Norman Baillie-Stewart
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Norman Baillie-Stewart (January 15, 1909 – 1966) was a British army officer known as The Officer in the Tower when he was imprisoned in the Tower of London.
Baillie-Stewart was born to a military family, christened Norman Baillie Stewart Wright. He graduated as 10th in the order of merit from Sandhurst military academy, and received a commission as a Subaltern in the Seaforth Highlanders in 1927. Immediately before joining he changed his name to make it sound higher up in the British class structure, under the belief that he was looked down upon by more senior officers. However, he soon grew to dislike army life.
On a holiday in South Africa, Baillie-Stewart met a German woman with whom he fell in love. He decided to become a German citizen and wrote a letter to the German Consul in London offering his services. On holiday in Germany in 1931, he sold military secrets for sexual favours and relatively small amounts of money. His regular trips to the Netherlands to meet his handlers attracted suspicion and he was arrested in 1933, and Court Martialled under the Official Secrets Act. He was imprisoned for five years, which he served at the Tower of London.
When released from prison in January 1937, Baillie-Stewart moved to Austria where he applied for naturalization but was refused. The Austrian government suspected him of being a Nazi agent and ordered him to leave; the British embassy refused to help. Rather than return to Britain, he went on to Bratislava, which was then in Czechoslovakia and is now the capital city of Slovakia. The Anschluss of 1938 enabled him to return and set up a trading business in Vienna. He applied for naturalization but the application was delayed by bureaucracy at the Ministry and he did not become a German citizen until 1940.
While at a party in July 1939, Baillie-Stewart criticised the standard of propaganda from German radio stations, remarks that were overheard by another party guest who worked at Austrian radio and mentioned them to his superiors; this led to his being invited to voice tests in Berlin. He was appointed as a propaganda broadcaster a week after the beginning of the war. Some suspect that it was Baillie-Stewart who made the broadcast which led the pseudonymous Daily Express radio critic Jonah Barrington to coin the term Lord Haw-Haw of Zeesen as Baillie-Stewart had a drawling upper-class accent which William Joyce did not.
Baillie-Stewart and Joyce did not get on, and, with the latter in favour with station bosses, Baillie-Stewart was dismissed from regular broadcasting in December 1939. He continued to work for the German Radio Corporation as a translator, where he shared an office with Railton Freeman, and made occasional broadcasts under the nickname 'Lancer'. In 1942, he made an English version of the popular German war-song Lili Marleen. Towards the end of the war, he returned to Vienna for medical treatment, and was arrested there in 1945.
As Baillie-Stewart was technically still a British citizen at the outbreak of war, he had committed the act of treason by taking German citizenship, and he was duly charged as such. However, the Attorney-General (Sir Hartley Shawcross) accepted this was a technicality as the Ministry had lost his papers, and so the prosecution dropped this charge, leaving only that of committing an act likely to assist the enemy. He pleaded guilty and was sentenced to five years' imprisonment in January 1946.
On his release he went to Dublin, where he married and had two children. He set up a company named Galway Bay Products to take handcrafts from the Aran Islands and sell them in a shop in Dublin, where he died in 1966 at the age of 57.
