Posted by Jason Diamond

I’m normally the first guy to come charging out of the foxhole when somebody is accused of being an anti-Semite (example: my article today on the IKEA founder’s ties to the Nazis), but I’m going to have to go with my gut and say that PG Wodehouse was not a Nazi stooge.  Even though he did radio shows for them during the second world war, I’d be pretty willing to bet that if a bunch of people with guns told me to do a radio show about my life as an internee, I’d probably just comply.

Also, can I just say, nobody did the whole “Possible Third Reich collaborator” thing quite like Wodehouse.  The two best examples of this are:

1. “Wodehouse was living in France when war broke out. He was taken prisoner when Germany invaded and sent to an internment camp in the German town of Tost, Upper Silesia. He described how, “as he was playing in a cricket match” on 21 June 1941, he was told to pack his bags and was put on a train to Berlin.”

2. “I thought that people, hearing the talks, would admire me for having kept cheerful under difficult conditions,” he said in a statement for MI5 in 1944.