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Lord Haw-Haw was a propaganda radio program broadcast by Nazi German radio to audiences in Britain and Ireland on the mediumwave station Radio Hamburg and by shortwave to the United States. It started on September 18, 1939 and continued until April 30, 1945, when Hamburg was overrun by the British Army.
Two announcers played Lord Haw-Haw:
- Wolf Mitler was a German national who spoke as the caricature of an upper-class Englishman. His persona was described by some listeners as similar to P.G. Wodehouse's Bertie Wooster. The pseudonymous radio critic Jonah Barrington of the Daily Express coined the term "Lord Haw-Haw" to describe Mitler's voice: "he speaks English of the haw-haw, dammit-get-out-of-my-way-variety". Under Mitler, the program reached its greatest popularity in the British Isles, with over six million listeners.
After Joyce took over, Mitler was paired with the American-born announcer Mildred Gillars in the Axis Sally program and also broadcast to ANZAC forces in North Africa. Mitler survived the war and appeared on postwar German television. Joyce was captured by British forces, tried, and eventually hanged for treason on January 3, 1946. As an American citizen and naturalised German, Joyce could not have been convicted of treason against the Crown, except that the prosecution successfully argued on a technicality that having lied about his nationality to obtain a British passport Joyce owed allegiance to the King.
Other British subjects willingly made propaganda broadcasts, including Raymond David Hughes, who broadcast on the German Radio Cymru; Norman Baillie-Stewart, a former Guards officer cashiered for selling secrets to Germany; and John Amery.
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