Sam Eastland - Berlin Red

These stations had proved to be a great success, keeping soldiers in touch with events at home at the same time as the local broadcasts allowed them to glimpse their surroundings through lenses not clouded by war.

No station had proved to be more popular than the Elbe network. Their broadcasts were expertly produced, the signal always strong and easy to locate and, with its lighthearted irreverence, spoke most convincingly to soldiers grown weary of the kind of incessant, humourless and increasingly far-fetched pronouncements about miracle weapons which would alter the course of the conflict.

What only Hitler, and a few others in his administration, knew, however, was that Sender Station Elbe did not originate from the German Ministry of Propaganda.

It was actually run by the British.

This pirate radio station had first come to Hitler’s attention back in early 1944, when it came on the air as Sender Station Calais. As it was named after a town on the French coast, those who tuned into its signal could be led to believe that the broadcasts originated from there, when in fact the programmes were being transmitted from England, on the other side of the Channel.

The Calais station had been in operation for some time before anyone in Berlin realised that it even existed. The reason for this was that, at first, no one listening to the programmes thought any of their content worth reporting. It was just the usual array of songs – the ‘Erika Marsch’, ‘Lili Marlene’, ‘Volks ans Gewehr’ – and the predictable anti-American, anti-British, anti-Russian stories.

It was only when a special programme appeared, narrated by a jovial, but disgruntled SS officer known only as Der Chef, that Berlin began to take notice. Der Chef spoke in the blunt, abbreviated language of a front-line soldier. His informal chats, broadcast for five or ten minutes between long stretches of popular music, were filled with sneering remarks about the effete quality of British soldiers, the drunkenness of Russians and the overindulgence of Americans. But he also did not hesitate to share whatever gossip he had picked up about the leadership in Berlin. It was Der Chef who exposed the juicy goings-on between Gerda Daranovski, one of Hitler’s private clerks, and Hitler’s chauffeur, Erich Kempka. Having left the womanising Kempka, Gerda married Luftwaffe General Christian. Soon afterwards, the jilted Kempka married a known prostitute from Berchtesgaden. Gerda, meanwhile, had begun an affair with SS Lieutenant-Colonel Schulze-Kossens. In other news, Hitler’s chief architect, Albert Speer, was having a fling with film-maker Leni Riefenstahl. Three members of Hitler’s private staff had been sent to a special venereal disease clinic in Austria. Martin Bormann, chief of Hitler’s secretarial staff, kept a mistress at his ski chalet in Obersalzberg, with the complicity of his wife.

There was never anything critical about Hitler himself. That would have been going too far. But these lesser players in the Berlin entourage were fair game.

It was not Der Chef’s rambling gossip that troubled Hitler and his staff. What bothered them was that Der Chef was right. Whoever this man was, he obviously had a source very near to the nerve centre of the German war machine.

When the existence of the Calais network was first reported, Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels immediately ordered the signal to be jammed. The signal was so powerful, however, that jamming it also disabled several legitimate sender stations, and Goebbels was forced to rescind the order.

The Ministry of Propaganda then considered broadcasting the truth about the Calais Sender on all the other sender stations, warning soldiers not to listen to Calais and threatening anyone who did with execution. But this idea was also abandoned. To acknowledge the existence of the Calais network would not only call into question the entire German propaganda apparatus, it would also require an explanation as to how the Allies were privy to such sensitive and personal information.

In the end, the Calais Sender was allowed to continue uninterrupted.

Soon after the Normandy invasion, in June of 1944, Sender Calais began rebroadcasting as Sender Caen, and after that as Sender Alsace. This gave the impression that the sender station was setting up shop in the line of the German retreat across Western Europe. In reality, the base of operations never changed and the pirate radio station continued to broadcast from England as it had always done.

Even if Der Chef was correct in his unearthing of such sordid details, the mere mention of them, embarrassing as they might be, had no serious effect upon the German war effort.

But it was not the gossip that caused such great anxiety among those few members of the German High Command who were aware of the station’s true source. If Der Chef knew about the sleazy parlour games of Hitler’s closest circle, then what else did he know?

This was the question which had been nagging Hitler ever since he first tuned in to Der Chef, whose seemingly inexhaustible supply of titbits echoed in Hitler’s brain like the relentless ticking of a metronome.

He had ordered his Chief of Security, General Rattenhuber, to conduct a full investigation. But Rattenhuber had found nothing. The best he could do was to tell Hitler that the informant probably worked somewhere in the Chancellery, was probably a low-level employee and had probably been there for a long time.

Probably.

In an attempt to play down Hitler’s concerns, as well as his own lack of results, Rattenhuber went on to assure the Fuhrer that once the High Command had relocated down into the bunker complex, where security was considerably tighter than up among the ruins of the Chancellery building, Der Chef’s source of information would undoubtedly dry up.

Every day since, Hitler had listened to the radio station, putting Rattenhuber’s pronouncement to the test.

This morning, Der Chef, speaking in his unmistakable Berlin accent, went off on a tirade against the kind of clothing worn by American civilians. Hula shirts. Zoot suits. In spite of himself, Hitler snuffled out a laugh at the description of these preposterous outfits. Other than what he had read in the cowboy novels of Zane Grey, Hitler knew very little about American culture, and what he did know left him unimpressed. Then Der Chef went on to congratulate a number of SS officers who had recently been awarded the Knight’s Cross, Germany’s highest award for service in the field.

Hitler felt his jaw muscles clench. He had approved that list of Knight’s Cross candidates himself not five days before. The award ceremony wasn’t even due to take place until next week.

So much for Rattenhuber’s fortune-telling, he thought.

He was just about to remove the headphones, after which he would carefully reorient the signal dials to their original position, when suddenly he froze.

That list of officers.

There was something about it.

He struggled to recall. There had been so many lists drawn up recently, so many meetings. It was hard to remember them all.

The candidates had been put forward by his old comrade Sepp Dietrich, now in command of the 6th SS Panzer Army. Initially, Hitler had approved the list as a matter of course but following the failure of the 6th Army to hold back Red Army forces attacking the city of Budapest, Hitler had ordered his approval to be withheld. His secretary, Bormann, had dutifully filed it away among those documents consigned to limbo at the headquarters. Withholding the document was not an outright refusal to issue the medals, only a sign of his disapproval at the performance of Dietrich’s soldiers. In practical terms, all it meant was that Dietrich would have to resubmit his request, but Hitler’s gesture would not go unnoticed.