One of the Allies’ Secret Weapons Against the Nazis Was a 21-Year-Old Woman Armed With a Microphone and a Script of Lies
As “Vicky With Three Kisses,” she strategically sweet-talked and sang to German troops over the airwaves of Europe. But Agnes Bernauer didn’t mean anything she was saying
Her voice was low, sultry.
“Hallo, Jungs. Hier bin ich wieder, eure Vicky mit drei Küssen.” “Hello, boys. Here I am again, your Vicky With Three Kisses.” Even on nights when the radio was filled with noise as Allied and Axis forces attempted to jam their enemies’ broadcasts, the woman’s meaning was unmistakable. She pursed her lips and sent a trio of smooches across the airwaves.
A German sailor listening to Vicky might imagine this was his girlfriend or wife waiting at home, as she had been for years while the war stretched through the summer of 1944. For those with no one to return to, the voice belonged to a blonde-haired and blue-eyed dream. “Wouldn’t it be nice if we could sit together now in a cozy little café, with a nice glass of Rhine wine, and we gaze into each other’s eyes, so deep, so warm,” she cooed in an upper-crust Berliner accent. She imagined a dance as a big band launched into “I Love You Truly,” the popular American song’s lyrics sung in German.
Vicky was creating a fantasy world with her kisses while reminding the men of the possibilities their real lives had held before they’d been ordered into cramped U-boats silently patrolling just off the British coastline. Was the Nazi cause they were fighting for worth the sacrifices they had made? Was it worth the sacrifice they might still be asked to make?
When the music faded, Vicky returned. Her words were sad now. “We don’t have much time left. And who knows when and where we will see each other again?”
In a radio studio 40 miles north of London, the dark-haired, dark-eyed, half-Jewish actress playing the role of Vicky stepped away from the microphone. Although she had playfully asked the question, Agnes Bernauer, 21, certainly hoped she would never meet the likes of her listeners again. She had fled from the Nazis once before. Now she was fighting back with the war’s newest weapon.
Radio was still a novel medium in the 1940s. Propagandists had plied their trade during World War I through print. Now radio allowed them to reach deep into enemy territory, and since its start, this new war had been a battle of the airwaves. The world was already familiar with what became known as “white” propaganda, government information campaigns waged openly to energize the home front and vilify the enemy. But World War II saw the advent of the more insidious “gray” propaganda, efforts that disguised the source of the message but did not hide its insurgent intentions. It also birthed something darker still: “black” propaganda, which deceived its audiences about its origins and confused them so thoroughly that they could not tell fact from fiction.
Did You Know? Disinformation and WWII
The Allies launched multiple disinformation campaigns during the war, including:
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Operation Fortitude: In the lead-up to D-Day, the British instigated a plan to convince the Nazis that the Allied Forces would be invading at Pas-de-Calais, rather than Normandy
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Operation Mincemeat: This famed deception used a corpse clad in a British officer uniform to pass fake classified invasion plans off to the Axis Powers.
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Ghost Army: This American force used inflatable tanks, artworks and other visual deceptions to trick the Nazis
The Allies had not started this psychological warfare. Propaganda of any color was an uncomfortable tool for a democratic country, and for years Germany’s Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda—the mouthpiece of the Nazis’ chief propagandist, Joseph Goebbels—controlled the information battlefield. As early as 1933, the Nazis had ordered the production of the Volksempfänger, “the people’s receiver,” a low-cost radio set that was key to the Nazis’ domestic propaganda plans. The British government, meanwhile, publicly dedicated itself to truth, depending on the BBC’s European Service to spread news to information-deprived listeners in Germany and its occupied territories. “In a world of poison,” said one French politician who spent much of the war imprisoned by Nazis, “the BBC became the great antiseptic.” He would not have been aware of the BBC’s shadowy counterpart, the collection of radio stations emanating from an old English estate in the village of Milton Bryan. German Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz referred to this rural site of Britain’s clandestine Political Warfare Executive (PWE) as a “Giftküche”—a “poison kitchen.”
Through the early 1940s, the PWE had quietly launched dozens of gray and black radio stations in an effort to influence listeners behind enemy lines. The best remembered of these was a nightly broadcast seemingly helmed by “Der Chef,” a fictional, foul-mouthed, disgruntled Nazi officer who spread fabricated, pornographic rumors about German officials. But in 1943, Der Chef was “murdered” on the air to free up resources for a more ambitious undertaking: Deutscher Kurzwellensender Atlantik, a shortwave station known to listeners as Atlantiksender (Radio Atlantic), and Soldatensender Calais (Soldier’s Radio Calais), which purported to be broadcast from the occupied French city but was really sent out from southern England on the world’s most powerful medium-wave transmitter.
The stations, which often shared content, were designed to be indistinguishable from official Nazi radio and to subtly demoralize German troops and civilians with strategic fictions buried beneath truth and entertainment. This was the war as seen through a fun-house mirror: Allied troops moved a little faster; German casualty estimates were a little higher; food shortages on the home front were suddenly a little more severe, and the big-band music was much better. “Cover, dirt, cover, cover, dirt, cover, dirt,” Britain’s top propagandist, Sefton Delmer, directed his staff.
Atlantiksender and Soldatensender Calais would become—in limited and sometimes contentious partnership with the United States’ young intelligence branch, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS)—the culmination of years of experimentation in radio propaganda on both sides of the war. At the stations’ peak, the falsified narratives they broadcast reached listeners from the American Midwest to Southeast Asia. But much of what we now know about the Allies’ black propaganda efforts today comes from the pulpy stories Delmer later told of his wartime exploits—perhaps fittingly, a confusing mix of fact and fiction, full of aliases and elisions, self-serving misdirection and personal propaganda.
The real story beneath those lies can be pieced together from first-person accounts of those who worked at Milton Bryan, today spread across archives in Europe and North America, and in scores of contemporary diaries and decades--old memoirs penned by soldiers and civilians who listened to the stations. It can be reconstructed from thousands of previously unexamined pages of transcriptions of the broadcasts, collected by various governments and media listening stations, and in daily logs from the radio studios themselves. The truth is startling: In the final years of World War II, as the scientists of the Manhattan Project raced to weaponize the atom, the broadcasters in Milton Bryan were doing the same with the lie. Today the world knows this as “disinformation.”
Agnes Bernauer knew nothing of these secret radio stations when she arrived at the Savoy Hotel on the Thames on the afternoon of Monday, June 12, 1944, a week after the Allies landed in Normandy. She was a little-known singer and actress on the verge of a big break: an audition with Carroll Gibbons, leader of one of wartime London’s hottest dance bands, the Savoy Hotel Orpheans.
The young German refugee—known as Agi to her family and as Agnes Bernelle to her few fans—had been planning for a career on the stage since the age of 5. Her father, Rudolf, had been a theater impresario and playwright in Berlin until he became a target of the insurgent National Socialists. In December 1930, when Bernauer was 7, Goebbels and his fellow brownshirts, emboldened by their electoral victories in the Reichstag that fall, launched an attack on her father’s theater empire in Berlin for the offense of screening All Quiet on the Western Front, a film the Nazis loathed for its supposedly anti-German critique of nationalist militarism. “Out, Jews!” Goebbels had yelled from the theater balcony, cuing a mob to release mice into the audience, set off stink bombs and beat patrons. For days, they marched with torches; the theater was forced to close.
As a child, Bernauer was unable to fight back. She hadn’t even dared join her classmates in throwing snowballs at a billboard of Adolf Hitler. Her father’s side of the family was Jewish, and schoolyard taunts warned her that she should not draw attention. Her mother’s side of the family served in Nazi uniforms. In November 1933, after Hitler rose to power, Bernauer’s father tried to flee Germany, but he was arrested at the border. He eventually secured Hungarian passports for the family and left the country for England in late 1935; Bernauer followed a year later. Her mother, Emma, whose Protestant upbringing offered a measure of protection, stayed in Berlin for another three years to manage what was left of the family business, collecting royalties on the popular operettas Rudolf had written earlier in his career. She almost waited too long. Just before the United Kingdom declared war on Germany in 1939, the Gestapo attempted to coerce Emma into informing on London’s Jewish refugee community. She fled Berlin hours later, escaping the horrors that Rudolf’s sister, Gisela, and her daughter Ilma would face in German concentration camps.
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This article is a selection from the March 2026 issue of Smithsonian magazine
As refugees in London, the Bernauers were considered “enemy aliens,” forbidden by the British from aiding the Allied cause in the army or in the St. John Ambulance service. Teenage Bernauer had to settle for contributing to the war effort as a civil defense air-raid warden. In her 1996 autobiography, The Fun Palace, Bernauer wrote about patrolling the north London neighborhood where she lived with her parents through the Blitz with a water pump in hand, feeling slightly foolish at the inadequacy of the gesture. She felt a little foolish almost everywhere. She had dedicated herself to learning English at her British boarding school and had practiced hiding her accent and her “Continental ways”—a conversational frankness and bawdy sense of humor that would have been right at home in the artistic havens of Berlin—-but she struggled to find her place in London.
With most of the West End theaters shuttered as the war dragged on, Bernauer’s biggest opportunity as a performer had been at Kleine Bühne—“the Little Theater”—a Hampstead venue run by the Jewish refugee community. But fresh off her first leading role, at a theater in Birmingham where she garnered good-enough reviews, and with an appointment to sing for Gibbons, her luck finally seemed to be changing.
In a private suite outfitted with a piano, Gibbons played as Bernauer crooned a selection of English hits. But it was not the bandleader who was looking for a new star. The role would be at the direction of the slight, anxious man who picked up the dinner check at the Savoy Grill that evening: Ira Ashley, an American radio producer turned OSS agent. The U.S. intelligence agency had first contacted Bernauer’s father about scriptwriting and translation work; Rudolf suggested there might be a place for his daughter on their mysterious government project. After auditioning her, Ashley concurred. Her “blonde voice,” as Bernauer recalled Ashley describing it, was just what he needed.
Soon dispatched to M.B., as the compound in Milton Bryan was known, Bernauer found a recording studio unlike any she had ever seen. There was a guard house, tall fences topped with barbed wire and German shepherds on patrol. The order to report to Milton Bryan was not widely considered a plum assignment. Black propaganda was an untested strategy, and those who found their way to the estate were misfits whose particular talents, biographies or peculiarities had no other place in the war effort. “A collection of cranks and characters,” in the words of one dismissive British Foreign Office official.
Delmer, a former journalist, and his wife, Isabel, a painter, had attracted a motley crew of reporters, artists and academics to the effort. They were teamed up with a staff of political refugees—monarchists, communists and social democrats—as well as prisoners of war who now pledged allegiance to the Allied cause and unexpected defectors, including a former German diplomat, a turncoat SS officer and three Luftwaffe pilots who landed in the U.K. in their night fighter. Most of these émigrés from the Third Reich were added to the ranks only by reluctant necessity. Their loyalty was considered suspect, but their deep knowledge of German culture and pitch--perfect accents were essential to disguising Atlantiksender and Soldatensender Calais. As one PWE official put it: “Effective propaganda cannot be undertaken except by people who are half in love with the enemy.”
To produce believable fake broadcasts, the PWE had built a journalistic organization to rival the BBC. The propagandists held the truth in unexpectedly high esteem, guided by an unofficial motto: “Never lie by accident, or through slovenliness, only deliberately.” They made good use of an abandoned Hellschreiber—a still-working German printing telegraph that relayed news directly from the Nazis—and aerial photographs taken from Allied bombers. But the station’s most valued information was not the stuff of international headlines. “We are not interested at this stage in the war in German atrocities or the shootings of Jews in Poland and Hungary,” advised the intelligence officers who helped craft the strategy of how and when to lie. Rather, they were interested in stories of everyday hardship in Germany, small breakdowns of authority in occupied countries and petty infighting within Hitler’s top ranks—anything that would dishearten listeners. The belief was that downtrodden workers slowed the production of war necessities and discouraged troops did not fight as well, and both were a distraction to the enemy. The officers also coveted small details, like the latest flotilla soccer matches, which solidified the stations’ cover story as a German broadcast. These seemingly inconsequential tidbits arrived daily from PWE and OSS agents behind enemy lines, through POW interrogations, and in smuggled newspapers.
By mid-1944, there was just one thing missing from this elaborate ruse. “The greatest single thing that may be said against the present Soldatensender program is that its entertainment is of very dubious quality,” Ashley’s boss, David Winton, wrote in an OSS memo stamped “Secret.” “With any program of this nature, its entertainment side is by far its most important, for it is the entertainment side of the show which builds and holds the audience of German troops and not only secures their attention but places them in the proper frame of mind for the subversive material that follows.” To win the radio war, the Allies needed to win the ratings war, drawing in listeners with the hottest music. Bernauer would strike back against the Nazis with her voice.
Bernauer stood in front of the microphone, script in hand, ready for the star turn for which she could never take credit. At one elbow, in a dark suit with a fashionable pocket square, was producer Charles Kebbe, looking the part of the Madison Avenue commercial maker he had been before enlisting in the U.S. Army. He glanced at his watch, seemingly impatient to move the rehearsal along. At her other side, offering notes on her performance, was her balding and bespectacled father. He and Bernauer’s mother had joined their daughter in the countryside in the summer of 1944: Rudolf was employed as an actor, a script writer and a director; Emma, who had once been a nanny, was something of a den mother for the cast and crew members of the OSS operation, who were mostly young and mostly single and billeted together in Newton Longville, about 10 miles from the M.B. studios. Among Emma’s charges were Czechoslovakian singer and beauty queen Trudi Binar; Elizabeth Caraco, a willowy Austrian performer; and Hilde Palmer, a German actress who had just finished a run in Cole Porter’s Something for the Boys.
Through July, boogie-woogie pianist Pat O’Neill hunched over the studio’s grand piano with a cigarette between his teeth as the four singers recorded some of the biggest English-language hits of the era in German. Access to popular big-band tunes was rare in Germany, giving the propaganda stations an edge over their German counterparts in the competition for listeners. Some were faithful covers, but others preyed on the war-weary listeners’ feelings of loneliness, despair and longing. Many were translated in London by Egon Larsen—who had “one of the strangest (and, I admit, cushiest) war jobs,” he would write in 1985, when he felt safe telling the story. Larsen, who was Jewish, had been a journalist in Berlin before the Nazis’ ascent, and he had taken a job with the BBC’s German Service when he made his way to England. But he had quickly grown disillusioned with the staid station. He believed, as the OSS did, that the Allies could not convince German servicemen and civilians with facts, but they could influence them with emotion. His rewritten lyrics manipulated listeners through “music, sentimentality, sex, dramatic episodes and maudlin verse,” as OSS officials later wrote—between air raid warnings and damage reports, purported news from the German home front and the front lines, and speeches from Nazi officials rebroadcast from other radio stations.
The first time Bernauer’s voice was heard on Atlantiksender and Soldatensender Calais, just after 9 p.m. local time on July 3, 1944, she was singing Larsen’s words. The cheerful tune was that of the wartime hit “Paper Doll,” but the translated lyrics gave the song about loyalty and jealousy a much darker tone. In the original Mills Brothers’ version, the singer was “gonna buy a paper doll that I can call my own / A doll that other fellows cannot steal.” In Larsen’s version, Bernauer wanted to be a faithful doll while her man was off to war, but, as she sang in German, “unfortunately I’m not a porcelain figurine”—a reference to Meissen porcelain, the pride of Saxony—“and need a real man in spring!” And now Bernauer was preparing for a bigger role. Three times a week, she would transform into Vicky With Three Kisses, a temptress dreamed up by Kebbe as a “pure sex act.”
“This is Vicky speaking, saying hello to all her friends in the Wehrmacht,” Bernauer purred in German on radio sets across Europe on the evening of August 13, 1944, as Benny Goodman’s gentle “A Smooth One” faded. It was her third appearance on the stations. “They say the first hundred times are the hardest. Still, it shouldn’t take us long to get acquainted, eh? Not if we take it easy.”
As Vicky, Bernauer promised her listeners a seductive slow dance and a night of romance, even as she segued into a rendition of “Where or When,” the original lyrics of which subtly winked at her deception: “Thought has wings / And lots of things / Are seldom what they seem.”
“It’s been fun, right?” she asked her listeners. “It’s been fun for me, dreaming here by the microphone.”
Finally a part of the war, Bernauer relished her position in what she would call the “dirty tricks department,” which offered “endless possibilities to bamboozle and confuse the Nazis.”
“Are you as sweet as your voice?” a German man wrote to the woman he knew only as Vicky, in a letter that found its way to Milton Bryan in February 1945. The fan, who had by then deserted the German war effort, expressed some doubts about the authenticity of the station broadcasting the “youngest star,” but that did not seem to concern him. “The chief thing is that you are there and that you don’t forget your goodnight kisses.”
The letter and other such “comebacks”—mentions of the stations from POW interviews and intelligence intercepts—reassured the propagandists that people were tuning in. The Germans knew it, too, according to a memo Allied forces discovered as they advanced through Europe. “DANGEROUS ENEMY PROPAGANDA / WARNING AGAINST THE SO-CALLED ‘SOLDATENSENDER CALAIS,’” it began. The memo showed that the Germans had little idea how to combat the disinformation. Even mentioning the stations seemed perilous. “In discussing the radio, care must be taken not to popularize the name ‘Soldatensender Calais.’” The Nazis, having promoted the widespread use of radio for their own domestic propaganda purposes, had unwittingly set the German people up for attack: By 1941, 65 percent of German homes had a Volksempfänger capable of receiving the powerful broadcasts of Soldatensender Calais as readily as the official Nazi news outlet Deutschlandsender.
Some who tuned into Atlantiksender and Soldatensender Calais (later renamed Soldatensender West after the Allies recaptured Calais in October 1944, making it an implausible headquarters for a purported German military radio station) believed the stations to be authentic. Others saw through the ruse and, disgusted by the propaganda of the enemy or fearful of Nazi reprisals for illegally listening to the broadcasts, changed the channel. But there was a third group: those who had suspicions about the stations’ origins and intentions but tuned in anyway. If listeners had convinced themselves there was no harm in hearing the enemy’s news tidbits and enjoying lively music, they were making a dangerous gamble. Psychologists today know that many people struggle to determine truth from lies, especially when repeatedly exposed to disinformation.
The PWE, recognizing the power of the weapon it was building and fearful it would poison the British media environment, issued a “defense notice,” advising Fleet Street journalists not to report news broadcast on the station, an unenforceable request that was widely honored. Nowhere else, however, seemed beyond the reach of the programs. In Paris, an exiled writer tuned his radio to the stations as German troops patrolled the streets in the months before the city’s liberation. In still-occupied Austria, a girl and her mother huddled around a battery-powered radio each evening, the volume turned low and their windows shuttered. In Hamburg, a young German manning an Acht-Acht, the feared anti-aircraft gun, heard American-style dance music for the first time, and in Berlin, Ingeborg von Kusserow, an actress about Bernauer’s age who had become a favorite of Nazi propaganda filmmakers, listened for the gossip necessary to navigate Hitler’s inner circle. “It was invariably right,” she would write, using the surname Wells, in her 1949 memoir.
At least one teacher at Germany’s National Political Institutes of Education—boarding schools established to groom the next generation of Nazi leaders—was known to play the stations for his students. And their big-band music was popular in the officers’ mess at the Wolf’s Lair, Hitler’s military headquarters on the Eastern Front. The Führer himself was briefed on the broadcasts; for Hitler, the real threat was not the stations’ lies, but their truths. The Allied broadcasters had such accurate information that Nazi leaders feared there was a mole among his closest advisers.
Dispatches from the stations, quoted as reliable news sources, were also a regular fixture on the front pages of American newspapers. Meanwhile, inside Buchenwald, the concentration camp, prisoner Eugen Kogon tuned in on a pilfered
radio. He transcribed the questionable reports of approaching Allied troops on scraps of paper to be passed among his fellow prisoners. “It was all-important for us to remain well informed about the situation at the fighting fronts so that we could take appropriate measures in time,” Kogon wrote after being liberated.
As the fighting dragged into the spring of 1945, each night brought stories crafted to exploit cracks in German morale and complicate the logistics of the war machine. In the Allies’ telling, Nazi officials were abandoning the cause in droves, and those who remained lived extravagantly. Some were said to have fled via submarine to Argentina, a fiction that caused an international manhunt. Another report suggested that Nazi leader Hermann Göring had moved his family and a trove of stolen art to a castle in the Alps while civilians in Berlin died from lack of shelter. For Bernauer, the best lies were the silliest, like the time she told listeners that the government requested they each send a urine sample to the Ministry of Health in Berlin. She liked to think she’d clogged up the German postal service for days.
By March 1945, the Allied broadcasts had a “grateful audience” and were beginning to have “a noticeable effect on the German people,” Goebbels reported in his diary. The Nazi propagandist worried that “the enemy now proposes to bring into action his big psychological warfare guns.” He was right. As Allied troops prepared to enter Germany, the broadcasters at Milton Bryan prepared to unveil their biggest lie: “Operation Intruder.”
The Allies had long known that German radio stations signed off as air forces approached, to prevent being used as beacons. With the power of the medium-wave transmitter that aired Soldatensender West, broadcasters could hijack the Nazi frequencies and segue seamlessly from authentic content into fraudulent news. The capability had been held in reserve; now it would be unleashed to cause a “stampede of the population ... by suggesting to them that the Party has given an evacuation order for a chosen few and is leaving the rest to be destroyed where they are,” according to a top-secret PWE memo.
Bernauer balked at the idea, she would later tell her family. Everyone at M.B. knew that their broadcasts targeted not only German soldiers but also unsuspecting civilians—only now the propagandists would be putting them in harm’s way. Despite her hesitations, Bernauer participated in this unprecedented effort to tangle supply lines and stymie the movement of German troops. On March 24, 1945, the fraudulent German evacuation orders for those “on whose preservation the continued life of the nation depends” were given. As for everyone else: “The evacuation of a great number of our compatriots will, for the time being, be impossible. Their duty, therefore, is to stick it out and, if need be, face death bravely.”
According to a memo written in late March by a Nazi officer in Westphalia, Germany, “considerable misunderstandings and great unrest were caused among the population by the intrusion of enemy wireless announcements on the German wireless.” Bernauer would always regret her part in that. After the war, even Delmer seemed abashed. On a visit to Germany just months before the war ended, he saw the roads crowded with refugees. “I did not stop to ask any of them whether it was a message on Radio Cologne or Radio Frankfurt”—German stations targeted in Operation Intruder—“that had first started them on their trek,” he wrote. “I did not want to know.”
But the confusion caused one delay for which Bernauer would later be very grateful. As Operation Intruder continued into April, a train left the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in northern Germany. It was loaded with 2,500 prisoners bound for Terezin, a camp in German-occupied Czechoslovakia. About 75 miles west of Berlin, the train stopped abruptly, its progress halted by reports of approaching forces and nearby Allied bombings. No one knew what was true or false—the ultimate goal of black propaganda. What is clear is that the German troops believed what they heard, abandoning the train and those crammed on it, who were later discovered by American soldiers. Ilma, Bernauer’s dear cousin, was among those liberated that afternoon. (Ilma’s mother, Gisela, did not survive; she had died in Auschwitz in 1942.)
The fight was finally over, according to the propagandists. “It is expected that the end of the war will be announced in the very near future simultaneously with the death of the Führer,” the stations reported on April 29, 1945. “The assumption that the Führer has already been quietly liquidated in the last days by Heinrich Himmler is now confirmed.” As usual, the news was almost accurate. Hitler died by suicide the following day, and Germany surrendered a week later.
The voices of Atlantiksender and Soldatensender West fell silent at dawn on May 1. There was no more reason to lie. There was no grand on-air send-off, just a note at the end of that night’s script: “Sag beim Abschied leise Servus ...”—“Say goodbye silently.”
“But where is the most listened-to station in Europe since May 1?” wondered a Swiss newspaper as the war in Europe drew to a close. Less than a week after the German surrender, the answer started to emerge: “Radio Atlantic Disclosed as Allied Propaganda Ruse,” an Associated Press headline blared. “Some of Germany’s best prewar actors entertained the enemy and chipped at his morale.” Allied officials did not confirm the scoop, because, one said, “there’s a war on the other side of the world.” Even then it was clear that the disinformation model built at Milton Bryan would be expanded upon and used again.
