The seminar will be given by Charmian Brinson and based on her recently published book. Working for the War Effort explores a facet of British propaganda during the Second World War that has not previously been considered: the apparent anomaly that much of Britain’s wartime propaganda was produced by ‘enemy aliens’, i.e. German-speaking refugees from Hitler, as a contribution to the British War Effort. German and Austrian refugees were involved in every aspect of British propaganda, both overt and covert: for the Ministry of Information, the BBC, the Intelligence organisations such as the Political Warfare Executive and the Special Operations Executive, and others. Refugee artists, writers, journalists, politicians, broadcasters, actors , academics and others were all drawn into different aspects of the British propaganda mill, as this seminar will describe.
