How to Win an Information War. The Propagandist Who Outwitted Hitler, Peter Pomerantsev. Faber 2024, £20.00.
In 1942 at the height of the Second World War Sir Stafford Cripps sent a hand written letter to Sir Anthony Eden in the Foreign Office expressing his disgust about, “The most foul and filthy pornography” disseminated by a British journalist working for the BBC German service. Orgies were graphically described; “If she gets dry between the legs, they pour in butter.” “Followed by indignant comments about butter being rationed to the common people.” “If this is what’s needed to win the war,” wrote Cripps, “I would rather lose it.” His outrage was caused by Sefton Delmer who posing as, “GSI,” Gustav Siegfried Eins, broadcast a pack of lurid lies to the Nazi state. His other identity was “Der Chef” (Chief) a Prussian Hitler loyalist who hated the generals who were letting the Fuhrer down. “It was always Delmer’s joy to find a story he had invented being retold as a fact by a German POW,” recalled Muriel Spark, who joined him in 1944 as a secretary. Delmer had just reported that there were now so many Italian prisoners that translators were needed, news that would demoralise the Germans, says Pomerantsev, as they had been, “Conditioned to despise Italian fighters.”
This detailed, sometimes hilarious book is not just about British war-time propaganda; it has a more relevant message. Opponents of Putin are buying Russian porn sites to insert clips of Russian war crimes and slip in messages from Zelenski. The author, born in 1977 to a Jewish family in Soviet controlled Kiev, whose father was arrested by the KGB for distributing anti-Soviet literature, is obsessed by past and present political mis-information. This is his third book about it, after a memoir of his time in Russia, “Nothing is True and Everything is Possible,” and “This is Not Propaganda,” demonstrating how Putin uses “black propaganda,” while the cynical Russian public assume that all “Kremlin’s reality is scripted.” This book is essential reading for the world we now inhabit; with AI and news fakery, which in Putin’s case, Pomerantsev sees as a kind of “posturing”. He says the Russians did not believe that he was fairly elected but are too scared to change things, an easy parallel with Nazi Germany, where a cowed population lost control of their leaders and the truth.
Delmer was the son of an Australian academic who grew up in Berlin where he was fluent in German but bullied at school as an, “Englander”. He got caught up in propaganda for the Great War, wanting to wave a German flag. Later he decided that German war enthusiasm had been false, he saw how they had “talked themselves into it”. Aged thirteen his family moved to London. He studied at Oxford and became Berlin correspondent for the Daily Express. In the Weimar years he behaved like Bertie Wooster, in white opera tails and twirling a silver-headed cane. At first he laughed at Hitler but seeing his rise to power infiltrated Nazi inner circles, striking up a friendship with Ernst Rohm, Hitler’s friend, the homosexual head of the SA. The book is full of vivid images from that time, even an interview with Hitler in which he was, “shouting as though he had the Sports Palace Crowd before him, not just a solitary British reporter”. Hitler couldn’t guess what kind of enemy was standing there with a note-book. Delmer bought a piano for Putzi Hanfstaengl Hitler’s gay press secretary and let Goring fondle his parrot which could squawk, “Heil Hitler”. He began flying to rallies in Hitler’s plane, sometimes for a day.
No one found out more about what made that dictatorship tick. In 1939 he joined the BBC German service and found it just an, “echo chamber,” with anti-Nazis talking to each other with no chance of changing German minds. He took a harder line. “There is an inner swine-hunt in every German,” he wrote, and the propagandist had to appeal to their “self-interest, greed and sense of humiliation”. Pomerantsev argues that Putin resembles this sense of national disgrace, basing his propaganda on the need to get, “Russia off its knees,” to restore it as a “great power”. By 1945 forty per cent of German POWs were listening to “Der Chef”. Partisans all over Europe fed him local news and he was able to make instant rebuttals of Nazi reports, satirising and provoking. They were praised by Hans Fritzsche, head of the Munich SS. People loved their porny gossip.
The author explores how he gave the German people, “Psychological cover,” to listen. He calls this, “Consensual self-deception”. As a fake German, he gave them the idea of, “Us” rather than “Them”. Posing as a Hitler loyalist, as they did, he gave them a, “High minded excuse,” to abandon the war, let down by poor generals. Like Delmer, Pomerantsev is highly perceptive. He must be a leading expert on disinformation and conspiracy theorising, suggesting “Propaganda is a remedy for loneliness,” as it, “Creates an ersatz community for lonely people,” giving them an, “Us” when they are feeling alone. He asks,
How does a system that relies on trust in common processes such as elections survive when so many deny their validity? We need a way to reach these audiences for democracy to function. What is at stake is whether we can create a communications environment where democracy can function, or whether other systems are more efficient in the new information era.
His work is entertaining and terrifying. He notes that in 2021 the Chinese Communist party turned a hundred and celebrated with an, “All-singing, all-dancing light show extravaganza.” At its climax, instead of proposing the next economic programme, “A huge, neon 5G hovered over the stage,” as the author says, “Celebrating next generation digital technology”. The show’s host, holding a red book, “Celebrated how China will lead the world in the online era.” Let’s hope that there is another Delmer out there somewhere to come to our aid.
