Susan Sweney

Susan Dorothea Mary Therese Hilton (née Sweney, 2 February 1915 – 30 October 1983) 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 (SS), watching Americans and Germans suspected of spying for the Allies. She came under suspicion by the Gestapo and was arrested but released and sent to Liebenau internment camp, probably at her own request. She was returned to Britain by MI5 where she was tried at the Old Bailey for assisting the enemy and jailed for 18 months. On release she worked as an international courier and later for a farm and pet shop business.

Early life Susan Sweney was born in Trichinopoly (now Tiruchirappalli), British India, on 2 February 1915 to British parents with Irish connections. Her father was Cyril Edward Sweney, a superintendent of railway police in Madras. Her mother was Dorothy Sweney, née Tower-Barter, She had a brother, Edward, who was born in India and became a poultry farmer in Meath, Ireland. and worked with the Special Operations Executive during the Second World War. His father was Lt. Col. George Hilton. According to her husband, she attended the Nazi party conference at Munich in 1938 and she had booked her passage to join her husband in Burma.

Sweney departed for Burma on the Kemmendine on 28 May 1940 Sweney acquired a reputation on the Atlantis for drinking and bad language, accusing the crew of being brutes, murderers, and many other things. They in turn nicknamed her "the devil's roast", the "D.R." and the "Plain Lady". The first officer, Ulrich Mohr, recalled in his memoirs that her particular complaint was that the ship's bartender had left his post and locked-up as soon as the ship came under fire, but that she could be calmed through the use of the ship's looted Scotch whisky. She broadcast a descriptive account of her adventures for which the Germans paid her 500 Reichsmarks. Her broadcast was published in Hamburg in 1942 as "An Irish woman's experience of England and the war at sea", taking at face value Sweney's claim to be Irish rather than British. Monaghan had been a British Army officer during the First World War and was a chaplain to the British Expeditionary Force in 1940 with connections to MI6. Sweney's story was supported by testimony gathered after the war from Miss Winifred Fitzpatrick, an Irish woman in Paris who knew Monaghan. 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.

In March 1942, she sent a letter to her brother Edward in Meath which she signed "your many times drowned sister, Susan".

While many of Sweney's broadcasts were innocuous,

She was sacked from Irland-Redaktion in autumn 1942 after making on-air mistakes, probably as a result of intoxication, but resurfaced in January 1943

Despite her drinking and wild nature, as a fluent English speaker and experienced radio presenter, Sweney was in demand by the Nazi propaganda machine. She was recruited by von Pott who asked her if she wanted to work against the communists and after Sweney said she was, introduced her to Dr Robert Wagner, an S.S. or S.D. officer who met Sweney weekly at 71 Ungargasse. She admitted spying on Doris Brehm, Count Leo Zeppelin, Dr Alphons Klingsland and his two sisters, and all the Americans in Vienna, Alphons Klingsland, a leading Viennese lawyer, reported that in December 1943, Sweney visited him twice in his office and tried to engage his services. He refused as he felt she was suspicious. A report stated, "she tried as hard as she could to involve him in legal and other measures on her behalf, which were such as might easily have compromised him in the eyes of the Gestapo." Klingsland also said that he could construe nothing Sweney said as a warning. He was later denounced to the Gestapo by an unknown person. Felix Krimann, the deserter from the Luftwaffe, also claimed, to his wife, to have been denounced to the Gestapo by von Pott and Sweney, Sweney never having liked him.

Among von Pott's circle was Countess Amethé von Zeppelin, a British woman who had married Count Leo Zeppelin and was regarded by the British security services to have been anti-British since before the outbreak of the Second World War and to have made a propaganda or anti-British radio broadcast from Vienna on 21 September 1939 shortly after the outbreak of the war. Among Sweney's possessions was later found a visiting card from the countess containing a cryptic message in German that was translated as: "The bearer of this card also brings the bird with her. Herr FINDERS will have spoken to you about them already and will have left the cage and birdseed with you. Please give it (the bird) seed and water till to-morrow morning".

Sweney was No. 29 on the British Renegades Warning List, After Liebenau was liberated she was held there for eight months while she was interrogated by MI5 while most of the other prisoners were released. confirming Mrs Krimann's statement that she had asked to be interned.

The trial took less than a day, meaning that much of the background information about Sweney's life in Germany, such as that she had originally refused spying work and had been arrested by the Gestapo, was not mentioned. Of her character, he said she was an "exhibitionist", "very immature and driven by fame", and "a person who needed a good deal of guidance. She was easily led, highly volatile, a very impressionable person, generous but hot-tempered".

Later life Sweney told Margaret Schaffhauser that when she left prison, she was met at the gate by two MI5 agents who she always referred to as "my friends" and who went out of their way to help her, suppressing a planned book and telling her to contact them immediately if anyone said or wrote anything derogatory about her. According to Sweney, they sent her Christmas cards every year until they retired. In 1998, after David O'Donoghue's research for his PhD dissertation, Hitler's Irish Voices, Edward Sweney asked the British Home Secretary Jack Straw to reopen his sister's case to rectify what he saw as a miscarriage of justice. A file of official papers about Sweney was released by the British National Archives in 2001.