William Joyce, Lord Haw Haw, was actually born in New York on 24 April, 1906. His father was Irish and his mother English, and he was to spend much of his childhood in Ireland. In 1922, at the height of the troubles in Ireland, the family emigrated to England. He was though an American national and he was later to lie to acquire a British passport, it was to be a lie that would ultimately cost him his life.

Joyce, who studied at the University of London, always seemed to have been an anti-Semite and to have had a fascination with far-right politics. It was not a politics he endeavoured to hide and while at University he was recruited by MI5. For Joyce, behind every problem in the world lay the hand of the Global Jewish Conspiracy, even his failure to secure a Masters degree which he blamed on his Jewish tutor. In 1923, he joined the British Fascisti, an organisation created to promote the ideas of Benito Mussolini. He would attend their rallies where he often acted as a steward. He had a deep facial scar which he later claimed he had received at the hands of a communist in a brawl at one of these reallies. But Joyce, soon tired of these drawing room fascists, he wanted to be involved in real politics. His opportunity came when he joined Sir Oswald Mosley’s recently formed British Union of Fascists, the B.U.F, or Blackshirts, in 1933. He soon became one of the party’s most active and effective members and was quickly promoted to be its Director of Propaganda. 

The B.U.F even at its peak in 1934, never numbered more than 40,000 members, but it received unparalled and positive press coverage particularly in Lord Rothermere’s Daily Mail. All this changed, however, after 7 June, 1934, when Oswald Mosley addressed a mass-rally of his supporters at London’s Olympia. It was the biggest rally ever held under one roof in Briitain but it had been infiltrated by hundreds of socialists and anti-fascists. When they began to heckle Mosley, his Blackshirts intervened. In unprecedented scenes of violence people were dragged forcibly from the auditorium and beaten up on the streets outside. Rothermere, who was not willing to be associated with such thuggery withdrew his support, and party membership went into steep decline. In an attempt to stem the haemorrhaging of support, Mosley decided to march his black uniformed membership through the streets of London’s East End, he said, to highlight the Jewish exploitation of the area that lay behind the poverty there. In November, 1936, in what became known as the Cable Street Riot, the working people of the East End prevented him from doing so. The Government later the same year hastily passed the Public Order Act which allowed the Home Secretary to ban marches and prohibited the wearing of political uniforms. The entire event had been a fiasco for Mosely. In response, Joyce ratcheted up the anti-Semitic rhetoric. He was the most effective speaker in the party after Mosely himself and despite falling membership elsewhere he continued to garner support in areas such as Shoreditch, Stepney, and Bethnal Green especially amongst the immigrant Irish population. He now demanded that Mosely focus on the racial issue and take violence onto the streets. Mosley, for whom the Jewish Global Conspiracy was more a convenient vehicle for his own political ambitions than a deep seated belief, and who was beggining to view Joyce as a threat to his leadership of the party, sacked him. Joyce left in high dudgeon and formed his own National Socialist Party as a direct challenge to Mosley, but it made little headway. Tipped off by his friends in MI5 that the Government intended to intern known fascists on the outbreak of war, fled to Germany on 26 August, 1939.

In Germany, and at a loose end, he was encouraged, not that he needed much encouragement, by other exiled British fascists to broadcast for Joseph Goebbels Ministry of Propaganda and Enlightenment. Whilst Joyce was broadcasting from Germany, Mosley was telling B.U.F members to do nothing to impede the war effort and to do all they could to repel any German invasion. It must have given Joyce a deep sense of satisfaction when in May, 1940, Mosley and 1600 other prominent fascists were arrested and interned.

William Joyce, wasn’t the only Briton to broadcast propaganda to England but he very quickly became the most well known. With his high-pitched voice, cut glass accent, and familiar cry of Germany Calling! Germany Calling! He soon earned the soubriquet of Lord Haw Haw. He gloried in German successes, reported British naval losses, lauded German bombing raids, and mocked the British war effort. It was not illegal to listen to foreign radio broadcasts in Britain though it was greatly discouraged. But people did listen to Lord Haw Haw, he was funny, and as the war progressed his increasingly hysterical assertions of the inevitability of German victory became more and more absurd.

Joyce not only broadcast propaganda to England he also distributed it amongst British prisoners of war in Germany. He tried to encourage them to join the recently formed pro-German British Free Corps but was more often than not given a frosty reception and was manifestly unsuccessful. Even so, he was awarded with a medal for his efforts. 

on 30 April, 1945, a clearly intoxicated Joyce gave his last broadcast from Hamburg as Allied troops closed in. It was a rambling and incomprehensible plea for German unity and warnings about the Soviet menace. Despite his drunken state he managed to escape from Hamburg but an exhausted and dishevelled Joyce was captured at Flensburg near the Danish border by a German Jewish intelligence officer who recognised his voice.

William Joyce was returned to London where he was arraigned on a charge of treason, but it would be difficult to make a treason charge stick. He was after all an American national who had become a naturalised German citizen. So in respect of treason he had neither betrayed the country of his birth nor the one of his choice. But he had lied about his nationality to acquire a British passport. It was proven that from 18 September, 1939, when he made his first broadcast, to 28 September, 1940, when his British passport was revoked, he had been a British citizen. He was thus found guilty of treason and hanged at Wandsworth prison on 3 January, 1946. It was said that the scar on his cheek burst open from the force of the noose pulling his face apart.