London, Aug 26 (ANI): British novelist PG Wodehouse has been revealed to have been more worried about how much the Nazis would pay him for his notorious German wartime radio broadcasts while his country was fighting for survival from their attacks.
According to a newly-released MI5 files, the comic author was paid the equivalent of around 1,000 pounds to make recordings for Werner Plack, a former Hollywood film extra turned Nazi propaganda official.
The 1941 recordings caused outrage in Britain, with many branding the author a Nazi collaborator.
"He was worried that they had not told him how much he would be paid for his broadcasts," the Daily Mail quoted the newly declassified files, made public by the National Archives, as stating.
Wodehouse, who was living in France when war broke out, was interned as an alien at a camp in Germany when Plack approached him.
The British writer, best known for the Jeeves and Wooster stories, immediately agreed to make a series of five light-hearted recordings about his life in the camp.
In the newly declassified files, Wodehouse claimed he was motivated by a desire to show his gratitude to his American friends for their support and to show the world how he "kept cheerful under difficult conditions".
The files show MI5, the British security agency, had serious doubts about the writer's version of events, but chose not to prosecute him for treason after he convinced them he had been politically naive.
After going to Berlin to make the broadcasts in the summer of 1941, Wodehouse told an American journalist he was meeting a "Mr Slack or Black or something".
In fact it was Plack, whom Wodehouse knew well enough to call him "my Hollywood friend" in letters.
The MI5 file notes the author was being disingenuous about his closeness to the German.
"This incident suggests that Wodehouse is not always quite as frank as he pretends," they stated. (ANI)
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