial purity that they published manuals on how to have a happy sex life with other Aryans, and at Matthias Göring’s Institute for Psychological Research and Psychotherapy, men were “cured” from homosexuality by being forced into sex with a female prostitute— and sent to concentration camps if they didn’t perform. Delmer was again pushing the Nazis’ ideology “into the ridiculous,” using their obsession with enforcing Aryan sex against them. (Location 2642)

To compile these scenes, Delmer plumbed the works of Magnus Hirschfeld, the German sexologist who had documented the sadomasochistic habits of Germans between the wars. (Location 2662)

“There is no doubt that suffering, submission, or suicide is the antithesis of positive aims of living. Yet these aims can be subjectively experienced as gratifying and attractive… as aiming at dissolving oneself in an overwhelmingly strong power and participating in its strength and glory.” (Location 2680)

Delmer was doing more than merely using sex as “bait”; he was revealing the political psychology the Nazis played on. (Location 2687)

Cripps didn’t stop with a letter. He went in to see the foreign minister personally: “If this is the sort of thing that’s needed to win the war,” he complained, “why, I’d rather lose it!” (Location 2709)

After being recorded at the billiards room studio, the records were taken by a special courier to a secret transmitter in the Buckinghamshire countryside, surrounded by War Office signs to “keep out,” where radio operators with no knowledge of German played the records, attempting to make them sound as if they were broadcast live. (Location 2731)

But despite the elaborate security, Delmer did have enemies. (Location 2741)

Voigt had allegedly first leaked the secret of der Chef to the British press, which didn’t reveal his name but was still stinging in its rebuke. (Location 2761)

Delmer despaired. “I would prefer to give up my connection with the Unit if its activities are to be continually endangered by the toleration of gross breaches of security,” he wrote to Leeper. (Location 2769)

He fought for the right to be immoral: “I am not pornographic. I dislike the baser sides of human life as much as Sir S. Cripps does,” but he would allow pornography if he could “see a purpose behind it in the fight against evil things…. In this case moral indignation does not seem to be called for.” (Location 2772)

botnets, troll farms, and online mobs have become ubiquitous from Mexico to Manila. And catching them has become a minor industry across the world. (Location 2797)

In 2017 one group of Democratic spin doctors then decided to create fake Russian accounts pretending to be fake Americans to accuse a Republican candidate in Alabama of getting Russian support (they later claimed this was an experiment). (Location 2801)

In 2018, when the terrorist group the Islamic State established a torturing, mass-murdering regime in the ruins of Syria and Iraq, Middle Eastern activists created fake Islamic State accounts in order to confuse the terrorists’ plans. (Location 2806)

the danger of dabbling in disinformation even in a “good cause”: it nurtures an environment of endless distrust that benefits authoritarian instincts. (Location 2816)

Delmer’s great innovation in countering Nazi propaganda was the truths he was burrowing into through the lies. (Location 2822)

His obsession with detail helped him tap into the audience’s world, and when he had slipped inside their imagination, he reconnected the logic of cause and effect. (Location 2823)

He helped articulate their hidden resentments and desires in ways that undermined the Nazi hold on people’s strongest feelings. He stimulated their curiosity— whereas the Nazis wanted them to give up on truth. (Location 2826)

it wasn’t his pro-war policies they were necessarily interested in, but what he might reveal. (Location 2836)

after the initial shock and novelty wore off, and after his mask had been removed, der Chef struggled to maintain the same levels of interest. (Location 2851)

When the war began, Wykeman’s German roots made him suspect. He was arrested and then shipped off to an internment camp in Canada where he chopped giant trees, was eventually released after fifteen months, and returned to Britain to finish his degree. (Location 2866)

“Radio Wehrmachtsender Nord.” It purported to be run by soldiers in occupied Norway and was aimed at both soldiers and, more importantly, civilians inside Germany who, Delmer hoped, “want to know what army life and Stimmung [morale] is like.” (Location 2881)

no one in the attic would have referred to anyone by their real name: code names were used for security. (Location 2889)

His drawings and paintings from his Woburn and later years are full of severed heads attached to mechanical contraptions, women grasping transistors while being nuzzled by deer, the natural and the mechanized amputated and then spliced into each other, any idea of a pure identity undermined: we are fluid, part people and part machines; out of our heads grow stairs, guitars, and transmitters; and our backbones are connected by electric wires. (Location 2895)

You never knew, thought Halkett, when Delmer was serious or joking. “He liked to bewilder you and put things before you where you couldn’t possibly be sure if it was true or not,” (Location 2906)

Delmer was experimenting with other new stations too. (Location 2913)

The station was a double front. It pretended to be a local workers’ station, but it was actually communicating stories that the Polish resistance could use for its newspapers. It was essentially a very elaborately disguised newswire service. Only three people at Woburn knew of this real reason. (Location 2917)

Delmer’s researchers provided the raw facts of Nazi atrocities, and a German priest wrapped the whole thing in religious imagery, equating the Nazis with the great sinners of Bible stories: Hitler was like Herod, slaughtering foreign children physically and German children spiritually; the German people had fallen for the seductions of the Nazi devils, who “with cunning method knew how to convince the German people that they were the most wonderful people in the world and they were called upon to rule over the other so-called inferior races.” But redemption was still possible if Catholics repented and resisted Nazi orders. (Location 2929)

He put out the rumor that the station was secretly sponsored by the Vatican, hinting that the pope was more opposed to the Nazis than His Holiness’s public, conformist posture implied. (Location 2940)

increasingly Delmer believed that for a news station to work, it had to be live, rapidly reacting to the day’s events as they happened. (Location 2944)

They had remained friends ever since. Throughout 1942, Fleming, impressed with der Chef and with Wehrmachtsender Nord, had Delmer lecture new Naval Intelligence recruits on his methods of subversion. (Location 2952)

By early 1943, the initial enthusiasm for fascist events was long gone. (Location 2986)

Hitler had gone “from leadership to martyrdom— and martyrs in Nazi Germany speak very little.” (Location 2993)

The questions that Goebbels asked were posed as responses to claims made by British propaganda, as if the crowd were shouting back at the English across the water. (Location 3018)

As German cities burned after British air raids, many blamed the Jews, who, they claimed, were exacting revenge for how Germans had victimized them previously. Goebbels encouraged the hatred— which also helped distract from the ever-increasing anger at the Nazi Party. (Location 3067)

A PWE strategy memo from mid-1943 was aware of the need to “split the German people, not do Goebbels’s job and unify them.” (Location 3072)

There were eleven death sentences for “radio crime” in 1943, including one for merely mentioning to colleagues what they had heard on the BBC. (Location 3099)

Goebbels’s stress on a mix of fear and denial posed new problems for Delmer and British propaganda. (Location 3112)

novel Alone in Berlin, Hans Fallada, (Location 3114)

The “Soldatensender Calais” on medium wave, which was also broadcast as “Radio Atlantik” on shortwave, had all these “safety” features. From 1943 onward, it was being listened to from U-boats under the Atlantic and Messerschmidts in the sky. (Location 3132)

In order to produce the Soldatensender, Delmer now had, according to the rough estimate of one colleague, about a hundred collaborators. (Location 3138)

A German news agency had left a Hellschreiber behind when it bolted from England at the start of the war, and it had made its way to Woburn. (Location 3151)

the Soldatensender was broadcast live, and the editorial team could get the messages from the Hellschreiber on air right away, often faster than the more sluggish stations in Germany, especially as the Sender also kept broadcasting during the night. (Location 3153)

to replace the Hellschreiber network with cable distribution would have involved the Germans in prohibitive expenditure.” (Location 3157)

The research department could even predict promotions for U-boat crews before they were officially announced. (Location 3169)

The ultimate aim of the news was to draw out what Delmer called “the inequalities of sacrifice” between the “common man” and the privileged party elites. (Location 3173)

The Sender encouraged listeners to feel they could stand up to the Nazis by showing how weak and decrepit the authorities were becoming. (Location 3175)

The Sender was the soldiers’ friend, always looking out for the interests of its listeners. (Location 3179)

There were special shows for each branch of the German military. (Location 3181)

the Sender wasn’t trying to pretend it was necessarily Nazi: the listener was welcome to work out it was British. The aim was not to dupe the listener but to give them a safe way, both physically and mentally, to escape from Nazi media. (Location 3205)

the Sender “provided the audience with the psychological excuse, or an alibi, and at the same time ensured the programme was presented in a manner which did not offend its prejudices.” (Location 3208)

The Sender would “( i) afford our German customers an excuse if caught listening, (ii) enable them to justify this dubious activity to themselves.” (Location 3214)

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. (Location 3226)

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. (Location 3239)

The Delmer-Reinhardt connection, which had started all the way back in World War I, was sealed at Woburn. (Location 3247)

a media that was both safe for those millions who were not comfortable with taking risks, that let them hang on to their desire for a collective identity, and simultaneously thoroughly subversive. (Location 3267)

a media that enemy audiences could trust— despite facing the most extreme partisan divides possible: not just across a culture war, but across a real war. (Location 3269)

Delmer had shown that trust develops when you are useful to your audience, when they feel that you know their world so intimately it almost stops mattering who you are. (Location 3273)

Attempts to jam the Sender had backfired spectacularly, blocking out the Munich Reich’s radio instead. (Location 3279)

DELMER HAD STARTED WITH just one experimental radio station and one staff member. By 1943, he had been promoted to Director of Special Operations Against the Enemy and Satellites (“ black”). (Location 3314)

“The simplest and most effective of all black operations,” Delmer wrote, “is to spit in a man’s soup and cry ‘Heil Hitler.’” (Location 3329)

“Delmer,” Lynder noted, “often drove his team of co-workers to the brink of breakdown… but we made life easier with humour, a lot of mutual stroking, and by playing silly tricks on each other. (Location 3338)

A MORAL AMBIGUITY IMPLICIT in tricks, hoaxes, and black humor pervades Delmer’s whole propaganda project. (Location 3368)

When there was a break in the shelling, they would disassemble the destroyed Russian vehicles and smelt down the plates that had complex wiring to retrieve gold. One plate would get them 15,000 rubles, a couple hundred dollars, back home. (Location 3424)

The soldiers claimed they were impelled by financial commitments: they had taken on loans, mortgages, and medical bills for their families, and they needed the army to pay them off. (Location 3434)

The day they left, the Russian soldiers grabbed everything they could from the village. The tanks were piled high with mattresses and pink suitcases, the armored vehicles stuffed full of bedsheets, toys, and washing machines. (Location 3447)

AS THE WAR WORSENED for the Nazis, Joseph Goebbels was also trying to make sacrifice more attractive. (Location 3468)

He advanced the view that there were two principal wishes involved in what he labeled “war neuroses”: “the wish for death and the wish for a wound…. Those who suffer from anxiety states have wished for death during the period of strain and fatigue preceding the final collapse… or for some disabling illness.” (Location 3496)

In the 1930s, as in the 2020s, Ukrainians were seen as emblematic of people dying so that their cause might live. (Location 3514)

“The notion of a great military victory had passed into the background while he poses more as a martyr, the speech ending on the theme of his death.” (Location 3528)

Any plan to undermine the allure of the Nazis’ appeal to sacrifice had, first of all, to position itself as part of a positive collective mission, had to be somehow a part of your duty to your fellow Germans; second, it had to restore your sense of being able to act and overcome the desire to just sink into passive acceptance of your demise. (Location 3532)

he must never try to name or define his disease, for that was up to the doctor to do: “One single symptom which the doctor has discovered by his own questions, is worth ten the patient has volunteered.” (Location 3544)

these “malingering manuals” had a double purpose: to help soldiers get out from the front lines but also to force German military medics to trust their patients less as they learned about the existence of the manuals. (Location 3565)

Almost everything that Delmer did had a double, often triple, purpose. (Location 3567)

Delmer’s “dead letters” and food hampers from hell were being delivered by a network of underground agents throughout Europe. (Location 3621)

When they killed a German, they should make it look like it was done by a German resistance movement. In the absence of a genuine anti-Nazi struggle, Delmer wanted to simulate one and confuse the Gestapo and SS. (Location 3627)

by nighttime hundreds of thousands of copies of Nachrichten were over enemy lines, ready to be read by German soldiers in the morning, often earlier than the Nazi newspapers. (Location 3643)

The Nachrichten took no sides, just matter-of-factly reinforced how the German army was losing, implying that the leadership had lost its way and it was time to think about self-preservation, not self-sacrifice. (Location 3648)

The mention of the “Mouth of the Seine” was a piece of deception, helping the Allies distract from the Normandy focus of the invasion. (Location 3683)

They had in them an undertone of personal tragedy which made these ephemeral pieces of psychological warfare as moving for me to listen to as if they had been the greatest literature. (Location 3693)

Halkett paused for a moment for the senselessness of the order to sink in. (Location 3713)

“an actor owned by the character he performed.” (Location 3728)

Delmer’s aim was to make the conspiracy sound as widespread as possible. (Location 3756)

The BBC, Delmer rued in his memoirs, was “stopped from saying anything to encourage the rebels, they were specifically ordered to announce that His Majesty’s Government was not prepared to absolve the army from its responsibility for the war or to differentiate Germans and Germans. All were responsible. The only terms on which Germany could have peace were— as before— unconditional capitulation.” (Location 3776)

The botched assassination had the opposite effect from what the conspirators and Delmer hoped: it united the army and the party. (Location 3780)

“Fanatical” had been one of the negative terms given a positive spin by the Nazis, an insult they had remodeled as something to aspire to. (Location 3785)

In terms of propaganda they have drawn something rousing, a mood of victory out of a most serious defeat, millions will once more believe in final victory.” (Location 3814)

All high-level officers of course knew that the Sender was British but saw in it a message that Delmer claims to have planted on purpose, that a revolt against Hitler would lead to a peace deal with the Allies. “Such a separate peace was of course out of the question,” (Location 3834)

German soldiers on the Western Front, the target of Delmer’s media, did desert and surrender in droves, unlike those on the Eastern Front. (Location 3858)

Both sides were pretending that a Sender rumor was true in order to give the Germans an honorable way to surrender. (Location 3867)

propaganda for Delmer was about giving people the excuse to do what they secretly desired anyway. (Location 3868)

The effectiveness of propaganda, or counterpropaganda, indeed of any communication, depends on how well you understand your audience. (Location 3881)

He conducted and reviewed more than six hundred interviews with POWs and concluded that “the psychology of Nazis, as disclosed by detailed individual investigation of large numbers of them and subsequent statistical validation, fails to show gross mental disorder. It is characterised by an unconscious over-emphasis of paternal authority, evasion of responsibility by blaming scape-goats, over-valuation of masculinity, and depreciation of feminine and tender influences.” (Location 3885)

The ensuing weak sense of individual agency led to a search for strong leaders and identification with an all-encompassing, abstract nation/ family. (Location 3890)

Irrational spurts of aggression were a way to deal with the sense of inadequacy. (Location 3892)

“If primary narcissism is structural and necessary,” explains Josh Cohen, “and is basically our investment in our own self-preservation, secondary narcissism involves specific character traits and habits— vanity, self-inflation, superiority, all of course masking an underlying fear of one’s own inadequacy.” (Location 3895)

propaganda exploits vulnerabilities and anxieties that can originate in childhood and persist throughout our lives. (Location 3903)

the more pressure the army applied to break people, the more individualistic they could become in contrast. (Location 3926)

to break the patterns of repetitive, unthinking behavior that the Nazis were trying to instill. (Location 3947)

A Schweinehund that rebels against Nazism is a beautiful animal— or at least not a repulsive one. (Location 3954)

But can you ever smuggle in the good under the guise of the bad without contaminating it? (Location 3957)

When René Halkett got hold of a Goebbels radio speech in advance, he also saw a chance to sabotage it. He had learned the cadences of Goebbels’s speeches and where the propaganda minister would leave little pauses and gaps. (Location 3973)

Delmer’s team had even learned to create ersatz Nazi programs that imitated them perfectly, then hack into Nazi airwaves when they went off air during air raids and “continue” them. (Location 3978)

Eva cut the yellow star off Victor’s coat with a pocketknife. From now on they traveled as the “Kleinpeters,” an Aryan couple who had lost their documents. (Location 4028)

On March 1 the Sender was as ever avoiding lecturing Germans, and instead giving damning detail about the progress of the war. (Location 4044)

In farthest west Germany, where the Americans and British were breaking through, the Allies had both air superiority and superiority over the airwaves: it was almost impossible to receive German broadcasts. (Location 4070)

Goebbels’s reliance on people’s fear of Soviet atrocities to inspire resistance in the East was having the opposite effect on the Western Front— wouldn’t surrender to the Allies be preferable to occupation by the Soviets? (Location 4091)

It was amusing to observe how isolated and crumbling scraps of NLI [Nazi language], which had been dutifully learned by heart, still floated around like islands in the man’s disillusioned and embittered head. (Location 4102)

The British government had a different job for Delmer: create a new media system in Germany. It was a chance to ensure that Germany didn’t repeat the same cycle as after the previous war: (Location 4117)

Delmer recalled how the exposure of British propaganda in World War I was then used by Nazi propaganda to claim, falsely, that the German loss had been brought about by mere “tricks and lies” and not by military defeat, (Location 4127)

On April 30, Hitler had shot himself. On May 1, Goebbels and his wife had killed themselves after poisoning their six children. (Location 4140)

Throughout the country, the rubble was being slowly cleared by hand. Many of those enlisted into this arm-aching work were former Nazi Party members, forced into it as a sort of penance by local groups. (Location 4145)

I wanted to set up a new media of mass communication which would… show the German press and radio how to free themselves from defects which in my opinion had helped to plunge a gullible German public into two world wars.” (Location 4153)

He had built on the existing slanderous, character-assassinating, dehumanizing media practices of the Weimar Republic and then used them as a weapon to cudgel opponents, critics, dissidents, and whole races. (Location 4163)

Whether this controversy played the decisive role or not, Delmer’s grand schemes were scrapped, and he was offered the much more truncated position of just running the newswire. He quit. (Location 4189)

Evidence that hadn’t been available at the Nuremberg tribunal later convinced the Nuremberg prosecutor Alexander Hardy that Fritzsche’s work as chief of the German Press Division “was far more important than the task of venting his golden voice…. (Location 4224)

The Americans, Delmer lamented, with the British following them, had abandoned attempts to “denazify” the country and were “seeking as allies against the Russians those very social strata in Germany” whom they had sworn to eliminate. (Location 4244)

both the Americans and our new German allies were proclaiming as historical fact our black propaganda legend that the German Officers’ Corps and the German generals had been in opposition to the Führer and his party.” (Location 4247)

While the fake past was becoming real in postwar West Germany, the real past was being avoided. (Location 4263)

Arendt tied the lack of responsibility to the Nazis’ relativist attitude to truth: if you thought facts and truth were all “subjective,” then everyone could choose their own reality and avoid responsibility: (Location 4272)

Arendt thought the very ease with which Germans had surrendered Nazi ideology without any serious debate about its precepts was itself part of Nazism: “What one is up against is not indoctrination but the incapacity or unwillingness to distinguish altogether between fact and opinion.” (Location 4277)

The Hothouse on the East River (Location 4289)

we are back in the Blitz; history has returned; the borders of past and present and future were not as solid as some had thought. (Location 4324)

Climbing up high always inspires a sense of possibilities. (Location 4340)

In the 1960s and 1970s a generation of young Germans finally rebelled. There were bloody protests on Germany’s streets opposing the inclusion of former Nazis in leading positions in government and business. School programs explored Germany’s fixation with authoritarianism. German and European films revealed the fascist relationship to sadomasochism. (Location 4344)

In Russia there has been no similar systemic attempt to deal with the Russian and Soviet past, let alone the present. (Location 4351)

“moral” content didn’t take off. What was more successful were issues that touched on Russians’ immediate self-interests, the Russian pigdog. (Location 4373)

Only by taking responsibility do you overcome propaganda that encourages apathy and passivity. (Location 4385)

They manipulate the desire to belong; provide a sense of false community to those left feeling deracinated by rapid change; help project our worst feelings about ourselves onto others; allow you to feel special, even superior, and foster the sense that you are surrounded by enemies that want to take something from you, something that’s yours and only yours and only you deserve. (Location 4388)

What is at stake is whether we can create a communication environment where democracy can function, or whether other systems are more efficient in the new information era. (Location 4408)

Digitally enhanced, new versions of the old propaganda are emanating from dictatorships and from inside democracies. (Location 4430)

we can gain even the most skeptical audiences’ attention if we understand their motivations. (Location 4438)

if propaganda is the remedy for loneliness, we need to provide a better cure. (Location 4443)

Through these four processes— creating media communities stronger than the propagandists’; breaking the propagandists’ monopoly on expressing the darkest feelings; making people aware of how Nazi social roles were a ghoulish cabaret you could discard; and provoking people to behave more independently— Delmer created a distance between the German people and the Nazi propaganda. (Location 4462)

So much of contemporary propaganda is designed to make you feel overwhelmed by the amount of confusing content out there, undermine the difference between truth and lies, and through this confusion find relief by placing your faith in a leader who reduces the world into crass conspiracies. (Location 4469)

What we don’t always have, however, is Delmer’s wit, his ability to descend into the origins of propaganda’s power, and then subvert it. (Location 4477)

Some of Delmer’s best insights came from recognizing his own susceptibility to propaganda. (Location 4478)

this moment when you suddenly step outside the performance you didn’t even realize you were putting on. The struggle against propaganda starts with this jolt into awareness. (Location 4482)

so many of his games, disguises, deceptions, and misdirections were designed to pull you free. (Location 4484)

John then returned to West Berlin and claimed that he had been kidnapped and forced to speak by the East German secret police but had managed to escape. The West German courts disagreed and sentenced John to four years in solitary confinement as a traitor. (Location 4496)

His memoirs gave him the chance to respond and tell the truth about his lies. The two volumes came out in 1961 and 1962: Trail Sinister and Black Boomerang in English, The Germans and I in German. (Location 4526)

Elmar finally told his story to the historians Siegfried Beer and Wolfgang Mutschich, who discovered him by accident in the mid-1980s. On their initiative Eisenberger was finally posthumously honored by the Austrian government for his contribution to the liberation of Austria in 1995. (Location 4561)

However much we reinvent ourselves, Halkett seems to be lamenting, we are always brought back to the defensive identities we put on to shield ourselves, but which in turn consume us and reveal our vulnerabilities. (Location 4584)

In the 1960s he was still doubling down on that old version of imperial Britishness that he had struggled to fit in with as a child. So much about him revolved around the need to simultaneously belong— and yet also express his uniqueness. (Location 4599)

Delmer’s insights and innovations stemmed from his ability to see how “ordinary ordinary” he was too, in the sense that he was vulnerable to propaganda for the same reasons we all are— through the need to fit in and conform. (Location 4623)

Propaganda at its most malign exploits this need, impels a type of belonging where you give up the capacity to differentiate between good and bad. At its most extreme it makes mass murder ordinary, ordinary. (Location 4626)

He welcomed you into a cabaret where you could find roles that gave you a chance to act yourself. (Location 4631)

My colleagues at the Reckoning Project are an endless inspiration. (Location 4639)

Karen Bayer’s biography of Delmer is a wonder of detail (Location 4644)

Ernst Kris and Hans Speier’s German Radio Propaganda is required reading; Michael Balfour’s Propaganda in War, 1939– 1945 is a grand guide. (Location 4647)

Sefton Delmer, Trail Sinister: An Autobiography (London: Secker & Warburg, 1961), (Location 4682)

Sefton Delmer, Black Boomerang (London: Secker & Warburg, 1962), (Location 4694)

Woburn at War, documentary by Anglia TV, 1987, directed by Graham Creelman. (Location 4695)

David Welch, Germany and Propaganda in World War 1: Pacifism, Mobilization and Total War (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), (Location 4716)

Peter Pomerantsev, This Is Not Propaganda: Adventures in the War Against Reality (New York: PublicAffairs, 2019), (Location 4739)

Henk de Berg, Trump and Hitler: A Comparative Study in Lying (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2024). (Location 4815)

Carol Jacobi, Out of the Cage: The Art of Isabel Rawsthorne (London: Thames & Hudson, 2021), (Location 4853)

William L. Shirer, Berlin Diary (New York: RosettaBooks, 2011), (Location 4864)

Adrian Weale, Renegades: Hitler’s Englishmen (London: Lume, 2021), (Location 4918)

Horst J. P. Bergmeier and Rainer E. Lotz, Hitler’s Airwaves: The Inside Story of Nazi Broadcasting and Propaganda Swing (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997), (Location 4919)

Docherty, “Black Propaganda by Radio,” (Location 4930)

Vike Martina Plock, The BBC German Service During the Second World War: Broadcasting to the Enemy (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021). (Location 4933)

Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Penguin Modern Classics, 1973), (Location 4995)

Ellic Howe, The Black Game: British Subversive Operations Against the Germans During the Second World War (London: Futura, 1982), (Location 5056)

Harald Welzer and Sönke Neitzel, Soldaten: On Fighting, Killing and Dying (New York: Simon & Schuster), (Location 5075)

The Black Art: British Clandestine Psychological Warfare Against the Third Reich ( www.psywar.org, 2010), 225– 226. (Location 5127)

Woburn at War, documentary by Anglia TV, 1987, directed by Graham Creelman. (Location 5153)

David Garnett, The Secret History of PWE (London: St Ermin’s Press, 2002), (Location 5156)

Brunhilde Pomsel, The Work I Did: A Memoir of the Secretary to Goebbels (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2018), (Location 5201)

Peter Fritzsche, Life and Death in the Third Reich (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), (Location 5214)

Peter Longerich, Goebbels: A Biography (New York: Random House, 2015), (Location 5220)

Victor Klemperer, To the Bitter End: The Diaries of Victor Klemperer, 1942– 1945 (London: Orion, 2021), (Location 5237)

Ellic Howe, The Black Game: British Subversive Operations Against the Germans During the Second World War (Location 5243)

Agnes Bernelle, The Fun Palace: An Autobiography (Dublin: Lilliput Press, 1996), (Location 5264)

Bob Bergin, OSS Undercover Girl: Elizabeth P. McIntosh, an Interview (Fairfax, VA: Banana Tree Press, 2012), (Location 5272)

Muriel Spark and Elaine Feinstein, Curriculum Vitae: A Volume of Autobiography (Manchester, UK: Lives and Letters, 2014), (Location 5277)

Lewis Hyde, Trickster Makes This World: Mischief, Myth, and Art (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010), (Location 5288)

Paul Radin, The Trickster: A Study in American Indian Mythology (New York: Schocken, 2015), (Location 5289)

The Raven Steals the Light, Bill Reid and Robert Bringhurst, eds. (Vancouver: Douglas & McIntyre, 1984). (Location 5290)

Stephen Bunker, Spy Capital of Britain: Bedfordshire’s Secret War, 1939‒ 1945 (Bedford: Bedford Chronicles, 2007), (Location 5341)

Agnes Bernelle, The Fun Palace: An Autobiography (Dublin: Lilliput Press, 1996), (Location 5346)

Victor Klemperer, To the Bitter End: The Diaries of Victor Klemperer, 1942– 1945 (London: Orion, 2021), (Location 5348)

Karen Stenner, The Authoritarian Dynamic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). (Location 5397)

Muriel Spark and Elaine Feinstein, Curriculum Vitae: A Volume of Autobiography (Manchester, UK: Lives and Letters, 2014), (Location 5408)

Harald Jähner, Aftermath: Life in the Fallout of the Third Reich, 1945– 1955 (New York: Knopf Doubleday, 2022), (Location 5443)

Richard Ashby Wilson, Incitement on Trial: Prosecuting International Speech Crimes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), (Location 5455)

Eugene Davidson, The Trial of the Germans (Columbia: University of Missouri, 1966), (Location 5457)

David Garnett, The Secret History of PWE (London: St Ermin’s Press, 2002), (Location 5465)

Victor Klemperer, The Lesser Evil: The Diaries of Victor Klemperer, 1945– 1959 (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2021), (Location 5467)

Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom, directed by Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1975. (Location 5483)

Karen Bayer, “How Dead Is Hitler?,” Der Britische Starreporter Sefton Delmer und Die Deutschen (Mainz am Rhine: Phillip von Zabern, 2008), (Location 5494)

Nicholas Rankin, Churchill’s Wizards: The British Genius for Deception, 1914– 1945 (London: Faber & Faber), (Location 5498)

“Slaughter in Indonesia: Britain’s Secret Propaganda War,” Guardian, October 17, 2021, www.theguardian.com/world/2021/oct/17/slaughter-in-indonesia-britains-secret-propaganda-war (Location 5508)