The Execution of Lord Haw Haw at Wandsworth Prison in 1946 « Another Nickel In The Machine The Execution of Lord Haw Haw at Wandsworth Prison in 1946 William Joyce William Joyce, the man with the famous nickname ‘Lord Haw Haw’, is Britain’s most well-known traitor, of relatively recent times anyway. He had a catchphrase as famous as any comedian’s and to cap it all he had a facial disfigurement in the form of a terrible scar that marked him as a ‘villainous traitor’ as if the words themselves were tattooed across his forehead. Saying all that, a lot of people have argued that he shouldn’t have been convicted of treason at all, let alone be executed for the crime. On the cold and damp morning of 3 January 1946 a large but orderly crowd had formed outside the grim Victorian prison in Wandsworth. The main gates of London’s largest gaol are situated not more than a few hundred feet from the far more salubrious surroundings of Wandsworth Common in South West London.

Some people had come to protest at what they considered an unjust conviction, while others, ghoulishly and morbidly, wanted to be as close as they could, to what would turn out to be, the execution of the last person to be convicted of treason in this country. Wandsworth Prison William Joyce had woken early that morning and although he ate no breakfast he drank a cup of tea. At one minute to nine, an hour later than initially planned, the Governor of Wandsworth Prison came to the condemned man’s cell to inform him that his time had come. The walk to the adjacent execution chamber was but a few yards but there was just enough time for Joyce to look down at his badly trembling knees and smile. Albert Pierrepoint, the practiced and experienced hangman, said the last words that Joyce would ever hear: ‘I think we’d better have this on, you know’ and placed a hood over the condemned man’s head followed immediately by the noose of the hanging rope. A few seconds later the executioner pulled a lever which automatically opened the trap door beneath Joyce’s feet.

Almost instantaneously Joyce’s spinal cord was ripped apart between the second and third vertebrae and the man known throughout the country as Lord Haw-Haw, was dead. The gates of HMP Wandsworth around the time of William Joyce's execution At about the same time as the hangman pulled his deadly lever a group of smartly dressed men in winter coats stepped away from the main crowd outside the gates of the prison and behind some nearby bushes, almost surreptitiously, were seen to raise their right arms in the ‘Heil Hitler!’ salute. At eight minutes past nine a prison officer came out and pinned an official announcement that the hanging of the traitor William Joyce had taken place. At 1pm the BBC Home Service reported the execution and read out the last, unrepentant pronouncement from the dead man; 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. The official declaration of William Joyce's execution pinned on the gates of the prison The official notice of execution being pinned on the gates of Wandsworth Prison William Joyce had actually been born in Brooklyn, New York forty years previously to an English Protestant mother and an Irish Catholic father who had taken United States citizenship. A few years after the birth the family returned to Galway where William attended the Jesuit St Ignatius College from 1915 to 1921. William had always been precociously politically aware but both he and his father, rather unusually for Irish Catholics at the time, were both Unionists and openly supported British rule. In fact Joyce later said that he had aided and ran with the infamous Black and Tans, the notoriously indisciplined and brutal British auxiliary force sent to Ireland after the First World War in an attempt to help put down Irish nationalism. Joyce actually became the target of an IRA assassination attempt in 1921 when he was just sixteen.

For his own safety William immediately left for England, and after a short stint in the British army (he was discharged when it was found he had lied about his age) he enrolled at Birkbeck College of the University of London where he gained a first but also developed an initial interest in Fascism. In 1924, while stewarding a Conservative Party meeting at the Lambeth Baths in Battersea, a seventeen year old Joyce was attacked by an unprovoked gang in an adjacent alley-way and received a vicious and deep cut from a razor that sliced across his right cheek from behind the earlobe all the way to the corner of his mouth. After two weeks in hospital he was left with a terrible and disfiguring facial scar. Joyce was convinced that his attackers were ‘Jewish communists’ and the incident became a massive influence on the rest of his life. The bandage was covering twenty six stiches, he remained in hospital for two weeks In 1932 Joyce joined Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists and within a couple of years he was promoted to the BUF’s director of propaganda and not long after appointed deputy leader.

Joyce was a gifted speaker and for a while became the star of the British fascist movement. He was instrumental in moving the union towards overt anti-semitism – something of which Mosley had always been relatively uncomfortable. Joyce’s career with the British Union of Fascists only lasted five years when, with membership plummeting, a devastated Joyce was sacked from his paid position in the party by Mosley in 1937. William Joyce, on the far left, with Oswald Mosley in 1934 In late August 1939, shortly before war was declared and probably tipped off by a friend in MI5 that he was about to be arrested, Joyce and his wife Margaret fled to Germany. Joyce struggled to find employment until he met fellow former-Mosleyite Dorothy Eckersley who got him recruited immediately for radio announcements and script writing at German radio’s English service in Berlin.

Crucially this was at a time when his British passport was still valid (although born in New York and brought up in Ireland Joyce had lied about his nationality to obtain a British passport – complications and niceties such as proving one’s identity with a birth certificate weren’t needed at the time) ostensibly to accompany Mosley abroad in 1935. Dorothy Eckersley The infamous nickname of ‘Lord Haw Haw’, associated with William Joyce to this day, was coined by a Daily Express journalist called Jonah Barrington. It’s not widely known but the title was actually meant for someone else completely – almost certainly a man called Norman Baillie-Stewart who had been broadcasting in Germany from just before the war. The nickname referenced Baillie-Stewart’s exaggeratedly aristocratic way of speaking. Barrington had written: A gent I’d like to meet is moaning periodically from Zeesen [the site in Germany of the English transmitter]. He speaks English of the haw-haw, dammit-get-out-of-my-way variety, and his strong suit is gentlemanly indignation.

Norman Baillie-Stewart - the real Lord Haw Haw Baillie-Stewart had already been convicted as a traitor by the United Kingdom for selling military secrets to Germany in the early thirties. He had the dubious distinction of being the last person in a long line of infamous people to have been imprisoned in the Tower of London for treason. Late in 1939 when William Joyce had become the more prominent of the Nazi propaganda broadcasters, although at the time no one knew who he was, Barrington swapped the title over to Joyce. Listening to Lord Haw Haw’s broadcasts (which famously always began with the words “Germany Calling, Germany Calling”) was officially discouraged, although incredibly about 60% of the population tuned in after the BBC news every night. The BBC’s output at the beginning of the war was said to have been exceedingly dreary (plus ca change) and the British public seemed to prefer being shocked rather than bored. Lord Haw Haw’s over-the-top and sneering attacks on the British establishment were really enjoyed, but in an era of state censorship and restricted information, there was also a desire by listeners to hear what the other side was saying.

At the start of the war, simply because there was more to brag about, the German news reports were considered, by some people, to contain slightly more truth than those of the BBC. William and Margaret Joyce in Germany As the tide turned in the latter stages of the war Joyce and his wife moved to Hamburg. On the 22nd April 1945 he wrote in his diary: Has it all been worthwhile? I think not. National Socialism is a fine cause, but most of the Germans, not all, are bloody fools. Eight days later, and on the very day that Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun committed suicide in their Berlin Bunker, Joyce made his last drunken broadcast – the remains of his Irish accent can be heard through his slurring voice. The actual microphone and a script used by Joyce for his German broadcasts At the end of the war William and his wife Margaret fled to a town called Flensburg near the German/Denmark border and it was there, in a nearby wood, that Joyce was captured by two soldiers. They, like Joyce, were out looking for firewood. Joyce stopped to say hello and one of the soldiers asked “You wouldn’t by any chance be William Joyce, would you?”.

To ‘prove’ otherwise, Joyce reached for his false passport and one of the soldiers, thinking he was reaching for a gun, shot him through the buttocks, leaving four wounds. The arrest was utter poetic justice. The soldier who had shot the infamous broadcaster was called Geoffrey Perry, however, he had been born into a German jewish family as Hourst Pinschewer and had only arrived in England to escape from Hitler’s persecutions. So in the end a German Jew, who had become English had arrested an Irish/American who pretended to be English but had become German.

The Woods near the German/Denmark border where Joyce was shot and arrested Margaret Joyce at her arrest in 1945 A well-guarded William Joyce after his arrest in Germany 1945 Back in London, he was charged at Bow Street Magistrates court and in the dock he quietly stated “I have heard the charge and take cognisance of it.” He was subsequently driven to Brixton Prison in a Black Maria and on arrival, he said “So this is Brixton.” “Yes,” retorted his guard, “not Belsen.” The trial of William Joyce began on 17 september 1945 and for a short period of time, when his American nationality came to light, it seemed that he might be acquitted. “How could anyone be convicted of betraying a country that wasn’t his own?” It was argued. However, the Attorney General, Sir Hartley Shawcross, successfully argued that Joyce’s possession of a British passport (even if he had misrepresented himself to get it) entitled him to diplomatic protection in Germany and therefore he owed allegiance to the King at the time he started working for the Germans.

It was on this contrived technicality that Joyce was convicted of treason on 19th September 1945. The penalty of which, of course, was death. Sir Hartley Shawcross, he later said that the trial of William Joyce was not one of which he was especially proud A sizeable minority of the population were uncomfortable with the verdict mainly because of the nationality issue but also because he was alway seen as a bit of a joke-figure rather than someone trying to bring the country down. On Christmas day 1945 an accountant named Edgar Bray wrote to the King: I know nothing about Joyce, and nothing about his Politics. I don’t know much about Law either, but I do know enough to be firmly convinced that we are proposing to hang Joyce for the crime of pretending to be an Englishman which crime, so far as I am aware, in no possible case carries a Capital penalty. It happens to be just our bad luck, that Joyce actually WAS an American, (and now IS a German subject), but that is no reason to hang him, because we are annoyed at our bad luck.

The historian AJP Taylor made the point that Joyce was essentially hanged for making a false statement on a passport – the usual penalty for which was a paltry fine of just two pounds. Interior of Wandsworth Prison The Execution of Lord Haw Haw at Wandsworth Prison in 1946 and a revealing NEW DOCUMENTARY by Tiina Paivarinta - Site news read more - OPCGLOBAL The Semper Occultus Secrets of Iraq by Giovanni Di Stefano 2012-05-31 The Execution of Lord Haw Haw at Wandsworth Prison in 1946 and a revealing NEW DOCUMENTARY by Tiina Paivarinta The Execution of Lord Haw Haw at Wandsworth Prison in 1946 and a revealing NEW DOCUMENTARY by Tiina Paivarinta William Joyce, the man with the famous nickname ‘Lord Haw Haw’, is Britain’s most well-known traitor, of relatively recent times anyway. He had a catchphrase as famous as any comedian’s and to cap it all he had a facial disfigurement in the form of a terrible scar that marked him as a villainous traitor as if the words themselves were tattooed across his forehead.

Saying all that, a lot of people have argued that he shouldn’t have been convicted of treason at all, let alone be executed for the crime. On the cold and damp morning of 3 January 1946 a large but orderly crowd had formed outside the grim Victorian prison in Wandsworth. The main gates of London’s largest gaol are situated not more than a few hundred feet from the far more salubrious surroundings of Wandsworth Common in South West London. Some people had come to protest at what they considered an unjust conviction, while others, ghoulishly and morbidly, wanted to be as close as they could, to what would turn out to be, the execution of the last person to be convicted of treason in this country. William Joyce had woken early that morning and although he ate no breakfast he drank a cup of tea. At one minute to nine, an hour later than initially planned, the Governor of Wandsworth Prison came to the condemned man’s cell to inform him that his time had come. The walk to the adjacent execution chamber was but a few yards but there was just enough time for Joyce to look down at his badly trembling knees and smile.

Albert Pierrepoint, the practiced and experienced hangman, said the last words that Joyce would ever hear: ‘I think we’d better have this on, you know’ and placed a hood over the condemned man’s head followed immediately by the noose of the hanging rope. A few seconds later the executioner pulled a lever which automatically opened the trap door beneath Joyce’s feet. Almost instantaneously Joyce’s spinal cord was ripped apart between the second and third vertebrae and the man known throughout the country as Lord Haw-Haw, was dead. At about the same time as the hangman pulled his deadly lever a group of smartly dressed men in winter coats stepped away from the main crowd outside the gates of the prison and behind some nearby bushes, almost surreptitiously, were seen to raise their right arms in the ‘Heil Hitler!’ salute. At eight minutes past nine a prison officer came out and pinned an official announcement that the hanging of the traitor William Joyce had taken place.

At 1pm the BBC Home Service reported the execution and read out the last, unrepentant pronouncement from the dead man; 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. William Joyce had actually been born in Brooklyn, New York forty years previously to an English Protestant mother and an Irish Catholic father who had taken United States citizenship. A few years after the birth the family returned to Galway where William attended the Jesuit St Ignatius College from 1915 to 1921. William had always been precociously politically aware but both he and his father, rather unusually for Irish Catholics at the time, were both Unionists and openly supported British rule.

In fact Joyce later said that he had aided and ran with the infamous Black and Tans, the notoriously undisciplined and brutal British auxiliary force sent to Ireland after the First World War in an attempt to help put down Irish nationalism. Joyce actually became the target of an IRA assassination attempt in 1921 when he was just sixteen. For his own safety William immediately left for England, and after a short stint in the British army (he was discharged when it was found he had lied about his age) he enrolled at Birkbeck College of the University of London where he gained a first but also developed an initial interest in Fascism. In 1924, while stewarding a Conservative Party meeting at the Lambeth Baths in Battersea, a seventeen year old Joyce was attacked by an unprovoked gang in an adjacent alley-way and received a vicious and deep cut from a razor that sliced across his right cheek from behind the earlobe all the way to the corner of his mouth. After two weeks in hospital he was left with a terrible and disfiguring facial scar. Joyce was convinced that his attackers were ‘Jewish communists’ and the incident became a massive influence on the rest of his life.

In 1932 Joyce joined Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists and within a couple of years he was promoted to the BUF’s director of propaganda and not long after appointed deputy leader. Joyce was a gifted speaker and for a while became the star of the British fascist movement. He was instrumental in moving the union towards overt anti-Semitism – something of which Mosley had always been relatively uncomfortable. Joyce’s career with the British Union of Fascists only lasted five years when, with membership plummeting, a devastated Joyce was sacked from his paid position in the party by Mosley in 1937. In late August 1939, shortly before war was declared and probably tipped off by a friend in MI5 that he was about to be arrested, Joyce and his wife Margaret fled to Germany. Joyce struggled to find employment until he met fellow former-Mosleyite Dorothy Eckersley who got him recruited immediately for radio announcements and script writing at German radio’s English service in Berlin.

Crucially this was at a time when his British passport was still valid (although born in New York and brought up in Ireland Joyce had lied about his nationality to obtain a British passport – complications and niceties such as proving one’s identity with a birth certificate weren’t needed at the time) ostensibly to accompany Mosley abroad in 1935. Dorothy Eckersley The infamous nickname of ‘Lord Haw Haw’, associated with William Joyce to this day, was coined by a Daily Express journalist called Jonah Barrington. It’s not widely known but the title was actually meant for someone else completely – almost certainly a man called Norman Baillie-Stewart who had been broadcasting in Germany from just before the war. The nickname referenced Baillie-Stewart’s exaggeratedly aristocratic way of speaking. Barrington had written: A gent I’d like to meet is moaning periodically from Zeesen [the site in Germany of the English transmitter]. He speaks English of the haw-haw, dammit-get-out-of-my-way variety, and his strong suit is gentlemanly indignation.

Lord Haw-Haw: The traitor executed for helping the Nazis Lord Haw-Haw: The traitor executed for helping the Nazis William Joyce, better known as Lord Haw-Haw Credit: Rex Features Telegraph Reporters 3 January 2016 • 8:20am William Joyce, better known as Lord Haw-Haw, was a notorious broadcaster of Nazi propaganda to the UK during World War II. His announcement 'Germany calling, Germany calling' was a familiar sound across the airwaves, introducing threats and misinformation which he broadcast from his Hamburg base. Joyce was originally an American citizen and lived in Britain before becoming a naturalised German citizen in 1940. He was hanged in London on January 3 1946 for betraying Britain. In this article originally published in 2005, Selina Hastings reviewed Haw-Haw: The Tragedy of William and Margaret Joyce by Nigel Farndale. It was Jonah Barrington in the Daily Express who coined the name "Lord Haw-Haw", by which William Joyce became known worldwide during his notorious broadcasts from Germany during the war.

Designed to demoralise and depress, Joyce's nightly programme of propaganda, Germany Calling, was initially treated by the British as a huge joke. It became immensely popular, welcomed as an hilarious alternative to the BBC's more sedate offerings, including a regular 10 dreary hours of Sandy Macpherson at the organ. By contrast, Joyce's electrifying speeches were considered premium entertainment, his voice, with that of Churchill, Hitler and the comedian Tommy Handley, quickly becoming the best known on radio, with more than nine million a day listening in. Naturally enough Dr Goebbels could hardly believe his luck, noting in his diary: "I tell the Führer about Lord Haw-Haw's success, which is really astonishing." Joyce was given a big pay rise, promoted to Chief Commentator of the English Language Service and generally made a great fuss of at the Funkhaus (the equivalent of Broadcasting House) in Berlin. By the time the Phoney War had ended and the real war had begun, the British public, in an atmosphere of increasing paranoia, were no longer finding Lord Haw-Haw so funny.

And because of a BBC policy in applying a time-lag to the reporting of news, Joyce was sometimes able to pull off a scoop – he was the first, for instance, to announce the resignation of Hore-Belisha as War Minister on January 5, 1940. This unnerved audiences at home and led to a series of widely-believed myths, favourite among them that Lord Haw-Haw regularly forecast Luftwaffe bombing targets and that he was uncannily well-informed as to which town-hall clocks were running slow. I tell the Führer about Lord Haw-Haw's success, which is really astonishing As Nigel Farndale makes clear in his excellent biography, one of the ironies of Joyce's situation was that his career as a traitor directly resulted from the man' s fanatical patriotism. A passionate anti-communist, he believed that an alliance between Britain and Germany was the best protection against the Red Menace. "From my earliest days," he wrote, "I was taught to love England and her Empire.

Patriotism was the highest virtue I knew." Furthermore, although Joyce was hanged as a traitor, there is a considerable doubt as to whether technically this judgment was legal: Joyce was an American, born in the United States of Irish parents, and during the war in Germany, where he was granted citizenship, his status was that of an alien outside the King's dominions, owing no allegiance, therefore, to the Crown. But the turning point, or peripeteia, as Nigel Farndale describes it in terms of Greek tragedy, came before this, in 1933, when Joyce, having long been settled in England, falsely claimed British nationality in order to get a passport. As the author puts it, "Joyce had unwittingly signed his own death warrant. From this moment on, he was a condemned man." In this vivid and intelligent account the extraordinary complexities of Joyce's character are made clear: on the one hand the political extremist and maniacal demagogue, on the other the linguist and scholar with a passionate love of language (James Joyce was a distant cousin).

Lord Haw-Haw at a meeting of British fascists in Chiswick Credit: Rex Features In private William Joyce was an amiable, amusing man of immense courage and conviction, like one of those slightly barmy schoolmasters with a crazy bee in his bonnet who is none the less a genius in the classroom. Having left America as a small boy, he spent his childhood in Ireland, came to England at 15, and was swept up by Sir Oswald Mosley into the British Union of Fascists. With war imminent he was threatened with internment, warned just in time by that mysterious, ambidextrous figure, Maxwell Knight, on whom Ian Fleming modelled James Bond's boss, "M". On August 26, 1939, only a week before the outbreak of war, Joyce and his second wife, Margaret, left London openly for the German capital, one-way tickets in hand, luggage clearly labelled. "Berlin! That's a rum place to be going right now," their porter at Victoria Station chattily remarked. But nobody tried to stop them. Joyce's marriage to Margaret Cairns White, or "Lady Haw-Haw", as she became known, was turbulent in the extreme.

Politically at one with her husband and in Berlin a celebrity propagandist in her own right, Margaret was beautiful, sexy, compulsively unfaithful, and like Joyce regularly drank to excess. They had stupendous rows, even divorced once, but then remarried as neither could live without the other, she loving his jokes and looking up to him as a father-figure, he sexually enslaved by her. In their letters, as a term of affection they referred to each other as sheep: "Yp -Baa!" Joyce would sign himself off; and after his eventual arrest, at night on the German-Danish border, Margaret was picked up wandering through the forest bleating for him like a lost ewe. Nigel Farndale shows both sympathy and understanding for his difficult subject. He is good, too, on the historical context, making admirable use of a daunting variety of sources.

Particularly memorable is his portrait of the Joyces' Berlin: in the early days of the war the well-paid couple lived high on the hog, enjoying a ceaseless round of expensive restaurants and cocktail- and dinner-parties with their Funkhaus colleagues; by the end, in a city of smoking ruins and amid hordes of desperate refugees, they were facing starvation, and taking shelter where they could from the nightly bombing raids carried out by the RAF. No wonder Wandsworth Prison proved a welcome contrast, with Joyce proving himself a model prisoner, liked and respected by warders and police. Despite the harrowing experience of being sentenced to death, Joyce never flinched, never showed fear, even at the arrival of the hangman, Albert Pierrepoint – who, as he pinioned the condemned man's arms behind his back, said reassuringly: "Follow me, sir, it'll be all right." Should Lord Haw-Haw really have been hanged? | Express Yourself | Comment | Daily Express VIDS Should Lord Haw-Haw really have been hanged? AT ABOUT 7pm on April 24, 1941, a familiar cut-glass English accent began its nightly broadcast from Nazi Germany.

Six million Britons had tuned in to his sneering tones, some entertained, many frightened, others simply intrigued by the latest instalment of “Germany Calling” from Nazi propagandist “Lord Haw-Haw”. PUBLISHED: 00:00, Sun, May 22, 2011 William Joyce was the voice of Nazi propaganda during the war [] In one London home, however, the motives for listening were somewhat different and when the voice announced: “Today is my birthday,” a young girl leapt from her seat and squealed: “It is daddy, of course it is!” Now an 82-year-old widow, Heather Iandolo, the daughter of William Joyce, the man nicknamed Lord Haw-Haw by the Daily Express, is making an appeal to the British authorities to have her father’s guilty verdict for high treason, for which he was executed in 1946, overturned.

Aged just 17 at his death, she has just put her name to an application to the Criminal Cases Review Commission (CCRC) which asserts that not only was her father not technically British, and therefore unable to be a traitor, but he was also a double agent for MI5 throughout the war, a protégé of the spy master who inspired Ian Fleming to create the Bond character M. The latter is an extraordinary claim which, if true, would mean he duped both Goebbels and Hitler, and would raise new questions about the anti-communist sympathisers in Britain’s secret services. Even at the time of his hanging at Wandsworth Prison on January 3, 1946, Joyce’s conviction was controversial, owing to the serious doubts about his nationality. The execution was also seen as a harsh penalty for someone who, by the end of the war, was mocked by ordinary Britons as a figure of fun. However, Joyce, one of Oswald Mosley’s fascist Black Shirts who had fled to Germany just before the outbreak of war, was no laughing matter to Sir Winston Churchill.

Those who listened to Joyce’s earlier broadcasts described a “sneering, horrible voice… full of vindictive pleasure” and Churchill, like Goebbels, was aware of the power of propaganda on the morale of the nation, particularly during the Blitz and after the retreat of the British to Dunkirk. The British authorities wanted him brought to justice. He was captured by British intelligence officers at the end of the war near Germany’s border with Denmark and brought back to London for trial and execution. Sitting in her terraced home in Gillingham, Kent, Mrs Iandolo, a retired schoolteacher who renounced her own anti-Semitic views after dating a Jewish man in 1949, last week said she still believes her father was the victim of an injustice. “He was so loyal that every time he heard the national anthem, God Save The King, he stood up,” recalls Mrs Iandolo. “I don’t think he hated Britain at all. He was very pro-Empire. Apparently, when he landed at the airport when he was brought back, he said: ‘Britain, God bless her.’ He was glad to be back on British soil again.

“I don’t have any proof that he was working for the British but I don’t think that he could have forgotten his pro-British sympathies. It is possible he was a double agent. He never mentioned it in his letters during the war but then it was the secret service, the silent service.” Born in New York in 1906, William was the son of Michael and Emily Joyce, who had renounced their Irish and British citizenships to become naturalised Americans eight years earlier. In 1909, the family returned to Ireland and settled in Galway, where, despite being Roman Catholics, they became targets for Sinn Fein nationalists because of their open loyalty to the Crown. The most ardent loyalist was teenage William, so much so that nationalists warned his parents they would “slit his tongue” if he continued to be an informer to the British, says Mrs Iandolo. Amid fears of retribution when Irish Home Rule was granted in 1921, the Joyces moved to Britain. Joyce briefly joined the Army, then studied and later taught at Birkbeck College, University of London, and it was while there he became a fascist anti-Semite.

Haw Haw claimed his large facial scar was caused by razorblade-armed communists who inflicted it on him during a Lambeth street battle in the Twenties. He married Hazel Barr and they had two daughters, Diana, who died two years ago, and Heather. The family homes in Chelsea and Norwood, south London, became centres for fascist meetings. Mrs Iandolo remembers visits by Mosley and also by several Germans, including Josef Streicher, who ran a Nazi newspaper and was later executed for war crimes at the Nuremburg Tribunal. She even played with Streicher’s teenage son Lothar. “He was very athletic and sweet,” she remembers. Another regular visitor, according to Mrs Iandolo, was Maxwell Knight. He was a virulent anti-communist, a member of a fascist group and an MI5 spy. “He was very friendly with my mother,” Mrs Iandolo says. “He used to come round to our home on Sunday afternoons after riding in Hyde Park. He had a pet bear that used to go round with him on a ch ain.

He was rather eccentric as a person but very handsome.” This relationship between Joyce and Knight is key to the new case: just days before war broke out in September 1939, Joyce and his second wife, Margaret White (he had divorced Hazel in 1936), were tipped off that fascists in London were to be arrested and interned as Nazi sympathisers. Unwilling to fight the Nazis, the couple fled to Germany on a British passport that US citizen Joyce had apparently falsely obtained. It IS widely thought that the tip-off came from Knight, a dashing figure who was an inspiration for Fleming’s character, M. After arriving in Germany he was employed as one of several announcers for radio broadcasts to Britain, first from Berlin and later from Hamburg. Mrs Iandolo said she remembers them well. “I listened when I finished my homework,” she says. “At first I couldn’t recognise the voice as being his but then I listened again and again and I said: ‘Yes, that’s him.’ Mother used to listen with me and she would sigh at the rhetoric and say: ‘Oh yes, we’ve heard all of this before.

We don’t want to hear it again.’ ” Joyce, who with Margaret had become a German citizen in 1940, was captured in May 1945. He was brought to London for trial on three counts of treason. He was acquitted of two of them but a majority of Law Lords in the Court of Appeal agreed with prosecutor Sir Hartley Shawcross that because he had relied upon a British passport until 1940, he had had a duty to the Crown. Intriguingly, Margaret, whose British nationality was certain and who had also broadcast a number of bulletins for the Nazis, was never arrested, let alone tried. Many, including Joyce’s biographer Nigel Farndale, believe he had made a deal with MI5 to let her live. It is Joyce’s lifelong connections with the intelligence services, from Galway onwards, which are central to the posthumous appeal bid by his daughter. Questions being raised by the submission to the CCRC include: was he tipped off that he would be arrested and, if so, why? Was he helping MI5 and Maxwell Knight during his time in the British fascist movement? How did British intelligence track him down so easily?

Was he later double-crossed by MI5 and allowed to go to the gallows, in return for saving his wife? Perhaps most improbably of all, the appeal paperwork asks if Joyce passed secret messages to British agents through his broadcasts. The deposition to the CCRC was signed by Mrs Iandolo but written by Giovanni di Stefano, a controversial Italian self-styled “legal expert”. Known as the Devil’s Advocate, he has made a career from representing some of the world’s most notorious characters, including Saddam Hussein, Slobodan Milosevic and Ian Brady. Although clearing Joyce’s name is his latest attempt to ruffle the feathers of the British Establishment, Mrs Iandolo is keen for the appeal to succeed. “It would be a bit late in the day but it would be a record of history,” she says. “There should be nothing to prevent the investigation and the opening of the intelligence files. “We pride ourselves on liberty in this country.

There was another side to my father that needs to be revealed.” BBC News | UK | Lady Haw Haw 'spared out of pity' Friday, 10 November, 2000, 07:42 GMT Lady Haw Haw 'spared out of pity' Margaret Joyce broadcast Nazi propaganda from Germany Documents released by MI5 show how wartime authorities faced a legal dispute over whether to prosecute the widow of traitor Lord Haw Haw. Lord Haw Haw - whose real name was William Joyce - was hanged at Wandsworth Prison in 1946 for broadcasting Nazi propaganda. Files recently released by the Public Record Office show that MI5 wanted to prosecute Joyce's wife, Margaret, but was overruled by government law officers who spared her out of pity. The disclosure lays to rest an historical controversy about why she escaped prosecution. Fled with husband Margaret Joyce, a 28-year-old typist from Carlisle, fled to Germany in 1939 with her husband, who was Sir Oswald Mosley's "right-hand man" in the British Union of Fascists.

William Joyce was hanged in 1946 Joyce, nicknamed Lord Haw Haw because of the sneering manner of his speech, became a reviled broadcaster of English language programmes for the Nazi propaganda ministry. "Lady Haw-Haw" also broadcast over the airwaves in her distinctive London-Mancunian accent. They were both captured after the war and Joyce, 40, was tried and found guilty of treason. He was hanged in 1946, while his wife awaited trial in Holloway Prison. 'Treasonable activities' But Captain W Skardon, her legendary MI5 interrogator, showed the compassionate side of the security services in the files just made public. He dropped proceedings against the traitor, who "submitted meekly to treatment meted out to her during her detention". He wrote in a top secret memo: "There is no lack of evidence implicating her in the treasonable activities of her late husband, but the authorities do not think that she need be punished further." Mrs Joyce had told her interrogators she went to Germany because she was "morally unable to assist in Britain's war effort".

It is not clear to what extent she may have aided the enemy Captain Skardon Captain Skardon was apparently happy to accept she had followed her husband to Germany out of loyalty. "In her political beliefs she merely echoes the views of her husband," he wrote. "It is not clear to what extent she may have aided the enemy; but she was a persistent speaker and writer for German radio ... her case is only less serious than that of William Joyce because she was less well-known and not so frequently heard in England as her husband." Mrs Joyce was deported to Germany that year and interned as a security risk, but later returned to Britain and died in London in 1972. Search BBC News Online German War Propaganda: William Joyce, alias Lord Haw-Haw LORD HAW-HAW Alex Softly Julius Streicher, who was executed at Nuremburg in 1946, had given himself the title “Jew-Baiter Number 1.” If there was ever a figure in British politics who deserved the title it was William Joyce, alias Lord Haw-Haw. Dismissed by many historians as a comical, almost pathetic, figure in reality his life was far more complex.

Joyce was born in New York of an Irish father and an English mother on 24 April 1906, but when he was only three the family moved to Ireland, settling in County Mayo. Joyce was educated at a convent school in Galway – the College of St. Ignatius Layola. It was here that during a fist fight with another boy that Joyce had his nose broken. He kept quiet about the injury and his nose never properly set – giving him the nasal broken drawl so familiar in his later broadcasts from Germany. The Joyce family were in Ireland at the time of the Sinn Fein insurrections and because they were Conservative and pro-Union they were very unpopular with the rebels. Joyce’s early life was marked by violence, including an attack on his father’s business and attacks on the family home by Sinn Feiners. When the British Prime Minister Lloyd George announced the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921 and the creation of the Irish State the Joyce family left for England. Joyce was then 15 years old. Far from being the puny figure described by the press during World War II, William Joyce was of average height and strongly built.

During his youth he excelled at boxing, swimming and fencing. This was to hold him in good stead later when he was involved in many street battles. In 1923 at the age of 17, the same year as Hitler’s attempted putsch in Munich and 9 years before Mosley formed the BUF, Joyce joined the ‘British Fascisti Ltd’ – a movement based on its Italian big brother. At a Conservative meeting at Lambeth’s Bath Hall the following year a squad of fascists under the control of William Joyce became involved in a fracas with left-wing agitators. It was here that Joyce received the famous scar that ran down the right side of his face from the lobe of his ear to the corner of his mouth. The scar was received during fighting in the meeting and Joyce had no doubt that the perpetrators were “Jewish Communists.” This incident had a marked bearing on his outlook. He was reminded of his hatred of “the enemy” every time he looked in the mirror until the day he died. Joyce left British Fascisti Ltd in 1925 seeing no way forward through their policies. He 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. When Sir Oswald Mosley launched the British Union of Fascists on 1 October 1932, Joyce was quick to join. He made a name for himself as a dedicated activist and a good speaker very quickly. A. K. Chesterton described Joyce as a “brilliant writer, speaker who addressed hundreds of meetings... always revealing the iron spirit of Fascism.” In 1934 Joyce was promoted to the BUF’s Director of Propoganda. With his savage anti-semitism and shrill voice at meetings Joyce began to alarm some members of the BUF. When asked about Jewish involvement in class war in 1934 Joyce snapped “I don’t regard the Jews as a class I regard them as a privileged misfortune.” It was during this time that the numbers protesting at major BUF meetings increased from a few dozen to a few thousand. Some of the enemies of the BUF came equipped with knuckle-dusters, metal bars and potatoes encrusted with razor blades.

William Joyce gained the reputation of a savage fighter and was always the first to dive into a fracas with knuckle-duster at the ready. † The image of “Jewish Communists” who scarred his face was always in the back of his mind and he wanted revenge. Standing on his soapbox in Blackshirt battledress – a buttoned black suit with a high-necked pullover – his left hand in his pocket and his right clutching the microphone – he fed on the tension and heckling like a drug. The June 1934 Olympia conference which turned into a bloody fight and the violent rhetoric of Joyce destroyed the image of respectability that Mosley and the BUF were striving for. But this did not prevent Joyce from being appointed Deputy Leader of the BUF. Mosley and Joyce were completely different in character. Mosley was relaxed, humorous and charming whereas Joyce was impatient, intense and bad-tempered. Joyce’s departure from the BUF in April 1937 came as a result of Joyce being dismissed from the salaried staff of the BUF. Bad election results, falling support and lack of money led to a BUF staff reduction of 143 to approximately 30.

This and Joyce’s personal differences with Mosley led Joyce to form the British National Socialist League. Despite Joyce having been Deputy Leader of the BUF between 1933 and 1937 and a brave fighter and powerful orator, Mosley snubbed him in his autobiography and denounced him as a traitor because of his wartime activities. When Joyce left the BUF in April 1937 he took approximately 60 members with him; the numbers dwindled quickly to about 20. Although the membership was very small they were loyal and worked extremely hard, and the League survived. It held many street-corner meetings, which resulted in many fights – fights which Joyce never shrunk from. Joyce made no effort to hide his admiration for Adolf Hitler and praised him whenever possible. Joyce had made up his mind long before World War II that it was the result of provocation by Jewry and International Finance. On 26 August 1939, approximately a week before the outbreak of war, Joyce and his family fled to Berlin after a tip-off that, under the soon to be introduced emergency powers, he would be interned for the duration of the war.

It was an act that would lead eventually to his death and denouncement by many, including Mosley, as a traitor. Rightly or wrongly Joyce was adamant that Britain was being led into another pointless war and Neville Chamberlain’s, and subsequently Winston Churchill’s, governments were betraying their people. Friends in Germany put Joyce in contact with Dr. Erich Hetzler – Private Secretary to Germany’s Foreign Minister von Ribbentrop. Two weeks after the outbreak of war he was appointed Editor and speaker for the German transmitters for Europe at Berlin’s Charlottenburg. Joyce was still only 33 years old. His wartime broadcasts to England became infamous – he was nicknamed ‘Lord Haw-Haw’ by a Daily Express journalist because of his aristocratic nasal drawl. Unknown to the public at this time, his image was very different from the scar-faced fascist thug he was usually portrayed as. Although it was illegal to listen to his broadcasts in Britain they became very popular with British listeners.

They always began with the words “Germany calling Germany calling,” which because of Joyce’s broken nose sounded like: “Jarmany calling, Jarmany calling.” During his heyday Joyce had almost as many listeners as the BBC – and he caused alarm with his tales of a Fifth Column in Britain and his talks on how to treat bombing wounds. He caused panic with his apparently accurate descriptions of Town Hall clocks that had stopped and how many steps there were in a particular church steeple. After the Battle of Britain and the invasion of Russia, Joyce’s broadcasts lost more and more listeners in Britain – but he still remained the number one broadcaster in Berlin and his anti-semitism never faded in its virulence – continuing to blame the war on “Jewish International Finance.” For his efforts Joyce continued to live a comfortable life in Berlin and in September 1944 was awarded the Cross of War Merit 1st Class with a certificate signed by Adolf Hitler. As the war worsened he began to drink heavily and his marriage became a joke with both his wife and he having numerous affairs. During the final stages of the war, with the Red Army approaching Berlin, Joyce moved to Hamburg.

He made a final broadcast on 30 April 1945 – warning that the war would leave Britain poor and barren now that she had lost all her wealth and power in 6 years of war, leaving the Russians in control of most of Europe. He signed off with a final defiant “Heil Hitler.” Joyce was captured while going through a wood near Flensburg after the war; he received a bullet wound to the leg in the process. Joyce’s fate at the gallows was then merely a formality and the British press whipped up all the hysteria they could – reminding people that he was a snarling traitor. The British Government passed the Treason Act 1945 the day before Joyce was flown back to Britain. Although Joyce was born in the USA, brought up in Ireland and took German nationality on 26 September 1939, he was charged with treason from 3 September 1939 to 2 July 1940, the date his British passport ran out, and sentenced to death. Joyce was confined in a death cell at London’s Wandsworth Prison.

In the cell next door was John Amery, the son of a British lord and the man who had tried to form British expatriates and sympathetic British POW’s into a Freicorp to fight on the German side. Joyce was executed five days after Amery on 3 January 1946. He was adamant and defiant to the end. He showed no emotion when confronted by news and scenes from the concentration camps, blaming the deaths on starvation and disease caused by Allied bombing of communication lines. He also scratched a swastika on the wall of his cell whilst awaiting sentence. His last public message reported by the BBC was “In death as in life, I defy the Jews who caused this last war, and I defy the powers of darkness they represent.” He was not yet 40 years old when executed. He was buried in an unmarked grave in the grounds of the prison. † If this is true then Joyce was acting contrary to Mosley’s orders. It was expressly forbidden for any Blackshirt to carry knuckledusters or other weapons on their person.

Real History and the WW2 Traitors The International Campaign for Real History Posted Saturday, April 24, 2004 Index to the Traditional Enemies of Free Speech Alphabetical index (text) [images added by this website] London, Saturday, April 24, 2004 By Michael Evans AN EXTRAORDINARY series of letters from William "Lord Haw-Haw" Joyce have (sic) revealed that the wartime traitor remained unrepentant as he awaited execution. David Irving comments: I AM not sure how undiscovered these letters are. I remember reading a Sunday Express series about thirty years ago in which letters of William Joyce were reproduced. They showed great strength of character, and fearlessness in the face of his adversaries. To his mother on the day of his execution he wrote, I recall: "I am not afraid of death. My death will cause less pain to me than my birth caused to you." And more in the same vein. BBC Monitoring Reports regularly transcribed Joyce's radio broadcasts from Berlin.

On the occasion of the 1945 British air raid on Dresden he broadcast that while the British were gloating that there would not be much china left undestroyed in the city that morning, they failed to realize that what was at stake was more than just the future of a few pieces of porcelain. His style went down well with the British working classes, and at one time he had a listening audience of millions in England. His fellow traitor in Berlin was John Amery, son of Churchill's schoolfriend and Cabinet Minister Leo Amery. On trial for his life at the Old Bailey in 1945, John Amery was asked on the first day, Nov 28, 1945, how he pleaded. He said: "Guilty, Your Honour." Shocked, the judge put on the black cap and sentenced him to death immediately, and he was hanged a few days later. His father was recently outed by Prof William Rubinstein as a secret Jew. Go figure that one.

Curious detail: In 1959, when I was having my scurrilous London University magazine Carnival Times produced, I was given a tour of the London printing work, Haycock Press, situated in London's Bermondsey I think. A printer came up to me, wiping his ink-stained hands on an overall, and thrust out one paw to me. "Great Editorial, David," he said. "Right stuff." He was Mr Joyce, William's brother. Small world. A reader suggests: "If you want to download some programmes of Lord Haw-Haw. go to install it and type in Lord Haw Haw in the search bit." The letters, written by Joyce as he awaited trial and then sentence in 1946 for broadcasting Nazi propaganda during the Second World War, have been discovered in an attic. In the last, dated December 28, 1945, just six days before he was hanged, Joyce made it clear there was no sense of repentance.

He wrote from Wandsworth prison: "The execution will take place at 9 am on Thursday; and you can think of me at that time as entering upon a triumph and of your friend as carrying this friendship to the other Bank (sic)." Joyce, who was dubbed Lord Haw Haw for his broadcasts from Berlin which always began with the words: "Germany calling", made his pro-Hitler, anti-Semitic broadcasts throughout the war, dismissing England's chances of resisting the Nazis. His diary: March 24, 1945 Website note: William Joyce was picked up by troops near the Danish border on May 28, 1945, shot in the arm by a soldier who believed he was trying to resist arrest, and brought back to stand trial under the ancient (1351) Treason Act. On May 31 he told Captain William Scardon of British Intelligence his reasons for going to help Hitler. He had been impressed, he said, by the constructive efforts of National Socialism and he was horrified by the war.

'One of my dominant beliefs was that a war between Britain and Germany would be a tragedy,' he wrote, 'the effects of which Britain and the British Empire would not survive, and I considered that a grossly disproportionate influence was exerted on British policy by the Jews, who had their reasons for hating National Socialist Germany.' He added, 'Whatever opinion may be formed at the present time with regard to my conduct, I submit that the final judgment cannot properly be passed until it is seen whether Britain can win the peace.' At Bow-street magistrates court in June 1945 he claimed to have been born in New York to an Irish-born naturalized American; but he was committed for trial at the Old Bailey (Central Criminal Court), found guilty, and hanged. The Execution of Lord Haw Haw at Wandsworth Prison in 1946 « Another Nickel In The Machine The Execution of Lord Haw Haw at Wandsworth Prison in 1946 William Joyce William Joyce, the man with the famous nickname ‘Lord Haw Haw’, is Britain’s most well-known traitor, of relatively recent times anyway.

He had a catchphrase as famous as any comedian’s and to cap it all he had a facial disfigurement in the form of a terrible scar that marked him as a ‘villainous traitor’ as if the words themselves were tattooed across his forehead. Saying all that, a lot of people have argued that he shouldn’t have been convicted of treason at all, let alone be executed for the crime. On the cold and damp morning of 3 January 1946 a large but orderly crowd had formed outside the grim Victorian prison in Wandsworth. The main gates of London’s largest gaol are situated not more than a few hundred feet from the far more salubrious surroundings of Wandsworth Common in South West London. Some people had come to protest at what they considered an unjust conviction, while others, ghoulishly and morbidly, wanted to be as close as they could, to what would turn out to be, the execution of the last person to be convicted of treason in this country. Wandsworth Prison William Joyce had woken early that morning and although he ate no breakfast he drank a cup of tea.

At one minute to nine, an hour later than initially planned, the Governor of Wandsworth Prison came to the condemned man’s cell to inform him that his time had come. The walk to the adjacent execution chamber was but a few yards but there was just enough time for Joyce to look down at his badly trembling knees and smile. Albert Pierrepoint, the practiced and experienced hangman, said the last words that Joyce would ever hear: ‘I think we’d better have this on, you know’ and placed a hood over the condemned man’s head followed immediately by the noose of the hanging rope. A few seconds later the executioner pulled a lever which automatically opened the trap door beneath Joyce’s feet. Almost instantaneously Joyce’s spinal cord was ripped apart between the second and third vertebrae and the man known throughout the country as Lord Haw-Haw, was dead. The gates of HMP Wandsworth around the time of William Joyce's execution At about the same time as the hangman pulled his deadly lever a group of smartly dressed men in winter coats stepped away from the main crowd outside the gates of the prison and behind some nearby bushes, almost surreptitiously, were seen to raise their right arms in the ‘Heil Hitler!’ salute.

At eight minutes past nine a prison officer came out and pinned an official announcement that the hanging of the traitor William Joyce had taken place. At 1pm the BBC Home Service reported the execution and read out the last, unrepentant pronouncement from the dead man; 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. The official declaration of William Joyce's execution pinned on the gates of the prison The official notice of execution being pinned on the gates of Wandsworth Prison William Joyce had actually been born in Brooklyn, New York forty years previously to an English Protestant mother and an Irish Catholic father who had taken United States citizenship.

A few years after the birth the family returned to Galway where William attended the Jesuit St Ignatius College from 1915 to 1921. William had always been precociously politically aware but both he and his father, rather unusually for Irish Catholics at the time, were both Unionists and openly supported British rule. In fact Joyce later said that he had aided and ran with the infamous Black and Tans, the notoriously indisciplined and brutal British auxiliary force sent to Ireland after the First World War in an attempt to help put down Irish nationalism. Joyce actually became the target of an IRA assassination attempt in 1921 when he was just sixteen. For his own safety William immediately left for England, and after a short stint in the British army (he was discharged when it was found he had lied about his age) he enrolled at Birkbeck College of the University of London where he gained a first but also developed an initial interest in Fascism.

In 1924, while stewarding a Conservative Party meeting at the Lambeth Baths in Battersea, a seventeen year old Joyce was attacked by an unprovoked gang in an adjacent alley-way and received a vicious and deep cut from a razor that sliced across his right cheek from behind the earlobe all the way to the corner of his mouth. After two weeks in hospital he was left with a terrible and disfiguring facial scar. Joyce was convinced that his attackers were ‘Jewish communists’ and the incident became a massive influence on the rest of his life. The bandage was covering twenty six stiches, he remained in hospital for two weeks In 1932 Joyce joined Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists and within a couple of years he was promoted to the BUF’s director of propaganda and not long after appointed deputy leader. Joyce was a gifted speaker and for a while became the star of the British fascist movement. He was instrumental in moving the union towards overt anti-semitism – something of which Mosley had always been relatively uncomfortable.

Joyce’s career with the British Union of Fascists only lasted five years when, with membership plummeting, a devastated Joyce was sacked from his paid position in the party by Mosley in 1937. William Joyce, on the far left, with Oswald Mosley in 1934 In late August 1939, shortly before war was declared and probably tipped off by a friend in MI5 that he was about to be arrested, Joyce and his wife Margaret fled to Germany. Joyce struggled to find employment until he met fellow former-Mosleyite Dorothy Eckersley who got him recruited immediately for radio announcements and script writing at German radio’s English service in Berlin. Crucially this was at a time when his British passport was still valid (although born in New York and brought up in Ireland Joyce had lied about his nationality to obtain a British passport – complications and niceties such as proving one’s identity with a birth certificate weren’t needed at the time) ostensibly to accompany Mosley abroad in 1935. Dorothy Eckersley The infamous nickname of ‘Lord Haw Haw’, associated with William Joyce to this day, was coined by a Daily Express journalist called Jonah Barrington.

It’s not widely known but the title was actually meant for someone else completely – almost certainly a man called Norman Baillie-Stewart who had been broadcasting in Germany from just before the war. The nickname referenced Baillie-Stewart’s exaggeratedly aristocratic way of speaking. Barrington had written: A gent I’d like to meet is moaning periodically from Zeesen [the site in Germany of the English transmitter]. He speaks English of the haw-haw, dammit-get-out-of-my-way variety, and his strong suit is gentlemanly indignation. Norman Baillie-Stewart - the real Lord Haw Haw Baillie-Stewart had already been convicted as a traitor by the United Kingdom for selling military secrets to Germany in the early thirties. He had the dubious distinction of being the last person in a long line of infamous people to have been imprisoned in the Tower of London for treason. Late in 1939 when William Joyce had become the more prominent of the Nazi propaganda broadcasters, although at the time no one knew who he was, Barrington swapped the title over to Joyce.

Listening to Lord Haw Haw’s broadcasts (which famously always began with the words “Germany Calling, Germany Calling”) was officially discouraged, although incredibly about 60% of the population tuned in after the BBC news every night. The BBC’s output at the beginning of the war was said to have been exceedingly dreary (plus ca change) and the British public seemed to prefer being shocked rather than bored. Lord Haw Haw’s over-the-top and sneering attacks on the British establishment were really enjoyed, but in an era of state censorship and restricted information, there was also a desire by listeners to hear what the other side was saying. At the start of the war, simply because there was more to brag about, the German news reports were considered, by some people, to contain slightly more truth than those of the BBC. William and Margaret Joyce in Germany As the tide turned in the latter stages of the war Joyce and his wife moved to Hamburg. On the 22nd April 1945 he wrote in his diary: Has it all been worthwhile? I think not. National Socialism is a fine cause, but most of the Germans, not all, are bloody fools.

Eight days later, and on the very day that Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun committed suicide in their Berlin Bunker, Joyce made his last drunken broadcast – the remains of his Irish accent can be heard through his slurring voice. The actual microphone and a script used by Joyce for his German broadcasts At the end of the war William and his wife Margaret fled to a town called Flensburg near the German/Denmark border and it was there, in a nearby wood, that Joyce was captured by two soldiers. They, like Joyce, were out looking for firewood. Joyce stopped to say hello and one of the soldiers asked “You wouldn’t by any chance be William Joyce, would you?”. To ‘prove’ otherwise, Joyce reached for his false passport and one of the soldiers, thinking he was reaching for a gun, shot him through the buttocks, leaving four wounds. The arrest was utter poetic justice. The soldier who had shot the infamous broadcaster was called Geoffrey Perry, however, he had been born into a German jewish family as Hourst Pinschewer and had only arrived in England to escape from Hitler’s persecutions.

So in the end a German Jew, who had become English had arrested an Irish/American who pretended to be English but had become German. The Woods near the German/Denmark border where Joyce was shot and arrested Margaret Joyce at her arrest in 1945 A well-guarded William Joyce after his arrest in Germany 1945 Back in London, he was charged at Bow Street Magistrates court and in the dock he quietly stated “I have heard the charge and take cognisance of it.” He was subsequently driven to Brixton Prison in a Black Maria and on arrival, he said “So this is Brixton.” “Yes,” retorted his guard, “not Belsen.” The trial of William Joyce began on 17 september 1945 and for a short period of time, when his American nationality came to light, it seemed that he might be acquitted. “How could anyone be convicted of betraying a country that wasn’t his own?” It was argued.

However, the Attorney General, Sir Hartley Shawcross, successfully argued that Joyce’s possession of a British passport (even if he had misrepresented himself to get it) entitled him to diplomatic protection in Germany and therefore he owed allegiance to the King at the time he started working for the Germans. It was on this contrived technicality that Joyce was convicted of treason on 19th September 1945. The penalty of which, of course, was death. Sir Hartley Shawcross, he later said that the trial of William Joyce was not one of which he was especially proud A sizeable minority of the population were uncomfortable with the verdict mainly because of the nationality issue but also because he was alway seen as a bit of a joke-figure rather than someone trying to bring the country down. On Christmas day 1945 an accountant named Edgar Bray wrote to the King: I know nothing about Joyce, and nothing about his Politics. I don’t know much about Law either, but I do know enough to be firmly convinced that we are proposing to hang Joyce for the crime of pretending to be an Englishman which crime, so far as I am aware, in no possible case carries a Capital penalty.

It happens to be just our bad luck, that Joyce actually WAS an American, (and now IS a German subject), but that is no reason to hang him, because we are annoyed at our bad luck. The historian AJP Taylor made the point that Joyce was essentially hanged for making a false statement on a passport – the usual penalty for which was a paltry fine of just two pounds. Interior of Wandsworth Prison BBC claims spy Haw-Haw was innocent | History | News | Daily Express HISTORY BBC claims spy Haw-Haw was innocent HE WAS the most infamous traitor of the Second World War who tormented the British public with pro-Nazi speeches on German radio. PUBLISHED: 00:01, Sun, Jan 31, 2016 GETTY The BBC suggest that Lord Haw-Haw was a victim of a miscarriage of justice Yet a BBC Radio 4 programme has suggested that William Joyce, better known as Lord Haw-Haw, was the victim of a miscarriage of justice when he was executed for treason 70 years ago. Human rights lawyer Geoffrey Robertson QC told Radio 4’s Treason On Trial: “It’s one of those regrettable episodes, listed with Stephen Ward and the Birmingham Six.

British justice has gone terribly wrong on a number of occasions.” GETTY William Joyce was executed for treason Related articles A missionary, opera sisters and the daring PoWs: Britain's unsung... He was a prominent member of Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists, who fled to Germany days before the outbreak of the War in 1939 to avoid internment for his pro-Nazi sympathies. From Berlin he made regular radio broadcasts to Britain on behalf of Joseph Goebbels’ propaganda ministry, denouncing Jews, mocking Britain’s War effort and celebrating German successes on the battlefield, in an attempt to undermine British morale. His affected upperclass accent earned him the nickname Lord Haw-Haw and he became a hate figure in Britain during the War years. After the War he was captured by British soldiers and put on trial for treason at the Old Bailey, where he was found guilty in September 1945. But Mr Robertson argues he could not have been guilty of treason against Britain because he was not a UK citizen. “Joyce, when he made these broadcasts, was an American living in Germany,” he said. Joyce was born in New York in 1906 before his family emigrated to Ireland. GETTY

Question: What was the real name of traitor 'Lord Haw Haw' who was executed for treason in 1946?
Answer: William Joyce