Rena Stewart, who has died aged 100, worked at the Bletchley Park codebreaking centre during the second world war and subsequently helped to interrogate German intelligence officers. She also translated Adolf Hitler’s will, before going on to become a pioneering female journalist with the BBC.
Stewart studied French and German at the University of St Andrews before joining the Auxiliary Territorial Service, the female equivalent of the army, and in early 1944 she was posted to Bletchley Park. Her fluency in German led to her being put to work in a small sub-section of Bletchley’s book room, where deciphered German army and air force messages were collated in book form to provide reference documents for long-term intelligence analysis.
Stewart and her two colleagues had to work out what was in the gaps in messages that had not been fully intercepted or deciphered. “The three of us were allocated a little side room off the main office,” she said. “We were told not to make too many wild guesses about what was missing, but it was usually pretty obvious. It was very exciting. I think the most interesting thing I ever got to type was going directly to Hitler.” That message was from Field Marshal Albert von Kesselring who, with the allied forces approaching the Rhine, had just taken over as commander-in-chief on the western front.
At the end of the war Stewart was sent to work at the Combined Services Detailed Interrogation Centre in Bad Nenndorf, 12 miles west of Hanover, to assist in the interrogation of captured German intelligence officers. Her role was to transcribe the interrogations into English, but her most memorable moment came when she and a colleague were given Hitler’s will to translate.
“There must be no mistakes,” they were told: “Make sure it’s absolutely perfect.” There was one particular phrase that Stewart and her colleague stumbled over: Hitler had asked that the executor of his will, Martin Bormann, his personal secretary, should be allowed to enjoy a “kleinen bürgerlichen” life.
“We were very puzzled as to how to translate it,” said Stewart. “The dictionary we consulted defined it as ‘lower middle-class’ but we didn’t think ‘lower middle-class’ had quite the right ring about it. So we decided to translate it as ‘petit bourgeois’.”
The British intelligence officer – and eventual Oxford professor – Hugh Trevor-Roper had tracked the final movements of Hitler in order to confirm he was dead. When he published his investigation as a bestselling book, The Last Days of Hitler (1947), Stewart was thrilled to see the official translation was hers, including the term “petit bourgeois”.
Rena was born in the Fife village of Lundin Links to Thomas, a bank employee, and his wife, Andrewina (nee Williamson); she had one sister, Isobel. She went to St Andrews in 1940, gained her degree three years later, joined the army as a volunteer and, after basic training, was sent to Bletchley.
Having risen to the rank of sergeant, she left the army in 1947 to join the BBC’s German Service, which employed a number of actors who had fled from Germany. Stewart translated Ibsen and Shakespeare plays for them to be broadcast to occupied Germany. However, her intention was always to become a journalist, and when the BBC Monitoring Service, based at Caversham Park, Berkshire, offered her a post listening in to Radio Moscow’s English language service, she gratefully accepted, staying there for 10 years.
The Monitoring Service did not just report to the BBC. It also fed information to the British government, and had an exchange agreement with the CIA’s Foreign Broadcast Information Service, which had a bureau on the first floor at Caversham Park. “They were there purely from an intelligence point of view,” Stewart said. “They were working for the CIA, telling America what we were doing. I think that was a bit hush-hush, you know.”
While at the Monitoring Service, Stewart was repeatedly turned down for jobs in the BBC World Service newsroom at Bush House in London, but eventually she managed to obtain a post there as a subeditor. When she arrived she found there was a widespread view that it was not a job for women, and that “the man in charge at the newsroom thought women were rubbish”.
But she fought her corner, and in time a new editor encouraged her to apply for promotion to chief subeditor. Once she had that job, she secured successive promotions to the post of senior duty editor, in charge of individual shifts, becoming the first woman to reach that grade in the World Service.
She retired from the BBC in 1983, after which she enjoyed going to the theatre and listening to music, particularly German lieder, and was for a long time an elder at St Andrew’s United Reformed Church in Ealing, west London, where she edited the church magazine, ran a Scottish country dance group and organised an annual Burns Night dinner.
While at Bletchley, Stewart had developed a close relationship with a male colleague who was keen to get married, but she never wanted to be a housewife – as she would have had to become in those days – and preferred to concentrate on her career.
She is survived by her nephew, Stewart.
• Rena Robertson Stewart, intelligence officer and journalist, born 17 February 1923; died 11 November 2023
