With­out any doubt the most pop­u­lar song of the Sec­ond World War was Lili Mar­lene. Record­ed by Dan­ish cabaret artiste Lale Ander­sen in 1939 under the title Das Mäd­chen unter der Lat­er­ne (“The Girl under the Lantern”), the song sold a mere 700 copies on release and fad­ed into obscu­ri­ty.

There it might have remained had not a sol­dier, work­ing for the Ger­man forces radio sta­tion in occu­pied Bel­grade, been sent to scour Vien­na for some records to broad­cast to Gen­er­al Rommel’s Afri­ka Korps. One of the records he found in Vien­na was Lale Andersen’s record­ing of Das Mäd­chen unter der Lat­er­ne, and it was first played over the air on 18^th August 1941.

It became an instant favourite with Rom­mel’s men, and for the next three years Radio Bel­grade played it almost every night at 9.57pm, as the clos­ing record. It also became a huge hit through­out Nazi-occu­pied Europe and was soon picked up by the British Eighth Army in the desert. It also soon assumed its sim­ple alter­na­tive song title, Lili Marlene (some­times spelled Lili Mar­leen, Lil­li Mar­lene etc).

In his mem­oir, British sol­dier Fitzroy Maclean describes the song’s effect in the spring of 1942 dur­ing the West­ern Desert Cam­paign: “Husky, sen­su­ous, nos­tal­gic, sug­ar-sweet, her voice seemed to reach out to you, as she lin­gered over the catchy tune…”

The next year, Maclean was para­chut­ed into the Yugoslav guer­ril­la war, and the song once again played its part:

“Some­times at night, before going to sleep, we would turn on our receiv­ing set and lis­ten to Radio Bel­grade. For months now, the flower of the Afri­ka Korps had been lan­guish­ing behind the barbed wire of Allied prison camps. But still, punc­tu­al­ly at ten o’clock, came Lale Ander­sen singing their spe­cial song, with the same unvary­ing, heart-rend­ing sweet­ness that we knew so well from the desert…Belgrade was still remote but, now that we our­selves were in Yugoslavia, it had acquired a new sig­nif­i­cance for us. It had become our ulti­mate goal, which Lili Mar­lene and her nos­tal­gic lit­tle tune seemed some­how to sym­bol­ise. ‘When we get to Bel­grade…’ we would say. And then we would switch off the wire­less a lit­tle guilti­ly, for the Par­ti­sans, we knew, were shocked at the strange plea­sure we got from lis­ten­ing to the singing of the Ger­man woman (sic) who was queen­ing it in their cap­i­tal.”

It’s not hard to imag­ine the Tom­mies, and Jer­ries alike, crowd­ed round their “receiv­ing sets”, smok­ing fags and dream­ing of Lili Mar­lene…