(28-05-2011 11:29 )skully Wrote: 1945 - World War II: the English broadcaster of Nazi propaganda, William Joyce (Lord Haw-Haw) was captured near Hamburg. He was later tried for treason, found guilty, and hanged.
To avoid the heavy bombing that affected Bristol, my mother, then a young child, was sent to live with relatives near the unscathed small town of Abersychan in South Wales. Out playing with a group of friends one day, they were surprised to see one sole military plane coming their way. It was a rare sight in those parts, so naturally they all stood and waved. They only saw the swastika insignia at the last moment, as the plane dropped a bomb on them!!!! Fortunately the bomb landed several hundred yards away, or I might not be here to tell you about it. The next day, Lord Haw-Haw boasted of how incompetent Britain's air defences were against the might of the Luftwaffe and to everybody's amazement heard him announce “why, we even dropped a bomb near Abersychan yesterday” (it was believed that the plane had been trying to find a small armaments plant some miles away but you can imagine the local reaction to that announcement).
William Joyce was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1906 to a Protestant mother and an Irish Catholic father who had taken United States citizenship. A few years after his birth the family returned to Ireland. Unusually for Irish Roman Catholics, both Joyce and his father were strongly Unionist. Joyce later said that he aided the Black and Tans during the Irish War for Independence and became a target of the IRA, causing him to flee to England after an attempt was made on his life.
He joined the Royal Worcester Regiment in 1921 but was discharged when it was discovered that he had lied about his age. He then applied to Birkbeck College of the University of London and to enter the Officer Training Corps. At Birkbeck he worked hard and obtained a First. He also developed an interest in fascism, and he worked with (but never joined) the British Fascisti of Rotha Lintorn-Orman. In 1924, while stewarding a Conservative Party meeting, Joyce was attacked and received a deep razor slash that ran across his right cheek. It left a permanent scar which ran from the earlobe to the corner of the mouth. Joyce was convinced that his attackers were "Jewish communists". It was an incident that had a marked bearing on his outlook.
In 1932 Joyce joined the British Union of Fascists (BUF) under Sir Oswald Mosley, and swiftly became a leading speaker, praised for his power of oratory. He was instrumental in changing the name of the BUF to "British Union of Fascists and National Socialists" in 1936, and stood as a party candidate in the 1937 elections to London County Council. In 1936 Joyce lived for a year in Whitstable, where he owned a radio and electrical shop.
In late August 1939, shortly before war was declared, Joyce and his wife Margaret fled to Germany. Joyce had been tipped off that the British authorities intended to detain him under Defence Regulation 18B. Joyce became a naturalised German in 1940. In Berlin, Joyce could not find employment until a chance meeting with fellow Mosleyite Dorothy Eckersley, former wife of the Chief Engineer of the BBC, and she got him an audition at the Rundfunkhaus (radio centre). Despite having a heavy cold and almost losing his voice, he was recruited immediately for radio announcements and script writing at German radio's English service.
The name "Lord Haw-Haw of Zeesen" was coined by the pseudonymous Daily Express radio critic Jonah Barrington in 1939, but this referred initially to Wolf Mittler (or possibly Norman Baillie-Stewart). When Joyce became the best-known propaganda broadcaster, the nickname was transferred to him. Joyce's broadcasts initially came from studios in Berlin, later transferring (due to heavy Allied bombing) to Luxembourg and finally to Apen near Hamburg, and were relayed over a network of German-controlled radio stations that included Hamburg, Bremen, Luxembourg, Hilversum, Calais, Oslo and Zeesen. Joyce also broadcast on and wrote scripts for the German Büro Concordia organisation, which ran several black propaganda stations, many of which pretended to broadcast illegally from within Britain. His role in writing the scripts increased as time passed, and the German radio capitalized on his public persona. Initially an anonymous broadcaster, Joyce eventually revealed his real name to his listeners, and would occasionally be announced as "William Joyce, otherwise known as Lord Haw-Haw". Urban legends soon circulated about Lord Haw-Haw, alleging that the broadcaster was eerily well-informed about political and military events, to the point of near-omniscience (as my mother would testify!!).
Although listening to his broadcasts was officially discouraged (but not illegal), they became very popular with the British public. At the height of his influence, in 1940, Joyce had an estimated 6 million regular and 18 million occasional listeners in the United Kingdom. The German broadcasts always began with the announcer's words "Germany calling, Germany calling, Germany calling" (because of a nasal drawl this sounded like "Jarmany calling"). These broadcasts urged the British people to surrender, and were well known for their jeering, sarcastic and menacing tone. There was also a desire by civilian listeners to hear what the other side was saying, since information during wartime was strictly censored and restricted and at the start of the war it was possible for German broadcasts to be more informative than those of the BBC. This was a scenario which reversed towards the middle of the war, with German civilians tuning (usually secretly) to the BBC.
Joyce recorded his final rambling broadcast on 30 April 1945, during the Battle of Berlin. He chided Britain for pursuing the war beyond mere containment of Germany, and warned repeatedly of the "menace" of the Soviet Union. He signed off with a final defiant "Heil Hitler and farewell". There are conflicting accounts as to whether this last programme was actually transmitted, despite a tape being found in the Apen studios. The next day Radio Hamburg was seized by British forces, who on 4 May used it to make a mock "Germany calling" broadcast denouncing Joyce.
Besides broadcasting, Joyce's duties included writing propaganda for distribution among British prisoners of war, whom he tried to recruit into the British Free Corps. He wrote a book Twilight Over England promoted by the German Ministry of Propaganda, which unfavourably compared the evils of allegedly Jewish-dominated capitalist Britain with the wonders of National Socialist Germany. Adolf Hitler awarded Joyce the War Merit Cross (First and Second Class) for his broadcasts, although they never met. Scripts and the microphone used by Joyce were seized by soldier Cyril Millwood and have now come to light following the ex-soldier's death.
At the end of the war, Joyce was captured by British forces at Flensburg, near the German border with Denmark. Spotting a dishevelled figure while resting from gathering firewood, intelligence soldiers - including a Jewish German, Geoffrey Perry (born Horst Pinschewer), who had left Germany before the war - engaged him in conversation in French and English. After they asked if he was Joyce, he reached for his pocket (actually reaching for a false passport); believing he was armed, they shot him through the buttocks, leaving four wounds. Two intelligence officers then drove him to a border post, and handed him to British military police.
Joyce was tried at the Old Bailey, London on three counts of high treason. During the processing of the charges Joyce's American nationality came to light, and it seemed that he would have to be acquitted, based upon a lack of jurisdiction (you cannot be convicted of betraying a country that is not your own). He was acquitted of the first and second charges. However, the Attorney General, Sir Hartley Shawcross, successfully argued that Joyce's possession of a British passport, even though he had mis-stated his nationality to get it, entitled him (until it expired) to British diplomatic protection in Germany and therefore he owed allegiance to the king at the time he commenced working for the Germans. It was on this basis that Joyce was convicted of the third charge and sentenced to death on 19 September 1945.
His conviction was upheld by the Court of Appeal on 1 November, and by the House of Lords (on a 4–1 vote) on 13 December. In the appeal, Joyce argued that possession of a passport did not entitle him to the protection of the Crown, and therefore did not perpetuate his duty of allegiance once he left the country, but the House rejected this argument. Lord Porter's dissenting opinion was based on his belief that whether Joyce's duty of allegiance had terminated or not was a question of fact for the jury to decide, rather than a purely legal question for the judge. Joyce also argued that jurisdiction had been wrongly assumed by the court in electing to try an alien for offenses committed in a foreign country. This argument was also rejected, on the basis that a state may exercise such jurisdiction in the interests of its own security.
Joyce was executed on 3 January 1946 at Wandsworth Prison, aged 39. He was the penultimate person to be hanged for a crime other than murder in the United Kingdom. The last was Theodore Schurch, executed for treachery the following day at Pentonville. In both cases the hangman was Albert Pierrepoint. In spite of pleadings from the hospital chaplain, Joyce chose to die in his mother's faith, that of the Church of Ireland, and he went to his death unrepentent and defiant.
It is said that the scar on Joyce's face split wide open because of the pressure applied to his head upon his drop from the gallows.
As was customary for executed criminals, Joyce's remains were buried in an unmarked grave within the walls of HMP Wandsworth. In 1976 they were exhumed and reinterred in the Protestant section of the New Cemetery in Bohermore in County Galway, Ireland. A Roman Catholic Tridentine Latin mass was celebrated at his reburial.
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