136 The Capture of William Joyce.pdf

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Number 136
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NUMBER 136
© Copyright
After the Battle
2007
Editor-in-Chief: Winston G. Ramsey
Managing Editor: Gordon Ramsey
Editor: Karel Margry
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William Joyce as the British public first got to know him: as the leading speaker at
meetings of the British Union of Fascists. Although many disagreed with his racist
views and aggressive tactics, he was generally praised for his powers of oratory. The
journalist and novelist Cecil Parker described a speech given by Joyce at the Park
Lane Hotel: ‘Thin, pale, intense, he had not been speaking many minutes before we
were electrified by this man. I have been a connoisseur of speech-making for a quar-
ter of a century, but never before, in any country, had I met a personality so terrifying
in its dynamic force, so vituperative, so vitriolic.’
CONTENTS
THE CAPTURE OF WILLIAM JOYCE
IT HAPPENED HERE
The Surrender of Nauru and
Ocean Island
PRESERVATION
Relics of War along the Barents Road
INVESTIGATION
Missing in Borneo
WRECK RECOVERY
T-34 Beutepanzer recovered
in Estonia
FROM THE EDITOR
2
22
30
34
43
47
Front Cover:
Renegade broadcaster William Joyce,
wounded in the thigh at his capture near Flensburg,
being carried into a British hospital at the Scharnhorst
Barracks at Lüneburg on April 29, 1945. (IWM) The
former military barracks are today the campus of
Lüneburg University. (Karel Margry)
Centre Pages:
The Australian frigate HMAS
Diamantina,
preserved at the Queensland Maritime Museum in Bris-
bane, Australia. In September 1945, the ceremonies for
the Japanese surrender of the Pacific atolls Nauru and
Ocean Island took place aboard this ship. (David Green)
Back Cover:
Recovery of a turncoat T-34 tank from Lake
Kurtna Mätasjärv in north-east Estonia in September
2000. (Meelis Mitt)
Acknowledgements:
For help with the William Joyce
story, the Editor would like to thank, in the UK: Geoffrey
H. Perry, Tim Carroll, I. Whittaker, and David List; in
Germany: Dr. Broder Schwensen of the Flensburg
Stadtarchiv, Rita Asmussen and Britta Madsen; and in
the Netherlands: Johan van Doorn and Hans Houter-
man. For help with the Missing in Borneo story he
extends his appreciation to Peter Boer and also to Harco
Gijsbers of the Nederlands Instituut voor Oorlogsdocu-
mentatie. For providing photographs and information
on the T-34 Beutepanzer he thanks Mihail Zenov.
Photo Credits:
AWM — Australian War Memorial;
IWM — Imperial War Museum, London.
In 1933 Joyce was member of a small BUF delegation sent to attend the Nazi Party
rally at Nuremberg, the first to be staged in that town and held from August 31 to
September 3. This picture appeared in the official Nazi brochure of the rally published
shortly after the event. Joyce is standing third from left (flanked by French fascists in
the front row). Other members of the BUF delegation are Unity Mitford (far left),
Alexander Raven Thompson, the BUF’s chief ideologist (fifth from left, with mous-
tache) and Captain Vincent (sixth from left, with Highland bonnet and medals). As
the brochure commented: ‘Even the foreign guests are swept off their feet by the
spirit and determination of the Hitler Youth’.
2
Joyce became notorious during the war
as propaganda broadcaster in English for
the Nazi-German radio, and is generally
judged one of the worst traitors in British
history. Joyce’s sneering and jeering
broadcasts from Germany — in that
peculiar fake-Oxbridge drawl that earned
him the nickname ‘Lord Haw-Haw’ — had
a tremendous adverse effect on morale in
war-torn Britain. Regarded as a joke fig-
ure at first, as the war got under way his
apparent inside knowledge of conditions
in Britain, his ability to spread rumours
and to play on ordinary people’s fear of
the unknown, severely unsettled his
British audience. A BBC report, drawn up
at the request of a worried Ministry of
Information, established that by the
spring of 1940 one-sixth of the adult pop-
ulation or six million people were regular
listeners to Joyce’s programme (broad-
cast on the 31 metre waveband), half or
18 million people were occasional listen-
ers, and only one third or 11 million never
listened. The impact of Lord Haw-Haw’s
broadcasts gradually diminished after the
end of the London Blitz in May 1941, but
never lost their effect entirely. By May
1945, with the Allies fighting to end the
war in Europe, the hunt was on for the
man whom many in Britain had grown to
hate intensely. Joyce and his wife Mar-
garet managed to evade capture longer
than many of the top Nazis but on May
28 — three weeks after VE-Day — their
journey ended near Flensburg on the
German-Danish border. Found wander-
ing in a wood by two British officers, one
of whom recognised his voice, Joyce was
shot in the thigh when his gesture to pro-
duce a false identity card from his pocket
was mistaken for drawing a weapon. The
news of Lord Haw-Haw’s arrest was a
sensation in Britain, and this picture of
him lying wounded on a stretcher under
armed guard was carried by most news-
papers and magazines in the following
weeks. (IWM)
THE CAPTURE OF WILLIAM JOYCE
William Joyce was born at Brooklyn, New
York, on April 24, 1906. His father, Michael
Joyce, originated from Killour near
Ballinrobe, County Mayo, Ireland, and his
mother Gertrude (née Brooke) from Cromp-
ton in Lancashire. Michael had emigrated in
1888 and taken American citizenship in 1894,
and Gertrude had become American on
marrying him in 1905, so William was Ameri-
can-born from American parents.
In 1909, when William was three, the fam-
ily returned to Ireland, settling in Galway,
where four more children were born: Frank,
Quentin, Joan and Robert. William was edu-
cated at the Jesuit-run St Ignatius Loyola
College where he proved a clever pupil with
a passion for debate, but also a gang-leader.
Unusually for Irish Roman Catholics, both
his father and young William were fervently
pro-British and strongly supported the Roy-
alist cause. As a 14-year-old schoolboy
William — or so he later claimed — acted as
an informer for the Black and Tans (the
paramilitary Royal Irish Constabulary
Reserve Force) during their campaign to
suppress the Irish rebels in 1920.
In December 1921, with the Irish Free
State declared and fearing revenge from the
IRA, William left Ireland in a hurry for Eng-
land, the rest of the family following soon
after. The next year, he applied for the Uni-
versity of London’s Officer Training Corps,
falsely claiming to be American-born from
British parents, a lie that was supported by
his father, and was enrolled. In September
1923 he entered University of London’s Bir-
beck College to study English, passing inter-
mediate BA courses in Latin, French, Eng-
lish and History.
As a student, he developed an interest in
fascism and in December 1923 joined the
British Fascisti of Rotha Lintorn-Orman. He
also became president of his college’s Con-
servative Society, where he soon gained a
reputation as a hard-line and race-conscious
orator. In October 1924, while returning from
stewarding a Conservative Party meeting,
Joyce was attacked by a gang of Communists
and received a deep razor slash across his
right cheek, which left a permanent scar from
the earlobe to the mouth. By now his views
were turning ever more anti-Semitic, so to
him his assailants were ‘Jewish Communists’.
In 1927 Joyce graduated from Birbeck
with a first-class honours degree. That same
year he married Hazel Barr, a 21-year-old
like himself. Two daughters were born,
Heather in 1928 and Diana in 1931. He failed
to complete his MA thesis and his applica-
tion for a job at the Foreign Office was
rejected — two setbacks which reinforced his
anti-Semitism. He found a teaching job at the
Victoria Tutor College and registered for a
PhD in philosophy and psychology at King’s
College.
In 1932, Joyce joined Sir Oswald Mosley’s
British Union of Fascists and swiftly
emerged as a leading speaker, reputed for his
aggressive and vitriolic rhetoric. In 1934, he
was promoted to BUF’s director of propa-
By Karel Margry
ganda and later to deputy leader. After the
bloody debacle of the BUF’s June 1934
Olympia rally, Joyce was instrumental in
shifting the party’s policy from campaigning
for economic revival to anti-Semitism and, in
1936, in changing its name to British Union
of Fascists and National Socialists.
In 1935, Hazel having fallen in love with
his friend and BUF colleague Eric Hamilton-
Piercey, Joyce separated from his wife. Soon
after, he began courting Margaret White, a
25-year-old redhead from Carlisle, who had
come to several BUF meetings to hear him
speak and had soon been noticed by him. In
February 1937, the month his divorce came
through, they married.
That same month he stood as a BUF can-
didate for the London County Council elec-
tions — a vote that he lost. Two months later
he was sacked from his paid position when
Mosley drastically reduced the BUF staff,
the lack of funds giving Mosley a good
excuse to get rid of his increasingly antago-
nistic deputy. Together with John Beckett
and Angus Macnab, and with financial back-
ing of stockbroker Alex Scrimgeour, Joyce
formed a new splinter party, the National
Socialist League, and set up a newspaper,
The Helmsman.
However, the party failed to
attract members as war with Nazi Germany
now seemed increasingly inevitable and by
1939 membership had dropped to about 40.
3
Margaret Cairns White was born in Manchester on July 14,
1911, the daughter of a manager of a textile warehouse. From
her earliest teenage years she was interested in politics and
she joined the British Union of Fascists in 1933, aged 22.
Margaret first met William Joyce on February 7, 1935, having
travelled from Manchester to Dumfries with a coach-load of
other Blackshirts especially to hear him speak. They began a
relationship soon afterwards, went to live together in 1936 and
got married on February 13, 1937. A good-time girl, outgoing
and feminine, she spent her life fleeing boredom.
BROADCASTING FOR NAZI GERMANY
On August 26, 1939 — five days before the
outbreak of war — Joyce and his wife left
Britain by ferry and travelled to Germany.
He had been tipped off by Maxwell Knight,
an MI5 contact, that the British authorities
intended to intern him under Defence Regu-
lation 18B. Joyce departed the country using
an illegally obtained passport. Back in July
1933, he had applied for a British passport,
falsely describing himself as ‘a British citizen,
born in Galway, Ireland’. He had the docu-
ment renewed on August 24, just two days
before his departure.
Arriving in Berlin on the 27th, Joyce could
initially not find employment but a chance
encounter with fellow-Mosleyite Dorothy
Eckersley eventually led to him getting an
audition as an English newsreader at the
Reichsrundfunkhaus (Reich Broadcasting
House) on September 11. Although it did not
go well, he was given the first live bulletin to
read later that day — the first of the hun-
dreds of radio propaganda broadcasts he
would make for Germany during the war. He
was offered an immediate job as editor and
announcer with the English broadcasting
team, the formal contract with the Reichs-
rundfunk-Gesellschaft (Reich Broadcasting
Company) being signed on September 18.
Thus he began his career as a propaganda
broadcaster for Germany. Night after night
for the next five and a half years he would
bring the Nazi view of the war into people’s
homes.
4
On August 26, 1939 — five days before the outbreak of the Sec-
ond World War — William and Margaret Joyce left England and
travelled to Nazi Germany. Offering his talents to the Reichs-
rundfunk (German radio), he read his first news bulletin in Eng-
lish on September 11 and joined the English Language Service
as editor, soon rising to become its leading commentator —
known to millions of Britons as ‘Lord Haw-Haw’. This wartime
picture shows Hauptkommentator Joyce in his Blackshirt uni-
form with Hitler-style hair and moustache, his face disfigured
with the razor slash from 1924.
Joyce but for another renegade broadcaster,
Norman Baillie-Stewart, but the epithet was
soon transferred to Joyce. With several Eng-
lish-speaking broadcasters taking turns at
reading the daily news, at first listeners in
Because of the affected upper-class tone of
his voice, he soon acquired the nickname
‘Lord Haw-Haw’. The sobriquet had been
coined by
Daily Express
journalist Jonah
Barrington on September 18, 1939, not for
The Reichsrundfunkhaus (Reich Broadcasting House) on Masurenallee in Berlin-
Charlottenburg, where the Joyces worked. Today it is named Haus des Rundfunks
and serves as the headquarters of Radio Berlin-Brandenburg (RBB).
Like her husband, Margaret Joyce began working for the German radio, signing a
contract in October 1939. Known as ‘Lady Haw-Haw’ she specialised in programmes
directed at the women of Britain. Here she is at the microphone with an official from
the Nazi Propaganda Ministry.
Britain were puzzled about Lord Haw-Haw’s
identity. The guessing game continued for
some time but by December the
Sunday Pic-
torial
had positively identified the new
enemy announcer as William Joyce.
At first, Joyce only read news bulletins but
he was soon asked to do more opinion
pieces. These commentaries on the war were
not broadcast live but pre-recorded, and
Joyce was soon allowed to himself write the
scripts for them. Titled ‘Views on the News’
and broadcast at 2230 hours (German time)
each night, they always began with the call-
sign ‘Germany calling!, Germany calling!’ —
but Joyce’s German intonation made it
sound like ‘Jairminny calling!’
At first the British people considered Lord
Haw-Haw mainly a joke, a figure of fun, a
favourite object of parody. But as the war
went on, he seriously got under people’s
skin. In the public imagination Lord Haw-
Haw acquired phenomenal, almost clairvoy-
ant powers of knowing what was going on in
England. His agents were thought to be so
ubiquitous that they could keep every public
clock in Britain under constant supervision.
He was said to have accurately predicted not
only British troop movements but also even
minor postings of civil servants; he was
reputed to have command over German
bomber forces and having sent them to tar-
gets according to his whims. Everyone
claimed to have heard him mention his or
her town or village by name. As public belief
in his claims and statements grew, so did peo-
ple’s hatred of him. More and more Joyce
came to personify the enemy. Generally con-
sidered to be a traitor of the worst kind, he
became, for many British, the most hated
personality of the war.
Three weeks after Joyce began broadcast-
ing for Germany, his wife Margaret was
hired as an editor and speaker by the Reichs-
rundfunk as well. Starting on October 3,
1939, she began a weekly talk to the women
of Britain aimed at lowering their morale by
comparing their lives unfavourably to that of
Right:
No. 29 Kastanienallee, practically
around the corner from the Rundfunkhaus,
where the Joyces lived from 1941 to 1945.
women in Germany. Easily recognised from
her distinctive London-Mancunian accent,
within days she was being dubbed ‘Lady
Haw-Haw’ by British listeners. The
Daily
Mirror
correctly identified her in March 1940
but she was not introduced by her own name
until December 9, 1942.
In early 1940 Joyce found time to expound
his views — his hatred of the British press and
politicians, international capitalism, the com-
munists and the Jews, all of whom he blamed
for the downfall of the British Empire and the
war — in a book titled
Dämmerung über Eng-
land
(Twilight over England), published by
the German Foreign Office in both a German
and an English edition.
On September 26, 1940, his British pass-
port having run out in July, both William and
Margaret took out German citizenship.
Life for the Joyces in wartime Berlin was
initially good. William and Margaret relished
his new-found celebrity status and the mater-
ial privileges it brought. Both vivacious char-
acters, they enjoyed the metropolitan life,
the socialising, the drinks and diners at their
favourite bars and restaurants, the concerts
and dance clubs. Their expatriation had
brought them closer together.
However, as time went on their relationship
became more turbulent. Always the flirting
type, in the winter of 1939 Margaret began a
love affair with a married German officer,
Nikolaus von Besack. Her infidelity led to vio-
lent rows with William. In February 1941,
they acquired a comfortable flat at No. 29
Kastanienallee, only to go and live separately
a few months later, Margaret finding a small
apartment of her own in Bülowstrasse.
Left:
In early 1940 Margaret began a love
affair with an aristocratic German officer,
Nikolaus (‘Nicky’) von Besack. A
Wehrmacht intelligence officer, he spoke
excellent English and they first met while
he was on temporary assignment to the
Reichsrundfunk to help out the short-
staffed English Language Service. The
affair lasted throughout the war, inter-
rupted only by von Besack’s tours of duty
at the front, and was the cause of William
and Margaret getting a divorce in August
1941 (they re-married six months later).
Although von Besack had explained to
Margaret in 1943 that he could not possi-
bly marry her because she was not ‘a
proper German’, she was still devastated
when he suddenly married another
woman in February 1944. Even after the
war, by then a widow, she sought to re-
establish contact with him.
5

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