Paul Ferdonnet

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Paul Ferdonnet (1901 – 1945), dubbed "the Stuttgart traitor" (le traître de Stuttgart) by the French press, was a French journalist.

A Nazi sympathizer, Ferdonnet was known for having published an anti-semitic book, La Guerre juive (The Jewish War). He relocated to Germany in the 1930s and was an employee of Radio-Stuttgart where he worked on propaganda broadcast in French and aimed at promoting the Nazi regime and demoralizing French troops and civilians^[1]. Ferdonnet was identified in 1939 as the main French speaker of Radio-Stuttgart. After the fall of France, transmissions in French were progressively discontinued and Ferdonnet stopped working for Radio-Stuttgart around 1942. He was arrested after the fall of Nazi Germany and executed for treason in 1945. During his trial, Ferdonnet asserted in vain that he had not been the speaker. Some historians consider that he might have merely worked for Radio-Stuttgart as a translator of the scripts submitted by the Germans, his translations being read by another Frenchman. According to writer Saint-Paulien (himself a former collaborationist), the actual speaker was "a former actor named Obrecht"^[2]