How an American Nazi became the World War II propagandist ‘Lord Haw-Haw’

Throughout the history of war (and politics), there has always been a constant barrage of propaganda. During World War II, the names Tokyo Rose (Iva Toguri D’Aquino, along with about a dozen more females), Axis Sally (Mildred Gillars and Rita Zucca), Mr. Guess Who (Robert Henry Best), and William Joyce, aka “Lord Haw-Haw,” are familiar.

These propagandists struck fear into the public, who couldn’t be sure.

William Joyce was born on April 24, 1906, in the Bedford Stuyvesant area in Brooklyn, New York. His parents emigrated from Ireland, and his father, Michael, became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 1894.

In 1909, the Joyce family moved back to County Galway, Ireland. His parents were staunch unionists opposed to Irish Republicanism. They even rented out some of their properties to the Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC) during the Irish War of Independence, which made the family a target for the Irish Republican Army (IRA).

Linked to a Priest’s Murder

The British army intelligence corps recruited Joyce, who was in his mid-teens at the time, as a courier. During this period, he contacted the “Black and Tans”—constables recruited to fight against Irish Nationalists. These brutal constables developed a penchant for extrajudicial killings and arson.

In November 1920, a local priest sympathetic to Irish independence was kidnapped from his home and found buried in an unmarked grave in a bog. Joyce was linked to the crime but not charged. The IRA attempted to assassinate the young Joyce on his way home from school, and his British army sponsor, Capt. Patrick Keating, got him enlisted in the Worcestershire regiment for his safety. Regiment commanders discharged Joyce when they discovered his true age.

In 1922, Joyce applied to the University of London Officer Training Corps. He lied on his application, stating he was born in America but of British parents. That lie allowed him to obtain a British passport; that mistake cost him later. During the general election in 1924, Joyce met with a conservative candidate when an Irish nationalist supporter slashed Joyce’s face with a razor. Many believe that moment pushed Joyce toward fascism.

While at college, he studied English literature and history and finished with honors in 1927. He married Hazel Barr and had two daughters with her, with the marriage lasting until 1936.

Joyce continued his flirtation with fascism, and in the early 1930s, he joined the British Union of Fascists, which Sir Oswald Mosley formed. In 1934, Joyce became the organization’s director of propaganda. Joyce was a powerful speaker, praised for his oratory.

“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,” British journalist Cecil Roberts once said of one of Joyce’s speeches.

As time went by, his propaganda became more violent and antisemitic, causing tension between Mosley and Joyce, who felt Mosley was a bleeding heart who was insufficiently antisemitic. Mosley believed the message should be economic prosperity through corporatism.

Mosley fired Joyce in 1937. Joyce formed a short-lived fascist party, the National Socialist League. Throughout the time leading to the war, Joyce’s rhetoric became increasingly antisemitic and right wing.

Becoming a German Citizen

In 1939, Joyce and his second wife, Margaret, moved to Germany. They became German citizens the following year. Joyce took a job with German radio’s English-language broadcast services, performing radio announcements and writing scripts.

Joyce became one of a couple of men known as Lord Haw-Haw. His broadcasts began with “Germany calling, Germany calling.” With his upper-crust, lord-of-the-manor accent and snide, menacing tone, Joyce urged the British to surrender while blaming the war on the Jews.

Although most of the public saw the broadcasts as propaganda, a little truth was mixed in. With the limited information available, the broadcasts frequently offered the only information about family members in the military. By the end of 1940, his popularity exploded with an estimated 6 million regular listeners and 18 million listening occasionally. He was sometimes introduced as William Joyce, aka Lord Haw-Haw. In the movie “Slaughterhouse-Five,” Howard W. Campbell Jr.—an American Nazi character—was patterned after William Joyce.

Joyce continued with his propaganda by writing pro fascist articles, persuading British POWs to join the British Free Corps, and conducting propaganda training for the SS. He wrote a book entitled “Dämmerung über England” (Twilight over England), which compared a Britain dominated by Jewish capital with the pristine state of Nazi Germany.

“Heil Hitler and Farewell”

On April 30, 1945, with Berlin on fire and Hitler dying by suicide in his bunker, Lord Haw-Haw signed off on his final broadcast. He and his wife fled to the small village of Kuffermuile near the Danish border. With victory declared in Europe on May 8, the Allies began hunting down war criminals, and Joyce was on the list.

On May 28, a British unit spotted Joyce, and as they approached, the lieutenant thought Joyce was reaching for a pistol. He shot Joyce in the leg as he reached into his back pocket to retrieve his forged passport in an attempt to evade arrest. The British Military Police transported him to the hospital and on to London to stand trial for three counts of high treason.

A jury acquitted Joyce of two of those charges, but it convicted him for the third: “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.”

On January 3, 1946, Joyce died by hanging. They buried him in an unmarked grave on the grounds of Wandsworth Prison. In 1976, his daughter requested to have his remains exhumed and interred in County Galway, Ireland. That’s where his grave remains.

Lord Haw-Haw was an effective propaganda tool with millions of fans. He was also a racist, fascist, and antisemite. His move to Germany coincided with Hitler’s rise. While he gained power for a moment, he ultimately answered for his crimes.

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