Peter Seckelmann

Peter Seckelmann (pseudonyms: Paul Secklmann, Paul Sanders, Peter Motram) (born March 27, 1902 in Berlin ; † October 29, 2001 ) was a German-British writer. During the Second World War, Seckelmann worked as a propagandist for British radio.

Life and activity

As a young man, Seckelmann wrote detective novels. In 1938 he emigrated from Germany to Great Britain because of the riots against the Jews. When the Second World War broke out, Seckelmann reported to the British Army Pioneer Corps, which was the only unit allowed to accept emigrants. Here he was deployed until 1941 in a bomb clearance party entrusted with defusing German aircraft bombs.

After Seckelmann reported to an SOE detachment behind the German lines in 1941 , he became acquainted with Leonard Ingram, who put him on to the journalist Sefton Delmer , who at that time was working as a functionary of the British propaganda service building a so-called black radio station. The task of this station was to process the German troops in the western European countries occupied by the German Reich in support of the Allied war efforts. For the purpose of increasing the effectiveness of its propaganda, the broadcaster should not “rub it right under the nose” as frontal slogans, but inoculate them as imperceptibly as possible by camouflaging itself as a regular German military radio station with an apparently normal program, whereby through fine accentuations in content and style should encourage confusion, demoralization and decomposition of the enemy.

To equip his transmitter ( Soldatensender Calais ) with convincing speakers, Delmer was looking for German native speakers, so that when Ingrams forwarded them to him, he invited Seckelmann to join his team, which Seckelmann accepted. Due to his impressive voice - described by Delmer as "sonorous masculine and with that slight hint of a Berlin tone [... as one [knew] from] the noble officers from the Imperial Guard regiments" - Seckelmann took over the programs in Delmer's broadcaster Role of the "boss". He was the protagonist of a regularly broadcast program in which an alleged officer of the old Prussian school, as a member of a fictional underground movement within the Wehrmacht against the NSDAP, gave his opinion on the current military and political situation. In doing so, he allegedly turned to his comrades in the underground movement as well as to the general public of the members of the army by criticizing the German warfare and denouncing all kinds of grievances as well as passing on allegedly encrypted orders to members of the underground movement. The chief tended to portray the underground movement he represented not as an organization allied with the Allies - or interested in an alliance - but as a concerned branch of the army anxious to get the leadership of the army into his hands to avert an impending catastrophe due to the amateurish leadership of the Nazi party.

About Rudolf Hess 's flight to England in 1941, Seckelmann, as "boss", stated in his program:

“First of all, we have to be clear about one thing: This Fatzke is by far not the worst. In the days of the Freikorps he was his man. But just like this whole clique of bunglers, megalomaniacs, masterminds and saloon Bolsheviks who are at the head of our government, he has far too weak nerves to hold out a crisis. As soon as he learns something of the darker side of the developments that lie ahead - what does he do? He loses his head completely, puts a couple of boxes of hormone pills and a white flag in his portfolio and flies off to hand himself and us over to mercy and disgrace to that flat-footed bastard of a drunk old Jew, the Churchill. And he doesn't even think about the fact that he is the bearer of the most important imperial secrets, which these shitty Englishmen will now just as easily suck out of him as if he were a bottle of Berlin wheat beer. "

The broadcast about Seckelmann as boss ended in October 1943 when it was decided that he could be better used elsewhere. For this reason he was allowed to "die" by simulating the storming of the chief's secret broadcasting area by the Gestapo in a final broadcast, with the broadcast ending with a volley of machine guns and the words "I finally got you, you pig!".

In Delmer's memoirs, Seckelmann appears under the name Paul Sanders.

After 1945 he helped set up the German Press Agency and from 1955 wrote in Zurich for the Swiss weekly newspaper Die Weltwoche .

In the 1960s and 1970s he wrote several historical and humorous novels under the pseudonym Peter Motram and translated into German novels by Irwin Shaw , Derek Parker , Alistair MacLean , David Armine Howarth and Jack Finney, among others . His novels, published under the pseudonym Peter Motram , include Eva and the Two Devils (1932), The Day Off the Calendar (1967), Myron (1973) and Dione (1977). Myron was reprinted in 2001 as The Winner of Olympia and Dione in 2002 as The Gift of Lysander .

literature

• Sefton Delmer : The Germans and I , 1963.
• Ursula E. Koch: German Journalism in Exile , 2000.

Web links

• Literature by and about Peter Seckelmann in the catalog of the German National Library

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Seckleman, Peter (Ps. Peter Motram). In: Kürschner's German Literature Calendar 2002/2003. Volume 2, KG Saur, Munich and Leipzig 2003, p. 1129