page_title: Susan Sweney
section_title: Berlin
hierarchical_section_title: Susan Sweney / Berlin
caption_attribution_description: English: Cuxhavener-Strasse-Ecke-Klopstockstrasse
context_page_description: 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.
context_section_description: 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 emigres. 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. A young woman in a foreign country with few friends and unable to leave, 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 a
caption: Cuxhavener Strasse and Klopstockstrasse, Berlin, where Sweney had an apartment with Sonja Kowanko
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