Post a interesting obscure fact about Western Europe during WW2

In the UK, during WWII, despite conscription, women having to take the place of men in industry and agriculture etc., etc.....there was still on average a million and a half unemployed/unemployable males in the British Isles.

 

In July1940, The British government selected Sefton Delmer, then working for the Ministry of Propaganda at the BBC, to broadcast a repudiation of Hitler's "peace terms" over the BBC the night after Lord Halifax made his...

Sefton "Tom" Delmer had been the leading British newspaper correspondent in berlin when the Nazis came to power. he was on first-name terms with most of the new rulers...and when he turned up at the Reichstag on the night of the Fire, Goering and Hitler invited him to tour the burning building with them!

His Berlin flat was a haven for most of the English-speaking news corps...although some were a bit suspicious of just HOW friendly he was with the Nazis...hence his nickname "Tom"...short for "Uncle Tom"...and most American ww2f members will realise that this nickname wasn't necessarily complimentary!

This "fame" passed by secondhand to London, and on the outbreak of the war, although he offered his services and knowledge to the various intelligence groups...no one trusted him. Instead he was put into the BBC where other MAP workers monitored him!

But he was regarded as THE best man for the job when it came to repudiating the Nazis' terms - as they would know JUST who was pushing them back at them Broadcasting rules were also dropped for the broadcast, which famously was as near-the-knuckle verbally as anything broadcast in the era! It was very much the 1940 equivalent of telling Adolf what to do with himself in terms of sex and travel...

 

Kurt Schwitters, the German-born Dadaist artist, when interned in the Isle of Man in the "intellectuals' camp", a number of houses on Hutchinson Square in Douglas, created a number of statues and sculptures out of....congealed porridge and various moulds! He regarded these early works in internment, made before the camp authorities got him some artists' materials, as the finest of his life; unfortunately they were not preserved for posterity...

...the mice that riddled Hutchinson Square ate them!

 

I don't think this is wholly fair. Sefton Delmer was a talented broadcaster and worked for Political Warfare Executive and was trusted with running several black propaganda stations and material. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sefton_Delmer