William Joyce

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William Joyce as a prisoner of war in 1945

William Joyce alias Lord Haw-Haw (born April 24, 1906 in Brooklyn , NY , † January 3, 1946 in Wandsworth ) was an Irish - American fascist politician and during the Second World War a propaganda broadcaster for the National Socialists . He was executed by the British for high treason . As the holder of a British passport, he owed allegiance to the British state - ironically, he had tricked his identity card with false information.

Life

youth

Joyce was a child of an Irish, Catholic father and an English , Anglican mother was born. A few years after his birth, his family returned to Galway , Ireland, where he attended St. Ignatius College from 1915 to 1921 . Unusual for Irish Catholics , William Joyce and his father were staunch unionists . William Joyce later claimed to have supported the Black and Tans and to have been threatened by the IRA because of it . Fearing revenge, the Joyce family moved to London after the establishment of the Irish Free State . Here William Joyce applied at Birkbeck College of the University of London and later for admission to the Officer Training Corps . In college, Joyce developed his interest in fascism and joined the British Fascisti of Rotha Lintorn-Orman .

While serving at a Conservative Party event in 1924 , he was attacked with a razor and sustained a deep cut across his right cheek from the earlobe to the corner of his mouth, which left a permanent scar. Joyce was convinced that his attacker was a " Jewish communist ". This incident strongly shaped his worldview.

British Union of Fascists

In 1932 he joined Oswald Mosley's British Union of Fascists and, as a gifted speaker, quickly rose to become one of its spokesmen. The journalist and novelist Cecil Roberts describes a speech by William Joyce as follows:

"Thin, pale and violent, he hadn't spoken for many minutes before we were electrified by this man, ... so captivating in his dynamism, so offensive, with such caustic sharpness."

In 1934 Joyce rose to the position of BUF propaganda officer and was later named Mosley's deputy. In addition to his reputation as a public speaker, Joyce has also earned a reputation as a riot maker. His aggressive rhetoric and the willingness to take physical action against his opponents certainly contributed to dampening the British sympathy for fascism that was certainly there.

At a BUF meeting in the London Olympia exhibition center with 30,000 participants, bloody riots broke out between 500 anti-fascists and 1,000 black-shirt stewards who entered the hall. In the wake of the public outcry over these riots, Joyce took the lead in changing BUF policy from economic revival to anti-Semitism .

Joyce supported the BUF's name change to the British Union of Fascists and National Socialists in 1936 . In 1937 he was a candidate for the London County Council elections . However, Mosley reduced the leadership of the BUF shortly after the elections, with Joyce losing his position. So Joyce formed a splinter organization, the National Socialist League .

Unlike Joyce, Mosley was never a declared anti-Semite, preferring to use only anti-Jewish sentiments as a useful political tool. After 1937 his party turned from anti-Semitism to anti-war activism. Although Joyce had been the BUF's deputy leader and influential speaker since 1933, Mosley denied him in his autobiography and denounced him as a traitor for his work in the war.

Joyce aka Lord Haw Haw

When the situation on the European continent came to a head in the summer of 1939, Joyce fled to Germany with his wife Margaret. He had (possibly by Maxwell Knight of MI5 ), will be notified that the British authorities it to the Defense Regulation 18B intern wanted. In Germany he soon found employment in Joseph Goebbels ' Propaganda Ministry and became the spokesman for the Germany Calling program . The program was produced in Berlin until 1943, then in Stuttgart and broadcast via the Reichsender Hamburg . In 1940 Joyce became a German citizen through naturalization .

The name, Lord Haw-Haw of Zeesen 'was 1939 by the pseudonymous Daily Express - radio critic Jonah Barrington coined, referring initially but on Wolf Mittler or possibly Norman Baillie-Stewart . When Joyce became the most famous propaganda broadcaster, the nickname was passed on to him.

Joyce's programs became very popular with the British public: at times, more than six million English people listened to his programs, also because the names of British prisoners of war in Germany and their letters were read out and short interviews were recorded, in short: everything that the soldiers' families were burning at home interested. They always started with the words "Germany calling, Germany calling", but due to Joyce's nasal pronunciation it always sounded like "Jairmany calling, Jairmany calling". The programs urged the British people to give up and were known for their sneering, sarcastic and threatening tones. They did not undermine British morality; many were annoyed or scoffed at Joyce. On the other hand, the British, especially from the lower classes, liked to hear the professionally made mockery of their authorities.

Joyce's last show aired on April 30, 1945. Audibly drunk, he berated Great Britain for its role in Germany's impending defeat and warned that the war would now leave Britain poor and barren. He concluded with the last defiant words: “Long live Germany! Heil Hitler and farewell! ".

In addition to his radio broadcasts, Joyce's duties were to spread propaganda among British prisoners of war . He tried to recruit her for the British Free Corps , a branch of the Waffen SS . He also wrote a book, Twilight over England , sponsored by the German Ministry of Propaganda: a work in which he drew an unfavorable comparison between the evils of supposedly Jewish-dominated capitalist Britain and the wonders of Nazi Germany. Adolf Hitler awarded Joyce the War Merit Cross, First and Second Class, for his show .

In the winter of 1941/42, the RSHA deployed Joyce to lectures at the University of Berlin only for SS members.

British capture, sentence and execution

In the last days of the war, Joyce fled via the so-called Rattenlinie Nord to Flensburg and went into hiding with forged papers as Wilhelm Hansen . At the end of May 1945 he and his wife were accidentally caught by units of the 2nd British Army in Kupfermühle . He was asked to identify himself, so he reached into his pocket; one of the soldiers thought he was going to draw a gun and shot him. This British soldier (Geoffrey Perry, born Horst Pinschewer) had to flee Germany as a Jew. He has now arrested the Irish-American radio announcer who pretended to be British and then became German.

Joyce was brought to England and tried. He was accused of “promoting and supporting the enemies of the king ” by broadcasting propaganda to his subjects as well as by striving for naturalization as a German.

Joyce asserted in his defense that his motives for the programs were patriotic: his aim was an anti-communist alliance between Germany and Great Britain.

In the course of the trial it was discovered that Joyce was not a British but a US citizen , so that as a non-citizen he could not be charged with high treason at all . The attorney general , Sir Hartley Shawcross , argued successfully on the following grounds: Joyce had received a British passport with false information about his nationality , which had expired in July 1940. During its validity this had granted him British diplomatic protection , therefore Joyce owed allegiance to the king during this time.

Joyce was sentenced to death by hanging . The Court of Appeal and the House of Lords upheld the verdict. On January 3, 1946, it was executed in Wandsworth Prison by the executioner Albert Pierrepoint . Joyce was the penultimate man executed in the UK for a crime other than murder ( Theodore Schurch was executed in Pentonville Prison the following day for espionage ). It was also the last case in the history of British criminal law where a person was sentenced to death for high treason.

Historian Alan JP Taylor commented: "In the end, Joyce was executed for false testimony in front of the passport authority, an offense that usually costs a mere two pounds fine."

Margaret Joyce aka Lady Haw Haw

Joyce married Margaret White, who was born in 1901 in Old Trafford , Manchester , for the second time in 1937 . She became deputy treasurer in his short-lived National Socialist League and fled with him to Germany at the end of August 1939, shortly before the declaration of war, where she became a German citizen through naturalization in 1940. From November 1940 (October 1939 according to other sources) she made regular radio propaganda broadcasts aimed at women in the United Kingdom. It propagated the allegedly much better general supply situation in Germany compared to the 'poor' in the UK and better social security. She first became known as 'Lady Haw-Haw' and from December 1942 under her own name.

In his biography of William and Margaret Joyce, the British author and journalist Nigel Farndale writes, after reviewing documents first made public between 2000 and 2005, that the British judiciary was also considering indicting Margaret.

MI5 had at least 500 radio recordings and wages for over 33,000 Reichsmarks, and Margaret, unlike her Irish-American husband, was English "like hot beer." However, there was apparently an agreement between the prosecution and Joyce, according to which Joyce would not tell about his connections to MI5 and that in return his wife would not be charged. And so it happened: two days after Joyce's execution, she was released from arrest, flown from London to Brussels on a military plane and, after she had acquired German citizenship during the war, deported to the British zone of occupation in Germany.

Farndale writes: "So the American husband was hanged as an Englishman, and his equally guilty English wife was released as a German."

Of the 32 British defectors and propagandists who were apprehended in Germany immediately after the war, she was the only one who was not charged with treason, despite being listed as' Case No. 9 'at MI5. In late 1947 she reappeared on the files of MI5 and the Foreign Office and it was decided that she could return, this time as British; when exactly she returned is unclear. Margaret Joyce died in 1972 in Soho ( London ), reportedly to alcohol abuse .

Different family

William Joyce had two daughters with his first wife Hazel, who then married Oswald Mosley's bodyguard Eric Piercey. One of them, Heather Landolo, had her father transferred from his unmarked grave site in the courtyard of Wandsworth Prison to New Cemetery in Bohermore , County Galway , Ireland in 1976 .

Others

The life of William Joyce was the model for Kurt Vonnegut's character Howard W. Campbell in his novels Mother Night and Slaughterhouse Five .

literature

Twilight over England. 3. Edition. 1942
  • William Joyce: Twilight Over England. International publishing house Cesare Santoro, Berlin 1940.
  • Rebecca West: The Meaning of Treason. Macmillan, London 1949.
  • William Cole: Lord Haw-Haw and William Joyce. Faber and Faber, London 1964.
  • Francis Selwyn: Hitler's Englishman. Routledge and Kegan Paul, London 1987.
  • Mary Kenny: Germany Calling - a personal biography of William Joyce. New Island Books, Dublin 2003.
  • Nigel Farndale: Haw-Haw: the tragedy of William and Margaret Joyce. Macmillan, London 2005.
  • CE Bechhofer Roberts (Ed.): The Trial of William Joyce. (= Old Bailey Trials series ). Jarrolds, London 1946.
  • Margret Boveri : Treason in the Twentieth Century . In: The time . No. 32/1956.

Radio plays

  • Robert Neumann : Lord Haw Haw. The man who wanted to be Goebbels' Goebbels [radio feature about William Joyce]; no indication of realization. Manuscript concept in the estate of the Austrian National Library . Signature: ONB06-000140079 or Cod.Ser.n. 20968 (n.d.).
  • Johann Buchholz, Daniel Gerlach: Lord Haw-Haw, Hitler's English voice . A documentary radio play with Ulrich Noethen, 2006 Random House Audio.

Web links

Commons : William Joyce  - Collection of Images, Videos and Audio Files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Ron Christenson: Political trials in history: from antiquity to the present . Transaction Publishers, 1991, ISBN 0-88738-406-4 ( google.com [accessed June 22, 2009]).
  2. ^ A b Matthias Matussek: Propaganda war in the ether. Hitler's malicious lord. In: one day . July 2, 2010, accessed April 30, 2011.
  3. ↑ Radiografías de la historia: Lord Haw Haw William Joyce Final Broadcast 1945. Retrieved July 20, 2020 .
  4. ↑ About the English fascism as well as acute questions of the Engl. World empire . Name prescribed to Joice. homepages.uni-tuebingen.de (PDF; 670 kB) p. 52.
  5. ↑ Goebbels' engelske stemme gemte sig i Kobbermølle (Danish) Flensborg avis online, 14 August 2020.
  6. ↑ a b nickelinthemachine.com The execution of Lord Haw-Haw, 1946 (Engl.) Called on 20130615
  7. ↑ Michael Smith: How Lady Haw Haw was shown mercy. In: The Telegraph . November 10, 2000, accessed October 25, 2018 .
  8. ↑ a b c d e Nigel Farndale: Love and treachery. In: The Telegraph . May 9, 2005, accessed October 24, 2018 .
  9. ↑ Nigel Farndale: Haw-Haw: The Tragedy of William and Margaret Joyce . Macmillan, 2005, ISBN 0-333-98992-9 .
  10. ^ Sunday Dispatch Reporter: MRS. JOYCE IS AN ALIEN, TO BE DEPORTED. Sunday Dispatch archived at The National Archives , January 6, 1946, accessed October 25, 2018 .
  11. ↑ Control Office for Germany and Austria and Foreign Office: Control Commission for Germany (British Element), Legal Division, and UK High Commission, Legal Division: Nationality problems: Mrs Margaret Cairns Joyce widow of convicted traitor William Joyce. The National Archives , November 10, 2000, accessed October 25, 2018 .
  12. ^ Francis Beckett : 'My father was a traitor but he was kind and loving to me' . In: The Guardian , December 5, 2005. Retrieved June 8, 2019. 
personal data
SURNAME Joyce, William
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Lord Haw-Haw
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British Union of Fascists
DATE OF BIRTH April 24, 1906
PLACE OF BIRTH Brooklyn , NY
DATE OF DEATH January 3, 1946
Place of death Wandsworth