Review: Searching for Lord Haw-Haw

By Colin Holmes
Routledge, £14.99

We shall never know just how many Britons, during the Second World War, were actually (never mind actively) sympathetic to the Nazi cause. But we do know that three of them were executed for their treachery.

One was the emotionally disturbed John Amery, who ought to have ended his days in a psychiatric institution but was hanged in Wandsworth prison on December 19 1945; 16 days later, former soldier Theodore Schurch was hanged at Pentonville. The previous day, also at Wandsworth, William Brooke Joyce - known both to his enemies and his friends as "Lord Haw-Haw"on account of his affected broadcasting voice - had also met his end in the hangman's noose.

The controversial circumstances of Joyce's trial have been exploited to help paint him as less evil than he actually was. Born in the USA in 1906, Joyce had used a fraudulently obtained British passport to travel to Germany, where in due course he became the leading English-language broadcaster of the Nazi state. As Professor Holmes tells us - in what must surely rank as the definitive Joyce biography - in today's internet age it is difficult to imagine the unique place and power of the radio in the war years. Joyce was a smooth talker (he had, after all, obtained a first-class honours degree in English from Birkbeck College London in 1927) and there can be no doubt that his broadcasts ("Germany Calling") attracted a following among British audiences.