Susan Dorothea Mary Therese Hilton (née Sweney, 2 February 1915 – 30 October 1983) was a British radio broadcaster for the Nazi regime in Germany during the Second World War.

Born in India to a family with Irish connections, she was active in the British Union of Fascists in the 1930s before attracting the interest of the police in London after which she set off to join her husband in Burma.

[2] She began to work as a journalist in Paris before moving to Berlin to make propaganda broadcasts in support of the Nazi regime.

[3] She was educated partly in England where her brother said that she had received "rough treatment" that had disillusioned her about the British class system and may have influenced her political views.

[3][6] She had already planned to give up the job for a quieter life as her young son had died which had affected her health[8] and she had booked her passage to join her husband in Burma.

[3][13] After she left the Atlantis, Mohr found correspondence on another captured ship that Sweney's husband George was suspected in Burma of spying for the Japanese.

[3] This was intercepted by BBC Monitoring in April and May 1941 who summarised it as emphasising how well the passengers were treated by the German crew and how many lives were lost, particularly women and children, when the Tirranna was sunk by the British.

[3] Based at the Hotel d'Amerique in the rue Rochechouart, Paris, she began to work as a journalist and according to a contemporary, established very good relations with high-ranking German officers in the city.

[19][20] Sweney's story was supported by testimony gathered after the war from Miss Winifred Fitzpatrick, an Irish woman in Paris who knew Monaghan.

[9] In June 1941, she was visited at her hotel by Abwehr agent Oscar C. Pfaus and the head of the Nazi propaganda organisation Deutscher Fichte-Bund, Theodore Kessemeir, to ask her to undertake undercover work on behalf of Germany.

[18] From September 1941,[4] Sweney worked for Büro Concordia, an arm of the German foreign ministry that ran a string of "black" radio stations targeted at discontented minorities outside Germany.

[2] Edward never received it and the letter was read by the Gestapo, British intelligence, and the Irish G2, inadvertently tipping them off about her activities and leading G2 to open a file on her.

[2] In May 1942, she wrote to Biddy O'Kelly, an Irish friend in Dublin, describing her work and asking how her broadcasts were received in Ireland, and whether she would she be able to show her face there after the war?

Educated in England and Italy and fluent in several languages, Kowanko was employed at Irland-Redaktion as a typist, but in practice had a larger role that included a weekly broadcast to Irish women under the name Linda Walters.

[25] While many of Sweney's broadcasts were innocuous,[16] and a diplomat from the Irish embassy in Paris found her as forthright off-air in her criticisms of the Germans as she was of the British,[2] her need to earn money to buy alcohol helped her Nazi masters to control her.

[2] In July 1942, for instance, she broadcast: Two years ago, I was myself taken in by Admiralty Churchill's lies, when he said that the British Navy had swept the seas of Nazi ships.

[26]She was sacked from Irland-Redaktion in autumn 1942 after making on-air mistakes, probably as a result of intoxication,[27] but resurfaced in January 1943[16] at Interradio because "Sonja and I wanted to be together".

[25][28] Despite her drinking and wild nature, as a fluent English speaker and experienced radio presenter, Sweney was in demand by the Nazi propaganda machine.

[29] In July 1943, Sweney was allowed to move to Vienna where the sculptor Lisa von Pott arranged for her to stay with Mrs Luze Krimann at her apartment at 71 Ungargasse.

Krimann told British intelligence that Sweney claimed to have turned against the war but that she had no choice but to continue writing anti-British propaganda and that she knew that if Germany lost, she would have to account for her actions.

She admitted spying on Doris Brehm, Count Leo Zeppelin, Dr Alphons Klingsland and his two sisters, and all the Americans in Vienna,[30][32] but claimed to have tried to warn them that they were at risk and to have only done the work in the hope that it would enable her to escape to Yugoslavia.

[30] In 1944, Sweney visited the Turkish consulate in Vienna to try to obtain a visa to leave the Third Reich but when the Gestapo discovered her intentions they arrested her in July.

[29] In August 1944, Sweney was sent to Liebenau internment camp for women and children in southern Germany,[29] a former asylum whose patients had been killed by lethal injection on the orders of Adolf Hitler to make space for internees.

I cannot travel in another ship and even an aeroplane scares me ... get us [Sweney and a friend from Liebenau] home to England or to a place where we can relax and feel no more fear.

[40] Sweney was arrested on arrival at Victoria Station in London and subsequently appeared at Bow Street Magistrates' Court charged with assisting the enemy by working for the German radio propaganda service.

[14][41] The trial took less than a day, meaning that much of the background information about Sweney's life in Germany, such as that she had originally refused spying work and had been arrested by the Gestapo, was not mentioned.

[14] Her brother, Edward, later told David O'Donoghue that he felt the guilty plea and quick proceedings had deprived her of a fair trial and that his sister was only pursuing peace and was "innocent of any blameworthy act".

[42] Sweney herself later believed that the suspicions of the Gestapo, her short trial, the narrowing of the charges purely to broadcasting, and the soft treatment she received in Holloway prison (her "own room" and a "maid" to look after her) were indicative that she was being used to cover up other British espionage activity that had not come to light, possibly a British female agent who had been on the Kemmendine and left when it called at Gibraltar.

[43] Sweney told Margaret Schaffhauser that when she left prison, she was met at the gate by two MI5 agents who she always referred to as "my friends" and who went out of their way to help her, suppressing a planned book and telling her to contact them immediately if anyone said or wrote anything derogatory about her.

[38][44] In 1998, after David O'Donoghue's research for his PhD dissertation, Hitler's Irish Voices, Edward Sweney asked the British Home Secretary Jack Straw to reopen his sister's case to rectify what he saw as a miscarriage of justice.