146 • DELMER, SEFTON
respondent, after the city fell in 1940, he found ‘‘a secret war job
in a hush-hush department which was part of the glamorous Secret
Service.’’ Born in Berlin to Australian parents, his father a lecturer
in English literature at the University of Berlin, Delmer had been ed-
ucated almost entirely in Germany. He had attended school through-
out World War I while his father endured internment at Ruhleben,
and at one point he was suspected of being a British spy. His family
was released and repatriated in May 1917, but in 1921 his father, who
had briefly represented theDaily Mailin Switzerland, returned to
Germany as a member of the Inter-Allied Control Commission. Fol-
lowing his graduation from Lincoln College, Oxford, with a history
degree, Delmer rejoined his parents in Berlin and, benefiting from a
chance encounter with Lord Beaverbrook, was appointed in 1928 to
theDaily Expressoffice. There he concentrated on covering German
politics and the rise of the Nazis, even accompanying Hitler on his
1932 election campaign.
Delmer was recruited into theSecret Intelligence Service(SIS) at
a lunch at Scott’s by an unnamed young officer ‘‘with an enviable
first in Greats from Oxford’’ and was asked to monitor the activities
of certain suspect American journalists who were in London to cover
the Battle of Britain. But, as he recalled, ‘‘when I came to work on
that first assignment, the whole thing petered out most prosaically.
What little I did manage to discover did not fit in with any theory of
espionage activities.’’ However, at the end of October 1940 he was
sent to Lisbon, ostensibly on an assignment for theDaily Express,
but in reality he reported to the local SIS station commander, Rich-
man Stopford. His task was to debrief German Jews who had been
wealthy enough to pay to escape to neutral Portugal, in transit for the
United States. While they waited for their visas, Delmer interviewed
them, helped by two recruits who were veterans of theInternational
Brigade, Alexander Maass and Albrecht Ernst, the latter a left-wing
German journalist and former chief of staff to General Emilio
Kleber, the first leader of the International Brigade, whom Delmer
had first met in Madrid during the Spanish Civil War.
Delmer later observed that his reports were ‘‘distributed to several
hundred persons, read by no one, and then incinerated as secret
waste’’ (unlike hisDaily Expressarticles, which he thought were
read by about 12 million before being used to light a fire). He re-