Part Two: Lord Haw-Haw: Hitler's Favorite Anglo Propagandist

Welcome back to Behind the Bastards, a podcast about the very worst people in all of history. And this week, we are on part two of our episodes on Lord HaHaw.
And this is Reverse Bastards.

I am sitting in the guest chair this week, and our host and topic expert is Patrick O'Rourke. Welcome back to the show.
Thank you so much for doing this.

And yeah, I'm excited to see how this guy becomes the mouthpiece of the German fascist movement in the UK.

Thanks very much, Robert. I hope,

and thanks for having me back. I hope in part one, your ears aren't bleeding from all my terrible British impressions that I'm not loading them on too thick.
They're much better than mine.

My poor wife is upstairs putting the kids to bed, and they can hear me doing the accents.

So now both of my sons are like doing their best attempts at posh British accents and terrifying their poor mother, just absolute hell for her, absolutely. So, she has it in surround sound anyway.

So, we're back for more bastardry. Uh, what do you think? Uh, you're you're excited for uh Joyce's escapade so far and see where he's going to end up, right? Sure, yeah.

So, iHeart's lawyers reached out to me after the last recording and demanded I make no more Prince Andrew jokes, so no sweat.

This is an iHeart podcast,

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returning to this week's uh bastard william joyce when we left at the end of part one All of his political projects that he had ever gotten involved in had ended in disaster.

In the early 1930s, he was an insignificant and embittered high school teacher, spouting conspiracy theories to anyone who would listen, whilst cheating on his wife, one of his students, when he found another would-be messiah, enter-stage right, Sir Oswald Mosley.

Now, regular listeners to the podcast will know that Oswald, Tommy Mosley, six foot two, was a British aristocrat who became the youngest ever sitting member of parliament in the 1918 British general election.

Roberts, did you know that in the mid-1920s, Mosley was a fishing buddy of future American president FDR?

I did not know that. Yeah, I just sent you an email there with a photo.
If you want to open it up,

this is their beach party. How would you describe this to the listeners?

It looks like a Christian rock album cover.

It looks like a Christian rock album.

What would they call their band?

Oh, my god uh geez i don't know um

yeah the apostles i don't know what you do it it looks like i don't know how else to describe it like you have i i think that's fdr there in the middle who's like sitting in the water with with his arms up and like a prayer gesture you have uh which which one of those is that crosby in the right um or is that uh uh mosley i think that's um i think that's mosley yeah he's like half kneeling with again, his hands up in prayer.

And then the third guy, Crosby, I guess, is laying on his back with his legs in the air. And they're all just kind of like

flat against, like, right in the tide pool level of the ocean, it looks like.

Can you imagine the kind of selfies they would have taken if they had had smart?

No.

No, no, but it would have gotten them all cancelled. Like FDR would never have been the precedent.
They would have all gotten in horrible trouble.

Yeah, basically, Mosley's first wife, Lady Cynthia Curzon, was totally famous. She was the daughter of a really famous British lord.
So that's probably how they met.

But they vacationed together for a month in Florida in February of 1926.

However, their budding political bromance fell apart when the two men adopted radically different positions on Hitler. FDR would end up being defined.

Yeah, would definitely end up being anti-Hitler, while Mosley remained very much pro-Hitler.

So much so that in 1932, Mosley founded the British Union of Fascists, or BUF. Sure did.
And you've done, I think, two episodes on this guy, Robert, or three even.

So obviously check those out, listeners, if you want more on Mosley. Mosley attempted to merge all of the veterans

of the nascient fascist movement in the UK together in the BUF. Now, the British Union of Fascists, or BUF, was heavily influenced by Italian fascism.

The BUF's uniform consisted of a black fencing jacket and black trousers. The BUF also adopted the so-called Roman salute.

In the 1920s, the Italian fascists were the first political movement to adopt the salute, which was later made famous by the Nazis and recently brought back into vogue by Richard Spencer, Steve Bannon, and Elon Musk.

Mosley's black shirts adopted the salute, but added their own unique British element to the gesture by shouting PJ PJ whilst giving it, short, not for pajamas, but perish Judah.

The motto of Mosley's new organization was

loyalty to the king and empire and the building of the greater Britain. And of course, William Joyce loved all of this and he joined immediately.

Throughout his life, Joyce had one phenomenal godlike talent, which he used frequently.

but never used for good. He was an incredible orator, a unique talent, possibly one of the greatest speakers of his generation.

He could speak without notes for several hours, if necessary, without faltering or losing his train of thought once.

At one BUF rally in Evesham, he spoke for over four hours, with one enraptured onlooker commenting, people stayed for the whole length of the speech out of sheer curiosity to see how long he could keep it up.

There wasn't a lot going on back then.

They didn't have Netflix or anything, you know? There wasn't.

It is easy to keep people in a line. Yeah, everyone, political opponents,

rivals in the fascist movement, everyone agrees this man is an incredible speaker.

The journalist

Cecil Roberts, who witnessed him speak, recalled, quote, I have been a connoisseur of speech making for over a quarter of a century, but never before had I met a personality so terrifying in its dynamic force, so vituperative, so vitrionic.

The words poured from him in a corrosive state. We listened in a kind of frozen hypnotism to his cold, stabbing voice.

There was a gleam of marat in his eyes, and his eloquence took on a satanic ring with which he invoked the rising wrath of his audience against the festering scum who, by cowardice and sloth, had reduced the British Empire to a marabound thing.

So, Joyce's fame as a speaker spread well beyond the BUF and even political opponents came to hear him. One such was John Beckett, former Labour Party Member of Parliament.

Quote, I first saw him in 1933 at a crowded meeting at Paddington Baths.

I had left political life and the Labour Party in disgust two years previously, but within 10 minutes of this 27-year-old taking the platform, I knew he was one of the finest orators in the country.

He had the trade unionist and Labour MP Philip Snowden's close reasoning and unnerving instinct for words, combined with the Scottish pacifist James Maxton's humour and the conservative Winston Churchill's daring.

His great audience assembled to hear a speaker quite unknown in the political world and the enthusiasm he created was an eye-opener for me.

Beckett was the son of a Christian father and a Jewish mother.

He had come to the meeting as a curious left-wing opponent and he departed a committed fascist and soon joined the BUF after hearing Joyce speak.

That's a rare

unholy talent.

Joyce's oratory brilliance led to his fellow black shirts hailing him as, quote, the mighty atom, the master, the professor, and most chillingly, the man without a soul.

Yeah, I mean, they,

like, the bootlicking goes down all the way with these people, right? Like, they're, that's kind of key to the fascist thing.

Is you have to have someone that you're like embarrassingly dick writing for.

And in this case, like that's, that's what it means to be a leader within these movements is to have a bunch of people making up the most cringeworthy praise and nicknames for you they possibly could.

It's the it's the old-timey equivalent of fucking having an AI make Donald Trump look jacked. Yeah, the man without a soul.

The only other nickname I can compare it to from the time is Hitler calling Reinhardt Heydrich

the man with the iron heart. The man with the iron heart, yeah.

Yeah, man. Anyway, amongst Mosley's adoring fascist fans was Margaret White, an organizer of the women's section of the BUF, and within days of first meeting, the two began an affair.

Joyce eventually dumped his first wife Hazel to take Margaret as his second wife. His pet name for her was Mother Sheep, and she in turn referred to him lovingly as the old ram.

Margaret later boasted that she was was like a dom, and Joyce was her sub, and that he was pathologically devoted to her.

She did not know, of course, that Joyce, true to form, soon started an affair with another fascist fangirl named Sylvia Morris.

So these two, Margaret and William Joyce, are just one of the most toxic couples ever. And they both constantly cheat on the other.

Now, look, I'm not judging people if that's their thing, open marriages as a couple or whatever. That's your thing, fine.

But according to their joint biographer, Nigel Farndale, this was done by each of them without the consent of the other. Yeah, they were part of the point was that they were cheating on each other.

That was important to both of them that they be cheating. Yeah.
Presumably that gave them the thrill or whatever.

She was constantly cuckolding him and altered between pouring affection on him, mocking him, making him sexually jealous and frustrated.

He responded by screaming verbal abuse at her, conducting his own illicit affairs and inflicting occasional bouts of domestic violence on her.

The fact that both of them were increasingly dysfunctional alcoholics did not help matters in their very, very fucked up relationship, which just got increasingly worse the longer they were together.

Yeah, that scans. That makes sense.
Now,

Mosley himself was no stranger to extramarital affairs, mistresses, and multiple spouses, and he also, of course, shared Joyce's talent for oratory.

Mosley appointed Joyce the BUF's Director of Propaganda, which was a full-time paid position. He paid about £300

per year at a time when the average construction worker would have made about £130 per year. So he's doing quite well off.

And this allows Joyce to quit his teaching job and devote himself full-time to politics.

Mosley, of course, never joined in the adulation for Joyce, even though he respected his abilities.

He referred to Joyce as the little man.

Now for reference Oswald Tommy Mosley as we know was six foot two whilst Joyce was just five foot five and as Mosley's catty nickname for Joyce implies the two men had a fraught hyper parasitic relationship which was the best term I could find online to describe their dynamic.

Okay.

Not a psychologist, but they're just two guys who were grifting off each other in an unending competition.

Whilst Joyce had been drawn to the leader, or Mosley, by his strongman image and the promise of a new fascist British Empire, he felt that Mosley was too soft on the Irish question because Mosley was not calling for the British Army to re-invade southern Ireland.

On a political level, Mosley admired Joyce's manic energy, his intelligence and dedication to the BUF, but an issue arose because of Joyce's fanatical, uncompromising, and unhinged anti-Semitic rhetoric.

As the BUF grew in popularity, its public image was increasingly tarnished by a wave of anti-Semitic attacks by the BUF in the East End of London, and of course, the rising tide of anti-Jewish violence and pogroms in Nazi Germany.

In response to this, Mosley turned down his own anti-Semitic remarks and repeatedly had to urge Joyce to do the same.

And let's face it, you have a serious problem if Oswald Mosley, the British Hitler, is telling you to dial down the anti-Jewish stuff. Yeah, yeah, you're going a little hard, man.

Mosley, on a personal level, was wary of Joyce's popularity within the movement, and he viewed him as a potential threat to his leadership. Regular bastards.

That's one of the weaknesses these movements always have. When you have two guys who are really good at the whole being charismatic thing, they inevitably fall out, right? You can't have two Fuhrers.

Yeah, they love a good Fuhrer fight.

Regular bastard spod listeners will recall that Mosley served in World War I as a member of the Royal Flying Corps, and he had crashed his aeroplane whilst doing a loop-the-loop to show off to his mother and sister, who were watching him fly an aeroplane in an aerobatic display.

As a result of this self-inflicted war wound, Mosley developed phlebiatis in his leg, which flared up from time to time.

On one occasion, the phlebiatis was so painful that he was not able to walk or stand to deliver a speech at a major black shirt rally

what is phlebitis because my only reference point is a joke they made with the nixon character on futurama what what what what what are we talking about here it's basically if you get a now not a medical doctor but my understanding because i looked it up for this is if you get a

broken bone and it doesn't heal properly, it can affect the nerves in the area around it and the nerves and the muscle can swell.

So, your leg could swell up so much so that it's painful to move the joint. Gotcha.
Gotcha.

Not a medical doctor, but that's what I could figure out from

a quick Google.

P-H-L-E-B-I-T-I-S.

Don't take my word first.

Go Google it yourself or ask your physician.

Or say the word while doing a Nixon accent. You'll appreciate why it's such a good bit.

Okay, I'm imagining that now.

On one occasion, it was so painful he was not able to walk or stand to deliver a speech at a major black shirt rally.

Joyce took his place at the last moment, giving a rousing oration as good, if not better, than anything Mosley could have delivered.

Joyce was such a good stand-in that Mosley increasingly saw him as a threat and was now determined to keep the little man in line or to get rid of him altogether.

Mosley got the opportunity to dismiss Joyce in late 1306 in the wake of the fascist defeat defeat at the Battle of Cable Street.

Between 1933 and 1936, Mussolini had sent Mosley a secret annual stipend of £60,000 per annum. Again, remember...
Jesus. Yeah, Jesus had not

a lot of money back then.

Yeah, it's you're talking again £130 for a construction worker's annual wage, and Mosley is getting £60,000.

Yeah, that's a shitload back then.

Yeah, so it gets laundered to Mosley through the London bank account of William Allen, who's a former Belfast loyalist member of parliament who had joined the British Union of Fascists.

So, but after the Battle of Cable Street, Mussolini regarded Mosley as a failure and he cut off the funds in 1937.

Though Mosley did later get financial support from the Nazis, it never matched Mussolini's generosity. And this left Mosley in financial difficulty.

So when he announced cutbacks, the very first thing that had to go was the BUF's Department of Propaganda, which Joyce had been director of with an annual salary of £300.

The loss of this wage was the last straw for Joyce, who already was suspicious that Mosley was, quote, too soft on a Jewish question.

So in 1937, Joyce adopted friend of the pod Adolf Hitler as his new political messiah, and he left the BUF to form his own organization called the National Socialist League with John Beckett, the secretly half-Jewish former socialist MP that I mentioned earlier.

Now, Robert,

what is the one thing that the Nazis in particular have always been streets ahead of compared to other political movements?

I mean, I guess

I would say like turning political violence into electoral success. Yeah,

that's one thing. I was thinking more along the lines of style.

Oh my God. Yeah, the outfits.
Jesus Christ. They looked so, I mean, fucking, just look at the fascists we're dealing with today.

Like,

yeah,

and honestly,

Mussolini, not a great-looking movement, you know, weird-looking outfits, but the Nazis, they had tailors.

They had it. Hugo Boss was making their uniforms.
Yeah.

So think again of how powerful the swastika was as a symbol. And I think covered this before.
And think of how evil, cool, and genocidally stylish the SS look in their black uniforms.

So, Robert, and that was a big reason why people joined them, right? You get a lot of early SS men who are like, Well, I thought the uniforms looked cool, yeah.

Like that kind of my politics descended from me wanting to look cool. Um,

off many such cases, unfortunately. That's it.
So, speaking of

um, you know, brilliant symbolism and style, I have sent you

the, if you look in the emails, the logo

that

William Joyce designed for the National Socialist League. Yes.
So I'm looking at it. And honestly,

it looks more like the logo for a Pray Away the Gay Camp. There's a bunch of like, I would, I know what it's supposed to be.

It looks like like about four or five, four to six rolling pins are forming like

almost like a Star of David type design with like a blue circle around them and then the word steer straight underneath it i i know that the the the rolling pins are actually supposed to be like a like a ship's ship's wheel right yeah what with england and the navy being such a big deal but just the whole steer straight thing it it looks like it's a it looks like a pray away the gay camp logo yeah yeah absolutely and i mean think of it even steer straight as a motto like um the nazis have deutschland derwach you know uh germany awake and these guys have steer straight but robert do you know who else has a dog shit logo

uh well i mean look it was a long time ago when we got the logo for this podcast. No, I mean it's done all right for us.

I was going to say not the sponsors of this of this podcast. Oh, yeah.
Yeah. Good logos only, unless it's the Washington State Highway Patrol again.

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So, all right.

In 1938, Joyce hoped that his movement with a shitty ship's wheel logo would grow to replace

Mosley's and that he would become the future British Fuhrer. The problem was that Mosley had 40,000 black shirts, whilst Joyce's splinter group had just 40.

One former comrade from the BUF came to see Joyce and Beckett speaking one day and recalled:

They were at a street corner with Joyce standing on a platform and speaking from it, with Beckett the only spectator pretending to be an opposition heckler.

It was their way of trying to attract some controversy and to generate an audience for their open air meeting.

What a terrible come down it was from the great BUF meetings attended by thousands that I had seen these men speaking at.

So Joyce writes the party's policy document entitled National Socialism Now, in which he declared his devotion to Hitler, but stressed that an indigenous form of Nazism was required for Britain.

Quote, we are the only 100% British organisation working with British people and British funds for the rebuilding of Britain in a modern British way.

So basically, he just wants it to be made very clear that he is definitely not Irish.

From the foundation of the party until the outbreak of the Second World War, Joyce organised public meetings in London, at which he disseminated Nazi propaganda, but he failed to attract many supporters.

Joyce's meetings were mainly attended by hostile audiences.

Joyce inflamed matters by singing God save the king as a means of ending each meeting, which was fairly customary across most political parties in Britain at the time.

But Joyce would follow the national anthem by giving the Nazi salute and shouting, Heil Heckler! The National Socialist League. Sure.
Yeah. See how that could have gone in 1939, England.
Yeah.

And you're on the pulse, man. The National Socialist League's lack of success meant that it was soon deregistered as a political party, and Joyce re-registered it as a drinking club.

I didn't realise you could formally found one of them in Britain, but I suppose it's kind of like what the proud boys have now.

Yeah.

So he became increasingly depressed about the looming prospect of war with Nazi Germany and was growing even more dependent on alcohol.

His last public meeting of the National Socialist League in May of 1939 ended in chaos when Joyce stood on stage giving the Nazi salute and repeatedly screaming Sieg Heil before stage diving into his audience in an attempt to punch Hitler.

Joyce was brought to court twice for assault, but neither case ever proceeded to trial.

Sounds like a screwdriver gig or something.

In the autumn of nineteen thirty nine, as the threat of war with Nazi Germany loomed, the British Government passed Regulation 18B to allow for the internment without trial of potential fascist fifth columnists.

On the afternoon of 24th of August 1939, Joyce received a phone call warning him that his internment had been approved and that MI5 had been ordered to arrest him within 48 hours.

It is widely believed that the tip-off to Joyce had come from Maxwell Knight, the head of MI5, who not only was the main source of inspiration for the character M in Ian Fleming's James Bond series, he was also a former friend and comrade of Joyce's from their time together in the early years of the British fascistity.

Joyce simply picked up the receiver and listened to the caller for some minutes without replying. He and his second wife Margaret then immediately left for London.

When Special Branch of the London Metropolitan Police raided his flat four days later, they found Joyce's mother Gertrude and his mistress Sylvia Morris, both of whom he had chosen to abandon, along with his two daughters, who he would never see again.

Because just one week later, when Britain declared war on Nazi Germany, Joyce was already safely in Berlin, looking for a way to serve the Nazi war effort.

William and Margaret Joyce arrived in the Third Reich without a plan. Joyce had not been in contact with the Nazis beforehand, and unlike Mosley's BUF, the Nazis had no idea who this guy was.

The Joyces were quickly running out of money, and for a while, it looked as if they would be interned as enemy aliens.

But luckily for Joyce, some other British Nazi sympathisers had fled to Germany earlier and had established close ties with the Nazi regime.

Through this network, Joyce got a job broadcasting propaganda to Britain. During World War II, the Nazis set up dozens of radio stations in a multitude of languages broadcasting all all over Europe.

For example, Nazi propaganda was broadcast in minority indigenous languages such as Irish Gaelic, Scots Gaelic and Welsh in the hope of encouraging separatists in Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales to rebel against the English-dominated British government in London.

Joyce was given a job broadcasting in English to the populace of Britain and Ireland.

Each night he bombarded his audience with anti-Semitic propaganda and assured them of the impending victory of Nazi Germany and urged the British to seek peace terms.

His broadcasts always began the same way. I think we were recording there the first one of how it starts.
No, people haven't heard it before.

Germany calling, Germany calling, Germany calling.

Here are the Reichster ambush, station Bremen and station DXB on the 31-meter bend.

You are about to hear our news in English.

The British Ministry of Misinformation has been conducting a systematic campaign of frightening British women and girls about the danger of being injured by splinters from German bombs.

The women have reacted to these suggestions and alarms by requesting their milliners to shape the spring and summer hands out of very thin tin plate, which is covered with silk, velvet, or other other draping material.

Okay. Yeah.

So

this was unbelievably successful at the time. Listening to Joyce's pro-Nazi broadcasts in Britain was not illegal, but it was very much discouraged.

Nonetheless, his broadcasts were, as I said, a phenomenal success.

At a time when official BBC news broadcasts had a radio listenership of 18 million listeners nightly, Joyce had a listenership of 9 million.

Okay. Joyce was rich.

Yeah, so he's kind of giving the people what they want. It drew a large audience in part because it usually had more accurate war news than the heavily censored BBC.

I mean, this guy can say anything he wants once it causes chaos in Britain. So he entertained them with humor at a time when BBC broadcasts were strictly scripted, stuffy, and fairly boring.

But most of all, he terrorised his fascinated listeners by sowing fear, doubt and demoralising rumours aimed at undermining the British war effort.

So at a time when there were thousands of British men serving in the Royal Navy or flying against the Luftwaffe in the RAF, the BBC refused to report any war losses out of fear of demoralising the nation and undermining the war effort.

In an effective effort to fill this vacuum, Joyce Joyce regularly broadcast nightly lists of dead and captured British servicemen.

And of course, millions of people tuned in to learn if their husbands, sons, fathers, and brothers were mentioned. Oh, God, that's bleak.

I mean, it's why also that's a bad propaganda idea, just pretending like nothing's bad happening while you're fighting a war.

Like, people will be aware that things are like, you know, they'll stop hearing from their loved ones. They'll see that, like, the notes are going out to neighborhoods in town.

Like, it's, you can't hide hide that sort of shit, really. Yeah, and this is one of the things he does.
Like, his most famous kind of catchphrase: one of the big British battleships is the Ark Royal.

And of course, the guys on board it can't send home, you know, mail and stuff.

And there's all kinds of security OPSEC, you know, things, you know, they can't report much about it or what it's doing, or even if it's still afloat or if it's been sunk.

So, Joyce's catchphrase that he'd repeat every few episodes was, Where is the Ark Royal? where is the ark royal you don't know but we do and we can sink it any time we choose um

so he also specializes in informing like think of what's happening in the early stages of the war it just looks like rolling nazi victory after nazi victory and he's happily broadcasting accurate information about it and this is terrifying people in britain and he's saying stuff like you know um

uh the invasion is coming hitler the time, the hour, the place, these are Hitler's secrets. But bear in mind, he is coming.
We'll be with you. I'll be broadcasting from London soon.

He also knew Britain very well because he had travelled all over England making speeches at different fascist rallies. And he exploited his brilliant photographic memory

to strike fear into people. So he might broadcast to some English town saying,

Dear listener, in Sophie's town, Robertshire, where Miss Smith serves tea in the Yellow Door Cafe, where the mallards swim in the duck pond off the village green, and the town hall clock runs three minutes slow.

And of course, this made it seem like he had a local secret Nazi spy, or that he had just parachuted in yesterday because he's describing the place so well, when in fact he hadn't been there for years.

And of course, there's a very good chance that one thing thing that keeps coming up in these listeners is the detail about the clock being three minutes slow.

And of course, there's a very good chance that somebody locally had a watch that's three minutes fast and they look at the town hall clock and think, fuck, he's right.

Or else the town hall clock is two minutes slow and people ignore the discrepancy when they're down the pub.

Or else somebody spread a conspiracy theory saying, ah, but the clock was three minutes slow yesterday, but then the home guard were sent in to synchronize the time to undermine Joyce.

And of course, all these rumors spread and it creates sheer panic. And there are some verified cases of Joyce's listeners actually being so terrified of

his shows

and the prospect of an immediate Nazi invasion that they commit suicide.

Joyce would announce that a specific armaments factory in some city would be bombed the following night. And of course, what happens is it might be bombed coincidentally.

He doesn't know what the Luftwaffe are planning, or it might be bombed five nights later. And again, people forget the discrepancy.

It's like Alex Jones' predictions: people just remember the hits and forget all the misses he has.

Yeah,

or munitions workers will listen to the broadcast and they just won't turn up at work the next day because they don't want to be bombed. And then the factory has to close.

So the rumor goes out that, oh, it's been closed and that's why the bombing raid didn't arrive.

So basically panic, fear and rumor filled the vacuum of information left in the wartime censorship. And that's, of course, what fascism thrives on, you know,

on fear.

Yes, peer isolation. Yeah.
Yeah. And he's so successful that the British government actually considers blocking the cross-channel radio signal.

But the problem is, if they broadcast or block his incoming broadcasts, they're also stopping their outgoing broadcasts and communications with the Royal Navy, the Royal Air Force, the OSS, and the French Resistance, and so on.

So they can't do anything about it.

And for the first few years of his broadcast, Joyce remained completely

anonymous. His nasal tone earned him the nickname Lord Hawhaw because of his perceived haughty, haughty, posh, Mayfair accent.

Now, Joyce, we don't know what kind of accent this guy had as a kid, because remember, he's born either in America or in Ireland. His father is Irish, his mother is

English. And when he comes to when he comes to Britain and starts making political speeches, I mean, he was from Galway, I'm from County Clare, which is the next county down.

So, like, you couldn't stand on a stage in Britain to give a political speech to the Conservative Party with my accent, you know, it would jar with people.

So, he basically gets received pronunciation lessons, and that is that's that's where the accent seems to come from.

There's a myth that you'll find online, and it's popular in Galway. That remember, remember, I said in episode one about how he used to make speeches against the IRA and against Bolshevism and stuff.

And yeah, he was supposed to have gotten into a lot of fights.

So there's a myth about it that some other kid broke his nose so badly that he had a nasal tone for the rest of his life, which is a great not impossible. Not impossible.

I talked to as as in-depth research for this i phoned up a friend of mine who's a consultant ophthalmologist and uh he said no

that is uh that is not really possible and even if you can find early accounts of william joyce he always seemed to have a kind of nasal or or high voice even from

people always talked about him being yeah well yeah Nice. You can still believe it.
You can still believe it.

Anyway, eventually, when a Nazi victory seemed inevitable in 1941, Lord Hawa, as he was known, outed himself on air as William Joyce, ending years of feverish speculation as to his identity.

People didn't know. And actually, the term Lord Hawa got applied.
It's kind of like the dread pirate Roberts. It gets applied to several different speakers, but Joyce is the guy who becomes Wesley.

He's the guy who goes on to kind of personify it.

So,

but the tide of war, of course, after he outs himself and the tide of public opinion soon changed.

Because with rapid Soviet-Russian advances on the Eastern Front, the D-Day landings, the Allied reconquest of Africa, and the invasion of Italy, Lord Haw Haw became less a figure of dread and more a figure of ridicule as his impassioned broadcasts about the inevitable Nazi victory rang more and more hollow.

So Looney Tunes produced a cartoon called Tokyo Jokyo as a piece of propaganda.

And it is mocking the Japanese, but also features Joyce as Lord Heehaw, depicting him as a braying Nazi donkey at a microphone.

Yeah, I remember this cartoon.

Yeah, and the comic, or the British Pathé, who would produce newsreels, also made like they start playing Joyce at his own game and, you know, doing comedy, which is something that, you know, British Pathé and the BBC would never have done before.

But they have

nasty Nazi news featuring Lord Haw Haw, and they depict him as a wealthy buffoon in the comedy clips, going around saluting Hitler's picture on the wall and all this kind of stuff.

And they would show these before

newsreels and movies in the cinema. And I think we have an audio clip.
There's also a song by the Western Brothers

that

is written about Lord Hawha, the humbug of Hamburg. And I think I've sent you a link to that, Robert.
Maybe the first 45 seconds are as much of it as you can stand because it's atrocious.

This is not a banger. Okay, not a banger.
All right, well, let's make that judgment for ourselves. Let's see how I feel about it.
Maybe this guy's going to be my new obsession.

Oh, referring to this fellow, Lord Hawhaw, this is Germany Germany calling so big Tolero.

Who is the chap who hits the high spot? The greatest comedian now of the lot? The definite radio star number one, the life of the party, the bundle of fun.

Lord Horhaw, the humbug of Hamburg. The bloke with the tonsils and toes.

His Homburg he raises in Hamburg. His top lip is quite overgrown.

And yet, in the winter, it's rather pathetic. He's frozen to death, cause his pants are synthetic.
Lord Hawhaw, the humbug of Hamburg.

Well, do you think

you could have prop or someone drop some beats behind this?

Yeah, yeah. You could remix that into something good.
No, you you that also reminds me, but you mentioned Pathay, which distributed a movie.

It's one of my favorite like fringe little British comedies that has some like fake

like comedy music bits like this in there that's made to sound like it's stuff from the 40s.

There's this film called Churchill the Hollywood years with Christian Slater and Nev Campbell, where Christian Slater plays Winston Churchill. And it was kind of like

there was this movie made in the 90s called U571. I think it made in the 90s.
It was basically, it was about the capture of the Enigma machine by the British.

But since it was an American movie, we just replaced all the British soldiers with Americans. So

the bit in this movie is that, like, no, no, no, all British heroes have been Americans throughout history.

You know, like, it's a grand conspiracy to convince the British that they can have heroes, but it's really just Americans the whole time. Yeah, well, what we're doing

is we get the British kind of stealing Irish celebrities. They come along and they say that, oh, Ser Sharon and she's Irish, or they'll say, you know, Brendan Gleason or Colin Farrell or someone.

And the award-winning Irish actress, Brenda Fricker, said,

When you win an Oscar, they call you British, and when you're drunk in an airport, they call you Irish.

You know,

she was called Daniel Day-Lewis's mother in my left foot. That's the movie she won an Oscar for.
Oh, okay, yeah. Good.
Yeah.

I think we need to take our revenge by just stealing British, successful British actors with no Irish heritage, like Benedict Cumberpatch, and just refer to him as one of ours.

I would say you guys are already ahead because you have Cole Meany, obviously one of the greatest actors of all time. Chief O'Brien, yeah.
Chief O'Brien.

He also beat the absolute shit out of James Bond in the movie Layer Cake. Just really, absolutely annihilated him.
Yeah.

And of course, the famous Star Trek episode with the United Ireland, which is very relevant. Yes.
But anyway, anyway, we've got on a sidetrack from Lord HaHa to Star Trek.

But anyway, I can talk about Cole Meanie all day. But yes, let's get back to Lord HaHa.
Yes. Facing ridicule for his day job as a radio DJ, Joyce began increasingly turning his hand to writing

propaganda leaflets in a failed attempt to recruit captured British prisoners of war as members of the British Freight Corps or the British Free Corps, a unit of the SS.

He also published a book on Anglo-German relations entitled Dammer uber England or Twilight over England, which was promoted by the German Ministry of Propaganda.

It compared the alleged evils of supposedly Jewish-dominated Britain with the purported wonders of Nazi Germany. The book was a publishing success and it was reprinted three times.
Dr.

Joseph Goebbels was delighted with Joyce's propaganda efforts, so much that he had Hitler bestow the German War Merit Cross first class on Joyce.

However, Hitler did not bestow the medal in person.

And though Goebbels was often in the same radio broadcast centre as Joyce and regularly left him gift baskets of cigars and brandy, he never met him in person.

He did refer to Joyce, however, as the finest horse in our stable, but he never regarded him as an equal. He never met Joyce to shake his hand or to pose for a photo with him,

but he was a big fan of his writing, so much so that in 1943, he commissioned Joyce to write a detective novel.

Now, Robert, I regret to inform you that when I looked in all the dark corners of the internet, I was unable to find a copy of Joyce's weird Hitler fanfic murder novel. That's tragic.
That's tragic.

But I think it's remarkable that in 1943, as the battle of Stalingrad is coming to an end, Goebbels thought, hey, I know what will turn the whole war efforts around.

Let's commission a detective novel championing national socialist principles. That does make sense for these guys.

I mean, Hitler sent a bunch of cowboy novels to his generals on the Ostfront when things were slowing down. They had a lot of faith in fiction.
Well, Robert, you some very talented listeners.

So if somebody wants to design a title and

a cover art for this, send it on. Anyway.
As the military and political situation went to shit in Nazi Germany in late 1944 and early 95, So too did William and Margaret's marriage.

Now, this had never been a Hollywood romance with a heavy dose of cheating, alcoholism, verbal attacks, domestic violence, engaged in by both spouses by now.

But amazingly, living in a war zone with almost nightly aerial bombardment, widespread food shortages, and increasing societal collapse actually made their relationship worse.

The pair got divorced on the 12th of August 1941, but later reunited and remarried. Almost immediately as soon as they remarried, they just dive back into their previous toxic behaviours.

Margaret started a long-term affair with a Wehrmacht officer, and when he caught a bullet on the Eastern Front, she had a string of shorter affairs and one-night stands, while Joyce fucked about every secretary who was willing in the radio centre.

And for some fucking reason, they just would not call it quits or go to therapy or marriage counselling, and they just seemed to take joy in making each other increasingly fucking miserable.

Even towards the end of the war, Joyce, creepy fucker that he was, began fantasizing again about Mary Ogilvy, the teenage student that he had cheated on his pregnant wife with when she was just 15 or 16 years old.

And Joyce wrote in his diary, quote, I think I was luckier in the marriages I did not contract than in those I did. The exception was Mary, with whom I am sure success would have been certain.

In the last years and months of the war, Joyce is just pounding schnapps all day, every day.

And he was such a dedicated Nazi that when he was offered extra food rations or extra pay because of his privileged position as a broadcaster, he doggedly refused to accept it.

But he did, however, take all the cigarettes and schnapps that he could get. And he was able to use his influence to dine out as often as possible in Die Presklub,

one of Berlin's few remaining functioning restaurants.

One evening, he was coming home from the club and he had gotten so fucking cabbage drunk that he started a fistfight with one of the wardens in charge of the air raid shelter where he and Margaret were sheltering from an aurea bombardment.

So, Robert, das Ich Schrang Verbotten in Deutschland. I don't know if you know this, but the Germans are said to be pretty big big on rules and discipline at the best of times.

And in the dying days of the Third Reich, they are not cool with anybody, including state employees like Joyce, assaulting air raid wardens, which they see as a subversive act undermining the national role,

national morale and the Nazi war effort. Look,

I very rarely say the Nazis have a point on this one, but you probably shouldn't start a fistfight with an air raid warden.

There might be anti-social behavior basically everywhere. Also, you should probably listen to their directions and take cover.
Anyway,

they're an air raid warden. Yeah.

Joyce wakes up the following morning in prison with the mother of all hangovers.

And even though he was a broadcaster on Nazi radio, he did not have enough influence to talk his way out of this situation.

He did get bail, but was due to be brought to trial for undermining the war effort. Potential penalty, if he was found guilty, was death.

But Joyce's case did not go to trial because the night before he was due to appear in court, the RAF did him a favour of killing the judge and obliterating the court records in an air raid, leaving Joyce free to return to the airwaves for the remainder of his increasingly pointless broadcasting career.

So this is the second time that Joyce has escaped a death sentence.

He really owes the RAF a favour here. Yeah.

But his luck is about to run out. But Robert, do you know whose luck won't run out? Our sponsors.
No, absolutely not.

Absolutely. I remember your old ad pivot and the joke you had about the child hunting island with Blue Apron.
Yeah, but you would always got us in trouble. You would always beep out Blue Apron.

But for me, listening in Ireland, I wasn't familiar with Blue Apron. And it's the exact same length of time and syllable starting off.

I always thought you were saying Bill Clinton's child hunting island.

If you know

if these emails have taught us anything, it's that he used someone else's child hunting island. He didn't maintain his own.
That's not the way it works when you're the president.

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And we're back. Okay, so the Joyces

were evacuated from Berlin in March of 1945 to a broadcast. Time to get out of Berlin.
Yeah. Yeah, to a broadcasting station in Hamburg.

And by April of 1945, it was clear to pretty much everyone that the Nazis had lost the war. But Joyce continued to broadcast every night.

He was repeatedly assured that he would not be captured by the Allies because the Nazis would take him and Margaret by submarine to Ireland, which had remained neutral during World War II.

The reality was that Hitler had a very packed schedule in April and May of 1945. He was running a government, fighting a war on two fronts, planning his 56th birthday party.

He had to to get his favourite dog put to sleep. He was planning his wedding and two funerals.

So he probably did not know who Joyce was, and any available submarines they had were being loaded with gold bars and looted Renaissance masterpieces.

And if they were going anywhere, it was to South America with senior Nazis on board and not

sailing to Ireland to save the Joyces.

Yeah.

Joyce made his final broadcast on the 30th of April 1945, same day as Hitler's suicide.

Joyce's last broadcast was a rambling monologue during which he was so rubber-drunk that he slurred his words repeatedly and struggled to string sentences together.

Joyce used this last opportunity to admonish Britain for declaring war on Germany and warned of the global menace that the USSR posed to the whole world.

So again, thankfully, our recording of this survives. Do you just want to pay like, I think, the last 45 seconds of it, Robert?

A tremendous,

world-shattering conflict

is being waged.

Have given their lives to show

that whatever else happens,

Germany will live.

And therefore, I say to you,

in these

last words,

you may not hear from me again

for a few months.

I say,

S Lieber Deutschland.

Heil Hitler.

And

well, yeah, I think that's probably about enough. Yeah,

how half-hearted did that last Heil Hitler sound, Robert? It does not sound motivated. It sounds like a guy who just got evacuated from Berlin in March of 1945 and is aware that, like,

we lost about as badly as we could have lost.

Yeah.

After the fall of Berlin, Joyce fled to Flensburg, where Hitler's successor, Admiral... Donitz had established a makeshift government and was busy teaching people how to

shout Heil Donuts whilst he plotted increasingly desperate strategies to try and keep the few scraps of territory that he had together under Nazi control as the Third Reich.

Yeah, how'd that work for him? Yeah.

Four days after Joyce made his last broadcast, Nazi Germany surrendered and the British Army took control of the Hamburg Broadcasting Centre.

A German Jew named Horst Pinscher, who had fled Nazi Germany for Britain at the age of 17, walked into Joyce's former studio and turned on the transmitter.

Lieutenant Pinscher had survived the D-Day landing and was present at the liberation of Belsen.

He picked up Joyce's old microphone and made this broadcast, quote, this is Germany calling for the last time from station Hamburg.

Tonight, you will not hear William Joyce or Lord Hawhaw as he is known to most of us in Britain.

He has been most unfortunately interrupted in his broadcasting career, and at present he has left rather hurriedly for a vacation, an extremely short vacation if the British Army has anything to do with it.

After tonight's great news of the surrender of the German forces, I wonder what now are Lord Hawhaw's views on the news.

Incredibly, just over three weeks later, the two met in person. William and Margaret Joyce were hiding in the town of Flensburg near the German-Danish border in the hope of escaping to neutral Sweden.

On the 28th of May, Joyce left to search for some firewood with which to cook and keep the couple warm.

Emerging from a forest clearing carrying a bundle of sticks, he was stopped when he met two British officers who were out on the same errand.

One was Pincher, who was accompanied by his commanding officer, who had the most English name ever, Captain Bertie Licorice. Oh my God.
Wow. Wow.

Yeah. And there's actually a British company, Bassett, it's a sweet company, like a candy company, who make licorice all sorts and have done for like a hundred years.

And their mascot is called Bertie.

How the fuck did his parents give him this name? Yeah,

that's shockingly English.

Let's also just pause here to remember that Joyce is literally carrying the symbol of fascism, a bundle of sticks when he encounters the british army yeah also that that facial scar is no longer doing him any favors because he is pretty recognizable

anyway joyce decides to bluff it out and he uh pretends to be a displaced belgian and speaks to the two british officers in french shouting ilia un plu de brindel para isi

which I'm told is the French for there is more firewood over here. So the trio collected some firewood together and exchanged a few pleasantries in German before Joyce broke into English.

He began critiquing the two soldiers on their technique for gathering firewood and then launched into an impromptu lecture on the difference between deciduous and coniferous trees before starting on about which types of timber were the best fuel.

Lieutenant Pinscher later recalled, he was insufferable. He would just not exactly try talking.

Does he get himself caught because he's a fucking tryhard? Yeah.

The more he spoke, the more his voice sounded familiar. And eventually, our hero, Captain Bertie Lickorich, grew suspicious and said to him, You wouldn't happen to be William Joyce, would you?

Joyce immediately reached for a fake German passport he had.

You wouldn't happen to be the British guy we're looking for, would you? You know, the one who's a huge asshole and has a scar on his face.

But

so he reaches for a fake german passport thinking it's going to get him out of it but lieutenant pincher uh thinking he was reaching for a weapon immediately drew his own gun and shot joyce twice first bullet awesome so it gets better lovers the first bullet went through and through both cheeks of joyce's ass the second lodged in his shoulder and knocked him off his feet neither wound uh looked fatal but pincher was immediately worried that he might have shot an innocent civilian But when they searched him, as well as the German passport with a fake name, they found a Volkstorm militia pass issued in the name of William Joyce, and they knew they had captured Lord Haw.

Joyce was a little bit of a mess. Why'd he keep that?

Go on.

Throw that thing out, man.

Joyce was taken to hospital in a Royal Army Medical Corps ambulance.

It was a memorable journey for Joyce, who lay in the back of the vehicle with four bullet wounds in his ass and another round lodged in his shoulder.

Couldn't have happened to a nicer guy.

It gets better. When the ambulance driver discovered who the wounded patient he had was, he drove as hard and as fast as he could, deliberately aiming the wheels of his vehicle at every rut.

Yeah, at every rut, pothole, and shell crater he could find.

Meanwhile, Lieutenant Pincher, who was guarding the wounded prisoner in in the back of the vehicle, took great delight in revealing to him that the British Army officer who had shot him was, in fact, not an English Christian, but a German Jew.

In due course, Joyce was extradited to Britain, where he was put on trial for treason.

Now, Joyce was extradited the day after the Felony Treason Act, which was a medieval law, had been updated to make his prosecution more likely. A legal issue arose because of a lack of evidence.

BBC had only kept transcripts and recordings of Joyce's Lord Haw Hall radio broadcasts in the latter stage of the war. And Joyce became a German citizen in 1942.

So after that point, his support for Nazi Germany couldn't legally be considered treason.

They managed to find a police officer who claimed he had heard Joyce

broadcasting in 1939 and had previously heard him at fascist meetings so he could identify the voice but the problem is that's hearsay evidence they couldn't play the recording in court.

Matters were further complicated by the fact that Joyce was now claiming American citizenship and of course the USA had been neutral until 1941.

The British government's prosecution lawyer, however, was able to prove that Joyce had sworn allegiance to the British king when he joined the British Army to escape from Ireland in 1922 And he had claimed the protection of the British Crown when he travelled to Germany on a British passport just before the outbreak of war in 1939, and therefore had committed treason by making pro-Nazi broadcasts between 1939 and 42 when he became a German citizen.

At his trial, Joyce did not deliver an impassioned rousing speech from the dock to defend his life. He merely spoke two words when entering a plea, not guilty.

After the death sentence was passed, he merely smiled and bowed his head, but otherwise remained silent.

Joyce's last recorded words were mailed to his friend, John McNabb, who had been a member of the National Socialist League. Quote, I do not, in the most infantesimal degree, regret what I have done.

For me, underlined, there was nothing else to do. I am proud to die for what I have done.
I shall not die in vain, and suspect my service in dying may be greater than my service in living.

May it be so. So a Nazi to the end.
Yep. There is another cool story about him that when they hanged him,

that the facial scar actually burst open because of the pressure, which is a very cool story.

And I was going to include, but again, until I talked to my friend, the consultant ophthalmologist, and he said, no, scar tissue was incredibly strong. There is no way that happened.

Yeah, you'd have to get something like scurvy or whatever to

have that happen. Again, great story.
There's loads of these hints about Joyce everywhere. But anyway, Joyce was executed by hanging at Wandworth Prison on the 3rd of January 1946.

If he made a speech from the gallows, it was not recorded by his executioner, Albert Pierpoint, who had also executed Irma Grees and other Nazi war criminals convicted at Nuremberg.

Joyce's body was initially buried in an unmarked grave within the prison walls. But in the 1970s, his eldest daughter, Heather, began a successful campaign to get his body exhumed.

And in 1976, it was reinterred at Bohr Moore Cemetery in Galway City.

His widow, Margaret, had vowed to William Joyce in one of her last prison letters to him that she would write his biography after his martyrdom.

When she died in 1972, all she left as a manuscript were a few scant biographical details about Joyce scribbled on a piece of cardboard.

That didn't prevent Joyce, however, becoming an inspiration to new generations of Nazis.

First editions of Joyce's book, Twilight Over England, are collectors' items often prized by neo-Nazis and sell for up to $10,000 online today.

In the 1960s, American Nazi Party leader George Lincoln Rockwell inspired Terry Byrne, an overweight Irish house painter who lived with his mom in Dublin, to found the Irish Nazi Party.

Yeah, Byrne said that his political heroes were Adolf Hitler and William Joyce.

Like his hero, Commander, Byrne was, like Joyce, repeatedly stabbed on more than one occasion by anti-fascist opponents in the IRA. But incredibly, he survived until the 1980s.

For almost 20 years, he echoed Joyce by continually encouraging his followers to harass Dublin's tiny Jewish community and attack Jewish-owned businesses there.

Joyce also remains popular on the British far-right scene.

Members of the British neo-Nazi movement, or sorry, the neo-Nazi British movement, founded by Rockwell's English pal, Colin Jordan, who incidentally was once convicted of shoplifting women's underwear, visited Joyce's grave in Galway City earlier this year to lay a wreath to him on the anniversary of his execution.

So that, Robert, is the Nazi bastard I have for you. Wow.

He continues, yeah, he continues to inspire hate from beyond the grave, but hey, at least he eventually got what he deserved after he was brought to justice by a Jewish refugee who shot him in the ass.

So I consider that a happy ending. Hey, you know what? We so rarely get a happy ending like this where it's like, and then the Nazi died.

And then the Nazi was killed, you know,

before he could get rehabilitated or enjoy a peaceful life. He just, somebody, somebody took that fucker out.
And that's nice. That's happy.
I'm happy to hear that.

There's your Christmas wish, Robert. Yeah.
Okay. Well, what a beautiful story.
Thank you so much.

I think that's going to do it for us. Do you want to plug your pluggables down at the end here? Yeah.
So my pluggable really is my book, Burn Them Out.

It is a history of fascism and the far right in Ireland. It's published by Bloomsbury, head of Zeus.
So just Google Burn Them Out, Fascism, Ireland, and it should come up.

And yeah, if you can buy that, that would be great. Thank you very much, Mila Margif.

Excellent. All right.
Well, thank you so much. And yeah, everybody, that has been our week.
We'll be back next week with another piece of shit who probably lives a long life and dies in bed

or is still alive, one of the two.

But at least this week, there was a happy ending.

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Complete disclosures available at public.com slash disclosures. Ready for seven days of discovery? For the first time, South by Southwest brings innovation, film and TV, and music together.

Running concurrently across Austin, March 12th through 18th. Experience bold storytelling, groundbreaking ideas, and live performances that define what's next.

The most unexpected discoveries happen when creative worlds collide at South by Southwest. Start planning your adventure and register today at sxsw.com/slash iHeart.

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