The Wrangell Sentinel

A.P. Reporter Visits Berlin's Lord Haw Haw

By PRESTON GROVER
(A. P. Feature Writer)

BERLIN—I have met Lord Haw Haw.

He is that almost fabulous Englishman—born in the United States—who by his own assertion perpetrates "high treason" daily against England by broadcasting from German stations with intent to disturb British self-assurance.

He is blond, ruddy-faced, short, William Joyce, former British fascist Mosleyite who was a prime mover for national-socialism in England until August, 1939. Then as it became evident war was about to break out, he and his wife hastily packed a few bags and dashed away to Germany. They'd become "sold" on Nazi-ism and on Hitler as its world exponent.

Now several times of an evening Lord Haw Haw reports the war in 15 minute broadcasts, always directed at English listeners. He ribs British patriotism, sardonically ridicules British claims of victories. He urges the inevitability of Nazi victory with a half cajoling, half ironic voice as British as Trafalgar square.

His "Title" Is British

Quickly his programs attracted a tremendous audience in England. English papers and magazines carried stories about him. Who was he? If he were German, how could he have acquired that unerring English accent? The British dubbed him Lord Haw Haw.

Even in Germany, few people know him. He broadcasts only on short wave bands. Germans rarely have short wave receivers, and are forbidden to listen to foreign broadcasts. Foreign correspondents, allowed to tune in on foreign broadcasts, listen to him regularly, but few ever have seen him.

We met quite by accident, of all hours, 3:30 a. m. in the half darkened hallway of the German propaganda ministry. The foreign press had been invited to tour the city to see the effects of a British bomb raid. Joyce was going along too.

"That's Lord Haw Haw," whispered one of the party to me. In no time we were talking. He is decidedly short, perhaps five feet four inches, and tightly knit physically.

His voice was unmistakable. On the air he uses no name whatever. In Germany he has adopted his German name of Froelich.

He grinned when I suggested he was far better known in England than in Germany.

They Like His Drollery

"I suppose so," he said, then added with that touch of drollery that seems to have tickled the English: "Not so many listen now. The German bombers are keeping them the cellar all the time."

He was casual and friendly. From time to time he strolled over to my side to help me understand the flood of German that periodically drowned my limited vocabulary.

A day or so later he sent me a book in English he has just published in Germany. Called "Twilight Over England," it tells his views of why England has come to such a pass. She ought to have become national Socialist, Joyce writes.

"I was born in New York in 1906," Joyce wrote. "My father's people had lived in Ireland since the Norman conquest. From my mother I inherited English, Irish and Scottish blood . . .

"I went to school in Ireland . . . From my earliest days I was taught to love England and her Empire. Patriotism was the highest virtue that I knew."

Joyce joined the British fascists in 1923, when he was about 17. He saw a "certain amount of street and hall fighting" against the communists, "of which I shall carry the marks so long as I live." He has a scar across his right cheek.

In 1933 Joyce joined Mosley's new "British Union of Fascists," and instilled in it, he said, definite anti-Jewish policy.

"To anybody who could see, in the years 1934 and 1935," he wrote, "it was only a specially successful effort to spread national-socialism widely in England that could avert the tragedy which has come to pass."

He broke with Mosley in 1937 "over organizational matters," and formed a movement of his own. To the Jews and financiers he laid most of England's troubles. British patriotism, he said, ever neglected the English poor. Two times in the year before the war he was arrested, and later acquitted of charges of disturbing the peace and assault.

Then, as the country moved toward war, he prepared to leave. He felt that if, "for perfect reasons of conscience, I could not fight for her (England), I must give her up for ever."