Lord Haw-Haw

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Lord Haw-Haw was the nickname of an announcer on the English language propaganda radio programme 'Germany Calling', broadcast by Nazi German radio to audiences in Great Britain on the mediumwave station Radio Hamburg and by shortwave to the United States. The programme started on 18 September 1939 and continued until April 30, 1945, when Hamburg was overrun by the British Army.

The pseudonymous radio critic Jonah Barrington of the Daily Express first used the term "Lord Haw-Haw" to describe a German broadcaster, in an attempt to reduce his possible impact. He said: "he speaks English of the haw-haw, dammit-get-out-of-my-way-variety".^[1]. (He did not invent the term "Lord Haw-Haw", it was originally the nickname of James Brudenell, 7th Earl of Cardigan, a 19th century British general.) However, the history of the name is somewhat confused; it was actually applied to a number of different announcers. Even soon after he wrote this, it was uncertain exactly which German broadcaster he was describing. Some people just used Lord Haw-Haw as a generic term to describe all English-language German broadcasters. Poor reception may have added to some people's difficulties distinguishing between broadcasters.

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

Wolf Mitler was a German national who spoke as the caricature of an upper-class Englishman. His persona was described by some listeners as similar to P. G. Wodehouse's Bertie Wooster. Most people who have examined the issue have concluded that it was probably Mitler whose voice Barrington described. Under Mitler, the program reached its greatest popularity in Britain and Ireland, with over six million listeners.

Norman Baillie-Stewart was a former Guards officer cashiered for selling secrets to Germany, who worked as a broadcaster for the Germans for a short time in 1939. He was jailed for five years by the British after the war. For a time he claimed that he was the original Lord Haw-Haw, he did have an upper-class accent, but he later came round to the view that it was probably Mitler whose voice Barrington had heard.

Eduard Dietze, a broadcaster of mixed German-British-Hungarian family background, is another possible but less likely candidate for the original Lord Haw-Haw.

William Joyce replaced Mitler in 1939. Joyce, an American-born citizen raised in Ireland, where, although a Catholic, as a teenager he informed on the IRA rebels to the British forces during the Anglo-Irish War. He was also formerly a senior member of the British Union of Fascists, and fled England when tipped off about his planned internment on August 26, 1939. He was the main German broadcaster in English for most of the war, and became a naturalized German citizen; he is usually regarded as "Lord Haw-Haw", even though he was probably not the person to whom the term originally referred. He had a peculiar hybrid accent, not a conventional upper class one. His distinctive pronunciation of "Jairmany calling, Jairmany calling" may have been the result of a broken nose.

After Joyce took over, Mitler was paired with the American-born announcer Mildred Gillars in the Axis Sally program and also broadcast to ANZAC forces in North Africa. Mitler survived the war and appeared on postwar German television. Joyce was captured by British forces in northern Germany just as the war ended, tried, and eventually hanged for treason on January 3, 1946. As an American citizen and naturalised German, Joyce could not have been convicted of treason against the Crown, except that the prosecution successfully argued on a technicality that having lied about his nationality to obtain a British passport and to vote, Joyce thus owed allegiance to the King.

The decision to hang him was made perhaps because of the fear his alleged omniscience had inspired. 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."

Other British subjects willingly made propaganda broadcasts, including Raymond David Hughes, who broadcast on the German Radio Metropole; and John Amery.