Herbert John Burgman

Herbert John Burgman (April 17, 1894 – December 16, 1953) was an American broadcaster of Nazi propaganda during World War II. He was convicted of treason in 1949 and sentenced to imprisonment for 6 to 20 years.

Herbert John Burgman was born in Hokah, Minnesota, the son of Gustave and Karoline (née Dahlke) Burgman.

He served with the U.S. Army from 1918 to 1920. Burgman was posted to Germany and served in the American zone in the Occupation of the Rhineland. In 1921 he joined the State Department in Berlin and worked as a clerk and economic statistician in the U.S. embassy to Germany. He married a German national, Johanna Karhl, in 1924. Their son was born the next year. By 1941, he was a committed Nazi sympathizer and when Germany declared war on America on December 11 1941, he chose to remain in Germany rather than return to the U.S. with the repatriation of the embassy staff.

During World War II, he broadcast for "Radio Debunk", the Voice of All Free America under the pseudonym of Joe Scanlon. He attempted to persuade American listeners in his broadcasts that prostitution and sexually transmitted diseases were widespread in the U. S. Army stationed overseas and that Britain and the Soviet Union were in collusion against the United States. He blamed Franklin D. Roosevelt and "his Jewish and Communistic pals" for the war.

Burgman was arrested at his home in Rumpenheim, Frankfurt, in November 1945. He was then held in detention along with Mildred Gillars and Donald S. Day by the Counterintelligence Corps at Camp King, Oberursel, until his conditional release on December 24, 1946. He was required to report regularly to U.S. Military Police who then employed him as an interpreter even though he had been assessed as mentally incompetent by U. S. Army psychiatrists.

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