William Joyce

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This article is about the Second World War propagandist. For the children's writer and film producer , see William Joyce (writer).
William Joyce

Lying in an ambulance under armed guard before being taken from British Second Army Headquarters to hospital.
Born April 24, 1906 (1906-04-24)
1906 Herkimer Street, Brooklyn, New York City, United States
Died January 3, 1946 (aged 39)
Wandsworth Prison, London, England
Cause of death Execution (hanging)
Other names Lord Haw-Haw

William Joyce (24 April 1906 – 3 January 1946), the man generally associated with the nickname Lord Haw-Haw, was a fascist politician and Nazi propaganda broadcaster to the United Kingdom during the Second World War. He was controversially executed for treason by the British as a result of his wartime activities.

Contents

[edit] Early life

Joyce was born at 1906 Herkimer Street in Brooklyn, New York City, to an English Protestant mother and an Irish Catholic father who had taken United States citizenship. A few years after his birth, the family returned to Galway, Ireland. He attended the Jesuit St Ignatius College (Galway) from 1915 to 1921. Unusually for Irish Roman Catholics, both William Joyce and his father were strongly Unionist. William Joyce later said that he aided the Black and Tans and became a target of the Irish Republican Army because of this.[1]

Following a failed assassination attempt in 1921 (which only failed due to the 16-year old Joyce taking a different route home from school) he left for England where he would briefly attend King's College School, Wimbledon for a foreign exchange, followed two years later by his family. 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.

[edit] British Union of Fascists

Flag of the British Union of Fascists.
Flag of the 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 later appointed deputy leader. As well as being a gifted speaker, Joyce also gained the reputation of a savage brawler. Joyce's violent rhetoric and willingness to physically confront anti-fascist elements head-on played no small part in further marginalizing the BUF. 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 antisemitism. 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. In 1936 Joyce lived for a year in Whitstable, where he owned a radio and electrical shop[2][3].

However, Joyce was sacked from his paid position when Mosley drastically reduced the BUF staff shortly after the elections, and Joyce went on to form a breakaway organisation, the National Socialist League. Unlike Joyce, Mosley was never a committed antisemite, preferring to exploit antisemitic sentiment only for political gain. After 1937, the party turned its focus away from antisemitism and towards activism opposing a war with Nazi Germany. Although Joyce had been deputy leader of the BUF from 1933 and an effective fighter and orator, Mosley snubbed him in his autobiography and later denounced him as a traitor because of his wartime activities.

[edit] Lord Haw-Haw

Main article: Lord Haw-Haw

In late August 1939, shortly before war was declared, Joyce and his wife Margaret fled to Germany. Joyce had been tipped off that the British authorities intended to detain him under Defence Regulation 18B. Joyce became a naturalised German in 1940.

In Berlin, Joyce could not find employment until a chance meeting with fellow Mosleyite sympathiser Dorothy Eckersley got him an audition at the Rundfunkhaus (radio centre). Despite having a heavy cold and almost losing his voice, he was recruited immediately for radio announcements and script writing at German radio's English service.

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 was transferred to him. Joyce's broadcasts initially came from studios in Berlin, later transferring (due to heavy Allied bombing) to Luxembourg and finally to Apen near Hamburg, and were relayed over a network of German controlled radio stations that included Hamburg, Bremen, Luxembourg, Hilversum, Calais, Oslo and Zeesen. Joyce also broadcast on and wrote scripts for the German Büro Concordia organisation which ran several black propaganda stations (many of which pretended to broadcast illegally from within Britain) [4]

Although listening to his broadcasts was officially discouraged (but not actually illegal), they became very popular with the British public. The German broadcasts always began with the announcer's words "Germany calling, Germany calling, Germany calling" (because of a nasal drawl this sounded like: Jairmany calling, 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 and at the start of the war it was possible for German broadcasts to be better informed than those of the BBC. This was a scenario which reversed towards the middle of the war, with some German high command officers tuning to the BBC for an accurate version of events.

Joyce recorded his final broadcast on April 30, 1945, during the Battle of Berlin [5]. In an exhausted, possibly intoxicated voice, he chided Britain's role in Germany's imminent defeat and warned that the war would leave Britain poor and barren. (There are conflicting accounts as to whether this last programme was actually transmitted, even though a tape was found in the Radio Hamburg studios.) He signed off with a final defiant "Heil Hitler" [6]. The next day Radio Hamburg was seized by British forces who on 4 May used it to make a mock "Germany calling" broadcast denouncing Joyce [7].

Besides broadcasting, Joyce's duties included distributing propaganda among British prisoners of war, whom he tried to recruit into the British Free Corps. He wrote a book, Twilight Over England, which was promoted by the German Ministry of Propaganda, a work that unfavourably compared the evils of allegedly 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, although they never met in person.

[edit] Capture and trial

At the end of the war, Joyce was captured by British forces at Flensburg near the Germany-Denmark border. He was engaged in conversation by soldiers who initially thought he was a German civilian. However, his voice betrayed him, and he was arrested and eventually returned to Britain. During the course of his arrest he was shot in the buttocks when the soldiers thought he was going for a gun (he was actually reaching for a false passport, claiming he was a schoolteacher, after one of the soldiers asked if he was "Lord Haw Haw").

He was tried on three counts of high treason:

  • William Joyce, on the 18th of September, 1939, and on other days between that day and the 29th of May, 1945, being a person owing allegiance to our Lord the King, and while a war was being carried on by the German Realm against our King, did traitorously adhere to the King's enemies in Germany, by broadcasting propaganda.
  • William Joyce, on the 26th of September, 1940, being a person who owed allegiance as in the other count, adhered to the King's enemies by purporting to become naturalized as a subject of Germany.
  • William Joyce, on the 18th of September, 1939, and on other days between that day and the 2nd of July, 1940, being a person owing allegiance to our Lord the King, and while a war was being carried on by the German Realm against our King, did traitorously adhere to the King's enemies in Germany, by broadcasting propaganda. [8]

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 upon a lack of jurisdiction; he could not be convicted of betraying a country that was not his own. He was acquitted of the first and second charges. 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 that Joyce was convicted of the third charge and sentenced to death on 19 September 1945. His conviction was upheld by the Court of Appeal on 1 November, and by the House of Lords (on a 4-1 vote) on 13 December.

[edit] Controversy

Joyce, in his appeal to the House of Lords, argued that mere possession of a passport did not entitle him to the protection of the Crown, and therefore did not perpetuate his duty of allegiance once he left the country, but the House unanimously rejected this argument. Lord Porter's dissenting opinion was based on his belief that whether Joyce's duty of allegiance had terminated or not was a question of fact for the jury to decide, rather than a purely legal question for the judge.

Joyce also 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 also rejected, on the basis that a state may exercise such jurisdiction in the interests of its own security.

[edit] Execution

He went to his death unrepentant and defiant. “In death as in 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 the hour of the greatest danger in the West may the standard be raised from the dust, crowned with the 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.”

Joyce was executed on January 3, 1946, at Wandsworth Prison, aged 39. He was the second-to-last person to be hanged for a crime other than murder in the United Kingdom. (The last was Theodore Schurch who was executed for treachery the following day at Pentonville. In both cases the hangman was Albert Pierrepoint.)

[edit] Joyce's family

The Crown considered trying his wife Margaret as well. It is not entirely clear 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. [9] Joyce was reinterred in 1976 at the New Cemetery in Bohermore, County Galway, Ireland.

[edit] Artistic works based on the life of William Joyce

The life of William Joyce was the inspiration for Kurt Vonnegut's character, Howard W. Campbell, in his novels Mother Night and Slaughterhouse Five. As a black comedy antihero, Lord Horror, Joyce appeared in the highly controversial works of British novelist and comic scriptwriter David Britton. The British government banned the novel Lord Horror and Britton served a jail sentence following a trial deciding that the comic Meng and Ecker, in which Lord Horror appears, violated the Obscene Publications Act.

[edit] References

  • The Trial of William Joyce ed. by C.E. Bechhofer Roberts [Old Bailey Trials series] (Jarrolds, London, 1946)
  • The Trial of William Joyce ed. by J.W. Hall [Notable British Trials series] (William Hodge and Company, London, 1946)
  • The Meaning of Treason by Dame Rebecca West (Macmillan, London, 1949)
  • Lord Haw-Haw and William Joyce by William Cole (Faber and Faber, London, 1964)
  • Hitler's Englishman by Francis Selwyn (Routledge and Kegan Paul Ltd, London, 1987)
  • Renegades: Hitler's Englishmen by Adrian Weale (Weidenfeld and Nicholson, London, 1994)
  • Germany Calling - a personal biography of William Joyce by Mary Kenny (New Island Books, Dublin, 2003)
  • Haw-Haw: the tragedy of William and Margaret Joyce by Nigel Farndale (Macmillan, London, 2005)
  1. ^ Lord Haw-Haw and the Black and Tans, Axis History Forum.
  2. ^ BBC - North West Wales Blaenau Ffestiniog - Coed-y-Bleiddiau
  3. ^ 1900 - 1950
  4. ^ Black propaganda by radio: the German Concordia broadcasts to Britain, 1940-1941 | Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television | Find Articles at BNET.com
  5. ^ The last Broadcast of Lord Haw Haw, 1945
  6. ^ http://www.earthstation1.com/WWIIAudio/Germany/HawHaw'sLastBroadcast.m3u
  7. ^ http://www.earthstation1.com/WWIIAudio/Mock_'Germany_Calling'_broadcast.wav
  8. ^ "Chapter 4: The Trial and Death of Lord Haw-Haw"
  9. ^ Beckett, Francis."'My father was a traitor but he was kind and loving to me'", London Guardian, December 5, 2005.

[edit] See also

[edit] External links

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to:
Persondata
NAME Joyce, William
ALTERNATIVE NAMES
SHORT DESCRIPTION fascist politician
DATE OF BIRTH April 24, 1906
PLACE OF BIRTH Brooklyn, New York City, United States
DATE OF DEATH January 3, 1946
PLACE OF DEATH Wandsworth (HM Prison), Wandsworth, London