HOW TO WIN AN INFORMATION WAR: The Propagandist Who Outwitted Hitler, by Peter Pomerantsev
In 1931, the British journalist Sefton Delmer interviewed Adolf Hitler, whose long-shot presidential campaign he was covering for a British paper. “I realized in a flash the secret to his power,” Delmer wrote in The Daily Express. Hitler had “mesmerized millions of men and women into fanatical allegiance” with his impassioned gaze and “personal zealotry.”
Delmer’s articles flattered the Nazi top brass. He threw parties for them and, in return, got scoops. Britain’s embassy in Berlin took notice, reporting home that Delmer was “probably the only one outside the charmed circle” who had the connections to gather so many Nazi luminaries.
When war broke out in 1939, British intelligence recruited Delmer to deploy his knowledge of Nazi propaganda toward countering it. “I think we should try out a new type of ‘black radio’ on the Germans,” Delmer suggested. “One that undermines Hitler, not by opposing him, but by pretending to be all for him and his war.” Delmer ran his faux Nazi broadcasts out of a radio station in Aspley Guise, a village 40 miles from London. The first show aired in 1941.
Eight decades later, another British journalist, Peter Pomerantsev, experienced his own flash of realization while surveying rising militarism in Europe. Pomerantsev was born in Kyiv. In 2022, he visited the Ukrainian town of Bucha as it emerged from a monthlong Russian military occupation. Survivors recounted mass-scale execution, torture and rape.
“They’ve been fed so much brain-destroying propaganda,” a Ukrainian general said of the Russians as he led Pomerantsev and others on a tour of the destruction. Gesturing to body bags filled with civilians, he added, “This is created by the propaganda.”
In “How to Win an Information War,” Pomerantsev weaves accounts of present-day Russian disinformation into a biography of Delmer and a close read of his radio programs. In his efforts to undermine the Nazis, the “revolutionary” Delmer, Pomerantsev argues, discovered powerful if uncomfortable truths about human nature that, “more relevant than ever,” could help to turn back authoritarianism’s march today.
Pomerantsev offers a sometimes colorful story of Delmer’s exploits, but he never delivers on this timely promise. The lessons of “How to Win an Information War” are mostly relegated to familiar bromides: “What we need to do is give people the motivation to care about truth again”; “we can gain even the most skeptical audiences’ attention if we understand their motivations.”
And what we hear of the broadcasts is hardly revolutionary. Between well-wishes to German U-boat crews and chipper dance tunes, Delmer reported on German frontline setbacks and avarice among party elite. He also encouraged listeners to take sleeping pills, hoping they might doze through air raids, and claimed that the wives of Nazi officials were buying up textiles in anticipation of a shortage. To Delmer’s delight, a newspaper in Kiel later blamed the rumor for a run on the town’s clothing stores.
Pomerantsev credits Delmer with kindling his German audience’s “desire to think for themselves again, to fall in love with finding facts,” but many of these antics seem designed to harm his audience, not to awaken them. Off the air, his colleagues produced pamphlets encouraging German soldiers to escape duty by faking illness. Delmer hoped the manuals would also seed distrust between military medics and their Nazi patients, making them harder to treat for real ailments.
Did Delmer’s trickery threaten the Third Reich? The broadcasts did vex the Nazi propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels enough to reportedly come up in his meeting notes, but Michael Balfour, a veteran of the British propaganda effort who later chronicled it as a historian, concluded that the campaign must “be said to have failed.” The Nazis had fought to the bitter end. Uprisings and desertions did not break them from within.
Pomerantsev acknowledges this but argues that Delmer may have helped provoke German soldiers into surrendering. He presents no real evidence, though. Similarly unsupported is his contention that a failed plot to assassinate Hitler, led by members of the German military, demonstrated that Delmer had “managed to influence the behavior of a specific group of people and helped bolster an action that, if it had worked, would have severely undermined the Nazis.”
Things become even more dubious when Pomerantsev explores the theories of psychoanalysis, then in vogue, that animated British counter-propaganda efforts. One feels for Pomerantsev, who, having insisted on Delmer’s brilliance, must also agree, for example, that Nazism was “a form of sadomasochism” or that Germans possessed a “lust for self-immolation,” part of an unconscious “death drive” that Delmer sought to cultivate.
Pomerantsev’s indulgence of midcentury psychobabble may help explain why Delmer arrived at the methods that he did, but it doesn’t go a long way in advancing 21st-century warfare. We are living through a golden age in peer-reviewed social science. Consider how useful a counter-propagandist might find the research linking support for autocracy to rapid changes in social hierarchies or to certain forms of income inequality. But Pomerantsev, having made himself a prisoner to his claim that Delmer was a “genius of propaganda” whose playbook “outwitted Hitler,” cannot avail himself of this knowledge.
In its place, “How to Win an Information War” rests on a central, albeit mostly implicit, thesis: If people rally behind a government that you or I find abhorrent, it must be because they have been manipulated into doing so — and can be manipulated out of it.
Propaganda matters. It can, for instance, nudge its targets a few more degrees in a direction that they already want to go. But can it really be blamed for the human draw to despotism and mass violence?
All this requires ignoring an alternative explanation for Hitler’s rise or Russian atrocities in Ukraine, one for which history and social science alike provide a great deal of evidence: Many people will, under certain circumstances, support authoritarianism, militarism, even genocide with their eyes wide open, because they find these things appealing.
The German thirst for war may not have been a front in the propaganda war at all, which is perhaps why Delmer never won it.
HOW TO WIN AN INFORMATION WAR: The Propagandist Who Outwitted Hitler | By Peter Pomerantsev | PublicAffairs | 277 pp. | $30
