A Fair Fight

How to Win an Information War: The Propagandist who Outwitted Hitler  by Peter Pomerantsev (Hachette, 2024)

Reviewed by Joel Tannenbaum

How to Win an Information War is Peter Pomerantsev’s third book. If you read them, you may be tempted to think of them as a trilogy. You might even be tempted to assign them a collective title, such as “The Disinformation Trilogy.” All three of them ask you to consider, in different ways, what happens when political power goes to war with reality, and what happens when reality attempts to fight back using the same tools. 

Pomerantsev published the first installment, Nothing is True and Everything is Possible: The Surreal Heart of the New Russia, in 2014. Largely a memoir, it chronicles the brief life of liberal post-Soviet Russia, via his own experiences as a Soviet-born, London-raised, journalist who arrived in Moscow in 2001 to work as a television producer. Entering a media and political landscape that had been thrust violently open a decade earlier, in which money, power and attention were largely up for grabs, Pomerantsev witnessed its gradual closure as he produced documentaries and reality television shows for a dwindling number of private media companies. The country he left in 2010 had reverted to nearly Soviet-levels of state media control. 

What happened between then and the publication of his second book, This is Not Propaganda: Adventures in the War Against Reality in 2019 was, to put it simply, social media. First seen as an organizing tool used to great effect by the young activists in Tahrir Square, Twitter, Facebook, and other popular platforms of the era were quickly co-opted by state actors who wished to clamp down on domestic dissent. Two could–and did–play at that game. Since then, state actors have gone far beyond repressing domestic dissent.

Armed with support from universities and pro-democracy think tanks, Pomerantsev traveled the world, studying and interviewing both democracy activists and the officials of authoritarian governments (or their proxies) who saw social media as their primary weapon. The net effect of this cat-and-mouse game, he observed, was an utter sense of unreality that pervaded the internet and, increasingly, the corporeal world, as well. By the time populist political cosplayers were violently overrunning the US Capitol Building early in 2021, Peter Pomerantsev was an internationally respected commentator on authoritarian disinformation campaigns–and how to fight them. 

Pomerantsev has now turned his attention to the past, and with great effect. Published in 2024, How to Win an Information War: The Propagandist who Outwitted Hitler, focuses on the life of Sefton Delmer, the British journalist who orchestrated one of the most effective–and dirtiest–information warfare campaigns of the twentieth century on behalf of the Allied war effort.

Delmer’s early life was unusual (and directly relevant to his wartime work): Born in Germany to Australian parents, a young Delmer witnessed his father–a literature professor at Berlin University–interned as a prisoner of war at the outset of the First World War. Viewed with suspicion by the neighbors, Delmer fled to England with his parents as soon as his father was released. As a schoolboy in London, he was taunted for being German, just as he had been ostracized in Germany for being English. Returning to Berlin in 1931, he worked as a journalist, finding himself in the presence of high-ranking Nazis, including Adolph Hitler. As the 1930s progressed, Delmer was viewed with suspicion again, by both the Germans and the British. 

Beginning in 1940, Delmer worked as a propagandist for a highly secretive branch of the UK Foreign Office, the Political Warfare Executive, charged with writing and producing covert radio broadcasts meant to influence German listeners. Dissecting his approach–unconventional, to put it mildly–is the central task of How to Win an Information War. 

When Delmer entered government service in 1940, he was entering an information landscape already defined by Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s propaganda chief and trusted confidante. Like the disinformation and propaganda specialists of the 2010s, Goebbels was ecstatic at the possibilities of a new communications technology to do his work for him. In that case, the technology was radio. With his famously low opinion of human intelligence, Goebbels saw the function of propaganda as implanting ideas in people’s heads which they would then believe and repeat. For him, the presence of a cheap radio in every home was an unprecedented opportunity to do just that. Radio had been integral to the Nazis’ electoral success in 1933 and, once in office, domestic manufacturing policies ensured that the medium would continue to proliferate in as many homes as possible. 

Delmer had different ideas. His principal creation was Der Chef, a disenchanted, dissolute, anonymous–and wholly fictional–Prussian army officer whose nightly broadcast began with a poorly tuned piano playing the same music that opened the news programs of official Nazi radio broadcasts. The show’s fictional host, voiced by German actor/refugee Peter Hans Seckleman, was a bizarre creation: as hateful and anti-semitic as the worst Nazi, but also foul-mouthed, cynical and full of enraged cynicism toward Hitler, the SS and the Gestapo. Der Chef, in other words, was a caricature of the traditional German officer class, the “Junker officers of the Kaiser’s guard regiments,” according to Delmer. 

Within the careful dramaturgy of the broadcasts, several things were happening. Der Chef was the perfect vehicle to circulate rumors: Nazi military mishaps that the regime sought to suppress, tales of bureaucratic corruption within the Nazi elite and, as the war went on, highly inventive stories of sexual depravity by the same–usually manufactured whole cloth by Delmer and his writers. 

The overarching intent was to demoralize a population already demoralized by food shortages and Allied bombing. There was plenty of evidence that this was effective: Hidden microphones in POW prisons revealed captured German soldiers swapping anecdotes picked up from Der Chef. He would express outrage that Germans were buying things on the black market, subtly conveying the message that such behavior was normal and everyone was doing it. According to Pomerantsev, there is credible evidence that Delmer was succeeding in his mission: to take the existing gap between the conservative parochialism of everyday Germany and the visionary fanaticism of the Nazi Party and yank it open with a pry bar. 

There are a few other layers, as well. Der Chef’s identity was left wholly ambiguous. No one knew if the broadcast was German or British. No one knew how literally to take it. Delmer was trying to create something akin to what Roland Barthes described as the “reality effect”--the use of minor, seemingly irrelevant details to make something appear more lifelike. It was like a  “cabaret act,” as Pomerantsev describes it or, meant to sound like,  in Delmer’s own description, the “insider conversations of a clandestine military operation.” The point was to pique the listener’s curiosity about their opaque political environment,  and to invite them to discover for themselves what was actually happening. Viewed from a certain angle, Delmer’s wartime radio experiment looks disconcertingly like a 1940s version of QAnon. 

Or, to view it more charitably, Delmer was trying to awaken in Der Chef’s listeners the curiosity and skepticism that Goebbels had worked so hard to deaden. Delmer’s techniques had plenty of vocal critics within the British war effort. Some were horrified by the prurience, others by the cynicism. There was no shortage of German-speaking propagandists working out of the same office who wished to appeal to everyday Germans with high-minded socialist rhetoric. When members of the royal family were briefed on Der Chef, they were given deliberately sanitized reports. Clips were chosen for their relatively minimal obscenity and sexual references. 

In the end, Delmer’s work was deemed successful by British wartime authorities. Intelligence estimates put listenership at 41% of German households. How to Win an Information War does a wonderful job of teeing up the question of what is gained and what is lost when one decides to fight monsters with monstrosity. There are no obvious deficiencies in Pomerantsev’s approach. He is not pretending to write a balanced history of British “black” propaganda, and is quick to acknowledge its most difficult elements, like one British rumor campaign (not spearheaded by Delmer) designed to encourage suicide among the German population. “Suicide is notoriously catching,” a wartime intelligence report explains. 

Having spent the last decade establishing himself as an expert in contemporary propaganda, Pomerantsev has now given us a fascinating–and at times troubling–portrait of a past master. It seems appropriate here to give Delmer himself the last word, via a brief excerpt from his memoirs, quoted by Pomerantsev in his introduction:

“‘I come out of all of this as rather a prig, I fear,” I said to my wife, when I had read through the manuscript of this book for the umpteenth time. 

‘What is a prig, daddy?’ inquired my daughter Caroline Selina, aged eight. 

‘Oh, a goody goody sort of chap,’ said I.

‘You’re not a goody goody,’ says Caroline Selina.’

‘No, I’m a baddy baddy.’”

Surely, pro-democracy and anti-authoritarian activists around the world right now–the types Pomerantsev interviewed for This is Not Propaganda–are wondering at this very moment whether or not a baddy baddy is something they might need to become. Or perhaps they have already begun the transformation. 

Joel Harold Tannenbaum chairs the Humanities Department at Community College of Philadelphia. He occasionally finds time to write about the history of food and food science in journals like Gastronomica and Petit Propos Culinaires.