59 Facts About Susan Sweney

Susan Sweney's ship was sunk in the Indian Ocean by a German raider, and she was sent with other survivors to France.

Susan Sweney began to work as a journalist in Paris before moving to Berlin to make propaganda broadcasts in support of the Nazi regime.

Susan Sweney had an intense and probably lesbian relationship there with a colleague, but suffered from loneliness and depression.

Susan Sweney gambled and drank as much as she could, leading to on-air mistakes for which she was dismissed.

Susan Sweney came under suspicion by the Gestapo and was arrested but released and sent to Liebenau internment camp, probably at her own request.

Susan Sweney was returned to Britain by MI5 where she was tried at the Old Bailey for assisting the enemy and jailed for 18 months.

Susan Sweney was born in Trichinopoly, British India, on 2 February 1915 to British parents with Irish connections.

Susan Sweney's father was Cyril Edward Sweney, a superintendent of railway police in Madras.

Susan Sweney's mother was Dorothy Sweney, nee Tower-Barter, who was born in Madras.

Susan Sweney had a brother, Edward, who was born in India and became a poultry farmer in Meath, Ireland.

In 1936, Sweney married the Scottish mining engineer George Martin Hilton.

In 1936, Susan Sweney joined the British Union of Fascists as she "believed in the Union's ideals".

Susan Sweney described herself as an active member and, in October 1936, was charged at Bow Street Court with disorderly behaviour at 10 Downing Street.

Susan Sweney moved to Dublin where she was monitored by the Irish police Special Branch.

Susan Sweney had already planned to give up the job for a quieter life as her young son had died which had affected her health and she had booked her passage to join her husband in Burma.

Susan Sweney departed for Burma on the Kemmendine on 28 May 1940 but the vessel was captured and then sunk by the German raider Atlantis in the Indian Ocean on 13 July 1940 with the crew and passengers evacuated to the Atlantis.

Susan Sweney acquired a reputation on the Atlantis for drinking and bad language, accusing the crew of being brutes, murderers, and many other things.

In Paris, Susan Sweney acquired a temporary Irish identity document and passport from the embassy there in December 1940, something issued to many who claimed Irish nationality in occupied Paris.

Susan Sweney's broadcast was published in Hamburg in 1942 as "An Irish woman's experience of England and the war at sea", taking at face value Sweney's claim to be Irish rather than British.

Susan Sweney later claimed to British intelligence to have helped the Irish priest father Kenneth Monaghan of the Chapelle Saint-Joseph to smuggle British merchant seamen out of Paris.

Susan Sweney's story was supported by testimony gathered after the war from Miss Winifred Fitzpatrick, an Irish woman in Paris who knew Monaghan.

Susan Sweney was given money and identity papers under an alias and travelled to Berlin where the proposal of undercover work was again discussed.

Susan Sweney understood it to involve travel to Ireland, the United States or Portuguese East Africa.

Susan Sweney refused on the grounds that the work was too "dirty", but was given other work such as telephone intercepts and then visiting military installations as research for a propaganda book about German armed strength.

From September 1941, Susan Sweney worked for Buro Concordia, an arm of the German foreign ministry that ran a string of "black" radio stations targeted at discontented minorities outside Germany.

Susan Sweney made broadcasts to Scotland as Ann Tower on Buro's Radio Caledonia.

Susan Sweney prepared religious material for Buro's Christian Peace Movement station.

Susan Sweney's brother was visited by a British representative, the poet John Betjeman, who was then doing war work in Dublin.

Susan Sweney spoke of enjoying smoking a pipe and socialising with Sophie Kowanko, a colleague on Irland-Redaktion who was known as Sonja.

Susan Sweney formed a close relationship with Kowanko who was born in 1916 and raised in Paris, the daughter of Russian emigres.

When Kowanko incurred the displeasure of the Gestapo and was transferred to factory work, Susan Sweney lobbied to get Kowanko released and succeeded in getting her appointed to a six-month contract at the Nazi-owned Interradio at the end of 1942.

Susan Sweney was obliged to present whatever material she was given, which sometimes included anti-Semitic content such as her broadcast for Irland-Redaktion of 19 July 1942, picked up by the Irish Army, which used wild extrapolations from statistics to present a picture of an exploding Jewish population in the United States.

Susan Sweney was sacked from Irland-Redaktion in autumn 1942 after making on-air mistakes, probably as a result of intoxication, but resurfaced in January 1943 at Interradio because "Sonja and I wanted to be together".

Susan Sweney worked there until June 1943 writing scripts for others but not broadcasting.

Kowanko returned to her family in Paris in mid-1943, where she lived until her death in 1993, and Susan Sweney sent her money when she could.

In July 1943, Susan Sweney was allowed to move to Vienna where the sculptor Lisa von Pott arranged for her to stay with Mrs Luze Krimann at her apartment at 71 Ungargasse.

Susan Sweney recalled that Sweney spent most of her time at the flat either typing for a magazine called Current Thoughts or asleep.

Susan Sweney made short broadcasts for Reichs-Rundfunk-Gesellschaft's Voice of the People series.

Susan Sweney was permanently short of money and had "enormous" bills for cigarettes and alcohol.

Krimann told British intelligence that Susan Sweney claimed to have turned against the war but that she had no choice but to continue writing anti-British propaganda and that she knew that if Germany lost, she would have to account for her actions.

Susan Sweney soon found employment however with what British intelligence called the "Von Pott Group", a group organised by Lisa von Pott to spy on anyone in Vienna suspected of helping the Allies.

Susan Sweney admitted spying on Doris Brehm, Count Leo Zeppelin, Dr Alphons Klingsland and his two sisters, and all the Americans in Vienna, but claimed to have tried to warn them that they were at risk and to have only done the work in the hope that it would enable her to escape to Yugoslavia.

Susan Sweney's claims were refuted by statements collected by the British after liberation from witnesses who believed that she had denounced them to the SS or the Gestapo:.

In 1944, Susan Sweney visited the Turkish consulate in Vienna to try to obtain a visa to leave the Third Reich but when the Gestapo discovered her intentions they arrested her in July.

Susan Sweney was No 29 on the British Renegades Warning List, a list developed by the British security services before the Normandy landings to enable Allied troops to identify people in occupied Europe who might try to subvert the invasion effort.

Susan Sweney received a British passport in 1936 on the grounds that her husband was British but she lost it before her arrival in France.

Susan Sweney was released from detention, unlike the other passengers from the Tirranna, and travelled to Paris where she obtained a temporary Irish identity document and passport, but the Germans replaced that with a Fremdenpass when she arrived in Berlin.

Susan Sweney tried to obtain new Irish papers but the Irish diplomats in Berlin told her that she had no claim to citizenship.

Susan Sweney was returned to Britain in December 1945 in the company of MI5 officer Iris Marsden who later recollected that Susan Sweney's arm was in plaster and thought that she had been roughed-up by French soldiers.

Susan Sweney knew what she had done and was terrified of the consequences.

Susan Sweney told Marsden that the internment camp had been "the safest place to be in the circumstances", confirming Mrs Krimann's statement that she had asked to be interned.

Susan Sweney was arrested on arrival at Victoria Station in London and subsequently appeared at Bow Street Magistrates' Court charged with assisting the enemy by working for the German radio propaganda service.

Susan Sweney's trial was on 18 February 1946 at the Central Criminal Court, when she faced ten charges of assisting the enemy.

Susan Sweney pleaded guilty to eight and two that she denied were dropped.

Susan Sweney received an 18-month jail sentence without hard labour.

Susan Sweney told Margaret Schaffhauser that when she left prison, she was met at the gate by two MI5 agents who she always referred to as "my friends" and who went out of their way to help her, suppressing a planned book and telling her to contact them immediately if anyone said or wrote anything derogatory about her.

Susan Sweney subsequently worked as a courier to Australia and South America and later for a farm and pet shop business in England.

Susan Sweney died in Surrey, England, on 30 October 1983.

In 1998, after David O'Donoghue's research for his PhD dissertation, Hitler's Irish Voices, Edward Susan Sweney asked the British Home Secretary Jack Straw to reopen his sister's case to rectify what he saw as a miscarriage of justice.