There was confusion about Wodehouse’s whereabouts for months. In December 1940 his stepdaughter, Leonora, received a letter from him. He was in an internment camp in Silesia, close to the border with Poland.

When he was released from internment, he made a series of broadcasts in answer, he said, to friends in America who were anxious about what had happened to him. The broadcasts were lighthearted and entirely free of political commentary. However, these were dark times. The Nazis saw propaganda potential and the British branded him a Nazi sympathizer.

“What happened was this”

Here is Wodehouse’s own account of what happened after his release in 1941

“What happened was this. I was released on June 21, 1941, a few months before I was sixty. I should have been released automatically on reaching the age of sixty, and I imagine that I was given my freedom a little earlier because of the agitation which had been going on in America for my release.

“On arrival in Berlin I ran into a very old friend of mine, a German who had been at Hollywood with me. I was telling him about life in camp, and a friend of his, who joined us, suggested that I might like to broadcast an account of my experiences to my American readers. It was so exactly what I wanted to do that I jumped at the idea. All through the last ten months of my internment I had been receiving letters from American readers, very anxious to know how I was getting on and I had not been able to answer any of these, as in camp you are allowed to write only to near relatives.

“I can honestly say that it never occurred to me for a moment that there was anything wrong in using the German radio as a medium for getting in touch with people in America to whom I was very grateful. (Some of them had sent me parcels). I can see now, of course, how idiotic it was of me to do such a thing and I naturally regret it very much, but at the time it never struck me that I was doing anything wrong.

“While in camp I had roughed out a humourous book about camp life, and I condensed this material into five talks, covering the five phases of my internment – the first week in Loos prison, the second week in Liege barracks, the next five weeks at Huy citadel and the rest of the time at Tost in Upper Silesia, starting with a description of my arrest at Le Touquet. I recorded these talks on wax and went off to stay in the country and thought no more about it. It was only when my wife arrived in Berlin on July 28, just after the last talk had been broadcast, that I heard of the reaction in England.

“I was tricked and I feel a damned fool”

“I see now, of course, that I was tricked into making these talks, and I naturally feel a damned fool, but I hope I have made it clear that there was never anything in the nature of a bargain with the Germans. I was released before there was any suggestion of a broadcast, and there was never any idea that my freedom was dependent on my broadcasting.

The broadcasts were entirely free of any political commentary. You can read all five of them here. I found them entertaining:

First Berlin Broadcast  Second Berlin Broadcast   Third Berlin Broadcast
Fourth Berlin Broadcast   Fifth Berlin Broadcast

Here are some typical extracts:

I never was interested in politics. I’m quite unable to work up any kind of belligerent feeling. Just as I’m about to feel belligerent about some country I meet a decent sort of chap. We go out together and lose any fighting thoughts or feelings.

First, they put us in a prison, then in a barracks, then in a fortress. Then they took a look at me and the rest of the boys on parade one day, and got the right idea at last. They sent us off to the local lunatic asylum at Tost in Upper Silesia, and there I have been for the last forty-two weeks.

It has been in many ways quite an agreeable experience. There is a good deal to be said for internment. It keeps you out of the saloons and gives you time to catch up with your reading. You also get a lot of sleep. The chief drawback is that it means your being away from home a good deal. It is not pleasant to think that by the time I see my Pekinese again, she will have completely forgotten me and will bite me to the bone – her invariable practice with strangers. And I feel that when I rejoin my wife, I had better take along a letter of introduction, just to be on the safe side.

Young men, starting out in life, have often asked me ‘How can I become an Internee?’ Well, there are several methods. My own was to buy a villa in Le Touquet on the coast of France and stay there till the Germans came along. This is probably the best and simplest system. You buy the villa and the Germans do the rest. At the time of their arrival, I would have been just as pleased if they had not rolled up. But they did not see it that way, and on May the twenty-second along they came – some on motor cycles, some on foot, but all evidently prepared to spend a long week-end.

In the days before the war I had always been modestly proud of being an Englishman, but now that I have been some months resident in this bin or repository of Englishmen I am not so sure… The only concession I want from Germany is that she gives me a loaf of bread, tells the gentlemen with muskets at the main gate to look the other way, and leaves the rest to me. In return I am prepared to hand over India, an autographed set of my books, and to reveal the secret process of cooking sliced potatoes on a radiator. This offer holds good til Wednesday week.

The Nazis used these broadcasts to demonstrate their humane treatment of prisoners and in the hope that it would prevent the US from entering the way. Many in Britain took great offense. It was not enough to think of Wodehouse as like Bertie Wooster – someone who took no interest in politics and lived a life detached from momentous world events. These jocular lighthearted broadcasts earned him the label traitor at worst and Nazi sympathizer at best.

They are fun to read – jocular in tone and make lighthearted fun of the less than pleasant experience of internment.  In Britain, they earned Wodehouse the label of being a traitor to the war effort and – worst of all – of being a Nazi sympathizer, a label that stuck to him for the rest of his life.

A week after Wodehouse was released, The Daily Mirror‘s Cassandra (pen name of the journalist William Connor) suggested that the early release had been part of a deal with the Nazis.  A few weeks later, Connor delivered a BBC broadcast, following the nine-o’clock news that called Wodehouse a traitor. to England, and again claimed that he had engaged in a quid pro quo for his early release. Connor’s comments on the BBC began, “I have come to tell you tonight of the story of a rich man trying to make his last and greatest sale—that of his own country.”

British opinion was divided.  Angry letters to the BBC, called the broadcast slanderous. Elsewhere his books were removed from libraries.

An official report into his alleged collaboration with the Nazis, submitted in liberated Paris on September 28, 1944, exonerated Wodehouse, but it also condemned him as a political naive – “susceptible to any form of flattery”. 

The debate simmered on through the 1940s. In 1946, when the Attorney General, Sir Hartley Shawcross – who had been Chief British Prosecutor at the Nuremberg – was asked in the House of Commons whether Wodehouse would be tried for treason. He answered that the question would be addressed if and when the writer returned to England.

Feeling a political and social outcast in post-war Britain, Wodehouse settled in the US.

The evidence suggests that Wodehouse well-intentioned and by turns, naive, mistaken and foolish throughout this sorry saga and that he was innocent of the charges of betrayal.

Towards the end of his life, there were some official gestures towards forgiveness, especially the 1975 New Year’s Honours knighthood for services to literature. Wodehouse considered this the Establishment’s “way of saying, that’s that”. He died in February.

Long after the war the British Embassy in Washington and the Foreign Office continued to oppose an official olive branch to repair the damage to his reputation. 

George Orwell Weighs In

His loyal readers forgave him, but political opportunists did not let go. George Orwell weighed in with his essay in defense of Wodehouse, published in the literary periodical Windmill in 1946. Orwell was familiar with Wodehouse’s novels and had started reading them as a boy. He saw Wodehouse as trapped in pre-WW1 time warp, writing about a social scene that had long vanished from England. 

Orwell wondered why Wodehouse’s remarks had caused such disproportionate outrage;

But why? Why should a few rather silly but harmless remarks by an elderly novelist have provoked such an outcry? One has to look for the probable answer amid the dirty requirements of propaganda warfare.

There is one point about the Wodehouse broadcasts that is almost certainly significant — the date. Wodehouse was released two or three days before the invasion of the U.S.S.R., and at a time when the higher ranks of the Nazi party must have known that the invasion was imminent. It was vitally necessary to keep America out of the war as long as possible, and in fact, about this time, the German attitude towards the U.S.A. did become more conciliatory than it had been before. The Germans could hardly hope to defeat Russia, Britain and the U.S.A. in combination, but if they could polish off Russia quickly — and presumably they expected to do so — the Americans might never intervene. The release of Wodehouse was only a minor move, but it was not a bad sop to throw to the American isolationists. He was well known in the United States, and he was — or so the Germans calculated — popular with the Anglophobe public as a caricaturist who made fun of the silly-ass Englishman with his spats and his monocle. At the microphone he could be trusted to damage British prestige in one way or another, while his release would demonstrate that the Germans were good fellows and knew how to treat their enemies chivalrously. That presumably was the calculation, though the fact that Wodehouse was only broadcasting for about a week suggests that he did not come up to expectations.

But on the British side similar though opposite calculations were at work. For the two years following Dunkirk, British morale depended largely upon the feeling that this was not only a war for democracy but a war which the common people had to win by their own efforts. The upper classes were discredited by their appeasement policy and by the disasters of 1940, and a social levelling process appeared to be taking place. Patriotism and left-wing sentiments were associated in the popular mind, and numerous able journalists were at work to tie the association tighter. Priestley’s 1940 broadcasts, and “Cassandra’s” articles in the Daily Mirror, were good examples of the demagogic propaganda flourishing at that time. In this atmosphere, Wodehouse made an ideal whipping-boy. For it was generally felt that the rich were treacherous, and Wodehouse — as “Cassandra” vigorously pointed out in his broadcast — was a rich man. But he was the kind of rich man who could be attacked with impunity and without risking any damage to the structure of society…. Consequently, Wodehouse’s indiscretion gave a good propaganda opening. It was a chance to “expose” a wealthy parasite without drawing attention to any of the parasites who really mattered.

Orwell comments on the timing. Wodehouse was interned just as all the dominoes were falling and when the outlook for Britain seemed dark indeed. At such a time it may have been reasonable to object to Wodehouse’s lighthearted words. But after 1945, with the Nazis defeated it was another matter to continue the condemnation. when many politicians were desperate to paper over their own less than honorable behavior leading up to the war.

In the desperate circumstances of the time, (i.e.1940) it was excusable to be angry at what Wodehouse did, but to go on denouncing him three or four years later — and more, to let an impression remain that he acted with conscious treachery — is not excusable. Few things in this war have been more morally disgusting than the present hunt after traitors and Quislings. At best it is largely the punishment of the guilty by the guilty. In France, all kinds of petty rats — police officials, penny-a-lining journalists, women who have slept with German soldiers — are hunted down while almost without exception the big rats escape. In England the fiercest tirades against Quislings are uttered by Conservatives who were practising appeasement in 1938 and Communists who were advocating it in 1940. I have striven to show how the wretched Wodehouse — just because success and expatriation had allowed him to remain mentally in the Edwardian age — became the corpus vile in a propaganda experiment, and I suggest that it is now time to regard the incident as closed. If Ezra Pound is caught and shot by the American authorities, it will have the effect of establishing his reputation as a poet for hundreds of years; and even in the case of Wodehouse, if we drive him to retire to the United States and renounce his British citizenship, we shall end by being horribly ashamed of ourselves. Meanwhile, if we really want to punish the people who weakened national morale at critical moments, there are other culprits who are nearer home and better worth chasing.

Orwell as always nailed the bigger issues, provided a sane perspective, and punched through the political hypocrisy.

The featured image is P.G.Wodehouse in England in 1928