James Ball

The dirty war of Sefton Delmer

Anything to break German morale was allowable in Delmer’s broadcasts from Wavendon Towers – which purported to come from a disgruntled character within Nazi Germany

Sefton Delmer broadcasting to Germany from the BBC, November 1941. [Getty Images] 
issue 16 March 2024

There is an obvious problem with trying to judge who ‘won’ a propaganda war. Unlike its physical counterpart, there is virtually no real-world evidence either way, and everyone involved has spent years learning how to spin, manipulate and outright lie about reality to try to shape it into what they want.

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