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Lord Haw-Haw was a nickname applied to William Joyce and several other people who broadcast Nazi propaganda to the United Kingdom from Germany during the Second World War. The broadcasts opened with "Germany calling, Germany calling," spoken in an affected upper-class English accent. The same nickname was also applied to some other broadcasters of English-language propaganda from Germany, but it is Joyce with whom the name is overwhelmingly identified.
The English-language propaganda radio programme Germany Calling was broadcast to audiences in the United Kingdom on the medium wave station Reichssender Hamburg and by shortwave to the United States. The programme began on 18 September 1939 and continued until 30 April 1945, when the British Army overran Hamburg. The next scheduled broadcast was made by Horst Pinschewer (also known as Geoffrey Perry), a German-Jewish refugee serving in the British Army who announced the British takeover. Pinschewer was later responsible for the capture of William Joyce. [1]
Through such broadcasts, the Reich Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda attempted to discourage and demoralise American, Australian, British, and Canadian troops, and the British population, to suppress the effectiveness of the Allied war effort through propaganda, and to motivate the Allies to agree to peace terms leaving the Nazi regime intact and in power. Among many techniques used, the Nazi broadcasts reported on the shooting down of Allied aircraft and the sinking of Allied ships, presenting discouraging reports of high losses and casualties among Allied forces.
Although the broadcasts were well known to be Nazi propaganda, they frequently offered the only details available from behind enemy lines concerning the fate of friends and relatives who did not return from bombing raids over Germany. As a result, Allied troops and civilians frequently listened to Lord Haw-Haw's broadcasts despite the often inflammatory content and frequent inaccuracies and exaggerations, in the hope of hearing clues as to the fate of Allied troops and air crews. [2] Mass-Observation interviews warned the Ministry of Information of this; consequently, more attention was given to the official reports of British military casualties. [3]
In a newspaper article of 14 September 1939, the radio critic Jonah Barrington of the Daily Express wrote of hearing a gent "moaning periodically from Zeesen" who "speaks English of the haw-haw, damit-get-out-of-my-way variety". [4] Four days later, he gave him the nickname 'Lord Haw-Haw'. He wrote scathingly:
I imagine him having a receding chin, a questing nose, thin yellow hair brushed back, a monocle, a vacant eye, a gardenia in his buttonhole. Rather like PG Wodehouse's Bertie Wooster… [5]
The voice Barrington heard is widely believed to be that of Wolf Mittler, a German journalist, whose almost flawless English accent sounded like that of a caricature of an upper-crust Englishman. However, Mittler made just five or six broadcasts and was quickly replaced by other speakers, leading to uncertainty over whom Barrington had meant. Some British media and listeners used the name "Lord Haw-Haw" for all English-language German broadcasters, although other nicknames, such as "Sinister Sam", were occasionally used by the BBC to distinguish among obviously different speakers. [6] [ page needed ] [7] Poor reception may have contributed to some listeners' difficulties in distinguishing between broadcasters. [6] [ page needed ] By the end of 1939, when Joyce had become the most prominent and regular broadcaster of English-language Nazi propaganda, the name was applied exclusively to him. Indeed, the Germans soon capitalised on the publicity generated in Britain and began announcing Joyce's talks as by "William Joyce, otherwise known as Lord Haw-Haw". [8]
In reference to the nickname, an American pro-Nazi broadcaster, Fred W. Kaltenbach, was nicknamed Lord Hee-Haw by the British media. [9] The Lord Hee-Haw name was also used for a time by The Daily Telegraph to refer to Lord Haw-Haw, causing some confusion between nicknames and broadcasters. [10]
A number of announcers could have been Lord Haw-Haw:
William Joyce replaced Mittler in 1939. Joyce was American-born and raised in Ireland, and as a teenager he was an informant to the British forces about the IRA members during the Irish War of Independence. He was also a senior member of the British Union of Fascists, and fled England when tipped off about his planned internment on 26 August 1939. In October 1939, the Fascist newspaper Action identified "one of the subsidiary announcers" on German radio, "with a marked nasal intonation", as one of its former members and distanced itself from him as a "renegade", whose broadcasts were "likely only to rouse the fighting ire of the average Briton". [17] [18]
In February 1940, the BBC noted that the Lord Haw-Haw of the early war days (possibly Mittler) was now rarely heard on the air and had been replaced by a new spokesman. Joyce was the main German broadcaster in English for most of the war, and became a naturalised German citizen; he is usually regarded as Lord Haw-Haw, even though he was probably not the person first so called. He had a peculiar hybrid accent that was not of the conventional upper-class variety. His distinctive nasal pronunciation of "Germany calling, Germany calling" may have been the result of a fight as a schoolboy that left him with a broken nose. [19]
Joyce, initially an anonymous broadcaster like the others, eventually revealed his real name to his listeners. The Germans capitalised on the fame of the Lord Haw-Haw nickname and came to announce him as "William Joyce, otherwise known as Lord Haw-Haw". [8]
After Joyce took over, Mittler was paired with the American-born announcer Mildred Gillars in the Axis Sally programme and also broadcast to ANZAC forces in North Africa. Mittler survived the war and appeared on postwar German radio, and occasionally television, until his death.
Baillie-Stewart was sentenced to five years' imprisonment.
Joyce was captured by British forces in northern Germany just as the war ended, [20] tried, and eventually hanged for treason on 3 January 1946. [21] Joyce's defence team, appointed by the court, argued that, as an American citizen and naturalised German, Joyce could not be convicted of treason against the British Crown. However, the prosecution successfully argued that, since he had lied about his nationality to obtain a British passport and voted in Britain, Joyce owed allegiance to the king.
In Haw-Haw: The Tragedy of William and Margaret Joyce, [22] the author Nigel Farndale presents evidence that shows that, during his trial, Joyce may have agreed not to reveal his pre-war links with Maxwell Knight, the head of the MI5 section B5(b), as part of a deal to spare his wife Margaret, a Germany Calling broadcaster known as Lady Haw-Haw, from prosecution for treason.
As J. A. Cole has written, "the British public would not have been surprised if, in that Flensburg wood [where he was captured], Haw-Haw had carried in his pocket a secret weapon capable of annihilating an armoured brigade". This mood was reflected in the wartime film Sherlock Holmes and the Voice of Terror (1942), starring Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce, in which Joyce's broadcasts are shown to predict actual disasters and defeats, thus, according to the storyline, seriously undermining British morale.
Other British subjects willingly made propaganda broadcasts, including Raymond Davies Hughes, who broadcast on the German Radio Metropole, and John Amery. P. G. Wodehouse was tricked into broadcasting, not propaganda, but rather his own satiric accounts of his capture by the Germans and civil internment as an enemy alien, by a German friend who assured him that the talks would be broadcast only to the neutral United States. They were, however, relayed to the UK on a little-known channel. An MI5 investigation, conducted shortly after Wodehouse's release from Germany, but published only after his death, found no evidence of treachery. [23]
Frederick Wilhelm Kaltenbach was an American of German ancestry who broadcast Nazi propaganda from Germany during World War II.
Norman Baillie-Stewart was a British army officer who was arrested in 1933 for espionage, and subsequently convicted and imprisoned.
John Amery was a British fascist and Nazi collaborator during World War II. He was the originator of the British Free Corps, a volunteer Waffen-SS unit composed of former British and Dominion prisoners of war.
Peter Pendleton Eckersley was a pioneer of British broadcasting, the first Chief Engineer of the British Broadcasting Company Limited from 1922 to 1927 and Chief Engineer of the British Broadcasting Corporation until 1929.
Axis Sally was the generic nickname given to women radio personalities who broadcast English-language propaganda on behalf of the European Axis Powers during World War II. These included:
The National Socialist League (NSL) was a short-lived Nazi political movement in the United Kingdom immediately prior to the Second World War.
Radio 1212 or Sender 11212 or Nachtsender 1212 was a black propaganda radio station operated from 1944 to 1945 by the Psychological Warfare Branch of the US Office of War Information (OWI) under the direction of CBS radio chief William S. Paley, who was based in London. Nachtsender 1212 broadcast from the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg using the former commercial radio facilities known as Radio Luxembourg, which had been occupied and then liberated from German control during World War II.
The year 1939 saw a number of significant events in radio broadcasting.
Germany Calling was an English language propaganda radio programme, broadcast by Nazi German radio to audiences in the British Isles and North America during the Second World War. Every broadcast began with the station announcement: "Germany calling! Here are the Reichssender Hamburg, station Bremen". Today, it is best known for its employment of several radio presenters jointly known as Lord Haw-Haw — most notably, William Joyce, who was German radio's most prominent English language speaker and to whom the name gradually came to be exclusively applied.
Jonah Barrington was the pseudonym of Cyril Carr Dalmaine the radio critic of the Daily Express, a British newspaper, during the Second World War. He is especially known as being the person who first used the term "Lord Haw-Haw" to describe a German radio broadcaster:
He speaks English of the haw-haw, damn-it-get-out-of-my-way variety, and his strong suit is gentlemanly indignation.
John Angus Macnab (1906–1977) was a British fascist politician who embraced Roman Catholicism under the influence of G. K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc. He was a close associate of William Joyce and later became known as a Perennialist writer on Medieval Spain and a translator of Latin and Greek poetry.
Jane Anderson was an American-Spanish war reporter journalist who broadcast Nazi propaganda in Germany during World War II. She was indicted on charges of treason in 1943, but charges were dropped after the war for lack of evidence.
Max Oscar Otto Koischwitz was a German-American who directed and broadcast Nazi propaganda against the United States during World War II.
Wolf Müller-Mittler was a German radio host and journalist. He was one of the persons associated with the nickname Lord Haw-Haw during World War II, though he only recorded half a dozen propaganda sessions in 1939. He has been described by one author as "a blond Polish-German Anglophile playboy". After the war he worked for Bavarian Radio, translating foreign broadcasts and conducting interviews.
Radio propaganda is propaganda aimed at influencing attitudes towards a certain cause or position, delivered through radio broadcast. The power of radio propaganda came from its revolutionary nature. The radio, like later technological advances in the media, allowed information to be transmitted quickly and uniformly to vast populations. Internationally, the radio was an early and powerful recruiting tool for propaganda campaigns.
Leonard Banning was a British broadcaster of Nazi propaganda during World War II. In 1946, he was convicted of offences under the Defence Regulations and sentenced to 10 years' penal servitude. He was born in St Albans, Hertfordshire.
William Brooke Joyce, nicknamed Lord Haw-Haw, was an American-born fascist and Nazi propaganda broadcaster during the Second World War. After moving from New York to Ireland and subsequently to England, Joyce became a member of Oswald Mosley's British Union of Fascists (BUF) from 1932, before finally moving to Germany at the outset of the war where he took German citizenship in 1940.
This is a list of events from British radio in 1945.
This is a list of events from British radio in 1939.
Bibliography
Dorothy Eckersley...a [fascist] political radical... with her connections got William Joyce hired by German Radio