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William Joyce

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William Joyce (April 24, 1906 – January 3, 1946), known as Lord Haw-Haw, was a fascist politician and Nazi propaganda broadcaster to the United Kingdom during World War II. Controversially, he was executed for treason by the British as a result of his wartime activities.

Contents

Early life

Joyce was born at 1877 Herkimer Street in Brooklyn, New York City, to an English mother and Irish father who had taken United States citizenship. A few years after his birth, the family returned to Galway, Ireland. He attended St. Ignatius College, Galway, from 1915 to 1921. Unusually for Irish Roman Catholics (particularly Irish Americans), the Joyces were strongly Loyalist. William Joyce later claimed to have aided the Black and Tans, and to have been threatened by the Irish Republican Army because of this. Fearing revenge, the Joyce family left for London after the establishment of the Irish Free State, and William Joyce applied to Birkbeck College of the University of London and to enter the Officer Training Corps. At Birkbeck, Joyce developed an interest in fascism, and he joined the British Fascisti of Rotha Lintorn-Orman. In 1924, while stewarding a Conservative Party meeting, Joyce was attacked and received a deep razor slash that ran across his right cheek. It left a permanent scar which ran from the earlobe to the corner of the mouth. Joyce was convinced that his attackers were "Jewish communists". It was an incident that had a marked bearing on his outlook.

British Union of Fascists

In 1932, Joyce joined the British Union of Fascists (BUF) under Sir Oswald Mosley, and swiftly became a leading speaker, praised for his power of oratory. The journalist and novelist Cecil Roberts described a speech given by Joyce:
"Thin, pale, intense, he had not been speaking many minutes before we were electrified by this man... so terrifying in its dynamic force, so vituperative, so vitriolic."
In 1934, Joyce was promoted to the BUF's director of propaganda and then later appointed as deputy leader. As well as a gifted speaker, Joyce also gained the reputation of a savage brawler. Joyce's violent rhetoric and willingness to physically confront anti-fascist agitators head-on played no small part in destroying the British establishment’s enthusiasm for Fascism. After the bloody debacle of the June 1934 Olympia rally, Joyce spearheaded the BUF's policy shift from campaigning for economic revival through Corporatism to anti-Semitism. He was instrumental in changing the full name of the BUF to "British Union of Fascists and National Socialists" in 1936, and stood as a party candidate in the 1937 elections to London County Council.

However, Joyce was sacked when Mosley drastically reduced the BUF staff shortly after the elections and went on to form a breakaway organisation, the National Socialist League. Unlike Joyce, Mosley was never a committed anti-Semite, preferring to use anti-Jewish feelings only as an expedient political tool. After 1937, the party turned its focus away from anti-Semitism and towards anti-war with Nazi Germany activism. Although Joyce had been deputy leader of the BUF from 1933 and a brave fighter and powerful orator, Mosley snubbed him in his autobiography and later denounced him as a traitor because of his wartime activities.

Lord Haw-Haw

In late August 1939, shortly before World War II started, Joyce and his wife Margaret fled to Germany. Joyce had been tipped off, probably by Maxwell Knight of MI5, that the British authorities intended to detain him under Defence Regulation 18B. Joyce became a naturalised German in 1940.

The name Lord Haw-Haw of Zeesen was coined by the pseudonymous Daily Express radio critic Jonah Barrington in 1939, but this referred initially to Wolf Mitler, (or possibly Norman Baillie-Stewart). When Joyce became the best-known propaganda broadcaster the nickname transferred to him. Joyce's broadcasts initially came from studios in Berlin later transferring (due to heavy Allied bombing) to Luxembourg and finally to Hamburg, and were relayed over a network of Axis-controlled radio stations which included Hamburg, Bremen, Luxembourg City, Hilversum, Calais, Oslo and Zessen.

Although listening to his broadcasts was officially discouraged (although not actually illegal) they became very popular with the British public. They always began with the words "Germany calling, Germany calling" (because of Joyce's nasal drawl sounded like: Jairmany calling, Jairmany calling). These broadcasts urged the British people to surrender, and were well known for their jeering, sarcastic and menacing tone. However, far from breaking British morale, they served only to increase either resentment or ridicule of Joyce. There was probably also a covert desire by listeners to hear what the other side was saying, since information during wartime was severely censored and restricted.

Joyce made his [final broadcast] on April 30, 1945, during the Battle of Berlin. In a clearly intoxicated voice, he chided Britain's role in Germany's imminent defeat and warned that the war would now leave Britain poor and barren. He signed off with a final defiant "Heil Hitler". The next day Radio Hamburg was seized by British forces who used it to make a mock Germany calling broadcast denouncing Joyce.

Besides broadcasting, Joyce's duties included distributing propaganda among British prisoners of war, whom he tried to recruit into the British Free Corps, as a branch of the Waffen SS#redirect . He wrote a book, Twilight over England, which was promoted by the German Ministry of Propaganda; a work which unfavourably compared the evils of Jewish dominated capitalist Britain with the wonders of National Socialist Germany. Adolf Hitler awarded Joyce the War Merit Cross (First and Second Class) for his broadcasts.

Capture and Trial

At the end of the war, he was captured by British forces near the Germany-Denmark border at Flensburg. He was intercepted by soldiers who initially thought he was a German civilian. However, his voice betrayed him, and he was recognised and returned to Britain. During the course of his arrest he was shot in the leg when the soldiers thought he was going for a gun.

He was tried on three counts of high treason:

During the processing of the charges Joyce's American nationality came to light, and it seemed that he would have to be acquitted, based not upon innocence of the charges of aiding the Nazi war effort but rather a lack of jurisdiction; he could not be convicted of betraying a country that was not his own. However, the Attorney General Sir Hartley Shawcross successfully argued that Joyce's possession of a British passport, even though he had mis-stated his nationality to get it, entitled him (until it expired) to British diplomatic protection in Germany and therefore he owed allegiance to the King at the time he commenced working for the Germans. It was on this technicality, confirmed by the Court of Appeal and the House of Lords (on a split decision), that Joyce was convicted and sentenced to death.

Controversy

A number of questions were raised about the verdict. The first of these related to the jurisdictional issue. Joyce, in his appeal to the House of Lords, argued that jurisdiction had been wrongly assumed by the court in electing to try an alien for offences committed in a foreign country. This argument was rejected, on the basis that there existed a well-recognised principle in international law that a state may exercise jurisdiction on the basis of protective principle where the safety and security of the state is threatened.

Furthermore, there was a more widespread feeling that whatever the technicalities, the penalty by far outweighed the crime. To execute him would put him in the same category (in terms of penalty meted out) of war criminals as those in charge of the Manila massacre and the Auschwitz concentration camp.

Execution

He went to his death unrepentant and defiant. "In death as in life, I defy the Jews who caused this last war," he was reported by the BBC to have said, "and I defy the powers of darkness which they represent."

Joyce was executed on January 3, 1946, at Wandsworth Prison, aged 39; the hangman was Albert Pierrepoint. He was the penultimate man hanged for a crime other than murder in the United Kingdom; the last was Theodore Schurch who was executed the next day at Pentonville.

Joyce's family

The Crown considered trying his wife Margaret as well. It is unclear why no trial took place. A straightforward explanation is that her nationality status was much more complex and a conviction thought unlikely.

Some also consider a deal for clemency was made on her behalf, perhaps recorded in a secret memo. Margaret Joyce died in Soho in 1972, reportedly from alcohol abuse.

William Joyce had two daughters by his first wife, Hazel; one of whom, Heather Iandolo, has spoken publicly of her father. Joyce was reinterred in 1976 at the New Cemetery in Bohermore, County Galway, Ireland.

Trivia

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

References

External links

 

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