I found it, like many discoveries, accidentally.
I was busy pursuing a pre-Internet interest of mine – poring through old newspapers – but now online. Having spent the first 76% of my life in Oklahoma City, I was interested in looking at The Southwest Jewish Chronicle, a regional Jewish newspaper published from 1932 – 1986 there. While looking for and finding some familiar names and faces from my childhood, one small article tucked away on Page 74 of the Saturday, September 1, 1951, issue quietly grabbed me.
I had earlier been checking issues of the Chronicle to see what information about Hitler’s attempt to kill every Jew in Europe was available to readers, when I took a break to look for childhood memories in the paper.
The title of the article causing my double take was Tucson Radio Station Drops Former Nazi Broadcaster. A few minutes’ research revealed that radio station KCNA, operating in Tucson under various names from 1947 – 1982, offered its listeners a regular program called “Speak Your Piece,” and a regular voice on the program belonged to a man named Ed Delaney.
Delaney failed to mention that during the War, he was living in Germany and was employed by Joseph Goebbels’s Reich Foreign Office’s Radio Department under the pseudonym E. D. Ward. He was as an American correspondent and observer sympathetic to the Nazi cause and against any U. S. involvement in (pre-Pearl Harbor) WWII. What made him attractive and useful to the Nazis as a mouthpiece was his virulent anti-Roosevelt and anti-Communist/Soviet Union attitude, along with his experience in radio broadcasting. After the war, Delaney was tried for treason in the U.S., but the indictment was dismissed.
Delaney may have kept his secret but for a caller to a nightly 11 p.m. program on KVOA radio called “What Do You Think?”.
A listener asked if the Delaney on KVOA was the same Ed Delaney who worked in Nazi radio broadcasting from Berlin in 1941 and who was mentioned in the best-selling Berlin Diary: Journal of a Foreign Correspondent, 1934-41 by William L. Shirer. The Arizona Daily Star verified the story, followed shortly thereafter by Delaney’s departure from Tucson.
The Friday, August 17, 1951, edition of The Arizona Post brought this incident to light in an editorial on page 4 titled “It Happened in Tucson.” The story of Delaney and his past was picked up by a few other papers in the U. S., including the Chronicle.
The fact that a 73-year-old Tucsonan from Oklahoma City recently discovered an article in a 73-year-old newspaper from Oklahoma City about a former American Nazi who worked in Tucson is not going to change the world. But I’ve been in the classroom long enough (43+ years) to know generating questions is more important than presenting names and dates. By presenting the latter, I hope to generate the former.
Gary Opper, a Tucson resident for 17 years, has been involved in Holocaust education, research, and commemoration for over three decades. He has lectured at schools, army bases, and education conferences about the nightmares of the 1933-1945 period, engaged in research for the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, and participated in and coordinated Yom HaShoah commemorations. He believes that the prayer and plea “Never Again” must never disappear from the human heart.
You can reach out to Gary at garyopper@hotmail.com.
