Douglas Chandler (May 26, 1889, Chicago [1] – 1976?) was an American broadcaster of Nazi propaganda during World War II. He was convicted of treason in 1947 and sentenced to life imprisonment.
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Chandler was an officer in the U.S. Navy in World War I and later worked as a newspaperman in Baltimore.
In 1924 he married at Bar Harbor Laura Jay Wurts (died 1941 in Germany[2]), daughter of Alexander Jay Wurts, a Carnegie Tech professor and Westinghouse inventor, and great-great-great granddaughter of John Jay (1745–1829), the first Chief Justice of the U.S.
He was ruined in the Wall Street Crash of 1929 and "fed up to the chin with the Depression and the miasma that was enveloping Washington" [3] he moved from the U.S. to France and then to Germany in 1931. There he worked as a journalist showing Nazi Germany in an ideal light and contributing on this theme to the National Geographic Magazine.[4]
From April 1941 Chandler broadcast Nazi propaganda from Berlin under the pseudonym of "Paul Revere". When the United States declared war on Nazi Germany on December 11, 1941 American citizens were repatriated from Berlin but Chandler chose to stay.
From January or February 1942 until January or February 1945 he worked under contract for the Reichs-Radio-Corp.-German Short Wave Station as a commentator in the USA newsroom. Towards the end of the war he broadcast on Radio Munich. Chandler became known as America's Lord Haw-Haw due to his cultivated American voice.[5][6]
Chandler was taken into custody by the U.S. Army at his home in Durach, Bavaria in May 1945, but he was released on October 23, 1945. He was then rearrested by the US Army on or about March 12, 1946, at the request of the Department of Justice.[7]
He was then flown to the United States to stand trial, arriving on December 14, 1946.
On July 26, 1943 Chandler along with Fred W. Kaltenbach, Jane Anderson, Edward Delaney, Constance Drexel, Robert Henry Best, Max Otto Koischwitz and Ezra Pound had been indicted in absentia by a District of Columbia grand jury on charges of treason.[8]
Chandler stood trial at the Boston Federal District Court on June 6, 1947. He entered a defense of insanity[9] and did not testify at the trial. He was found guilty of all ten counts of treason on June 28, 1947.[10][11][12][13] Chandler was fined $10000 and sentenced to life imprisonment. His subsequent appeal was denied.[14]
After sixteen years’ imprisonment, Chandler’s sentence was commuted by President John F Kennedy in 1963 on condition he leave the United States. He was released from the federal penitentiary at Lewisburg, Pennsylvania on August 9, 1963 and returned to Germany.
He was apparently still alive in 1975 and resident on Tenerife in the Canary Islands.[15] His precise date of death is not known.