Foreign News: Swedish Nightingale

We Swedish girls are not so cold as you Spaniards may think, I am burning with desire to teach the Spaniards how Nordic women can love.

This incendiary message was broadcast

from Berlin to hot-blooded Spain by dazzling, blonde Brita Brager. It had a coldblooded purpose: to persuade Spaniards that signing up for work in German munitions plants would be a short cut to a life of opulent lechery.

Last week Dr. Paul Joseph Goebbels’ “Girl with the Sex-Appeal Voice” turned up in Stockholm. Brita Brager, the 23-year-old daughter of a Swedish naval attache, had been one of the stars of the Propaganda Ministry’s radio section. In October, for reasons which must have been satisfactory to the Nazis, she abruptly left her job. Home in Sweden, she was more petulant than contrite.

Teutonic Tower. In a by-line story distributed by North American Newspaper Alliance, Brita gave a chatty, uninhibited view of the electronic Tower of Babel which pumps Nazi propaganda all over the world.

It sends in 153 languages and dialects.

Goebbels runs the show but Ribbentrop’s Foreign Office has the final say on what is broadcast—a source of endless friction.

After Hamburg was flattened by bombs, the organization was scattered from Berlin to all parts of the Reich. The broadcasters themselves are a motley crew of traitors and adventurers; many (including Lord Haw Haw) suffer from maudlin homesickness. Their pay, on the whole, is not high; Brita seldom hit $400 a month, even with overtime and extra broadcasts.

Nordic Charm. The job did give a girl a chance to meet prominent people. Of her first introduction to Adolf Hitler, Brita confided: “Many good-looking girls were present [at a fashionable wedding] but the Fuhrer made straight for me, probably because I happened to be the tallest, blondest and most ‘Aryan’ of the collection.”

In many meetings after that, Hitler never attempted more than a “discreet squeeze of the hand.” Brita doubted that he ever attempted more with any woman.

German Fear. Of the German people, Brita confirmed the impression brought out by many untainted neutrals: gloom, apathy, disillusion, but above all, desperate fear of what will happen if they lose the war. Her guess: The Germans will fight to the finish.