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| He left the B.U.F. in April 1937 with a part of the members, founding his own small party, but aside from many street meetings, eventually resulting in street fights, nothing greatly important happened in his life before 26th August, 1939, when he and his family, threatened with internation, fled to Berlin. Thanks to his contacts in Germany, he soon started off his career in German radio, being appointed editor and speaker. His broadcasts, despite being illegal to listen to in Britain, eventually became very popular among civilian and military audience, which at the height of his career matched the audience of the B.B.C. In spite of his image of a Blackshirt thug in Britain, he proved to have some sense of humour and rhetorical ability, sarcastically criticizing Churchill, the Free French & the Allies in general. He also became the inventor of the 'Desert Rats' nickname for the besieged Tobruk garrison during the north African campaign. As the war proceeded and the tide was gradually turning the other way, Lord Haw Haw's speeches began losing their vigour. Although he did continue to live a life of comfort and wealth, he began to drink heavily and his marriage was changing to a comedy with the numerous affairs he had. In the last year of the war he moved his broadcasting studio to Hamburg, still a bit safer from the approaching Red Army than Berlin. When the time came and the war was coming to an end, he made a final broadcast on 30th April, 1945, giving his audience a disturbingly accurate prediction of the post-war development of Europe. He was eventually wounded and captured in a wood near Flensburg. His fate was now at the gallows. He was sentenced to death for treason in accordance with the British Treason Act 1945, passed by the British government the day before Joyce's arrival to Britain. He was hanged on 3rd January, 1946, defiant till the very end of his life. |
| Lord Haw Haw Jan Hyrman |
| Lord Haw Haw, one of the strangest figures of the Second World War, provided in his broadcasts by German radio a source of popular entertainment to the British and American civilians and troops on the British Isles and in Europe. He was a kind of a comic character, as his comments and news broadcasts often made the Allies burst into laughter, he managed to make many people think what he wanted them to think and his speeches are considered as an important chapter in the history of propaganda. William Joyce, known to the Allies as Lord Haw Haw, was an American citizen and a member of the prewar British Union of Fascists, led by the vigorous personality of Sir Oswald Mosley. He was born in New York on 24th April, 1906, his father was Irish, his mother English. In no more than three years the family moved to Ireland, where he was educated in a Catholic school. A fist-fight with one of his schoolmates resulted in a broken nose and, eventually, in the voice pattern known from his speeches. As the family was distinctly unionist, they moved to England after the forming of the Irish state - Joyce was 15. During the year's following the outbreak of nationalist feelings in Italy and Germany, he joined the British nationalist movement, first under the influence of Italian Fascism with the British Fascisti Ltd., later with the British Union of Fascists (B.U.F.). He was involved in a number of street battles, which marked his face with a scar reaching from his hear to the corner of the mouth. He became Deputy Leader of the B.U.F., ranking the second most powerful man in the party after Sir Mosley, whose character was the exact contrary to Joyce, who was impatient, radical and bad-humoured. Ranking among the officials of the B.U.F., he gradually became disappointed with the party policy, while many members of the party were becoming increasingly disappointed with his radicalism and fierce anti-semitism. |