Nazi monster who deserved hang to
Many believe wartime traitor Lord Haw-Haw was a harmless buffoon who was wrongly executed. Nonsense, says a new biography. He plotted to be Britain’s Fuhrer and was a...
Haw-Haw gloated as London was carpet-bombed ‘My sacrifice will not be in vain,’ he declared
HE NEVER could keep his big trap shut, and in the end it got him hanged. If loudmouthed William Joyce — alias Lord Haw-Haw, the ‘Germany calling’ traitor who ranted foul Nazi propaganda over the radio to Britain throughout World War II — had kept quiet, he might well not have been caught.
But the self-important twerp with the plum-in-his-mouth voice couldn’t resist the temptation to gab.
On the run in northern Germany three weeks after the end of the war in May 1945, he spotted a couple of British Army officers gathering firewood. Instead of slinking away in silence, Joyce was so convinced of his own invincibility that he called out to them: ‘There are some bits over here.’
The soldiers were intelligence officers. The voice was familiar. They’d heard its distinctive tones praising Hitler’s ‘super-human heroism’ and cursing Winston Churchill as a traitor doing the bidding of his ‘Jewish masters’. It had crowed at British defeats and threatened that secret ‘reprisal weapons’ were on their way to devastate England. Just weeks previously, it had drunkenly signed off from Berlin with: ‘Ich liebe Deutschland! Heil Hitler and farewell.’ One of the officers produced a revolver. ‘You wouldn’t be William Joyce, by any chance, would you?’ he asked.
Joyce’s hand moved to the pocket where he kept his false identity papers. The officer fired, and Joyce fell wounded.
After years of taunting the British people on behalf of the Third Reich, trying to undermine their morale, the game was up for him.
The farcical manner of his capture confirmed what many people came to think about Joyce — that he was a buffoon who made not a dent in Britain’s defiance of Hitler. It was argued that he was an accidental traitor anyway, that he had simply been marooned in Germany when war broke out and sucked into the propaganda business.
His trial subsequently provoked legal and chattering-class concerns that he couldn’t have been guilty of treason because he was an American, not a British, citizen by birth.
That he went bravely and philosophically to the gallows — calmly playing chess in his cell the night before — seemed to confirm this view of him as a wronged man who had stuck to his beliefs (however odious) and simply been caught up in massive events that overwhelmed him. Poor old William Joyce!
But such a benign view of the man is not shared by a new biographer, history professor Colin Holmes. He reveals Haw-Haw as a thoroughly nasty piece of work.
He was a bully, a braggart, a wifebeater, a drunk and a lecher.
Politically, he was not only a totally committed Nazi and a Jew-hater to a degree that out-Mosleyed the FarRight members of the British Union of Fascists (BUF), but his goal was to be the black-shirted, stern-faced Fuhrer of Britain after Churchill and his cronies had been despatched by the invading Germans.
Don’t waste your sympathy on Joyce, is Professor Holmes’s advice. He was nothing more than a jumpedup little Hitler of the vilest sort.
Joyce was born in Brooklyn, New York, to parents of Irish extraction and grew up in Galway in Ireland, where his parents moved when he was three.
A clever boy with a high opinion of himself and a fixation about Napoleon, he crossed to England as a teenager to join the Army. He was turned down on health grounds, a blow to his self-esteem that always rankled.
There were more disappointments as he drifted through student life and teaching as a private tutor in London in the Twenties, never making much of a mark or finding his niche. Then, in the age of extremes of Left and Right, he was drawn into street politics.
Fascism — always an ideological home for misfits — fascinated him, fuelled by a vicious and deep antiSemitism that saw a Jewish conspiracy around every corner.
He became an activist: marching, giving inflammatory speeches, plotting. He strutted like a parading Prussian; his thin lips took on a sneer; he grew a stubby moustache and slicked back his hair like Hitler.
The comic Germanic look was completed by a vivid scar from a razor slash that ran across his cheek from his right ear to the side of his mouth, put there by a political opponent. (Joyce always claimed it was a Jewish Communist who did it, but the new book about him offers evidence that it was the IRA, punishing him for anti-republican activities back in Galway.)
He was director of propaganda for the BUF for a while before his ego — as it always did — had him falling out with the leader, Oswald Mosley. To Joyce’s mind, Mosley had gone soft, leaving him as the Right’s only real hard man in England.
Increasingly, he campaigned for Hitler to triumph and for the Nazis to take over a Britain he believed was a nest of vipers run by effete liberals and grasping Jews. He was only one step ahead of detention by Special Branch because of his toxic activities when he decided to leave for Germany shortly before war broke out.
For this, he needed a British passport, which was issued in August 1939 after he signed a declaration that he was ‘a British subject by birth’. It was a lie — one that, when the reckoning came six years later, would cost him his life. He and his wife Margaret bought one-way tickets to Germany and, waved off by family and friends, embarked on the train from Victoria station. They were going for keeps, despite her protestations later that they had always intended to come back and were stranded in Berlin by the outbreak of war.
Author Holmes writes that, on the contrary, Joyce was pursuing a deliberate strategy. He was convinced that Britain as it stood had to be destroyed by Germany and come under Nazi control to be revived. He saw himself as central to this fascist rebirth. He would return as the country’s swastika-wearing saviour.
And if things went wrong, he believed he had his American citizenship to fall back on — a ‘get out of jail free’ card to protect him from British retribution.
In Berlin, Joyce presented himself as a potential recruit at the German Foreign Ministry, from where he was directed to the Propaganda Ministry (proprietor, Josef Goebbels). Within a fortnight or so, he made his first radio broadcast.
For an ecstatic Goebbels, the new boy proved to be ‘eine perle’, a real gem, as he aired his doom-and-gloom views to British ears. Germany was on the march, he proclaimed. When France fell, Britain would be next. He denounced new prime minister Winston Churchill as ‘slobbering, bastardised and mendacious’. He gloated as German planes carpetbombed London.
His language was extravagant, his tone creepy and there is a view that listeners on this side of the Channel took it all with a pinch of salt. It was just old Haw-Haw blathering on from Berlin. Tune in for a good laugh. But this was not strictly true. Britain, particularly in 1939-40, was a country in more turmoil than we often care to admit. Most of Europe was under Nazi rule, and there were plenty of voices — in high places and low, Parliament and pubs — arguing for a deal with the dictator.
Joyce played dangerous moodmusic to that uneasy audience as they looked for a possible alternative to all-out war, or were simply scared about the future.
As those snarling, wheedling tones came out of the wireless night after night, some couldn’t help wondering if he was right when he said that democracy was a sham and Churchill a conman.
One serviceman admitted that Haw-Haw ‘talks a lot of cock and 75 per cent of his statements are lies. But occasionally he hits the nail on the head, and it’s then that he makes you think.’
The fact is that, with the Government (rightly) deciding not to jam his transmissions or outlaw listening to them, as a matter of principle, his voice got through.
Pubs would go quiet when a broadcast from Berlin began. Inevitably, some people chose to believe him. Morale was affected in some measure, however small.
His reports of sunken British ships caused a lot of distress to families. Often they were untrue, which brought unnecessary anguish.
And nor was his influence confined to radio listeners. Between broadcasts, he took to his typewriter to churn out more bile in a book he called Twilight Over England, which portrayed the country’s supposed decline under generations of corrupt politicians and grasping Jews.
It was handed out to British prisoners-of-war in German camps in the hope of undermining their loyalty.
But away from his microphone and desk, Joyce’s life was spiralling out of control. He drank to excess and chain-smoked. He quarrelled with his wife and beat her up. They both took lovers, with him arrogantly claiming to her that he could ‘unleash any woman’s deep carnal desires’.
At one point, they divorced, before reconciling and remarrying, though
he still found her difficult to live with. The real problem was that she refused to worship the ground he walked on, which he always believed was his due.
What his tawdry Berlin lifestyle tried to conceal was his growing realisation the dream was shattering. Britain defied Hitler in 1940 and — instead of pursuing the invasion that might have projected Joyce into a position of power in his homeland — the Fuhrer turned away to fight the Soviet Union instead.
Now that front was also going badly. The whole Nazi project was unravelling. It could have been so very different, Joyce mused to himself, with massive self-regard. His Nazi masters had simply not made the best use of his talent.
He said: ‘If only I had been near the old man [Hitler], Germany’s defeat would not have happened.’
He saw himself as a linchpin of Nazism. But in Germany he was, in reality, a nobody. He never met Hitler or even shook Goebbels’s hand. Yet his belief in fascism never wavered, even amid the burning remains of the Third Reich.
‘My sacrifice will not be in vain,’ he declared. ‘One day, out of the ruins of Europe, there will emerge in full triumph the idea for which I have fought — National Socialism as the saviour of the West.’ As it was, William Joyce was left stranded on the wrong side of history.
He fully expected to pay the price. When he came to trial at the Old Bailey, the popular consensus was that he was guilty of doing the country down at one of its most difficult times and deserved to hang. MI5 agreed — he was a traitor.
But the lawyers were in a bind. Did spouting propaganda for the enemy actually constitute high treason, or did that description only apply to sabotage and espionage?
And what about his true nationality? If he was legally born an American, what was his offence under British law?
The prosecution argued that the precise place of his birth was irrelevant. Joyce always claimed to be British — on that crucial passport application in 1939 and again to his interrogators when arrested in northern Germany in 1945 — and that was sufficient grounds to demand his allegiance.
He was also condemned out of his own mouth. In his book attempting to subvert British prisoners-of-war, he admitted to committing treason on a daily basis.
The jury took 23 minutes to pronounce him guilty. As the death