The voice of treason: ThePost.ie


TCH Archives > Sunday Business Post > 2006/01/01 > The voice of treason

The voice of treason
Sunday, January 01, 2006 - By David O'Donoghue
Sixty years ago, on January 3, 1946, William Joyce made his last brief journey from the condemned cell at London's Wandsworth prison to face the hangman, pausing momentarily to smile at his shaking knees.

Having endured Joyce's pseudo-aristocratic, sneering taunts for the duration of World War II, the British establishment had finally caught up with Lord Haw Haw and forced him to pay the ultimate price for treason.

Joyce was only 39 when he was executed.

Still reviled by some of Britain's wartime generation as the treacherous English voice of Adolf Hitler, Joyce is considered by others to have been the victim of post-war public opinion, which sought retribution against citizens of the crown who had sided with Nazi Germany.

Born in the New York suburb of Brooklyn on April 24, 1906 of Irish parents (his father was a naturalised American), Joyce moved to Ballinrobe, Co Mayo with his parents at the age of three. From there the family relocated to Galway where the future Lord Haw Haw was educated by the Jesuits at St Ignatius College.

By his own admission, Joyce worked as an informer for the Black and Tans in Galway during the War of Independence, touring the city in Crossley tenders to point out the homes of republican sympathisers.

By December 1921, he was on an IRA hit list and his family decided to flee.

Joyce appears to have benefited from the move to England, distinguishing himself at London University, receiving a first class honours degree in English from Birkbeck College in 1927.

According to his biographer, Mary Kenny, after moving to Britain, Joyce “became a sort of perverse Englishman with an Irish temperament'‘.

He was first attracted to the Conservatives and became active in the party's Kensington and Chelsea branch. He might well have secured a nomination for that safe seat were it not for an ill-judged affair with a Tory lady, which was frowned upon by the party's men in grey suits. In fact, fleeting affairs were to dog Joyce in adult life, leading to the break-up of his first marriage.

In the mid-1930s, Joyce abandoned the Tories in favour of Sir Oswald Mosley's British Union of Fascists (BUF). It was a time of street-brawling politics, which held a fatal attraction for Joyce. A brilliant orator, he was involved in numerous scrapes at BUF rallies as communists fought with fascists for the soul of Britain's inner cities and Europe lurched towards war. In one such fracas, a communist agitator slashed the Galwayman's face with a razor, leaving Joyce with a highly visible scar from his mouth to his right ear.

Despite rising to second in command of the BUF, by the late 1930s, Joyce had split with Mosley and founded his own party, the National Socialist League. In the post-war years, Mosley disclosed that he had dismissed Joyce because he was anti-Semitic and “was attracting the wrong sort of people to the BUF'‘. Today, Mosley's elderly and dwindling band of supporters still meets regularly in London as a group called the Friends of OM (Oswald Mosley).

Joyce remained anti-Jewish up to his death, but where did his anti-Semitism originate? According to Mary Kenny, it was not in Galway, but in England with the Mosleyites.

The late Professor Thomas P O'Neill thought it unlikely that Joyce had picked up his anti-Semitism from the Jesuits in Galway, but noted that certain Catholic writers had published anti-Jewish material at the time.

In August 1939, Joyce was on a list of extreme right-wingers scheduled to be rounded up under the Defence of the Realm Act and interned on the Isle of Man.

However, just before his arrest, he received a tip-off and fled to Nazi Germany.

The British authorities kept the top secret papers relating to Joyce's escape under lock and key for 60 years, such was their sensitivity. The files reveal that Joyce's tip-off came from none other than an MI5 agent.

MI5 was the British security service which was supposed to be keeping Joyce under surveillance. Since MI5 had been infiltrated by communist agents such as Anthony Blunt, it is perhaps no surprise that the organisation also had its fair share of pro-fascist moles.

In Berlin, Joyce was initially out of his depth and could not find gainful employment. But a chance meeting with Dorothy Eckersley, a fellow fascist sympathiser from the prewar Mosleyite circles in London, got Joyce a voice test at the Rundfunkhaus (radio centre) on Masurenallee. Despite having a heavy cold and almost losing his voice, he was hired immediately to do radio announcements and script writing for German radio's English service.

In the early weeks of the war, English broadcasts from Berlin were undertaken by Wolff Mittler, a German who had been educated in England, and by Norman Baillie-Stewart, a Scot who had been thrown out of the Seaforth Highlanders and locked in the Tower of London in the mid-1930s for suspected treason.

But William Joyce was a far more effective speaker and in the 1939-40 period had an estimated radio audience of six million regular listeners in Britain. His ‘Views on the News' programme contained sarcastic comments on Churchill and other British government ministers, together with terrifying, but bogus, predictions of where Luftwaffe bombers would strike next. Joyce also pulled in more listeners because he read out messages from prisoners of war - something that the folks at home in Britain could never get on the BBC.

Joyce also had a loyal listenership in Ireland, nowhere more so than in his adopted city of Galway. Seán MacReamoinn recalls that when he was a student in the war years, Lord Haw Haw, as Joyce had been dubbed, had a wide following among UCG students who were attracted to his anti-British invective.

Elsewhere, in Belfast, Joyce's broadcasts were turned up loud to annoy RUC men patrolling nationalist areas.

The Irish writer Francis Stuart arrived in Berlin in January 1940 to take up a job as a lecturer in a university English department. He paid Joyce the ultimate compliment by telling a high-ranking German Foreign Office employee that “Haw Haw is winning the war for you single handed'‘.

In reality, however, the two men didn't get on and Stuart may have been behind the decision by Dr Hans Hartmann, the head of German radio's Irish service, not to allow Joyce to use the so-called Irland-Redaktion to talk to what Joyce termed “my Irish followers'‘.

Hartmann (who had spent the 1937-39 period at UCD's Folklore Commission in Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin, learning to speak Irish) and Stuart were well aware that Joyce had no love for nationalist Ireland.

The Irish service of Radio Berlin was deliberately tapping into hardline republican sentiment to stir up Irish public opinion against England, so Joyce - a pro-British fascist - would have been persona non grata on Hartmann's team, which also included the Kerry-born Jack O'Reilly (whose father Bernard had arrested Roger Casement on Banna Strand in 1916).

Joyce's threatening tone, advising British listeners to “scurry into your holes like rats'‘, is unforgettable for anyone of the war generation who heard it. But contrary to some accounts, Joyce was not privy to the Luftwaffe's nightly bombing plans nor did he famously claim that the clock on Leeds town hall was running two minutes slow.

Many people tended to recall what they imagined Joyce had said rather than what he actually did say. Terry Charman of the Imperial War Museum, who is a leading expert on Joyce, insists that “the Germans would not give such sensitive information [Luftwaffe targets] to a man they themselves saw as a renegade'‘.

But while the Germans may not have trusted Joyce with details of their military plans, he was privy to at least one top secret plan involving fellow broadcaster Jack O'Reilly. In 1943, O'Reilly, realising that Germany would lose the war, had persuaded the Germans to fly him home on a spying trip aboard a Luftwaffe bomber. But in December 1943, shortly before he set off to parachute into Kilkee, Co Clare (the town where he had grown up), Joyce arrived in his office seeking details of the mission.

O'Reilly was shocked that Joyce knew about his forthcoming flight back home, which had been arranged by the SS-controlled SD or Nazi security service. On one occasion Joyce managed to alarm British military planners by broadcasting details of floating pontoons in Tilbury docks. Mr W A D Williams, who was then working with military intelligence, heard that Haw Haw talk on April 21, 1944.

“It caused great concern to those planning the D-Day landings because the material was for Mulberry harbours'‘, Williams recalls.

“However, the German high command misread the information [from Luftwaffe photographs], thinking they were anti-aircraft installations. If the Germans had known, they would have twigged we were going to land at a place where there were no harbours'‘.

On a lighter note, Haw Haw regularly lampooned “Churchill's gang of scabs'‘ and “superannuated politicians'‘, but he stopped short of criticising the royal family.

Another Joyce biographer, John Cole, pointed out that when the Germans suggested creating a republican radio station to be beamed at Britain, “Joyce strongly criticised it; he was opposed to any attack on the British crown'‘.

Even in Berlin, the wannabe English loyalist had not changed his spots.

As well as doing his own broadcasts, Joyce also wrote scripts for bogus German radio stations such as Workers' Challenge, which pretended to be a left-wing station broadcasting from London's East End. Recently released British files show that the authorities there were worried about the effect that the Haw Haw talks were having on “working class listeners'‘, particularly their references to “social ills, including mass unemployment'‘.

There were, in fact, two wartime Joyce personas: the first, a figure of fear as Germany looked like accomplishing a blitzkrieg invasion of Britain in 1940; and the second, a figure of fun as it became clear that Germany could not win the war.

As the conflict progressed and Allied victories mounted, Joyce turned to the bottle. In his last radio talk - the tape of which was seized by the British army as evidence of treason - from Hamburg on April 30, 1945, Joyce is heard slurring drunkenly in praise of Hitler, regretting that Britain never struck a peace deal with the Nazis, and pointing out that German soldiers were still laying down their lives to protect western Europe from communism.

Haw Haw's last words on radio were: “Germany will live because the people of Germany have within them the secret of life: endurance, will and purpose. Ich liebe Deutschland [I love Germany]. Heil Hitler and farewell.”

But behind the public radio voice was a complex man whose private life was in turmoil. During the course of the war he managed to divorce and remarry his second wife, Margaret. The two, who had met at a pre-war Mosleyite rally, had a stormy and drink-fuelled relationship in Berlin, which was not helped by Haw Haw's liaisons with other women.

Joyce enjoyed a smoother relationship with the Nazi party leadership by whom he was held in high esteem. For example, he received a box of cigars from Joseph Goebbels as a Christmas present in December 1939, although he never actually met the propaganda minister face to face.

In September 1944, the Galway man received his greatest accolade from the regime - a medal from Hitler.

The war merit cross, first class, was awarded to Joyce for his services to German broadcasting and although the Fuehrer did not present the medal personally, Hitler did sign the order for the award. Margaret Joyce also received a medal on the same occasion.

In November 1944, Joyce joined the Wilhelmsplatz battalion of the Volkssturm, or home guard, in Berlin, but he never served with the auxiliary force because Goebbels ordered that William and Margaret were to be kept out of Allied hands “at all costs'‘.

With Allied troops approaching Germany's borders, a plan was hatched to get the couple to Ireland aboard a U-boat, but this idea was dropped when naval chiefs said it was too dangerous and unlikely to succeed.

Hitler committed suicide in his Berlin bunker on April 30, 1945, the same day that Joyce's final pre-recorded talk was broadcast from Hamburg. By the time Hitler's death was made public, Joyce was on his way northwards to Flensburg near the Danish border where he would spend the next four weeks masquerading as a fugitive Dutchman. The Germans had supplied him with false papers.

It was his by then well-known accent that betrayed him in the end. While out walking near Flensburg on May 28, 1945, Joyce met two British officers in a wood.

When he tried to engage them in conversation, one of the officers instantly recognised his voice as being that of Lord Haw Haw. Joyce tried to protest that he was only a displaced Dutchman, but when reaching inside his coat for the fake papers, the British - thinking he was pulling a gun on them - opened fire, wounding him in the hip. Joyce was then brought back to London to face trial for treason.

Despite being American by birth, Irish by parentage and opting to become a naturalised German in September 1940 (adopting the name Wilhelm Froelich), Joyce was found guilty of treason at his September 1945 trial in London by virtue of the fact that he had “claimed and asserted the rights to British citizenship'‘ by applying for a British passport in 1933 (so he could attend that year's Nuremburg rally). When his appeal failed, pleas for clemency flooded in to Downing Street and Buckingham Palace, including one from the Duke of Bedford who asserted that Joyce's “execution would be an act of quite unjustifiable vindictive severity'‘.

According to Terry Charman, Joyce “was hanged because, as the leading English speaker on German Radio, he personified Nazi Germany even more than Hitler or Goebbels'‘. William Joyce maintained his innocence to the end, telling his jailers, “I have been guilty of no underhand or deceitful act against Britain'‘. He was the last man to be executed for treason in Britain and his body was buried in the grounds of Wandsworth prison.

Despite having also broadcast for the Nazis, Margaret Joyce escaped post-war prosecution. In 1976, following a campaign by his daughter, Heather Iandolo, Joyce's body was reinterred in Galway's New Cemetery; the wandering Lord Haw Haw had finally come home.

David O'Donoghue is the author of Hitler's Irish Voices: The Story of German Radio's Wartime Irish Service.