PG Wodehouse has been cleared completely
of any impropriety
For those wishing to appraise themselves fully of all the facts then
Iain Sproat's excellent book Wodehouse at War is an essential work.
To give an overview here is Sproat's excellent article from the Times Literary Supplement.
Documents from the files of MI5, previously classified, were
released last month by the Public Records Office. These documents included
references to PG Wodehouse's activities during the Second World War, and to
MI5's investigations into whether Wodehouse had been guilty of treachery, by
working for the Germans. The release of MI5 files has provoked in the media over
the past few weeks a ferocious storm of accusations against PG Wodehouse. In
British newspapers ranging from the serious broadsheets to the tabloids, he has
been branded - often without even the puny mitigation of the word "alleged" - a
traitor, a spy, "a sinister character ... of extreme right wing views". Accused
of being sympathetic to Hitler; of having been on the Nazi payroll "in a
lucrative job for Hitler's propaganda chief, Joseph Goebbels"; of having spent
the war in "luxurious hotels" in Berlin and Paris, all expenses paid by the
Nazis.
The key references were in papers taken from the files of the
German Embassy in Paris, following the liberation of Paris in August 1944. They
showed that Wodehouse had been paid, through the German Embassy in Paris, the
following sums: 568,000 French francs in October 1943; and 100,000, 180,000,
60,000 and 60,000 French francs in May, June, July and August 1944. The files
also showed enquiries as to whether Wodehouse might be entitled to receive
Embassy rations of soap and cigarettes; and that the German military authorities
had been requested by the Embassy to see that Wodehouse's villa at Le Touquet
(where he had been living before the war) be kept in good order.
Let me put this new evidence in the wider context of
Wodehouse's life from 1940 to 1944.
In July 1941, he gave five talks on Nazi radio, from Berlin. In
this country and in the United States, he was denounced as a traitor, a coward,
a collaborator and a Nazi sympathizer. A BBC broadcaster, that same month,
poured upon him what was, perhaps, the most vituperative vilification of one man
ever heard on the BBC. In Parliament, Anthony Eden, then Foreign Secretary,
accused Wodehouse of having lent his services to the Nazi war propaganda
machine", and Quintin Hogg, then a Conservative MP, compared him to "Lord
Haw-Haw". The BBC banned all his works. Public libraries refused to buy any more
of his books; indeed, Southport Public Library removed ninety of his books from
their shelves, and destroyed them.
In fact, nobody who reads the text of those broadcasts today
can fail to see that they are no more than light-hearted accounts of Wodehouse's
capture and internment by the Nazis. They contain not one single word of
pro-Nazi, or anti-British, sentiment. Indeed, they poked fun at the Germans, and
made clear that morale among British internees was high. As Wodehouse himself
said in a cable to the editor of the American magazine, the Saturday Evening
Post (America had not yet joined the war), who had complained, after the
first broadcast, that Wodehouse had been "callous about England": "Cannot
understand what you meant about callousness. Mine simple flippant, cheerful
attitude of all British prisoners; it was a point of honour with us not to
whine." In fact, in a conversation which I had last year with the distinguished
historian, Barrie Pitt, who had been a fellow internee of Wodehouse's, he told
me the following: to help keep up morale at Tost, it was decided by the British
internees to have a series of talks and concerts. The first of these talks, one
Saturday morning, was given by Wodehouse. The text of his talk was pretty much
the text of the five broadcasts. The talk was received by his fellow internees
with much laughter and applause.
However, as described above, the broadcasts were received
differently back in Britain, and in the US. What appear now to be absurd
interpretations were placed upon Wodehouse's words: for example, as a mildly
facetious way of describing how the Germans, arriving in Le Touquet,
commandeered his bath, Wodehouse wrote: "There was scarcely an evening when two
or three of them [German soldiers] did not drop in for a bath at my house, and a
beaming party on the porch afterwards." Even George Orwell, in his essay, "In
Defence of P. G. Wodehouse", ludicrously misinterpreted this as: "He [Wodehouse]
was placed under house arrest .... German officers in the neighbourhood
'dropping in for a bath or a party.'" In a letter to his old schoolfriend, Bill
Townend, Wodehouse wrote:
From Orwell's article, you would think I had invited the
blighters to come and scour their damned bodies in my bathroom. What actually
happened was that at the end of the second week of occupation, the house next
door became full of German Labour Corps workers and they seemed to have got me
muddled up with Tennyson's Sir Walter Vivian. The gentleman who 'all of a
summer's day gave his broad lawns until the set of sun to the people.' I suppose
to a man fond of German Labour Corps workers, and liking to hear them singing in
the bath, the conditions would have been ideal, but they didn't suit me. I
chafed, and a fat lot of good chafing did me. They came again next day and
brought their friends.
Wodehouse protested his innocence in various interviews with
newspapers and magazines. It did little good. As he also wrote in the letter to
Townend already quoted:
You ask, Do I approve of your publishing this book [of
correspondence between them] with all the stuff about German troubles?
Certainly. But mark this, laddie, I don't suppose that anything you say, or
anything I say, will make the slightest damn bit of difference. You need
dynamite to dislodge an idea that has got itself firmly rooted in the public
mind
.... It [the general public's
belief that Wodehouse was a traitor] is embedded in the world's folklore, and
nothing will ever get it out.
Was Wodehouse innocent? What is the whole truth?
Wodehouse and his wife, Ethel, had lived in Le Touquet since
1934. The speed of the German advance, through northern France, in May 1940,
took the Wodehouses - as it took the British High Command - by surprise.
Wodehouse was captured and sent to an internment camp at Tost in Upper Silesia.
In June 1941, he was released, and taken to Berlin. There he made five
broadcasts on German radio. His wife soon joined him in Berlin. The Wodehouses
lived in Germany under supervision for just over two years; in the Hotel Adlon
in Berlin during the winters, and for the rest of the year with friends, in,
respectively, Degenershausen in the Harz mountains, and in Lobnis in Upper
Silesia. In September 1943, they were allowed to move to Paris, where they
stayed under supervision at the Hotel Bristol. In August 1944, the Allies
liberated Paris. In September, an investigation into Wodehouse's actions was
carried out by Major E. J. P. Cussen of MI5, later a judge.
The main charges against Wodehouse, which Cussen specifically
investigated, were as follows: that he made no attempt to escape the advancing
German Army in May 1940; that he and his wife willingly entertained Germans in
their hotels in Germany and France; that he was a Nazi sympathizer; that during
his time in internment he was granted special privileges for collaborating with
the Germans; that he was released from internment on condition that he broadcast
Nazi propaganda from Berlin; that he did broadcast such Nazi propaganda; and
that thereafter he lived a life of contemptible ease and luxury for the rest of
the war, paid for by the Germans, as reward for his help in their war
effort.
Cussen's first report, and, as it turned out, his only report
on the truth or otherwise of these charges, was signed by him on September 28,
1944. The purpose of my giving this date is to make clear that the report was
written after only a month's investigation; and, of course, it was written while
the war was still raging, with all the chaotic difficulties which that meant. In
that month, Cussen was able to find no proof of that guilt on any of the
charges, and in the case of two of the charges - namely, that Wodehouse had not
tried to escape the advancing German Army, and that the broadcasts were Nazi
propaganda - Cussen found Wodehouse innocent.
Cussen continued his investigation after September 28; indeed,
there are copies of important letters from Wodehouse to Cussen, dated as late as
February 1946, included in the MI5 file released last month. By this time,
Cussen was convinced of Wodehouse's innocence. I have been told this by
independent witnesses who had discussed the case with Cussen. But Cussen, sadly,
did not produce a report giving his final conclusions of Wodehouse's innocence.
Nor was the one report he did produce, referred to above, released until 1980.
This failure to make public his innocence was tragic for Wodehouse. Furthermore,
Wodehouse suffered from the loss of another opportunity for his innocence to be
publicly made clear. There is a passage in one of Wodehouse's letters to Cussen,
in the file, dated November 2, 1945:
I had a letter from Ian Hay [the authorial pseudonym of
Major-General John Hay Beith] in which he mentioned meeting Sir Donald
[Somervell; Attorney-General] at the Beefsteak Club,
and he said that Sir Donald, when my case came up, said that, while I had been
indiscreet, no possible charge of disloyalty could be made against me.
Would it not be possible for some public statement to this
effect to be made? As matters stand at present, very few people in America know
what has happened, and the prevalent opinion seems to be that I did German
propaganda on the radio, and am pro-Nazi. My friends naturally ridicule this
opinion, and do all they can to counter it, but what is needed is an official
statement .... I do think that, if Sir
Donald Somervell's opinion is the accepted one, some notification of the fact
should be given to the public.
It was a reasonable request. It was not granted. Justice was
not served.
It is a melancholy reflection on Wodehouse's remark that the
prevalent opinion in America, when the war ended, was that he was "Pro Nazi", as
even some ten years later a literary critic reviewing his latest book,
Nothing Serious, after using words of lavish praise, such as Wodehouse
"is in midseason form ... Just what the
doctor ordered ... sheerest delight",
added these ludicrously false sentences: "Gone are the memories of the nightmare
which was visited upon him [Wodehouse] in World War II, when his Nazi captors
persuaded him to broadcast from his Upper Silesian prison appeals to his British
countrymen to surrender to the madman of Berchtesgaden." Some thirty-five years
after the war ended, I tracked down witnesses, British and German, one or other
of whom had been with Wodehouse at every relevant moment of his tragic sequence
of events. The collected testimony of these witnesses showed poor Wodehouse to
have been well intentioned throughout, and wholly innocent of all the charges,
although, at different moments in the wretched saga, mistaken, foolish and
naive.
Of those witnesses, the most important was Werner Plack. Plack
had been an actor in Hollywood when Wodehouse was writing film scripts there in
1936-7. The two men were slight acquaintances. In 1943, Plack was working in the
German Foreign Office. Plack explained to me how Wodehouse was unwittingly
manipulated into making the broadcasts. The plan was the brainchild of Dr Paul
Schmidt, the head of the private office of Ribbentrop, the German Foreign
Secretary. In his plan, Schmidt brought together several disparate elements:
first, it was, in 1941, a key German Foreign Office policy objective to keep
America out of the war. Second, the German Foreign Office was strongly conscious
of their need for a policy success to increase their influence in Nazi circles -
particularly vis-�-vis Goebbels's Ministry of Propaganda, which they regarded as
uncouth and narrow-minded. Third, it was the custom of the Germans to release
all interned civilian enemy aliens at the age of sixty. Fourth, a US
Senator, Warren Barbour, had presented a well-publicized petition to the German
Embassy in Washington, asking for Wodehouse's release.
Since Wodehouse would be sixty in October 1941, Schmidt felt
that releasing him a few months early would be a relatively simple matter about
which to get agreement from other German ministries; would please the Americans;
show that Germans were capable of civilized behaviour; and thus help keep
America out of the war, and show the German Foreign Office in a successful
light. But Schmidt's plan hit a snag. Goebbels refused to agree to Wodehouse's
release.
At this point, another character entered their plot.
Confusingly, he was also called Paul Schmidt. He was director of the German
Foreign Office's American department. He had been Hitler's English interpreter;
he was an admirer of Wodehouse's novels, though he had never met him; and he had
recently read an article which Wodehouse had written for the Saturday Evening
Post, entitled "My War with Germany". Prompted by the thought that many
British prisoners of war had been allowed to broadcast brief messages to their
families, reassuring them they were alive, the second Schmidt suggested tacking
on to the other Schmidt's original idea the possibility of a broadcast by
Wodehouse to America - not to the UK - along the same light-hearted lines as the
magazine article. This time Goebbels's Ministry agreed.
Wodehouse knew nothing of all this. All he knew was that, on
June 21, 1941, he was released, wholly unexpectedly, and, without warning, taken
to Berlin, where he was met by Plack. In Wodehouse's own words, there was
another relevant thought: he had received many letters and even food parcels
from American fans to whom he had not been allowed to reply (internees were
allowed to write only to family members). He had much wished to do so, and this
proposed broadcast would enable him to.
So the wretched cycle of events began.
Plack emphasized to me very strongly that the whole point of
releasing Wodehouse, and persuading him to broadcast, was that he was not a Nazi
sympathizer, that he was not a collaborator and that he was not a traitor. If
Wodehouse had been any of these things, there would have been nothing surprising
about the Nazis' releasing of him, nor of his broadcasting, and therefore
nothing by way of good reaction from America.
Such were the German Foreign Office's intentions. Tragically
for Wodehouse, after the broadcasts had been recorded, Goebbels's Propaganda
Ministry changed its mind and decided - to the fury of the Foreign Office - that
there was more mileage to be made out of portraying Wodehouse as a Nazi
sympathizer, as a second Lord Haw-Haw. Goebbels's officials then began a
campaign to persuade all neutral, foreign journalists in Berlin - notably
American and Swedish ones - that this was the case. It was Goebbels's Ministry
which rebroadcast the talks to the United Kingdom, without the knowledge of the
German Foreign Office.
Plack was detailed by the Foreign Office to become Wodehouse's
minder. This he did very willingly. Plack, and the second Schmidt, felt deeply
guilty about the now widespread belief that Wodehouse was a traitor. It was
indirectly Plack's, and Schmidt's, remorse that was responsible for the
financial entries in the files of the German Embassy in Paris in 1944. Schmidt
gave Plack three general instructions: first, that he was to see the Wodehouses
regularly, just to make sure they got into no trouble, and to offer help or
advice whenever it could be done without compromising Wodehouse; second, that
Wodehouse should be encouraged to resume his writing, so that he could earn a
living without ever having to take any money from the German Government;
thirdly, that Plack was to ensure that Wodehouse never met any of the real
traitors, like William Joyce (Lord Haw-Haw), or John Amery. All these
instructions, Plack fulfilled.
Wodehouse never received any money from the German Government,
Plack made clear to me, and provided for his wife and himself in Germany and,
later, in France, from royalty payments from neutral countries; by borrowing
from acquaintances, to be repaid after the war; by his wife selling her
jewellery; by living free, on two occasions, in the house of a German friend,
met in America (later shot for being involved in a plot to assassinate Hitler);
by selling the film rights of his novel, Heavy Weather, to the Berliner
Film Company, on condition that no propaganda use was made of this, and that the
film was made after the war; and by selling a short story to a Paris
newspaper.
Although the various sums of money listed in the files of the German Embassy
in Paris seem to be new evidence, this is not the case. For example, the sum of
580,000 French francs given to Wodehouse by the Embassy in October 1943 is
(allowing for exchange rates) the same sum of 29,000 German marks which appears
in the account of his own money which Wodehouse wrote for Cussen in September
1944, as being all the money which the German currency regulations allowed him
to take from Berlin to Paris in 1943. This sum was, in fact, only half the money
the Wodehouses then had; the other half was given by them to Plack for
safe-keeping. Ethel Wodehouse complained in September 1944, in her note to
Cussen about the Wodehouse finances, that she often, while in Paris, asked Plack
to give this money back, but that he had been slow in returning it. Actually,
Plack's slowness may have been because returning the money would have been in
breach of the currency regulations. I suspect from the whole tenor of my talks
with Plack in 1980, when he told me with some relish of the wiles to which he
resorted to help the Wodehouses, that the 100,000 francs described in Embassy
files as "travelling expenses" in May 1944 were a small but no doubt useful part
of the balance of the Wodehouses' Berlin money, slipped through the Embassy
conduit as "travelling expenses". In fact, Plack did send 560,000 francs (the
remaining half of the Berlin money) to the Wodehouses, through the Swiss
Consulate in Paris, in September 1944, a few weeks after the German forces had
been driven out of Paris. This is mentioned in Cussen's report.
The reference in the Embassy files, in October 1943, to a query
as to whether the Wodehouses might be eligible to receive soap and cigarette
rations through the Embassy was, as I am sure from my talks with Plack, a
response to the instruction to Plack to look after the Wodehouses without
compromising them.
Likewise, I am sure that Plack was responsible for the
reference, in February 1944, to the request to German military authorities to
ensure that Wodehouse's villa at Le Touquet, commandeered as accommodation for
German troops, be kept in good order.
The final references to Wodehouse's finances are the payments
of 180,000, 60,000 and 60,000 French francs in June, July and August 1944. These
sums were suspected at first by MI5 of being payments for work done by him on
behalf of the Nazis. However, after detailed investigation, MI5 rejected this
conclusion. In fact, these sums correlate, as approximately as might seem
reasonable in the chaos of that time, to the sum of 320,000 francs which
Wodehouse had already listed, in his statement to Cussen, as having been
received as royalties from his Spanish publisher, Jose Janes, sums which would
have had to be paid through the German authorities.
The British Foreign Office and Ministry of Defence papers,
contained in the MI5 file, show that by 1947 the British authorities had
concluded that Wodehouse had no case to answer either over the broadcasts or the
money, and, in the words of the Foreign Office, contained in the file:
"Mr
Wodehouse made the celebrated broadcasts
in all innocence and without any evil
intent."
© Iain Sproat & The TLS
