Faber signs Pomerantsev's book on secret propaganda

Faber has acquired a book by Peter Pomerantsev about the secret British propaganda hidden within the Nazi military.

Publishing director Angus Cargill acquired UK and Commonwealth rights (excluding Canada) to How to Win an Information War: The Propagandist Who Outwitted Hitler from Peter Straus at RCW. It will publish in March 2024.

The synopsis reads: “In the summer of 1941, Hitler and his allies controlled Europe from the Atlantic to the Black Sea.

“But inside Germany, there was one notable voice of dissent from the very heart of the military machine, Der Chef, a German whose radio broadcasts skilfully questioned Nazi doctrine. He had access to high-ranking German military secrets and spoke of internal rebellion.

“His listeners included German soldiers and citizens, American officials and even the president... But what these audiences didn’t know was that Der Chef was a fiction, a character created by the British propagandist Sefton Delmer, just one player in Delmer’s vast counter-propaganda cabaret, a unique weapon in the war.”
Faber said: “As author Peter Pomerantsev uncovers Delmer’s story, he is called into a wartime propaganda effort of his own: the global response to Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.

"This book is the story of Delmer and his modern-day investigator, as they each embark on their own quest to seduce and inspire the passions of supporters and enemies, and to turn the tide of information wars.” 

Cargill said: “It’s so exciting to have another book from the brilliant Peter Pomerantsev. Uncovering the full story of the complex and fascinating figure of Sefton Delmer, it is his first historical subject, but one which speaks urgently and insightfully to today’s world, and particularly the ongoing war in Ukraine.” 

Pomerantsev is a senior fellow at Johns Hopkins University, where he studies contemporary propaganda and how to defeat it.  

His debut, Nothing is True and Everything is Possible (Faber), won the 2016 RSL Ondaatje Prize and was nominated for the Guardian First Book Award, Pushkin Prize, Baillie Gifford Prize and Gordon Burn Prize. His second, This is Not Propaganda (Faber), won the 2020 Gordon Burn Prize.  

His essay on authoritarian propaganda, ‘Memory in the Age of Impunity’, won the 2022 European Press Prize. He is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and co-creator of ‘The Reckoning Project’, an NGO documenting war crimes during Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. 

He said: “I’ve written two books about how contemporary propaganda warps reality and empowers evil across the world. But what can we do to fight it? Most current, well-meaning attempts at fact-checking or education fail. Then I discovered the declassified archives of Sefton Delmer, who ran the British secret operation to undermine Nazi propaganda.

“Delmer used the tricks of propagandists against them, and his experiences speak to our present crisis. He described himself as a ’baddy’ fighting for a good cause – is the way to defeat evil to become a little like it?”