It’s a late night in London in 1940, and Austrian exile Robert Lucas is writing at his desk. Bombs are raining down on the city every night, Hitler’s army is winning throughout Europe and the invasion of England has become a genuine prospect.
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In spite of the air-raid sirens and, as he put it “the hell’s noise of the war machinery" going off all around him, Lucas is focused on the job at hand: to “fight for the souls of the Germans”. He is composing a radio broadcast aimed at citizens of the Third Reich. But this is not a passionate plea for them to come to their senses. This is an attempt to make them laugh.
Lucas had been working for the German Service of the BBC ever since it haphazardly sprang to life during the height of the Sudeten Crisis in September 1938. The aim of the German Service from the beginning – when it broadcast a translation of a Neville Chamberlain speech shortly before he signed the infamous Munich Agreement – was to break the Nazi monopoly on news within the Third Reich.
The Nazis could not stop foreign radio waves crossing into Germany but they could make listening to enemy stations a crime. They did so as soon as war broke out. Those caught were jailed; the sentence for spreading news from enemy broadcasts was the death penalty. Germans brave enough to disregard the law had to beware of eavesdroppers and ill-meaning neighbours, and so would listen under blankets as if curing themselves of a heavy cold over a bowl of steaming water.
But why would you choose to broadcast satire under these circumstances? Cracking jokes to sustain morale on Britain’s home front might be a successful strategy – implemented particularly well in the BBC’s wartime satire It’s That Man Again (better known as ITMA). But for enemy propaganda? And in any case, who would risk their life listening to it?
The satire programmes relied upon an unlikely coalition between the BBC, British propaganda officials and disaffected German-speaking exiles
Indeed, when Lucas began writing Die Briefe des Gefreiten Adolf Hirnschal he had “no idea whether there would be at least 50 people in Germany listening”. He spoke “into the dark without any echo”, as he later described it. That his programme – along with two other satire series called Frau Wernicke and Kurt und Willi – was commissioned in 1940 reveals the bold, experimental approach adopted by the German Service in its infancy.