“My colleague and friend Dundonian Margery Forbes and I were tasked with translating the prisoners’ handwritten statements. The leader of the unit was Major Bill Oughton. One day he came into our office looking very solemn…he said, “I want you to stop doing whatever you’re doing. You must work together on the translation of this document. Take all the time you want, but there must be no mistakes. And of course you must not tell anyone.” As Rena Robertson Stewart, who died in London on November 11th at the age of 100, recounted the adventurous translation of Adolf Hitler’s will for the Allied governments during the Second World War. As a British intelligence officer you played a vital role in Bletchley Park, also known as Stationin deciphering Nazi codes and encrypted messages.
In September 1939, as soon as Great Britain declared war on Germany, young scholars from the universities of Cambridge and Oxford began to be recruited. To increase the numbers and therefore the productivity of the United Kingdom’s cryptanalysis unit in 1941 the The Daily Telegraph to organize a crossword competition: the most promising participants were contacted in great secrecy with the offer of “a particular job that would contribute to the war effort”.
Stewart studied French and German at the University of St Andrews before joining the Auxiliary Territorial Service, the female equivalent of the British army. In early 1944 she was sent to Bletchley Park. Her knowledge of German led her to work in a small subsection of the Government School of Codes and Ciphers, where deciphered messages from the German army and air force were collected in book form to provide reference documents for intelligence analysis long-term.
Stewart and his two colleagues had to figure out what was in the gaps in messages that hadn’t been fully intercepted or deciphered. It was she deciphered numerous secret messages from Field Marshal Albert von Kesselring who, with Allied forces approaching the Rhine, had just assumed the role of commander-in-chief on the Western Front.
At the end of the war Rena Stewart was sent to work in Germany at Combined Services Detailed Interrogation Center in Bad Nenndorfnear Hanover, for assist in the interrogations of captured German intelligence officers. Her role was to transcribe the interrogations into English, but her most memorable moment was when she and a colleague were given Hitler’s will to translate. «There must be no mistakes – they were told -. Make sure it’s absolutely perfect.”
The translation of “petty bourgeois” in Hitler’s will
There was one sentence in particular that Rema Stewart and her colleague stumbled over: Hitler had requested that the executor, Martin Bormann, his personal secretary, be able to enjoy a “kleinen bürgerlichen” life. “We were very perplexed about how to translate it,” Stewart said. The dictionary we consulted defined it as “lower middle class,” but we didn’t think “lower middle class” had the right sound. So we decided to translate it as “petty bourgeois”».
Career as a BBC journalist
After reaching the rank of sergeant, Rena Stewart left the British Army in 1947 to join the BBC’s German service, which employed numerous actors who had escaped from Germany. Stewart translated works by Ibsen and Shakespeare for transmission in Allied-occupied Germany. But her intention was always to become a journalist and when the BBC Monitoring Service, based in Caversham Park, Berkshire, offered her a place listening to Radio Moscow’s English-language service she accepted and stayed there for ten years .
The BBC Monitoring Service also passed information to the British government and had an exchange agreement with the Foreign Broadcast Information Service of the CIA, which had an office on the first floor of Caversham Park. While working on the Monitoring ServiceStewart was repeatedly rejected for a job in the editorial department of the BBC World Service at Bush House in London, but eventually managed to get a job as an editor. When she arrived, she discovered that it was widely believed that this was not a job for women and that “the man who ran the newsroom thought women were rubbish.” But she stubbornly went ahead and was promoted to editor-in-chief. Once in that position she secured successive promotions to the position of senior editor, responsible for individual shifts, becoming the first woman to reach that rank in BBC World Service. She retired from the BBC in 1983.
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