Quantity with Quality
The Tale of the Twice-shipwrecked Fascist Double Agent Radio Propagandist
A story of a woman broadcaster fired by the Germans for on-air mistakes, probably as a result of intoxication
This is my next story in a series of articles responding to Dr Mehmet Yildiz’s challenge to produce a short quality article with three take home points each day for thirty days.
I have chosen to use Wikipedia’s main page as inspiration, choosing one item from the “Did You Know” section as topical encouragement.
With a husband serving with the British Royal Engineers in Burma, young mother Susan Sweney joined the British Union of Fascists in 1936 and served as editor of their newspaper.
Sweney quit the fascist group because of the party’s anti-semitism stance, and after the death of their young son, left London sailing to Burma to join her husband.
Sweney’s ship was attacked by the Germans and sank, with the passengers captured and retained on the German vessel. On board, Sweney became quickly known for her heavy drinking and bad language, calling the Germans brutes and murderers.
She and the other passengers were transferred to another German-held ship; a Norwegian vessel sailing back to France as a prize ship with looted goods. This vessel was attacked by a British submarine and sunk with 87 lives lost. The survivors were transported to Paris, where she began working as a journalist.
Sweney was approached by a German intelligence agent and asked to do undercover work in Berlin, and later began doing radio broadcasts to discontented minorities outside Germany.
In spite of her hard-drinking, gambling and wild behavior, Sweney was in high demand by the Nazi propagandists because of her command of the English language and journalism skills. Sacked from on-air broadcasts for making errors, Sweney continued to work writing scripts until the Gestapo began investigating her under the suspicion of being an allied spy.
What We Can Learn from a Hard-drinking Ex-fascist:
Allowed to move to Vienna, Sweney was recruited by Lisa von Pott to spy on Americans and other ally sympathizers, but purportedly tried to warn her targets to leave Vienna as they were in danger.
Sweney was arrested by the Gestapo and sent to an internment camp in 1944. After the internment camp was liberated, Sweney was held much longer than the other prisoners and interrogated extensively by MI5 agents. Sweney was tried in Britain and pled guilty on 8 of 10 counts of espionage and served 18 months in Holloway prison where she had her own room and a maid.
Sweney continued to get Christmas cards from the MI5 agents close to her every year until they retired.
Take home points:
- Things may not always be as they seem. We won’t really ever know for sure where Sweney’s alliances truly fell. She likely was making the best of a bad situation, but always maintained that she attempted to sabotage the German effort whenever possible.
- Make the best of a bad situation. In a letter to her brother (intercepted and never received) Sweney talked of her “soul-destroying loneliness” to which her relief was to “go to the races and gamble as hard as I can”.
- Keep your friends close and your enemies closer. While she initially agreed to do undercover work for the Nazis, she later refused to do direct subversive broadcasts but rather stuck with more innocuous content on the air. This allowed her to remain in good stead with the Germans but limited her pro-Nazi impact.
If nothing else, you have to admire the spirit of this woman of Irish and English heritage in a devastating time in world history.
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Timothy Key spent over 26 years in the fire service as a firefighter/paramedic and various fire chief management roles. He firmly believes that bad managers destroy more than companies, and good managers create a passion that is contagious. Compassion, grace and gratitude drive the world; or at least they should. Follow me on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter, and join the mail list.
