WODEHOUSE EXPLAINS

Auckland Star, Volume LXXV, Issue 215, 11 September 1944, Page 5

WODEHOUSE EXPLAINS

Spoke Over German Radio To Reassure Friends NOT AT REQUEST OP ENEMY Rec. 9.30 a.m. LONDON, Sept. 10. "Speaking over the German radio, wrong as it may have been, was my own idea of talking to my friends, letting them know I was well and acknowledging letters and parcels from those seeking my release," said the English novelist, P. G. Wodehouse, in an interview at the Bristol Hotel, Paris, where he and his wife have been living for a year. "The talks were mostly comical. The Germans never asked me to broadcast or suggested what I should say. After considerable pleading, the Gestapo gave me permission to return to Paris, where I continued writing, while reporting to the Gestapo headquarters weekly." Mr. Wodehouse said all the stories about him living a life of luxury at the Adlon Hotel, Berlin, were lies. He spent three days there under a Gestapo guard. He had been released in a regular manner after a year in an internment camp, like numerous other British prisoners of his age. After his release, he and his wife lived in the country for a long time on borrowed money and the proceeds of the sale of his wife's jewellery.

P. G. Wodehouse and his wife were captured at Le Touquet, France, in June, 1940. Mrs. Wodehouse was released because she was an American citizen, but Mr. Wodehouse was interned in his house, and later transferred to a prison camp in Upper Silesia. In June, 1941, it was reported that he had been released from an internment camp and taken to an hotel in Berlin. The next day it was reported that he was going to reside on an estate in the Bavarian Alps, owned by an American friend. In a broadcast from the Adlon Hotel, Berlin, he said he had been liberated on condition that, he undertook not to try to escape from Germany, and announced that he was going to give weekly radio talks to ihe United States. These talks, he told an American reporter, would be "general chats, entirely non-political." This assurance did not prevent a great feeling of resentment in Britain, and the matter was brought up several times in ihe House of Commons.