Nazi ‘black’ Propaganda to Britain: Secret Radio Stations and British Renegades

Abstract

While many will be familiar with the British traitor William Joyce who, as Lord Haw-Haw, became infamous for his radio broadcasts to Britain on behalf of Nazi Germany during the Second World War, much less widely known and studied is the work of Büro Concordia, an organisation created by Joseph Goebbels to broadcast ‘black’ propaganda from Berlin to Britain. Between 1940 and 1945 five secret radio stations posed as the voice of British dissident, anti-war organisations operating within the United Kingdom, broadcasting a stream of propaganda which aimed to demoralise the British people and undermine its support for the war. While they can be credited with some limited success, they fell far short of what Goebbels had hoped and expected from them. These stations were launched by the Reich Propaganda Ministry, but the two dozen writers and speakers who produced these broadcasts from studios in Berlin were British citizens. This study evaluates these ‘British renegades’ and the system that identified, recruited and trained them, and concludes that whatever potential there might have been to influence the course of the war, the employment of people so wholly unsuited to the work ensured that Concordia was bound to fail from its inception.