Pearl Vardon

Pearl Joyce Vardon (5 April 1915 in Jersey, Channel Islands – 1972, London) was a British broadcaster of Nazi propaganda during World War II. In 1946 she was convicted of an offence under the Defence Regulations and sentenced to nine months' imprisonment.

Pearl Vardon was a school teacher on Jersey when the island fell under the German occupation of the Channel Islands in 1940. As she spoke German, she found herself ordered by the German administration to work locally as an interpreter for a construction company based in Cologne.

She began a relationship with a Wehrmacht officer, Oberleutnant Siegfried Schwatlo, and when he was posted to Germany in 1944 she decided to go with him.

Vardon began employment as an announcer at Radio Luxembourg for the DES, the Deutsche Europasender. She introduced music and programmes such as Ladies First which criticised the USA and praised Germany's social security system, and Matters of Moment which gave news from a German perspective. More significantly, in For the Forces and their Kin, she read out letters written by British POWs for their families back home. A German colleague later said of Vardon's attitude that she "simply hated all things English and loved all things German".

In mid 1944 she was evacuated to Berlin and in October 1944 she was working at Apen in Lower Saxony until the Red Army drew close on the advancing Eastern Front.

Vardon fled from Apen to Wilhelmshaven, arriving on 30 April 1945. She was arrested there when she enquired how to obtain new identity papers and she was then held by the British Army at Esterwegen Internment Camp, the former Esterwegen concentration camp, where she was interrogated.

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