British Nazi propagandist, born in New York City, USA. As a child he lived in Ireland, and in 1922 his family emigrated to England. He founded the fascist British National Socialist Party and fled to Germany before war broke out. Throughout World War 2 he broadcast from Radio Hamburg propaganda against Britain, gaining his nickname from his upper-class drawl. He was captured by the British at Flensburg, convicted of treason, and executed in London.
For the children's writer and film producer, see William Joyce (writer). It has been suggested that this article or section be merged with Lord Haw-Haw.Early life
Joyce was born at 1877 Herkimer Street in Brooklyn, New York City, to an English mother and Irish father who had taken United States citizenship. Unusually for Irish Roman Catholics (particularly Irish Americans), the Joyces were strongly Loyalist. William Joyce later claimed to have aided the Black and Tans{see []}, and to have been threatened by the Irish Republican Army because of this. Fearing revenge, the Joyce family left for London after the establishment of the Irish Free State, and 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.
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.
In 1934, Joyce was promoted to the BUF's director of propaganda and then later appointed as deputy leader. Joyce's violent rhetoric and willingness to physically confront anti-fascist agitators head-on played no small part in destroying the British establishment’s enthusiasm for Fascism. 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 anti-Semitism.
However, Joyce was sacked when Mosley drastically reduced the BUF staff shortly after the elections and went on to form a breakaway organisation, the National Socialist League. Unlike Joyce, Mosley was never a committed anti-Semite, preferring to use anti-Jewish feelings only as an expedient political tool. Although Joyce had been deputy leader of the BUF from 1933 and a brave fighter and powerful orator, Mosley snubbed him in his autobiography and later denounced him as a traitor because of his wartime activities.
Lord Haw-Haw
In late August 1939, shortly before World War II started, Joyce and his wife Margaret fled to Germany. Joyce had been tipped off, probably by Maxwell Knight of MI5, that the British authorities intended to detain him under Defence Regulation 18B. Joyce became a naturalised German in 1940.
In Berlin, Joyce initially could not find employment until a chance meeting with fellow Mosleyite sympathiser Dorothy Eckersley, got Joyce an audition at the Rundfunkhaus (radio centre). When Joyce became the best-known propaganda broadcaster the nickname transferred to him. Joyce's broadcasts initially came from studios in Berlin later transferring (due to heavy Allied bombing) to Luxembourg and finally to Hamburg, and were relayed over a network of Axis-controlled radio stations which included Hamburg, Bremen, Luxembourg City, Hilversum, Calais, Oslo and Zessen.
Although listening to his broadcasts was officially discouraged (although not actually illegal) they became very popular with the British public. They always began with the words "Germany calling, Germany calling" (because of Joyce's nasal drawl sounded like: Jairmany calling, Jairmany calling). However, far from breaking British morale, they served only to increase either resentment or ridicule of Joyce.
Ironically Joyces programmes were also popular among hardline Irish nationalists, who presumably were unaware of or had forgotton about his time in Ireland.
Joyce made his final broadcast on April 30, 1945, during the Battle of Berlin. The next day Radio Hamburg was seized by British forces who used it to make a mock Germany calling broadcast denouncing Joyce.
Besides broadcasting, Joyce's duties included distributing propaganda among British prisoners of war, whom he tried to recruit into the British Free Corps, as a branch of the Waffen SS. Adolf Hitler awarded Joyce the War Merit Cross (First and Second Class) for his broadcasts.
Capture and Trial
At the end of the war, he was captured by British forces near the Germany-Denmark border at Flensburg.
He was tried on three counts of high treason:
William Joyce, on 18 September, 1939, and on numerous other days between 18 September 1939 and 30 April, 1945 did aid and assist the enemies of the King by broadcasting to the King's subjects propaganda on behalf of the King's enemies. William Joyce, on 26 September, 1940, did aid and comfort the King's enemies by purporting to be naturalised as a German citizen. William Joyce, on 18 September 1939 and on numerous other days between 18 September 1939 and 2 July 1940 did aid and assist the enemies of the King by broadcasting to the King's subjects propaganda on behalf of the King's enemies.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 a lack of jurisdiction; 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, confirmed by the Court of Appeal and the House of Lords (on a split decision), that Joyce was convicted and sentenced to death. Joyce, in his appeal to the House of Lords, argued that jurisdiction had been wrongly assumed by the court in electing to try an alien for offences committed in a foreign country.
Joyce was executed on January 3, 1946, at Wandsworth Prison, aged 39;
Joyce's family
The Crown considered trying his wife Margaret as well. Margaret Joyce died in Soho in 1972, reportedly from alcohol abuse.
William Joyce had two daughters by his first wife, Hazel; Joyce was reinterred in 1976 at the New Cemetery in Bohermore, County Galway, Ireland.
Trivia
The life of William Joyce was the inspiration for Kurt Vonnegut's character, Howard W Campbell, in his novels Mother Night and Slaughterhouse Five.
User Comments Add a comment…