How the BBC tried to fight Hitler with a sense of fun
Why did the BBC spend the Second World War trying to make Germans laugh? A war effort too far, you might think. Nonetheless, that’s what happened, as told in Archive on 4: Beating Hitler with Humour (Radio 4, Saturday). To mark 80 years since the outbreak of the war, the German writer Timur Vermes told the story of the BBC German Service, which broadcast from London in the German language in the hope of reaching listeners in Germany and encouraging them to resist Hitler’s regime. It only went off-air in 1999, so you’ve got to admit they were thorough.
Initially, the German Service broadcast only straightforward news. They attempted to make the bulletins as accurate as possible, including reports of British losses, to encourage listeners to trust them to tell the truth. But soon, in 1940, BBC staff stumbled across an act from a comedy Hitler impersonator in a London theatre, and everything changed. The Czechaustrian actor, Martin Miller, was a Jewish refugee who had fled Austria for London in 1939. His impression of Hitler was uncanny.
The BBC German Service decided, as a one-off for April Fool’s Day in
1940, to broadcast a parody speech performed by Miller in character as Hitler. In it, “Hitler” claimed that the German annexation of the United States would be entirely natural because Christopher Columbus had used German navigational instruments when he first discovered it. Quite silly, but clearly believable, because the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation contacted the BBC in a panic to ask how they’d managed to pick up one of Hitler’s speeches that nobody else had heard.
That one-off was so popular the BBC wondered if more comedy might encourage more people to try to listen. And so there followed Frau Wernecke, a series of tongue-in-cheek monologues by a “Berlin cockney cafékeeper with a very sharp tongue”; Letters from Corporal Hirnschal, a fictional soldier writing to his wife making satirical points about the Nazi regime; and Hitler on Hitler, which pointed out times that Hitler had contradicted himself.
Vermes’s account told the story from all angles. We heard from people who remembered listening at the time, including a man who had listened as a child in gleeful secrecy with his mother. We heard how the Nazis had tried to jam the signal with music to stop the broadcasts being audible, and the BBC responded by scripting programmes with short, staccato sentences so they could still be heard over the music.
After the war, thousands of Germans wrote to thank the BBC, though as historians pointed out, everyone wanted to be seen to have opposed the Nazis, and the numbers of people claiming to have listened are frankly unlikely given how hard it was to pick up the signal and the punishments for listening – including imprisonment.
It was, though, a compelling argument for comedy as public service. “Laughter opens something,” said Vermes. “It tells you that someone else thinks the same thing is as funny as you do. That there is something in common.” The German Service attempted to show ordinary Germans that, unlike the Nazis, the British understood them.
Archive on 4 is consistently one of the most imaginative and surprising programmes on Radio 4. This particular instalment was a vivid window into the past and a reminder of the power of humour to sustain us in uncertain times.
On that note, what a relief it was to hear some comedy in Archers (Radio 4, Sunday), as the odd new vet Jakob briefly joined Kate, his inexplicable love interest, and her grandmother Peggy for tense tea and cake. Peggy delivered one of the most withering lines in recent Ambridge history, when she asked Jakob: “So, if you’re not a vegan, what attracted you to Kate?”
After the grim Grundy showdown on Friday, in which Will had to be talked down from doing something awful with his shotgun, the comic relief was relief indeed. It’s been an overblown few months in Ambridge, what with the revelations about Jim Lloyd’s past, the Grundys’ ongoing money and relationship troubles, and Peggy’s Ambridge Conservation Trust debacle turning her relatives against one another in a sort of sustainable farming version of King Lear.
Lots of plot has been going on, but somehow in amongst it all I’ve missed the characters. Who’d have thought we’d be grateful to hear more of the insufferable hippy Kate and her love life? Yet here we are.