William Joyce

British broadcaster for the Nazis during World War II

• Born: April 24, 1906
• Birthplace: Brooklyn, New York
• Died: January 3, 1946
• Place of death: London, England

Major offense: Treason

Active: September, 1939-September, 1940

Locale: Germany

Sentence: Death by hanging

Early Life

William Joyce (joys) was born in were chosen. His parents were native Britons who had emigrated to the United States. Joyce’s father, Michael, who left Ireland as a teenager, was naturalized as a U.S. citizen in 1894. The Joyce family eventually returned to the British Isles, first to Ireland in 1909 and then England in 1921. It became clear when he was enrolled in university that Joyce’s heart lay not in academe but rather in politics. Beginning in 1923, Joyce was an active participant in a British fascist group that lionized Benito Mussolini and, later, Adolf Hitler.

Broadcast Career

About a year after Oswald Mosley began the British Union of Fascists (BUF) in 1932, Joyce signed on, soon becoming propaganda director. He and Mosley fell out in 1937, with Joyce forming his own National Socialist League (NSL). Joyce proved a mesmerizing speaker, though he never was as well known as Mosley.

During the 1930’s, Joyce obtained a British passport and renewed it several times. His purposes in traveling to the Continent were political; he wanted to observe Hitler at close hand. In the summer of 1939, as tensions mounted between Britain and Germany, Joyce decided he could not continue to live in England. On August 24, 1939, he applied for a one-year passport renewal, repeating an earlier affirmation that he was a British subject. Joyce and his wife Margaret departed from England by boat on August 26, 1939.

Upon arrival in Germany, Joyce quickly put himself at the service of the Nazi apparatus. Soon he secured a job with the Reichsrundfunk (RRF), the radio propaganda operations headed by Joseph Goebbels. Joyce remained the Germans’ favorite English-language radio spokesperson throughout the war. In addition, he directed the process of recruiting British POWs (usually under duress) as radio speakers.

Through radio broadcasts and recordings, Joyce became quite well known as a personality in English-speaking areas of the world, including Canada and the United States. His sneering and pseudo-aristocratic speaking style earned him the derisive nickname “Lord Haw Haw.”

The Allies captured Joyce in late May, 1945, in a village near the Danish border. Despite the fact that the British were actively searching for him, the Joyces were identified by accident. Joyce was gathering firewood, and some Allied soldiers nearby engaged him in casual conversation. When he replied to them, one of the Englishmen recognized his voice.

Legal Action and Outcome

The most important charge against Joyce was that he had violated the Act of Treason of 1351. That law defined treason as giving aid and comfort to the king’s enemies. The act also made clear that treason could consist of committing such an offense not only within England but also outside the geographical confines of the realm.

The allegation against him that proved most critical in Joyce’s conviction was the charge that he had committed treason between September 18, 1939, and July 2, 1940 (the date of his first known employment at the RRF and the date that his last British passport expired). Joyce’s alleged offense was the radio broadcasting of propaganda.

As the trial began, the issue of Joyce’s American birth was raised immediately by the defense as a barrier to his being convicted. The judge, however, ruled that because he held a British passport, Joyce was required to refrain from adhering to Britain’s enemy. The jury—who remembered the horrors of the Blitz and Joyce’s radio taunting—clearly were unsympathetic to Joyce. He was sentenced to hang.

Joyce’s case went as far as the House of Lords and there garnered one famous, if narrow, judicial argument for the conviction’s being overturned. However, in the end, Joyce’s appeals failed. He was executed in early January, 1946.

Impact

In the immediate wake of William Joyce’s execution, several legal and historical experts maintained in books and law journal articles that the prosecution and execution of Joyce were troubling. To these scholars, Joyce’s trial and execution did not have to be an inevitable outcome of his capture by Allied forces. They frequently echoed a vital point that was raised by Joyce’s attorneys: Since Joyce was by birth an American citizen, he should not have been required to show allegiance to the British government. In the 1940’s, as well as in the decades since his death, the fate of Lord Haw Haw has inspired discussions among scholars about the definition of treason and the nature of citizenship.

Bibliography

Cole, J. A. Lord Haw Haw and William Joyce: The Full Story. New York: Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 1964. Filled with illustrative detail, Cole’s biography of Joyce explores his relationship with Fascists in England and on the Continent.

Hall, J. W., ed. The Trial of William Joyce. London: W. Hodge, 1946. Hall’s study of the Joyce case was published as a number of the prestigious Notable British Trials series. Hall includes detailed records of the original trial as well as arguments and decisions on appeal.

Joyce, William. Twilight over England. Berlin: Internationaler Verlag, 1940. Joyce provided justification for his own actions in this autobiographical account.

Kenney, Mary. Germany Calling. Dublin: New Island Books, 2003. In her biographical study of Joyce, Kenney places emphasis on Joyce’s Irish roots and his style as a broadcaster.

Martland, Peter. Lord Haw Haw: The English Voice of Nazi Germany. London: National Archives, 2003. Using government files opened in the early twenty-first century, Martland carefully pieces together a picture of what British intelligence knew about Joyce.

West, Rebecca. The Meaning of Treason. London: Macmillan, 1949. West wrote as a reporter who sat in on Joyce’s trials and who also recalled the horrors of the war. She argued passionately for Joyce’s conviction.