Douglas Chandler

Douglas Chandler (* 1889 in Chicago , Illinois , † after 1963 in Connecticut ; also Paul Revere or Lord Ho-Hum ) was an American journalist and radio propagandist for Großdeutscher Rundfunk .

Life

Chandler grew up with two sisters in Baltimore . He attended a private school and entered the advertising industry at the age of 18. Shortly before the end of the First World War , he was in the US Navy and afterwards wrote a column for the Baltimore Sunday American newspaper , among other businesses .

In 1924 he married Laura Jay Wurts from Pittsburgh , the daughter of the Westinghouse inventor and professor at the Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie Mellon University ), Alexander Jay Wurts, a descendant of John Jay . In the Great Depression , which Chandler attributed to the “un-American fog from the swamp of imported Jewish- Bolshevik subversion ”, he suffered economic damage and in 1931 he moved to Trieste with his wife and two young daughters .

Europe

The family lived in France, Austria, Germany, Yugoslavia, and Italy. Chandler wrote geological and ethnological articles for the German press and from 1936 for National Geographic . Since 1927 he dealt with National Socialism ; Even before the war began, he had contact with Rolf Hoffmann, an employee of the Reich Press Office. In 1940 he moved from Yugoslavia to Florence and developed the idea of ​​acting as a radio host to warn Americans about entering the European war. He first addressed the Italian government under Benito Mussolini , but they refused.

The US consul in Florence did not allow Chandler to travel to Germany with his American passport; he moved to Berlin with a German alien passport in February 1941, and his family followed him later.

Großdeutscher Rundfunk

Chandler offered to help the German Propaganda Ministry and sent to the United States for six months as " Paul Revere ". The intro of his radio shows consisted of the Yankee Doodle , accompanied by the sound of galloping horses.

After the attack on Pearl Harbor when Americans were repatriated from Berlin , Chandler decided to stay. In early 1942 he signed a contract as a commentator for USA news with the Reichsrundfunkgesellschaft - German short wave station. For this work he received 1,000 Reichsmarks per month. In addition, Chandler had two further contracts of 750 RM each - with the foreign language service agency and the Anti-Comintern . He earned more than twice as much as the head of the US department of the shortwave station, as the US court ruled in 1948.

Between July and October 1942 he interrupted his three weekly broadcasts because of the death of his wife Laura and then again in the summer of 1943, this time for five months. His broadcasts recorded in Vienna were transmitted to Berlin via the German shortwave transmitter , where they were recorded on tape and broadcast. After not broadcasting for two months in the spring of 1944 due to illness, he moved to Durach in October of that year and recorded in Munich until February 1945. This time he turned down the position as superintendent of the shortwave station that he was now being offered and for which he had unsuccessfully applied in 1943 and did not move to Berlin.

arrest

A first treason charge against Chandler was brought by the United States District Court Columbia on July 26, 1943.

Chandler was arrested by the United States Army in Durach in May 1945, but released on October 23. At the request of the US Department of Justice , he was arrested again on March 12, 1946 and in December of that year via Paris, the Azores , Gander (Newfoundland), along the Chesapeake Bay , across the Potomac River (all non-US 'land') and Went to 'Westmoreland Field' near Boston , Massachusetts , to Washington DC . Here he was formally arrested, placed under the old 1943 indictment, and handed over to the marshal district of Massachusetts because he was "first back in the country" there. The circumstances arose from the legal problem that the defendant treason had not taken place in the United States but abroad, Chandler was not in the country and he was also to be indicted in the District of Columbia along with Robert Best .

process

The Chandler trial was the first in a series of former Axis propagandists who were US citizens. This was followed by Mildred Gillars , Robert Best and Iva Ikuko Toguri D'Aquino , among others . In Great Britain it was preceded by the case of William Joyce in 1946, which set the legal direction.

In his defense, Chandler stated that he wanted to help his country. 16 former German employees testified against him in the trial. His lawyer advocated a paranoid form of insanity because of his anti-Semitism ; the jury followed suit in disobeying Prosecutor Oscar R. Ewing's death penalty for undermining morale on the home front and in the field. The fact that Chandler might have only carried out the instructions of the daily briefing of the radio department heads by Joseph Goebbels , as an interviewee Ewings addressed in 1969, was not discussed.

Douglas Chandler was sentenced to life imprisonment and a $  10,000 fine on December 3, 1948 . The fact that Chandler's work was rated so highly was also due to the importance attached to subversion , espionage and propaganda as the fourth military force (alongside air, land and naval forces) in the United States during World War II . (see: Office of the Coordinator of Information , United States Office of War Information )

In 1953 one of his daughters went to Oscar Ewing, the former Special Assistant to the Attorney General and now the Federal Security Administrator who had started the series of trials, and asked for a recommendation to suspend or pardon their father. This refused. It was not until 1963 that Chandler was pardoned by President Kennedy .

literature

• John Carver Edwards: Berlin Calling: American Broadcasters in Service to the Third Reich . Embossers. 1991

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Time Magazine , June 9, 1941. ( Memento of the original from August 31, 2019 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. 
2. ^ Chandler v. United States of America, December 3, 1948
3. ↑ Time Magazine , July 7, 1947.
4. ↑ Interview with Oscar R. Ewing from April 30, 1969
5. ↑ Douglas Chandler . In: Der Spiegel . No. 34 , 1963 ( online ).