Author’s latest book is, in essence, a quest to understand the informational bunker Zelenskiy was confronted with following Putin’s invasion
Sefton Delmer making a propaganda broadcast to Germany from the BBC in 1941. Delmer was a leading figure in Britain’s psychological warfare campaign against the Nazi regime. Photograph: Kurt Hutton/Picture Post/Hulton Archive/Getty ImagesHow to Win an Information War, Peter Pomerantsev’s latest book on his specialist topic of propaganda, is driven by deeply personal motives.
Delmer was a leading figure in Britain’s psychological warfare campaign against the Nazi regime. Born in Berlin to Australian parents, his early experiences deeply influenced his understanding of propaganda. At the outbreak of the first World War, Delmer saw how German friends and neighbours abruptly turned against him and his family, labelling them as “foreign enemies”. His father’s arrest and the family’s subsequent deportation to England further traumatised the young Delmer.
But Delmer’s experiences also showed him that support for the regime was not driven solely by love of the Fuhrer, devotion to the Fatherland and longing for the Third Reich. The reality on the ground was also driven by much more sordid, self-serving and shameful motives – settling scores against a neighbour, acquiring the apartment of a deported Jew, keeping a job, or gaining a promotion. In fact, Goebbels too recognised this.
Pomerantsev does not find a silver bullet. Delmer too, Pomerantsev reports, was left doubting how important propaganda had been in defeating Hitler. After the war he concluded correctly that the big factor in the defeat of the Nazis was the total war waged upon it, at the cost of millions of lives.