Rena Stewart | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Born | 17 February 1923 |
| Died | 11 November 2023 (aged 100) |
| Known for | World War II codebreaker at Bletchley Park, translated Adolf Hitler’s will. First woman Senior Duty Editor at the BBC World Service. |
Rena Stewart (17 February 1923 - 11 November 2023) was a World War II codebreaker at Bletchley Park who later translated Adolf Hitler's will. She became a journalist, and the first woman Senior Duty Editor at the BBC World Service.
Rena Robertson Stewart was born on 17 February 1923 in Lundin Links in Fife to Andrewina (née Williamson) and Thomas Stewart. Her father worked for a bank and she had a sister, Isobel. In 1940, she went to the University of St Andrews, studying French and German, graduating in 1943. [1]
Stewart volunteered to join the Auxiliary Territorial Service during the Second World War. In 1944 her linguistic abilities, particularly in German, led to her posting to Bletchley Park as part of the code breaking staff. [2] She worked in what was known as Bletchley's German book room, where she deciphered German army and air force messages that were collated in book form to provide reference documents for long-term intelligence analysis. [3] [4]
Stewart collaborated with two colleagues, Elma Morley and Margery Forbes to figure out what the missing content was in partially intercepted messages. Sometimes these involved communications between the Nazi high command. [1] [3]
Stewart was deployed to the Bad Nenndorf interrogation centre, part of the Combined Services Detailed Interrogation Centre in Germany following the end of the war, rising to the rank of sergeant. Based in Bad Nenndorf she was part of the teams interrogating German intelligence officers imprisoned after the fall of the Reich. Her language skills were pressed into service translating prisoner interrogations from German into English. The most important document Stewart worked on was translating Hitler's will with her friend and colleague Margery Forbes, also an alumna of St Andrews. [3] The original document was typed by Traudl Junge in the Führerbunker the day before Hitler's suicide. [5] Stewart and Forbes were encouraged by Major Bill Oughton to take their time to ensure the translation as “absolutely perfect.” They deliberated over the phrase “kleinen bürgerlichen” life which Hitler had stipulated that Martin Bormann, his personal secretary and named executor of the will should be allowed to lead. [6]
They eventually decided the correct phrase was ‘petit bourgeois’ life and Stewart was pleased to discover in 1947 that Hugh Trevor-Roper used her translation in his seminal book, The Last Days of Hitler. [1]
In 1947, Stewart was demobbed. Due to the secret nature of her wartime work, she could not disclose what she had accomplished in her work during the war to potential employers. She eventually joined the BBC's German Service, translating Ibsen and Shakespeare plays for actors who had fled Germany for Britain and now recorded programmes for broadcast to occupied Germany. [1]
Stewart's ambition was to become a journalist, and she transferred to BBC Monitoring Service, in Caversham Park, Berkshire, monitoring Radio Moscow’s English language service. The Monitoring Service reported to the BBC but also provided potential intelligence from this monitoring to the UK government, and the American CIA. [1]
Stewart was determined to get a purely journalistic job at the BBC World Service and after a decade at Caversham and numerous applications to the BBC newsroom, she was appointed as a subeditor at Bush House in London. She met considerable sexism from the management of the newsroom but was not put off. At one editorial meeting Stewart was the only woman in the room and when the assembled staff were greeted with "Good morning, gentlemen" by the editor, she replied "Ken, I'm not a gentleman", so he reframed the greeting as "Good morning, gentlemen and Rena". [4]
Eventually, management changed and a different newsroom editor suggested that she apply for the role of chief subeditor. After this, Stewart was promoted through a number of roles eventually becoming senior duty editor, the first woman to hold that role in the World Service. [7] [8]
Stewart retired in 1983, and led an active cultural life, including theatre and opera. She was an active elder in the congregation of St Andrew's United Reformed Church in Ealing, west London, running a Scottish country dancing group, organising a yearly Burns Night dinner and editing the church magazine. [9] She appeared on Songs of Praise in a programme commemorating the 75th anniversary of D Day [10] [11] and was interviewed about her wartime experiences by the BBC's Witness History programme in 2013. [12] [13]
One unusual meeting was with Margery Tarwinska's (born Forbes) family including her daughter Rena Tarwinska. Rena Tarwinska was named after her but she and her family had never heard of Rena or the role that her Margery had played during the war. Margery had died in 1973 after only telling her family that her job during the war was secret. Rena Stewart was able to show them photographs and tell them of the role that she and her lifelong friend had played during the war. [14]
Rena Stewart died on 11 November 2023 at the age of 100. [7] [1] [4]
Mein Kampf is a 1925 autobiographical manifesto by Nazi Party leader Adolf Hitler. The book outlines many of Hitler’s political beliefs, his political ideology and future plans for Germany and the world. Volume 1 of Mein Kampf was published in 1925 and Volume 2 in 1926. The book was edited first by Emil Maurice, then by Hitler's deputy Rudolf Hess.
Gertraud "Traudl" Junge was a German editor who worked as Adolf Hitler's last private secretary from December 1942 to April 1945. After typing Hitler's will, she remained in the Berlin Führerbunker until his death. Following her arrest and imprisonment in June 1945, both the Soviet and the U.S. militaries interrogated her. Later, in post-war West Germany, she worked as a secretary. In her old age, she decided to publish her memoirs, claiming ignorance of the Nazi atrocities during the war, but blaming herself for missing opportunities to investigate reports about them. Her story, based partly on her book Until the Final Hour, formed a part of several dramatizations, in particular the 2004 German film Downfall about Hitler's final ten days.
Bad Nenndorf is a small town in the district of Schaumburg, Lower Saxony, Germany. Its population is 10,210 (2005). It is situated approximately 12 km east of Stadthagen, and 25 km west of Hanover, at the southern edge of the North German Plain and the northern edge of the Deister ridge. The area of the town includes the outlying villages of Riepen, Horsten and Waltringhausen.
Alexander Otto Hermann Wolfgang Bernd(t) Freiherr Freytag von Loringhoven, was a Baltic German officer in the German Army during World War II. In 1956, he joined the German Federal Armed Forces, the Bundeswehr, and rose to the rank of Generalleutnant.
Agnes Miegel was a German author, journalist and poet. She is best known for her poems and short stories about East Prussia, but also for the support she gave to the Nazi Party.
Captain Raymond C. "Jerry" Roberts MBE was a British wartime codebreaker and businessman. During the Second World War, Roberts worked at the Government Code and Cypher School (GC&CS) at Bletchley Park from 1941 to 1945. He was a leading codebreaker and linguist, who worked on the Lorenz cipher system – Hitler's most top-level code.
Stephanie Julianne von Hohenlohe was an Austrian princess by her marriage to the diplomat Prince Friedrich Franz von Hohenlohe-Waldenburg-Schillingsfürst, a member of the noble Hohenlohe family. She was born a commoner, allegedly of Jewish family background.
The Bad Nenndorf interrogation centre was a British Combined Services Detailed Interrogation Centre (CSDIC) located within the Winckler-Bath complex and adjacent buildings, in the West German town of Bad Nenndorf, district of Schaumburg, Lower Saxony. This was located in the British Occupation zone in Germany. The interrogation centre operated from June 1945 to July 1947. Allegations of mistreatment of detainees by British troops resulted in a police investigation, a public controversy in both Britain and Germany, and the eventual closure of the interrogation centre. Four of the centre's officers were brought before courts martial in 1948; one of the four was convicted on charges of neglect, and Dismissed from Service.
German submarine U-530 was a Type IXC/40 U-boat of Nazi Germany's Kriegsmarine during World War II. She was laid down at the Deutsche Werft in Hamburg on 8 December 1941 as yard number 345, launched on 28 July 1942 and commissioned on 14 October 1942 with Kapitänleutnant Kurt Lange in command, who led her in six patrols. Lange was replaced in January 1945 by Oberleutnant zur See Otto Wermuth, who led her escape to Argentina after Germany's surrender. The submarine's voyage to Argentina led to legends, apocryphal stories and conspiracy theories that it and U-977 had transported escaping Nazi leaders and/or Nazi gold to South America, that it had made a secret voyage to Antarctica, and even that it sank the Brazilian cruiser Bahia as the last act of the Battle of the Atlantic. Later investigations led by the U.S. and Brazilian Navies proved that the cruiser was sunk in an accident during exercises with depth charges.
The year 1945 saw a number of significant happenings in radio broadcasting history.
Walter Wagner was the notary who married Adolf Hitler to Eva Braun in the Führerbunker on 29 April 1945.
Jean-Marie Loret was a French railway worker and allegedly Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler's illegitimate son. According to Loret, his mother revealed to him in 1948 that Hitler was the "unknown German soldier" with whom she conceived a child during World War I. Hitler's valet Heinz Linge claimed in his memoirs that he witnessed Heinrich Himmler speak over the phone with Hitler, implying he wanted to find a woman and her son in their French village.
The Hitler family comprises the relatives and ancestors of Adolf Hitler, an Austrian-born German politician and the leader of the Nazi Party, who was the dictator of Germany, holding the title Chancellor of Germany from 1933 to 1945, and head of state as Führer und Reichskanzler from 1934 to 1945. Adolf Hitler had a central role in the rise of Nazism in Germany, provoking the start of World War II, and holding ultimate responsibility for the deaths of many millions of people during the Holocaust.
Heinz Lorenz was German Chancellor Adolf Hitler's Deputy Chief Press Secretary during World War II.
Camp 020 at Latchmere House in south-west London was a British interrogation centre for captured German agents during the Second World War. It was run by Lieutenant Colonel Robin "Tin Eye" Stephens. Although other wartime interrogation centres were alleged to have used torture to extract confessions, Stephens denied claims that torture had been used at Camp 020. His instructions for interrogators ordered: “Never strike a man. In the first place it is an act of cowardice. In the second place, it is not intelligent. A prisoner will lie to avoid further punishment and everything he says thereafter will be based on a false premise.”
Margery Myers Strohm, also known as Margery Kallus, was a British opera singer, who having married a German and emigrated to Germany, became a British spy during World War II, meeting Adolf Hitler and singing at a British prisoner of war camp.
Emilie Christine Schroeder, also known as Christa Schroeder, was one of Adolf Hitler's personal secretaries before and during World War II.
Joan Elisabeth Lowther Murray, MBE was an English cryptanalyst and numismatist who worked as a code-breaker at Bletchley Park during the Second World War. Although she did not personally seek the spotlight, her role in the Enigma project that decrypted the German secret communications earned her awards and citations, such as appointment as a Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE), in 1946.
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This is a list of events from British radio in 1945.