LETTERS Black propaganda
Sir: The spectacular collapse of the egg industry leads me to suppose that if there had been an abundance of eggs in Ger- many during the last war the late Sefton Delmer, the Political Warfare Executive's gifted director of black operations, would have disseminated information there to the effect that eating eggs can seriously dam- age your health. However, it is possible that his medical advisers then knew no- thing about salmonella.
However, in the autumn of 1942 we did circulate a warning that the current methods of milling wholemeal flour in Germany were liable to cause abdominal cancer and male impotence. For this pur- pose my small unit in PWE, which special- ised in printed fakes and forgeries, de- signed and printed a booklet which claimed to originate from a research office for food chemistry which had an address in Munich. The text was supposed to be for the attention of Herr Dr Herbert Backe, a Secretary of State at the Reich Ministry of Food (Wilhelmstrasse 72, Berlin).
Many years after the war, when I was doing the research for The Black Game: British Subversive Operations against the Germans during the Second World War, I found a document at the Public Record Office which referred to this operation. Colin Wintle, the member of SOE who dealt with the dissemination of my unit's productions, which were mostly conceived by Delmer's section, wrote to Delmer on 22 December 1942 as follows: You will be pleased to know that we have had reports about the tricky posting opera- tion of the bread booklets. You will recall that the posting had to be carried out in two particular towns. We now hear that the majority of the consignment has been suc- cessfully posted in two towns and that the remainder has already gone over the border in the right direction.
The postage stamps for this and similar mailings were forged in London.
I vaguely recall that a typed summary of the bread booklet's contents, the equiva- lent of a review, was prepared, and that Delmer told me that it had been published in the Danziger Vorposte newspaper.
While Mrs Currie's revelations had a devastating effect, there is no evidence that we effectively wrecked the German flour- milling industry. In any case we did not invariably receive evidence of reception in Germany.
Ellic Howe
202 Rivermead Court, Ranelagh Gardens, London SW6
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