Susan Sweney
Susan Dorothea Mary Therese Hilton was a British radio broadcaster for the Nazi regime in Germany during the Second World War.
Born in India to a family with Irish connections, she was active in the British Union of Fascists in the 1930s before attracting the interest of the police in London after which she set off to join her husband in Burma. Her ship was sunk in the Indian Ocean by a German raider, and she was sent with other survivors to France. That ship too was attacked and sunk, this time by a British submarine off the coast of France, and she was again rescued, causing her to describe herself as "many times drowned".
She began to work as a journalist in Paris before moving to Berlin to make propaganda broadcasts in support of the Nazi regime. She had an intense and probably lesbian relationship there with a colleague, but also suffered from loneliness and depression. She gambled and drank as much as she could, leading to on-air mistakes for which she was dismissed. In Vienna in 1943/44, she worked for the Schutzstaffel, watching Americans and Germans suspected of spying for the Allies. She came under suspicion by the Gestapo and was arrested but released and sent to Liebenau internment camp, probably at her own request. She was returned to Britain by MI5 where she was tried at the Old Bailey for assisting the enemy and jailed for 18 months. On release she worked as an international courier and later for a farm and pet shop business.
Early life
Susan Sweney was born in Trichinopoly, British India, on 2 February 1915 to British parents with Irish connections. Her father was Cyril Edward Sweney, a superintendent of railway police in Madras. Her mother was Dorothy Sweney, née Tower-Barter, who was born in Madras. She had a brother, Edward, who was born in India and became a poultry farmer in Meath, Ireland. She was educated partly in England where her brother said that she had received "rough treatment" that had disillusioned her about the British class system and may have influenced her political views.In 1936, Sweney married the Scottish mining engineer George Martin Hilton. The couple had a son who died young. George Hilton later became a captain in the Royal Engineers and worked with the Special Operations Executive during the Second World War. His father was Lt. Col. George Hilton.
Fascism
In 1936, Susan Sweney joined the British Union of Fascists as she "believed in the Union's ideals". She described herself as an active member and, in October 1936, was charged at Bow Street Court with disorderly behaviour at 10 Downing Street. According to her husband, she attended the Nazi party conference at Munich in 1938 but she left the BUF that year over the party's policy towards Jews, not because the anti-Semitism troubled her, but, as she put it: "if the Jews were as powerful as alleged, then attacking them would only bring counter-attack". She moved to Dublin where she was monitored by the Irish police Special Branch.By January 1940, she was back in London, and had rejoined the BUF. At the suggestion of Charlie Watts, BUF district leader Westminster St. George's branch, she took up the editorship of the fascist newspaper Voice of the People which she performed from January to May 1940 when the police Special Branch raided her flat and seized all her materials. She had already planned to give up the job for a quieter life as her young son had died which had affected her health and she had booked her passage to join her husband in Burma.
Twice shipwrecked
Sweney departed for Burma on the Kemmendine on 28 May 1940 but the vessel was captured and then sunk by the German raider Atlantis in the Indian Ocean on 13 July 1940 with the crew and passengers evacuated to the Atlantis. Sweney acquired a reputation on the Atlantis for drinking and bad language, accusing the crew of being brutes, murderers, and many other things. They in turn nicknamed her "the devil's roast", the "D.R." and the "Plain Lady". The first officer, Ulrich Mohr, recalled in his memoirs that her particular complaint was that the ship's bartender had left his post and locked-up as soon as the ship came under fire, but that she could be calmed through the use of the ship's looted Scotch whisky. After she left the Atlantis, Mohr found correspondence on another captured ship that Sweney's husband George was suspected in Burma of spying for the Japanese.She and the other survivors from the Kemmendine were transferred to the Norwegian Tirranna, another ship captured by the Atlantis, and sailed for France as a prize ship with a cargo of looted goods. According to Sweney, it was on the Tirranna that she became known to the Germans as Irish rather than British after she befriended the often intoxicated Thomas Cormac MacGowan, the 54-year-old Irish ship's doctor on the Kemmendine. On 22 September, however, the Tirranna was torpedoed off the coast of France by the British submarine Tuna and sank with 87 lives lost. The survivors were taken to a German naval facility in Royan, from where Sweney and MacGowan travelled to Paris in December 1940.
Paris
In Paris, Sweney acquired a temporary Irish identity document and passport from the embassy there in December 1940, something issued to many who claimed Irish nationality in occupied Paris. Her British passport had been taken from her by the Germans before she arrived in France. She broadcast a descriptive account of her adventures for which the Germans paid her 500 Reichsmarks. This was intercepted by BBC Monitoring in April and May 1941 who summarised it as emphasising how well the passengers were treated by the German crew and how many lives were lost, particularly women and children, when the Tirranna was sunk by the British. Her broadcast was published in Hamburg in 1942 as "An Irish woman's experience of England and the war at sea", taking at face value Sweney's claim to be Irish rather than British.Based at the Hotel d'Amerique in the rue Rochechouart, Paris, she began to work as a journalist and according to a contemporary, established very good relations with high-ranking German officers in the city. She later claimed to British intelligence to have helped the Irish priest father Kenneth Monaghan of the Chapelle Saint-Joseph to smuggle British merchant seamen out of Paris. Monaghan had been a British Army officer during the First World War and was a chaplain to the British Expeditionary Force in 1940 with connections to MI6. Sweney's story was supported by testimony gathered after the war from Miss Winifred Fitzpatrick, an Irish woman in Paris who knew Monaghan.
In June 1941, she was visited at her hotel by Abwehr agent Oscar C. Pfaus and the head of the Nazi propaganda organisation Deutscher Fichte-Bund, Theodore Kessemeir, to ask her to undertake undercover work on behalf of Germany. She was given money and identity papers under an alias and travelled to Berlin where the proposal of undercover work was again discussed. She understood it to involve travel to Ireland, the United States or Portuguese East Africa. She refused on the grounds that the work was too "dirty", but was given other work such as telephone intercepts and then visiting military installations as research for a propaganda book about German armed strength.
Berlin
From September 1941, Sweney worked for Büro Concordia, an arm of the German foreign ministry that ran a string of "black" radio stations targeted at discontented minorities outside Germany. The stations aimed to give the impression that they were the work of internal dissidents broadcasting from within the target country rather than propaganda from abroad. She made broadcasts to Scotland as Ann Tower on Büro's Radio Caledonia. The name Ann was invented but Tower came from her mother, and she acquired a German passport in that name. She also prepared religious material for Büro's Christian Peace Movement station.From January 1942, she worked at Irland-Redaktion, a semi-independent station on which she used her maiden name of Susan Sweney. Her work there consisted of writing talks for others, presenting her own talks three times a week which she admitted were "sheer propaganda" aimed at keeping Ireland neutral, and writing plays and reciting poetry that was broadcast to America. Her colleague there, Francis Stuart, described her as "a nice sort" but constantly seeking alcohol, an opinion shared by fellow colleague John O'Reilly.
In March 1942, she sent a letter to her brother Edward in Meath which she signed "your many times drowned sister, Susan". Edward never received it and the letter was read by the Gestapo, British intelligence, and the Irish G2, inadvertently tipping them off about her activities and leading G2 to open a file on her. Her brother was visited by a British representative, the poet John Betjeman, who was then doing war work in Dublin.
In May 1942, she wrote to Biddy O'Kelly, an Irish friend in Dublin, describing her work and asking how her broadcasts were received in Ireland, and whether she would she be able to show her face there after the war? She also asked for news of her husband whose fate she did not know, although he told his superiors in the British Army in 1944 that he had not been on friendly terms with his wife for some years. She spoke of enjoying smoking a pipe and socialising with Sophie Kowanko, a colleague on Irland-Redaktion who was known as Sonja. In June, she wrote again, saying:
Never have I felt so utterly homesick and shut away as I do now. Biddy, nothing can ever make up to me for these years of unbelieveable, soul-destroying loneliness. I try to shake these morbid thoughts off me. I go to the races and gamble as hard as I can. I work hard so as to forget.
She formed a close relationship with Kowanko who was born in 1916 and raised in Paris, the daughter of Russian émigrés. Educated in England and Italy and fluent in several languages, Kowanko was employed at Irland-Redaktion as a typist, but in practice had a larger role that included a weekly broadcast to Irish women under the name Linda Walters. The two women shared a flat in Berlin's Klopstockstrasse, and drank and played billiards together. Francis Stuart and his colleagues thought they were probably in a lesbian relationship. When Kowanko incurred the displeasure of the Gestapo and was transferred to factory work, Sweney lobbied to get Kowanko released and succeeded in getting her appointed to a six-month contract at the Nazi-owned Interradio at the end of 1942.
While many of Sweney's broadcasts were innocuous, and a diplomat from the Irish embassy in Paris found her as forthright off-air in her criticisms of the Germans as she was of the British, her need to earn money to buy alcohol helped her Nazi masters to control her. She was obliged to present whatever material she was given, which sometimes included anti-Semitic content such as her broadcast for Irland-Redaktion of 19 July 1942, picked up by the Irish Army, which used wild extrapolations from statistics to present a picture of an exploding Jewish population in the United States. Such material was not common in her broadcasting, however, as the management of the station resisted the constant stream of anti-Semitic material from the central propaganda pool, feeling that it was too crude for the audience. Instead, Irland-Redaktion concentrated on anti-war and anti-British material that emphasised the importance of Irish neutrality.
In July 1942, for instance, she broadcast:
Two years ago, I was myself taken in by Admiralty Churchill's lies, when he said that the British Navy had swept the seas of Nazi ships. Two years ago to-day, I suffered for my stupidity in the Indian Ocean. Let everybody learn from personal experience that Churchill is a liar. The immediate future is indeed black for Britain and her Allies, but it has been black all along – Only Churchill never admitted it.
She was sacked from Irland-Redaktion in autumn 1942 after making on-air mistakes, probably as a result of intoxication, but resurfaced in January 1943 at Interradio because "Sonja and I wanted to be together". She worked there until June 1943 writing scripts for others but not broadcasting. Kowanko returned to her family in Paris in mid-1943, where she lived until her death in 1993, and Sweney sent her money when she could.
Despite her drinking and wild nature, as a fluent English speaker and experienced radio presenter, Sweney was in demand by the Nazi propaganda machine. From January to October 1943, she worked for the German Foreign Office preparing talks titled Voice of the People. In 1943 and 1944 she also wrote anti-communist articles for Anti-Komintern. In mid-1943, she was asked to take a tour of the Reich's main cities to prepare an article for foreign consumption documenting the life of the Catholic Church, focusing particularly on churches damaged by Allied bombing to counter the Allied line that the church was being destroyed by the Nazi regime. However, she had begun to be followed by the Gestapo who, for reasons that are unknown, suspected her of being an Allied spy.