Lord Haw Haw - Britain's most vile Fascist?

The rise and rise of Fascism in inter-war Britain was both powerful and nightmarish. I had little trouble researching Sir Oswald Mosley, the BUF and its organised opposition, The 43 Group; the Battle of Cable St in the East End of London; Archibald Ramsay and the Right Club; two of the Mitford sisters; and King Edward VIII and Wallis Simpson. The elephant in the room was always going to be William Joyce, and that was a story clouded in secrecy. So thank you to The Heretical Press for presenting new evidence.

William Joyce (1906–1946) was born in New York to an Irish Catholic father, and when he was a child the family left the USA and moved back to Ireland, settling in County Mayo. Because the family was very Cons­ervative and pro-Union, they were very unpopular with the local Sinn Fein supporters. Joyce's early life was marked by violence, but luckily for him he was very athletic, strong and brutal.

In 1924, while working as a patrolman at a Conservative Party meeting, Joyce was silently trapped by men in black; he received a deep razor slash that ran across his right cheek to his mouth, leaving a permanent scar. In an incident that he relived over and over in his mind, Joyce claimed his attackers were Jewish communists.

Joyce formally joined the Conservative Party, but left after a short period in 1931. He called the old men of the Con­serv­ative Party weak, grasping and dishonest men, who were betray­ing the nation to the Agents of International Finance. In particularly the Conservative Party failed him by not being anti-Semitic enough.

In 1932, Joyce joined the British Union of Fascists (BUF) and was much admired for being brutal with his knuckledusters in fights against the anti-Fascists. More surp­ris­ingly Joyce became a leading speak­er, praised for his power of oratory. “His speech was elect­rifying, so terrifying in its dynamic force, so vituperative, so vitriolic.

Germany Calling: A Personal Biography of William Joyce, Lord Haw-Haw 
written by Mary Kenny and published by New island Books, 2013.

Two years later, Joyce was promoted to the BUF's Director of Propaganda under Sir Oswald Mosley. But a devastated Joyce was sacked from his paid position in the party by Mosley in 1937. By the time war broke out, Joyce was adamant that Britain was being led into another pointless war and the governments of Neville Chamb­erlain and Winston Churchill were betraying their people.

In Aug 1939 Joyce fled from the UK when tipped off about the government's plan­ned internment of Fascists. He escaped to Germany where friends put him in contact with the Private Secretary to Germany's For­eign Minister von Ribbentrop. Just a fortnight after the out­break of war, he was appointed Editor and speaker for the German transmit­ters for Europe in Berlin.

Joyce became the main German broadcaster in English, and became a naturalised German citizen. The English-language propaganda radio programme Germany Call­ing was broadcast to UK audiences on the mediumwave station Reichssender Hamburg and by shortwave abroad. The programme started in Sep 1939 and continued until April 1945, when the British Army was finally victorious.

Through such broadcasts, the Reich Ministry of Public Enlighten­ment and Propaganda wanted to demoralise both British and British Commonwealth troops and English-speaking citizens, and to spread German propag­anda. For example the German broadcasts happily rep­orted on the loss of Allied aircraft and ships. Allied troops and civilians often felt they had to listen to Lord Haw-Haw's broadcasts because they offered the only details available from behind enemy lines concerning the fate of Allied soldiers.

Lord Haw Haw and his wife Margaret in Germany

photo credit: Daily Mail

Joyce was capt­ured by British forces in northern Germany just as the war ended. He was taken back to Wandsworth Prison in Britain, tried, found guilty and hanged for treason in Jan 1946.

Why did he betray his own adopted British nation? Facing death Joyce wrote “In death, as in this life, I defy the Jews who caused this last war, and I defy the power of darkness which they represent. I warn the British people against the crushing imperialism of the Soviet Union. May Britain be great once again and in the hour of the greatest danger in the west may the Swastika be raised from the dust, crowned with the historic words: You have conquered never­the­less. I am proud to die for my ideals; and I am sorry for the sons of Britain who have died without knowing why”.

Did he believe it was worth risking the lives of 40 million British citizens to exterminate a tiny Jewish population? Or was he admonishing the Allies for fighting a war secretly organised by the Jews? In either case he was being disingenuous! His radio voice suggested he was totally thrilled when London was blitzed and Coventry almost disappeared from the map!

Commentators have since argued that Joyce achieved nothing except a reputation as a comical, almost pathetic, figure in Britain. But this was never true. The Nazis were de­lighted that Joyce’s anti-Semitism never faded in its viru­lence. For his efforts Joyce continued to live a comfortable life in Berlin and in Sep 1944 was awarded the Cross of War Merit 1st Class with a certificate signed by Adolf Hitler himself. And from the other side, there was also an impact. The an­x­ious mood in Britain was well depicted in the wartime film Sherlock Holmes and the Voice of Terror (1942), starring Basil Rathbone. In the film, Joyce's broadcasts were shown to pred­ict actual defeats, thus seriously undermining British morale.

Some British media and list­eners used "Lord Haw-Haw" as a generic term to describe all English-language German broad­casters using an unintentionally comic upper-class accent. The same nickname was also applied to some other broad­casters of English-language propaganda from Germany. eg James R. Clark was a young English broadcaster and a friend of British Fascists William Joyce and and Unity Mitford. James Clark's mother Dorothy Eckersley showed great interest in German National Socialism and Fascism, and moved to Germany with her teenage son, enrolling him in a German school. Clark and his pro-Nazi mother were both tried for treason and she was gaoled after the war.

But today the nickname almost always refers just to William Joyce.

I don’t believe in capital punishment in ANY event, but I do understand the British government’s reluctance to let a war-time traitor go on with his role. Even had he been given a life sent­ence with no parole, he would certainly have become a celebrated martyr to the Fascist cause in Britain. I suggest this proves how influential Lord Haw Haw truly was during the war - the British government felt hanging was the only possible outcome.