Gillies Committee

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The Gillies Committee was founded on the proposal of the International Transport Workers' Federation (ITF) in March and April 1939 through corresponding inquiries from Walter Auerbach .

It was proposed to set up “Committees for Class Propaganda” and, first, a committee to plan and prepare special “Labor Propaganda Notes”.

William Gillies , head of the International Department of the Labor Party, then, in collaboration with the Political Intelligence Department (PID), considered the creation of a propaganda committee made up of German Social Democrats to act as an “Advisory Committee” to the Labor Party.

The members of the committee were appointed by Gillies himself and were supposed to have advisory functions only.

The committee was chaired by labor lawyer Otto Kahn-Freund and sociologist Charlotte Lütkens . The two representatives of the Sopade , Karl Höltermann and Wilhelm Sander, withdrew after the appointment of Karl Borromäus Frank the representative of New Beginning during the preparations, so that only left-wing socialists and independent socialists like Walter Auerbach, who had been appointed to the committee at the beginning of 1940, were allowed to join this body , Fritz Eberhard and Hilde Meisel were members.

In December 1939, the Gillies Committee began its work with the establishment of an archive of journals and the collection and preparation of statements on war propaganda.

The transmitter of the European revolution (SER)

In the BBC's workers' broadcasts, German listeners were never called upon to take part in concrete resistance actions. The German BBC programs consisted for the most part of news supplemented by special reports and commentaries. In a deliberate demarcation from National Socialist propaganda, the BBC programs were committed to the “Strategy of Truth”; Purposeful lies and half-truths only occurred in exceptional cases.

The Gillies Committee campaigned against both calls for resistance actions and against the appearance of German emigrants by name on the BBC's programs.

Walter Auerbach commented:

BBC broadcasts are broadcasts by an English government institution that only allows England's allies a certain broadcasting autonomy. As long as the internal German anti-Nazi movement is not recognized as an ally, German-language worker programs from London are English propaganda programs and are perceived as such by the listeners. All of the emigrants who speak of their membership in trade union organizations via the BBC today incriminate the overall movement with the vast majority of the BBC listeners.

Instead, plans had been developed in this group for the establishment of a so-called black channel that was to concentrate domestically on “instructions on sabotage and passive resistance” and, in terms of foreign policy, to refer to “Hitler's plans for world domination for the sake of power and war and his community of interests with capital as well as the fact that, despite all the fundamental criticism of its military war goal, Great Britain was the ally of the German revolutionaries. ”This then gave rise to the broadcaster of the European Revolution (SER).

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