26 Facts About Sefton Delmer

Denis Sefton Delmer was a British journalist of Australian heritage and propagandist for the British government during the Second World War.

Denis Sefton Delmer, known familiarly as "Tom", was born in Berlin as a British subject, as a son of Australian parents living in Germany.

Sefton Delmer's father, Frederick Sefton Delmer, was British of Australian heritage, born in Hobart, Tasmania, who became Professor of English Literature at Berlin University and author of a standard textbook for German schools.

In 1917, the Delmer family was repatriated to England in a prisoner exchange between the British and German governments.

Sefton Delmer was brought up to speak only German until the age of five, and as late as 1939 spoke English with a slight accent.

Sefton Delmer was educated at the Friedrichswerdersches Gymnasium, Berlin, St Paul's School, London, and Lincoln College, Oxford, where he obtained a second-class degree in modern languages.

In 1933, Sefton Delmer was sent to France as head of the Daily Express Paris Bureau.

Sefton Delmer covered important events in Europe including the Spanish Civil War and the invasion of Poland by the Wehrmacht in 1939.

Sefton Delmer reported on the German western offensive in 1940.

Sefton Delmer returned to Britain and worked for a time as an announcer for the German Service of the BBC.

When, in 1945, Sefton Delmer learnt that he had been placed on Germany's Special Search List for arrest after the invasion of Britain, he concluded that it was this broadcast that had put him there.

Sefton Delmer considered that British wartime attempts to counter German propaganda were misguided, with broadcasts aimed at anti-Nazis who did not need convincing, in what today we call an echo chamber of like-minded people.

In September 1940, Sefton Delmer was recruited by the Political Warfare Executive to organise black propaganda broadcasts to Nazi Germany as part of a psychological warfare campaign.

The operation joined a number of other "research units" operating propaganda broadcasts, based at Wavendon Tower, but in Spring 1941, Sefton Delmer was given his own base, a former private house in nearby Aspley Guise.

Sefton Delmer's first, most notable success was a shortwave station: Gustav Siegfried Eins, G3 in the Research units.

GS1 ran for 700 broadcasts before Sefton Delmer killed it off in late 1943 with gunfire heard over the radio intimating that the authorities had caught up with "Der Chef".

Sefton Delmer created several stations and was successful through a careful use of intelligence using gossip intercepted in German mail to neutral countries to create credible stories.

Soldatensender Calais was another clandestine radio station Sefton Delmer directed at the German armed forces.

Sefton Delmer oversaw the production of a daily "grey" German-language newspaper titled Nachrichten fur die Truppe, which first appeared in May 1944, much of its text being based on the Soldatensender Calais broadcasts.

Consequently, former Nazis were able to claim, without contradiction, that they had assisted the fictitious resistance movement; Sefton Delmer described this unintended consequence as a "black boomerang".

In December 1945, Sefton Delmer was appointed an Officer of the Order of the British Empire, with the citation specifying merely that he was "Controller of a Division, Foreign Office".

Reinhard Gehlen stated it was Sefton Delmer's Daily Express article of 17 March 1952 which dragged the German intelligence chief into the daylight by unleashing a "flood of further publications".

Sefton Delmer died at Lamarsh, after a long illness, on 4 September 1979.

David Hare based his play Licking Hitler on Black Boomerang, and his plot included the faked, on-air discovery and shooting of the broadcaster, in the same way as Sefton Delmer had finished the career of "Der Chef".

Sefton Delmer was the subject of a This Is Your Life broadcast in 1962, when he was surprised by Eamonn Andrews outside Le Caprice restaurant in London's Mayfair.

Sefton Delmer was the subject of a book and BBC Radio 4 series by Peter Pomerantsev in 2024.