A Theory of Very Little Substance

Over the last couple of weeks I've been watching a documentary series called Europa: The Last Battle. It covers the history of Jewish communities around the world, and of the rise of Hitler. It's described on IMDB as “Historical Truth Setting”, with quite a high average rating of 7.3 out of 10 and some positive reviews, saying things such as:

• “This is true history, what really happened. A must watch.”
• “The most important documentary you'll ever see. Watch and make your own mind up.”
• “History is written by the victors. Essential viewing, we've been lied to.”
• “One of the best documentaries ever made”
• “This is so far above anything Hollywood has produced with their billion dollar budgets that it's almost ridiculous. Truth, truth, truth. So much of it, you cannot grasp it.”

Sadly, these reviews seem to gloss over the fact that this documentary is modern day pro Nazi propaganda, created by a Swedish man called Tobias Bratt. The production quality reminds me of other conspiratorial documentaries that have become popular over the last two decades like Zeitgeist and 9/11 Loose Change, created since home computers have made it easy to download footage and stitch it together with a voiceover to make a video at no cost.

I'm watching the show because I've heard that it's currently being promoted in New Zealand in conspiracy circles - people are saying that it's eye-opening, and shows the truth that is hidden from everyone. But so far most of what I'm noticing is a cherry picking of quotes, along with the use of made up fake quotes, to support a narrative that communism is evil, and communism is a Jewish creation. Some really daft claims are made, like that Stalin was Jewish.

I've just finished episode 4, which tried to re-frame the second world war as something Hitler didn't want - a war he tried to avoid because he only wanted peace, and only entered reluctantly. The episode is really scathing about Churchill, saying that he was pushing for war since the early 1930s, and that he was the reason World War II started, not Hitler.

And then the show made a very particular claim that I just had to look into:

_“Churchill was now too drunk to deliver speeches himself.

So drunk, in fact, that he hired the actor Norman Shelley who voiced Winnie the Pooh for the BBC children's hour to impersonate him.

He made the most famous radio speeches in twentieth-century British history impersonating Churchill, and fooled tens of millions of listeners.”_

Now, with conspiracy documentaries, often there's a nugget of truth behind their claims. I'm pretty sure that, for all of Churchill's flaws, he didn't spend the war so drunk that he couldn't speak properly, so I was happy to chalk that down as fantasy. But the bit about Norman Shelley sounded interesting, so I searched for “Norman Shelley Churchill” on google and started at Wikipedia. It turns out that Norman Shelley did indeed read out the Winnie the Pooh stories for BBC's Children's Hour, as well as having other famous roles such as playing Colonel Danby in the radio show The Archers in the UK. Here he is as Pooh bear:

A Guardian article I found says that Norman Shelley made a claim late in his life that he had voiced many of Churchill's famous speeches, including the famous “Fight them on the beaches” speech:

Now the reason given for this happening is that, when Churchill first delivered many of his wartime speeches, they were given in the UK parliament, and at the time parliament did not have microphones to record the proceedings. So sometimes MPs were asked to re-record their speeches for the BBC to broadcast to the public. The argument goes that Churchill was busy enough fighting a war that he didn't have time to visit the BBC, and so he'd asked them to use actor Norman Shelley to do it for him. And as a voice actor, Norman was known for being able to impersonate Churchill.

After Norman's death his son found a 78 RPM vinyl record in his house that had a label on it saying:

“BBC, Churchill: Speech. Artist Norman Shelley. September 7, 1942”

Historian David Irving was the first to write that Shelley had recorded some of Churchill's speeches, after he interviewed him. Since then several other notable historians have also made similar claims about Shelley being used to record Churchill's speeches for the radio.

So, is this a case of the public having been lied to? Was everyone duped by a well known voice actor pretending to be Winston Churchill?

It's tempting to believe this story - after all, it has a confession from the perpetrator, the physical evidence of the recording, and a historian documenting it all - but it turns out that reality is more complicated:

Firstly, the confession made by Norman Shelley to David Irving was supposedly given in an interview in 1981, which turns out to have been a year after Shelley had died.

Secondly, David Irving, although technically a historian, is not very well respected in his field, and in fact is most famous for being a holocaust denier. There's a great dramatisation of a libel lawsuit in England involving Irving that's well worth watching, called Denial. As Irving has good reason to want to make Churchill look bad, he's not very reliable.

Thirdly, the physical recording that was found was from 1942, and is obviously not from the June 4th 1940 Fight Them on the Beaches speech.

Fourthly, it's been found out that on June 4th, the BBC didn't play a recording of the speech at all - instead, they had a newsreader read out portions of the speech to the audience. The audio clip we listened to of the Fight them on the beaches speech is from when the BBC had Churchill re-record some of speeches after the war, in 1949.

The reality, as uncovered by the International Churchill Society, is that at some point after Churchill had given his famous speech on June 4th, the British Council had asked him to record a copy for use in the US - he told them he was too busy, and that they should use a voice actor for the task. And the actor they ended up using is likely to have been Norman Shelley. There's no hard evidence that this version was ever played publicly in the US, although it's feasible it was.

And the vinyl record that was found by Shelley's son and labelled Churchill Speech 1942 turns out to have been a recording of a 1942 Churchill speech on North Africa that a private company paid Shelley to record for them.

But, despite these two recordings that Shelley has been shown to have made of Churchill's speeches, the claim that Norman Shelley was the voice of Churchill on the radio for his most famous speeches is categorically untrue.

In summary, I can heartily recommend not watching Nazi propaganda made by some random guy on the internet. It's icky to watch, and it'll lie to you from start to finish.