Lord Haw-Haw
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. Through such broadcasts, the Reich Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda tried to discourage and demoralise both Allied troops and the British population. Although the broadcasts were known to be Nazi propaganda, they often offered the only details of Allied troops and air crews caught behind enemy lines.
The nickname, coined by a reporter, was applied to other broadcasters of English-language propaganda from Germany, but it is Joyce with whom the name is overwhelmingly identified.
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, a German-Jewish refugee serving in the British Army who announced the British takeover. Pinschewer was later responsible for the capture of William Joyce.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. Mass-Observation interviews warned the Ministry of Information of this; consequently, more attention was given to the official reports of British military casualties.
Origin of the name
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". 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…
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. Poor reception may have contributed to some listeners' difficulties in distinguishing between broadcasters. 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".
In reference to the nickname, an American pro-Nazi broadcaster, Fred W. Kaltenbach, was nicknamed Lord Hee-Haw by the British media. 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.
Announcers associated with the nickname
A number of announcers could have been Lord Haw-Haw:- Wolf Mittler is widely believed to be the voice that Jonah Barrington originally wrote about, thus making Mittler the original 'Lord Haw-Haw'. Mittler, who was a German journalist, spoke almost 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. It was said that he found broadcasting political matters distasteful and that he was happy to be replaced. One of those who replaced him, Norman Baillie-Stewart, stated that Mittler "sounded almost like a caricature of an Englishman". Mittler told the BBC in 1991 that it "can't have been more than five or six times" that he made the broadcasts "because I remember quite distinctly that these two chaps, Stewart and Joyce, popped up and relieved me of the job". In 1943, Mittler was deemed suspect and arrested by the Gestapo, but he managed to escape to Switzerland. After the war, he worked extensively for German radio and television.
- 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 for the German broadcaster RRG between August and December 1939. He was imprisoned 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 concluded that it was probably Mittler whose voice Barrington had heard. He may, however, have been the broadcaster the BBC called "Sinister Sam".
- Eduard Dietze, a Glasgow-born broadcaster of a mixed German–British–Hungarian family background, is another possible, but less likely, candidate for the original Lord Haw-Haw. 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.
- James R. Clark was a young English broadcaster and a friend of William Joyce. Clark and his pro-Nazi mother, Dorothy Eckersley, were both tried for treason after the war. 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. 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 in a German school. After this move, "Dorothy Eckersley came to play a key role in William Joyce's fate in Berlin".
William Joyce
In February 1940, the BBC noted that the Lord Haw-Haw of the early war days 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.
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".
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.Baillie-Stewart was sentenced to five years' imprisonment.
Joyce was captured by British forces in northern Germany just as the war ended, 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.
In Haw-Haw: The Tragedy of William and Margaret Joyce, 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, 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 , 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, 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.