David Collard
Germany Calling
‘Lord Haw-Haw’ was the name originally concocted by a Daily Telegraph hack to mock one Wolf Mittler, a German broadcaster who spoke with a cut-glass English accent on the wartime radio programme Germany Calling, produced by the Reich Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda and transmitted to Britain between September 1939 and April 1945. A far more famous Haw-Haw was Mittler’s successor, William Joyce, ‘the war’s outstanding radio traitor’, who was hanged for treason in Wandsworth Prison in 1946.
Born in the United States in 1906 and the bearer of an Irish passport, Joyce joined the British Union of Fascists (BUF) in 1932 and quickly rose through the ranks as a charismatic public speaker and enthusiastic thug. Appointed director of propaganda and later deputy leader by the movement’s founder,
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