Author more concerned about money

The comic author, best known for the Jeeves and Wooster stories, was asked to make the recordings by Werner Plack, a former Hollywood film extra turned Nazi propaganda official.

Wodehouse said he agreed to the humorous broadcasts about his life in a German internment camp to thank his American friends for their support and to show he had “kept cheerful under difficult conditions”.

But he was pilloried in Britain as a Nazi collaborator and could have been prosecuted for treason.

MI5 had serious doubts about his account of how he came to make the light-hearted broadcasts in the summer of 1941, declassified documents made public by The National Archives show.

Wodehouse later defended his decision to broadcast on Nazi radio, implying that he thought of himself as an American, adding, “we are not at war with Germany”.

The file adds: “He was worried that they had not told him how much he would be paid for his broadcasts.”

In the event he received 250 marks for the five recordings, without considering the implications. Wodehouse and his wife were living in northern France in 1939. After being interred by the Germans, he saw out the war in Paris, quietly writing novels and short stories.