Lord Haw-Haw

Lord Haw-Haw was a nickname applied to William Joyce, who broadcast Nazi propaganda to the UK from Germany during the Second World War. The broadcasts opened with "Germany calling, Germany calling", spoken in an affected upper-class English accent.

For the person most often called "Lord Haw-Haw", see William Joyce.

1945: William Joyce lies in an ambulance under armed guard before being taken from British Second Army Headquarters to a hospital.

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 now overwhelmingly identified. There are various theories about its origin.

Aim of broadcasts

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 (aka Geoffrey Perry), a German 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 sometimes infuriating content and frequent inaccuracies and exaggerations, in the hopes of learning clues about 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]

Origin of the name

Radio critic Jonah Barrington of the Daily Express applied the phrase in describing a German broadcaster,[4] in an attempt to reduce his possible impact: "He speaks English of the haw-haw, dammit-get-out-of-my-way-variety".[5][6] The "Haw, Haw" name reference was then applied to a number of different announcers and, even soon after Barrington coined the nickname, it was uncertain exactly which specific German broadcaster he was describing.[7] Some British media and listeners just used "Lord Haw-Haw" as a generic term to describe all English-language German broadcasters, although other nicknames, like "Sinister Sam", were occasionally used by the BBC to distinguish between obviously different speakers. Poor reception may have contributed to some listeners' difficulties in distinguishing between broadcasters.[8]

In reference to the nickname, American pro-Nazi broadcaster Fred W. Kaltenbach was given the moniker Lord Hee-Haw by the British media.[9] The Lord Hee-Haw name, however, was used for a time by The Daily Telegraph to refer to Lord Haw-Haw, generating some confusion between nicknames and broadcasters.[10]

Announcers associated with the nickname

A number of announcers could have been Lord Haw-Haw:

  • Wolf Mittler was a German journalist. Mittler spoke near-flawless English, which he had learned from his mother, who had been born of German parents in Ireland. His persona was described by some listeners as similar to the fictional aristocrat Bertie Wooster.[11] Reportedly finding political matters distasteful, he was relieved to be replaced by Norman Baillie-Stewart, who stated that Mittler "sounded almost like a caricature of an Englishman".[12] It has been speculated that it was Mittler's voice which Barrington described; if so it would make him the original Lord Haw-Haw.[7] In 1943, Mittler was deemed suspect and arrested by the Gestapo, but he managed to escape to Switzerland.[13] After the war, he worked extensively for German radio and television.[14]
  • Norman Baillie-Stewart was a former officer of the Seaforth Highlanders who was cashiered for selling secrets to Nazi Germany. He worked as a broadcaster in Germany for a short time in 1939. He was jailed for five years by the British after the war. For a time he claimed that he was the original Lord Haw-Haw. He did have an upper-class accent, but he later decided that it was probably Mittler whose voice Barrington had heard. He may have been the broadcaster the BBC referred to as "Sinister Sam".[7]
  • Eduard Dietze, a Glasgow-born broadcaster of a mixed German-British-Hungarian family background,[15] is another possible, but less likely, candidate for the original Lord Haw-Haw.[8] He was one of the English-speaking announcers with an "upper-crust accent" who were heard on German radio in the early days of the war.[16]
  • James R. Clark was a young English broadcaster and a friend of William Joyce.[8] Clark and his pro-Nazi mother, Mrs. Dorothy Eckersley, were both tried for treason after the war.[17] Dorothy Eckersley was born Dorothy Stephen in 1893. She later married Edward Clark, a musician, and had a son, James Clark, who was born in 1923. She divorced her first husband and was married to Peter Eckersley, a senior figure working in the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC). After ten years of marriage to Peter Eckersley, Dorothy's increasing interest in German National Socialism and fascism led her to move to Germany with her son, enrolling him (by then aged 17 years) in a German school. Following this move, "...Dorothy Eckersley came to play a key role in William Joyce's fate in Berlin..."[18]

William Joyce
Main article: William Joyce

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.".[19][20]

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 in 1940; he is usually regarded as Lord Haw-Haw, even though he was probably not the person to whom the term originally referred. 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.[21]

Joyce, initially an anonymous broadcaster like the others, eventually revealed his real name to his listeners. The Germans actually capitalised on the fame of the Lord Haw-Haw nickname and came to announce him as "William Joyce, otherwise known as Lord Haw-Haw".[7]

Later history and aftermath

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,[22] tried, and eventually hanged for treason on 3 January 1946. 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.

As J. A. Cole has written, "the British public would not have been surprised if, in that Flensburg wood, 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 seriously undermining British morale.

British subjects who broadcast

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]

"Lord Hee-Haw, Chief Wind-Bag" from the 1943 animated propaganda film Tokio Jokio

Film
  • In the 1940s, actor Geoffrey Sumner played Lord Haw-Haw for laughs in a series of Pathé Gazette short subjects named "Nasti" News From Lord Haw-Haw.[24]
  • The 1943 animated propaganda cartoon Tokio Jokio has a brief sequence with an anthropomorphic donkey wearing a monocle, seated at a desk with a sign reading "Lord Hee-Haw, Chief Wind Bag", as he reads from a script into a microphone.

Print

Theatre
  • Joyce's radio broadcasts and his relationship with his wife were dramatised in the stage play Double Cross (1983), by Thomas Kilroy. Stephen Rea played the role of Joyce.[27]
gollark: https://github.com/joaomilho/Enterprise
gollark: Wait, is it *in* the Enterprise™ programming language?
gollark: https://github.com/EnterpriseQualityCoding/FizzBuzzEnterpriseEdition
gollark: Java is enterprise.
gollark: ... Java?

See also

References
Notes
  1. "Churchill's German Army". National Geographic.
  2. Stourton, Edward (2015). Auntie's War. Doubleday. pp. 75–86. ISBN 9780857523327.
  3. Freedman, Jean R. (1999). Whistling in the dark: memory and culture in wartime London. Lexington, Ky: University Press of Kentucky. p. 47. ISBN 0-8131-2076-4.
  4. Hall, J. W. (1954). "William Joyce". In Hodge, James H. (ed.). Famous Trials. 4. Penguin Books. p. 80. Usually, the inventor of a popular nickname is unidentifiable, but the 'onlie begetter' of Lord Haw-Haw was undoubtedly Mr Jonah Barrington, then of the Daily Express…CS1 maint: ref=harv (link)
  5. Freedman (1999: 43)
  6. Farndale, Nigel. Haw-Haw: The Tragedy of William and Margaret Joyce, 2005 (ISBN 0-333-98992-9)
  7. Doherty 2000, p. 13
  8. Kenny, Mary (2004) Germany Calling – A Personal Biography of Lord Haw-Haw, William Joyce "Archived copy". Archived from the original on 21 February 2010. Retrieved 21 April 2010.CS1 maint: archived copy as title (link)
  9. Laurie, Clayton D. "Goebbel's Iowan: Frederick W. Kaltenbach and Nazi Short-Wave Radio Broadcasts to America, 1939-1945". Traces. Archived from the original on 10 November 2017. Retrieved 18 October 2018.
  10. Lord Haw-Haw & William Joyce: the full story, Faber & Faber, 1964, page 126
  11. "Germany calls again as Lord Haw-Haw goes online", The Irish Times. Dublin. 4 February 2010.
  12. Doherty 2000, p. 10
  13. Kultur as Bayern Archived 19 July 2011 at the Wayback Machine.
  14. "Programm vom Dienstag, den 29. März 1960". Tvprogramme.net. Retrieved 6 April 2011.
  15. Doherty 2000, p. 7
  16. Doherty 2000, pp. 11–12
  17. Doherty 2000, p. 11
  18. page 152 of Mary Kenny's biography on Lord Haw Haw "Germany Calling" (https://mary-kenny.com/books/germany-calling/) Furthermore [ref. page 192] "Dorothy Eckersley...a [Fascist] political radical... with her connections got William Joyce hired by German Radio". As for her son [ref. page 192] "...James Clark had a teenage enthusiasm for Adolf Hitler, and also worked at the Rundfunk as a newsreader..."
  19. German Radio Announcer." In: Action, 12 October 1939, p.8.
  20. German Radio." In: Action, 19 October 1939, p.8.
  21. Wharam 1995, p. 166
  22. "THE OCCUPATION: Renegade's Return". Time. XLV (24). 11 June 1945.CS1 maint: ref=harv (link)
  23. Iain Sproat, 'Wodehouse, Sir Pelham Grenville (1881–1975)', Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, Sept 2004; online edn, Oct 2007
  24. ""Nasti" News from Lord Haw Haw". British Pathé historical archive. London: British Pathé. 25 January 1940. Archived from the original on 18 January 2013. Retrieved 8 March 2011.
  25. Russell, William Howard (1895). The Great War with Russia. London: Routledge. p. 177. OCLC 758948288.
  26. https://thedailyvonnegut.com/interviews/american-fascism-and-mother-night-an-interview-with-professor-susan-farrell/
  27. "Irish Playography". Irish Playography. 3 February 1986. Retrieved 6 April 2011.
Bibliography
  • Biggs, Stanley Champion (2007). As Luck Would Have It in War and Peace. Trafford Publishing. OCLC 230986018.CS1 maint: ref=harv (link)
  • Cole, J. A. (1965). Lord Haw-Haw & William Joyce: The Full Story. Farrar, Straus, & Giroux. OCLC 318091.CS1 maint: ref=harv (link)
  • Doherty, M. A (2000). "Organisation of Nazi Wireless Propaganda". Nazi wireless propaganda: Lord Haw-Haw and British public opinion in the Second World War. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. ISBN 0-7486-1363-3.
  • Farndale, Nigel (2005). Haw-Haw: The Tragedy of William and Margaret Joyce. Macmillan ISBN 0-333-98992-9
  • Wharam, Alan (1995). Treason: Famous English Treason Trials. Alan Sutton Publishing. ISBN 978-0-7509-0991-4.CS1 maint: ref=harv (link)
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