Britain’s information war against Nazi Germany

Even before the Nazis came to power in Germany, propaganda had acquired a bad reputation in Britain, where its association with exaggeration and deception dated back to the Great War. As Joseph Goebbels rose to prominence after 1933, propaganda’s reputation plunged from bad to worse: so much so that by the time that the Second World War started in September 1939, most Britons had acquired a healthy mistrust of any information emanating from Berlin. It was extremely surprising, therefore, that over the next few years many of them still read, listened to – and sometimes believed – the Nazi version of events.

It began on the radio. In the early weeks of the war, Mass Observation – a relatively new organisation that used more than 1,000 volunteers to detect the popular mood in various communities – lamented how the BBC had ‘misjudged both the course of the war and the mind of the masses’. Much of this grumbling related to the dull programming that dominated the early wartime schedules, as Britons, stuck indoors because of the blackout, heard nothing but ‘endless news bulletins – when there was not nearly enough news to fill them’, or lighter shows consisting ‘almost entirely of commercial records, e.g. dance music’.

Small wonder that, as one survey found, ‘there has been a massive percentage increase in listening to German news’, especially the nasally drawl of William Joyce, Lord Haw-Haw, who sought to undermine the publicity campaigns of what he called the ‘British Ministry of Misinformation’.

The situation only got worse when the fighting began in earnest the following spring. On 10 May 1940, Adolf Hitler launched his long-awaited attack on Belgium, France and the Netherlands. A few hours later, Winston Churchill became Britain’s new prime minister. Over the ensuing days, some of the 20th century’s most significant events unfolded, both in Western Europe, as the Wehrmacht scythed through Allied defences, and in Whitehall, where Churchill created a coalition government. Yet Britain’s Ministry of Information provided so little information that, on one occasion, the BBC ‘stopped its 1 o’clock bulletin in 11 minutes, and filled in with a gramophone record, while Britain’s ears itched for information’.

Across the country, many Britons scratched this itch by turning their radio dials to the Nazi channel, where Haw-Haw’s snide sallies were interspersed with detailed Wehrmacht bulletins. ‘The German broadcasts’, explained one surveyor at another dark moment of the war, ‘are not regarded as more reliable than ours, but as being almost as reliable, and so much fuller that this outweighs their untruthfulness.’

British officials were acutely aware of this ‘ferocious’ public criticism at ‘the reticence of the BBC and the Service communiqués’. They were also deeply troubled that so many Britons were turning toward Germany. Yet they often found this problem easier to identify than to fix. As military disaster followed military disaster – from the fall of France to the evacuation of Greece, from the surrender of Singapore to the retreat to El Alamein – British military censors in various command posts invariably clamped down hard on information. With the enemy holding the initiative, their own superiors were often uncertain about the exact location of the fighting. And no-one in either the political or military hierarchies wanted to supply their marauding opponents with sensitive operational details that would only worsen an already desperate plight.

The same logic applied in the headquarters of Britain’s Allies, who tended to be particularly taciturn. The French in 1940 combined ‘total or post-censorship’, which often resulted in newspapers containing visibly redacted stories, with over-optimistic communiqués that were rapidly belied by battlefield events. If anything, the Soviets were even more mendacious when they were attacked by Germany the following year. When the BBC and press relied on Red Army sources, the public reacted angrily to the ‘pitiful attempts to impart a rosy complexion on grave tidings’. In the wake of Kiev’s fall in September 1941, one surveyor again found ‘that German communiqués are being relied upon more and more, in much the same way as they were during May and June 1940 – to the disparagement of the USSR and our own news services’.

While the BBC shouldered much of the blame, Fleet Street’s willingness to publish German claims was even more striking. In late May 1940, Mass Observation found that Nazi communiqués regularly appeared in all the major British newspapers except the Daily Mirror, with the Times invariably placing them on page one. ‘The claims made by the German communiqués’, the surveyor continued, ‘are one of the chief elements of the news, whether they are admitted or denied by the Allies.’ To be sure, most newspapers carefully printed ‘warnings that German claims are exaggerated’.

Increasingly, these Nazi claims had an uncomfortable habit of becoming true, for the Wehrmacht had little incentive to exaggerate when it was enjoying a string of stunning successes. ‘Comically enough’, remarked a senior US reporter after one successful Wehrmacht campaign, ‘it now turns out that the German communiqués – in cases where checks are now possible – erred chiefly only on the side of modesty, and that the Allied claims were often more preposterous.’

British propagandists were particularly desperate to turn this situation around during the Battle of Britain in the summer of 1940. The press found it easiest to cover this existential battle in the air as a pseudo-sporting event, with a daily winner and loser tabulated from plane and pilot losses. Yet the Air Ministry initially struggled to provide accurate figures. In the thick of a dogfight, pilots firing at enemy aircraft diving steeply away and emitting bursts of black smoke often registered a kill when their prey had escaped to fight another day. In the highly competitive milieu of an air base, many victorious pilots frequently claimed the same victim, which further inflated the figure.

It was the job of the Air Ministry’s News Service to sift through all the evidence. Working under intense time pressure, it had to turn the pilots’ combat reports and squadron debriefs into easy-to-digest communiqués that met the deadlines of reporters working in the BBC and Fleet Street. These communiqués invariably lagged behind the German ones, however, which skewed the statistics in opposite directions. Even more troubling, the British public initially showed an alarming tendency to acknowledge the Nazi claims. ‘Our air losses are constantly compared with those of Germany’, noted the Ministry of Information on August 10, ‘and since German communiqués are widely heard or read in this country, people are at a loss to understand the reasons for our disproportionate losses. Without interpretation and explanation vague suspicions grow.’

Over the following weeks, the British government worked hard to confront these suspicions. Sir Archibald Sinclair, the Air Minister, assured Parliament that RAF pilots exercised ‘the utmost discretion in reporting. They are, in fact, on their honour’, he explained, ‘and the honour of their squadron as well as that of the Royal Air Force is involved. It can be asserted with confidence that the reports of our pilots tend to err on the side of understatement.’ Sinclair also took great pains to ensure that the same could not be said about British losses, instructing Fighter Command to admit ‘all battle casualties to aircraft which are shot down’, while also making clear ‘the number of pilots saved’. Hugh Dowding, Fighter Command’s under-pressure commander, was strongly opposed to this policy, contending that it was plain stupid to ‘convince the world (including the Germans) that we are telling the truth, and then present them with accurate figures of our battle casualties’. But Sinclair would not be moved. He even sanctioned ‘more detailed broadcasts’, which, as the Ministry of Information noted, further helped to dispel ‘previous doubts as to the credibility of news bulletins referring to RAF successes’.

What really restored credibility, however, was the simple fact that the Battle of Britain ended in victory, which in turn exposed the crucial dynamic underpinning the war over war news. If the Wehrmacht had little incentive to exaggerate in 1940 and 1941, the Allies had their own victories to trumpet between 1943 and 1945. As Britain’s propagandists moved to close their troubling credibility gap with the provision of more prompt and accurate information, so the press and public gradually weaned itself off consulting the Nazi version of events. By the end of the war, the British media only rarely turned to German communiqués, including the news that Hitler had committed suicide in his Berlin bunker.