BERTIE WOOSTER A NAZI?

According to an article in today’s Guardian, newly released records show that the light and fluffy British novelist P.G. Wodehouse was questioned by MI5 as a suspected German collaborator for broadcasting from Berlin during World War II. A shocked Wodehouse denied the accusation.

Wodehouse was 59 years old and living in France when war broke out. He was taken prisoner when Germany invaded and sent to an internment camp in the German town of Tost, Upper Silesia. He described how, “as he was playing in a cricket match” on 21 June 1941, he was moved to Berlin. Installed at the posh Adlon hotel, and was paid to make a series of broadcasts, mainly for American listeners, describing his life as an internee. He claimed he was motivated by gratitude over letters sent by fans from the US. Afterwards, he and his wife were relocated to Paris, where they lived in the Bristol Hotel until liberation of Paris.

In his statement for MI5 to Wesley Stout, Wodehouse said his broadcasts simply reflected the “flippant, cheerful attitude of all British prisoners. It was a point of honour with us not to whine. . . . .I thought that people, hearing the talks, would admire me for having kept cheerful under difficult conditions.” In one of his jokes, he wrot: “If this is Upper Silesia, what on earth must Lower Silesia be like?”

Wodehouse said that, while interned at Tost, he completed his novel Joy in the Morning, and wrote Full Moon, Spring Fever, and Uncle Dynamite. The writer told MI5: “I would like to conclude by saying that I never had any intention of assisting the enemy and that I have suffered a great deal of mental pain as the result of my action.” MI5 decided that the broadcasts were not pro-German and had been unlikely to assist the enemy, and decided against prosecution. M15 later changed its mind, and said that if Wodehouse ever returns to Britain–he had moved to the United States, and lived there until his death in 1975–he should be prosecuted.”