Harry Flash
May 11th, 2005, 06:21 AM
Interesting article altho' it does contain some bullshit.
Love and treachery
(Filed: 09/05/2005)
Lord Haw-Haw was the last civilian in Britain to be hanged for treason. Yet his wife, who also broadcast Nazi propaganda and was decorated by Hitler, was never brought to trial. Nigel Farndale reveals evidence that suggests a deal was struck between the traitor and the MI5: his silence for his wife’s life
The day after her husband's execution, Margaret Joyce, better known as Lady Haw-Haw who???, was told by the governor of Holloway Prison that she must pack up her belongings. She was to be "returned to the Continent", he said, though he couldn't say where exactly. She was relieved, in a way, because this ruled out the possibility of her being tried for high treason at the Old Bailey.
.............
The following morning, feeling ''half loopy'' as she put it, she was driven under armed escort to Croydon airport for a 9am flight to the military detention centre in Brussels. Two weeks later, Major J. F. E. Stephenson of MI5 sent a memorandum to the head of the British Intelligence Bureau there.
...................
Even so, for 60 years, the official reason Lady Haw-Haw was not tried and hanged along with her husband remained: she was a German, and, if the MI5 memo is to be believed, those old softies in the security services felt a bit sorry for her. The truth, however, may have been far stranger - more human, too, involving as it did an extraordinary love affair, and what would appear to be an even more extraordinary deal.
During the war, William and Margaret Joyce had come to personify the enemy. His "Germany Calling" broadcasts delivered in an upper-class drawl, and her lesser- known though no less insidious pro-Nazi wireless talks, had been part of the very fabric of the Home Front. Lord Haw-Haw especially had become an institution: nearly as many people listened to his broadcasts as to the BBC. Even the young princesses, Elizabeth and Margaret, used to tune in.
Yet something mysterious happened between the time of her arrest and her flight back to Brussels six months later. It seems to have taken the form of a gentleman's agreement between William Joyce and a senior figure in MI5. The evidence for this, though circumstantial, is compelling. As I argue in Haw-Haw: The Tragedy of William and Margaret Joyce, it centred on the double life Joyce had led before the war, when he was deputy to Sir Oswald Mosley, the leader of the British Union of Fascists.
As I discovered, Joyce had also been working as an undercover agent for B5(b), a semi-autonomous department within MI5, responsible for surveillance and infiltration of extremist political groups. Maxwell Knight, the head of B5(b), was an old friend of his. Knight, indeed, helped Joyce escape to Berlin on the eve of war - tipping him off that he was about to be arrested and interned - and he almost certainly maintained some form of contact with him during the first few months of the war, sending him coded letters and, seemingly, keeping him "on the books" as a potential agent of influence.
Understandably, Knight, the model for M in Ian Fleming's James Bond stories, was keen that all this should remain a secret between himself and Joyce. The deal then, I believe, was this: if William remained silent about his links with MI5, Margaret would not be prosecuted. It was a simple trade-off. His life for hers.
Josef Goebbels had been among those who assumed Margaret would be hanged along with her husband, if caught. With this in mind, one of his final orders to his head of foreign broadcasting had been: "The Joyces are at all costs to be kept out of Allied hands." In the last month of the war, the couple were duly issued with false passports, and plans were made for them to escape to Ireland in a U-boat; but these fell through and, after Lord Haw-Haw made a final drunken broadcast on the day Hitler killed himself, the couple went on the run.
Hiding in the northern German countryside, the Joyces had found a certain tranquillity in their predicament, enjoying the spring sunshine after a hellish winter spent among the ruins of Berlin. According to Margaret, William was being "very sweet". They would sit for hours on the pine needles in the forests - talking, reflecting, awaiting the inevitable.
According to one MI5 report: "Margaret Joyce is a very strongly sexed woman who demands notice and attention and would not hesitate to use her sex to get what she wants. She is a good actress. She has never shown any sign of cracking." This was true. When a lieutenant, supported by 10 soldiers, two Bren carriers and a lorry, came to arrest her on May 28, 1945, a few hours after her husband had been captured in a nearby forest, she made light of her situation.
She was taken to the police station in Flensburg and put in a cell recently vacated by Heinrich Himmler. Under "reason for arrest" on her charge sheet it read: "Danger to security." One of the guards on duty that night entered her cell and stared. After a while he said: "I just wanted to see what a traitoress looked like." Other soldiers craned their heads around the door. "Come on in, gentlemen," Margaret said. "Have a good gawp." In her diary that night she would write: "Quarrelled with Will and let him go out alone. He was arrested and shot at. I was arrested as well. Some of the officers came to jeer at me, but some were nicer."
William Joyce was taken to the 74th British General Hospital, in Lüneburg, near Hamburg, a seven-hour drive away. By now news of his arrest had filtered out. Soldiers, some with cameras, crowded around the ambulance, hoping for a glimpse of the demonic "aristocrat" with the sinisterly funny voice. He had been shot in the buttocks during his capture and, lying on a stretcher, wearing blue-and-white-striped pyjamas, he wasn't quite as dapper as everyone thought he would be.
For one thing, he wasn't wearing the monocle which cartoonists had always depicted him with. And his face, though pallid and gaunt, wasn't contorted into a permanent sneer, as folklore suggested it would be. In fact, his face appeared sunken because his false teeth had been confiscated in case they contained a secret cyanide capsule - and this made him look much older than his 39 years.
As he was being carried in to the hospital some of the soldiers began taunting him with shouts of "Jairminny Calling! Jairminny Calling!" The headlines in the Star of May 29 read: "WE'VE GOT HAW-HAW!" and "CAUGHT IN MANHUNT: WIFE, TOO". At least the Star accepted Margaret was Joyce's wife. Most papers described her as "a woman who claims to be his wife", as if they thought it impossible that people as depraved as the Joyces could actually be married.
Margaret was taken to Lüneburg later that day. There she made a statement to Capt William Skardon, MI5's top interrogator (who was later used to try to ''break'' Kim Philby). "I came to Germany on August 26, 1939," she said, "having left England because I felt that, as I was morally unable to assist in Britain's war effort, it would be unfair to remain in the country … While in Germany I worked for the Reichsrundfunkgesellschaft [the RRG, the German equivalent of the BBC]. From September 1939 until April 1945 I have written and spoken talks… I did of course attack British politicians with whose views I profoundly disagreed."
On May 31, with the pain from his wounds ebbing, it was William's turn to be visited by Skardon. "I know that I have been denounced as a traitor," his statement began, "and I resent the accusation as I conceive myself to have been guilty of no underhand or deceitful act against Britain, although I am also able to understand the resentment that my broadcasts have, in many quarters, aroused… I would like to stress the fact that, in working for the German radio system, my wife was powerfully influenced by me. She protests to the contrary but I am sure that if I had not taken this step she would not have taken it either."
His avowal of his wife's innocence was telling. Already a plan was forming in his mind that might enable him to secure her freedom. By the time Margaret was taken in an open-top jeep to Lüneburg airport a week later, she had firmed up her story. The flight was to Brussels and it proved to be a white-knuckle one. According to Robert Bruce, who was serving with the signals section of an RAF squadron at Wunstorf, the aeroplane carrying her was, following engine trouble, forced to do an emergency landing.
.........................
It fell to Commander Leonard Burt of British Intelligence to bring William Joyce home on June 16, 1945. The two men sat together on the plane smoking and, as Burt later recalled, "talking as though we had been boyhood friends". Joyce, for his part, later said he found Burt a "singularly fine chap".
As the Channel glinted below them he turned to Burt and said: "I have the courage of my convictions, you know. I can stand up to the consequences."
"I like you for saying that," Burt said. "I'm not the thug people always think I am," Joyce replied.
Moments later he craned forward and said: "Look! The White Cliffs of Dover!" before adding under his breath, "God bless old England. God bless old England." Such comments may seem strange, coming as they did from the lips of a traitor, but Joyce had always regarded himself as a patriotic Englishman, believing from the early 1930s onwards that it was in the best interests of the British Empire to form an alliance with Germany against the forces of world communism. Whatever else he might have been, he was not politically fickle.
.........................
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml?xml=/arts/2005/05/09/bftjoyce09.xml&menuId=564&sSheet=/arts/2005/05/10/ixartright.html
Love and treachery
(Filed: 09/05/2005)
Lord Haw-Haw was the last civilian in Britain to be hanged for treason. Yet his wife, who also broadcast Nazi propaganda and was decorated by Hitler, was never brought to trial. Nigel Farndale reveals evidence that suggests a deal was struck between the traitor and the MI5: his silence for his wife’s life
The day after her husband's execution, Margaret Joyce, better known as Lady Haw-Haw who???, was told by the governor of Holloway Prison that she must pack up her belongings. She was to be "returned to the Continent", he said, though he couldn't say where exactly. She was relieved, in a way, because this ruled out the possibility of her being tried for high treason at the Old Bailey.
.............
The following morning, feeling ''half loopy'' as she put it, she was driven under armed escort to Croydon airport for a 9am flight to the military detention centre in Brussels. Two weeks later, Major J. F. E. Stephenson of MI5 sent a memorandum to the head of the British Intelligence Bureau there.
...................
Even so, for 60 years, the official reason Lady Haw-Haw was not tried and hanged along with her husband remained: she was a German, and, if the MI5 memo is to be believed, those old softies in the security services felt a bit sorry for her. The truth, however, may have been far stranger - more human, too, involving as it did an extraordinary love affair, and what would appear to be an even more extraordinary deal.
During the war, William and Margaret Joyce had come to personify the enemy. His "Germany Calling" broadcasts delivered in an upper-class drawl, and her lesser- known though no less insidious pro-Nazi wireless talks, had been part of the very fabric of the Home Front. Lord Haw-Haw especially had become an institution: nearly as many people listened to his broadcasts as to the BBC. Even the young princesses, Elizabeth and Margaret, used to tune in.
Yet something mysterious happened between the time of her arrest and her flight back to Brussels six months later. It seems to have taken the form of a gentleman's agreement between William Joyce and a senior figure in MI5. The evidence for this, though circumstantial, is compelling. As I argue in Haw-Haw: The Tragedy of William and Margaret Joyce, it centred on the double life Joyce had led before the war, when he was deputy to Sir Oswald Mosley, the leader of the British Union of Fascists.
As I discovered, Joyce had also been working as an undercover agent for B5(b), a semi-autonomous department within MI5, responsible for surveillance and infiltration of extremist political groups. Maxwell Knight, the head of B5(b), was an old friend of his. Knight, indeed, helped Joyce escape to Berlin on the eve of war - tipping him off that he was about to be arrested and interned - and he almost certainly maintained some form of contact with him during the first few months of the war, sending him coded letters and, seemingly, keeping him "on the books" as a potential agent of influence.
Understandably, Knight, the model for M in Ian Fleming's James Bond stories, was keen that all this should remain a secret between himself and Joyce. The deal then, I believe, was this: if William remained silent about his links with MI5, Margaret would not be prosecuted. It was a simple trade-off. His life for hers.
Josef Goebbels had been among those who assumed Margaret would be hanged along with her husband, if caught. With this in mind, one of his final orders to his head of foreign broadcasting had been: "The Joyces are at all costs to be kept out of Allied hands." In the last month of the war, the couple were duly issued with false passports, and plans were made for them to escape to Ireland in a U-boat; but these fell through and, after Lord Haw-Haw made a final drunken broadcast on the day Hitler killed himself, the couple went on the run.
Hiding in the northern German countryside, the Joyces had found a certain tranquillity in their predicament, enjoying the spring sunshine after a hellish winter spent among the ruins of Berlin. According to Margaret, William was being "very sweet". They would sit for hours on the pine needles in the forests - talking, reflecting, awaiting the inevitable.
According to one MI5 report: "Margaret Joyce is a very strongly sexed woman who demands notice and attention and would not hesitate to use her sex to get what she wants. She is a good actress. She has never shown any sign of cracking." This was true. When a lieutenant, supported by 10 soldiers, two Bren carriers and a lorry, came to arrest her on May 28, 1945, a few hours after her husband had been captured in a nearby forest, she made light of her situation.
She was taken to the police station in Flensburg and put in a cell recently vacated by Heinrich Himmler. Under "reason for arrest" on her charge sheet it read: "Danger to security." One of the guards on duty that night entered her cell and stared. After a while he said: "I just wanted to see what a traitoress looked like." Other soldiers craned their heads around the door. "Come on in, gentlemen," Margaret said. "Have a good gawp." In her diary that night she would write: "Quarrelled with Will and let him go out alone. He was arrested and shot at. I was arrested as well. Some of the officers came to jeer at me, but some were nicer."
William Joyce was taken to the 74th British General Hospital, in Lüneburg, near Hamburg, a seven-hour drive away. By now news of his arrest had filtered out. Soldiers, some with cameras, crowded around the ambulance, hoping for a glimpse of the demonic "aristocrat" with the sinisterly funny voice. He had been shot in the buttocks during his capture and, lying on a stretcher, wearing blue-and-white-striped pyjamas, he wasn't quite as dapper as everyone thought he would be.
For one thing, he wasn't wearing the monocle which cartoonists had always depicted him with. And his face, though pallid and gaunt, wasn't contorted into a permanent sneer, as folklore suggested it would be. In fact, his face appeared sunken because his false teeth had been confiscated in case they contained a secret cyanide capsule - and this made him look much older than his 39 years.
As he was being carried in to the hospital some of the soldiers began taunting him with shouts of "Jairminny Calling! Jairminny Calling!" The headlines in the Star of May 29 read: "WE'VE GOT HAW-HAW!" and "CAUGHT IN MANHUNT: WIFE, TOO". At least the Star accepted Margaret was Joyce's wife. Most papers described her as "a woman who claims to be his wife", as if they thought it impossible that people as depraved as the Joyces could actually be married.
Margaret was taken to Lüneburg later that day. There she made a statement to Capt William Skardon, MI5's top interrogator (who was later used to try to ''break'' Kim Philby). "I came to Germany on August 26, 1939," she said, "having left England because I felt that, as I was morally unable to assist in Britain's war effort, it would be unfair to remain in the country … While in Germany I worked for the Reichsrundfunkgesellschaft [the RRG, the German equivalent of the BBC]. From September 1939 until April 1945 I have written and spoken talks… I did of course attack British politicians with whose views I profoundly disagreed."
On May 31, with the pain from his wounds ebbing, it was William's turn to be visited by Skardon. "I know that I have been denounced as a traitor," his statement began, "and I resent the accusation as I conceive myself to have been guilty of no underhand or deceitful act against Britain, although I am also able to understand the resentment that my broadcasts have, in many quarters, aroused… I would like to stress the fact that, in working for the German radio system, my wife was powerfully influenced by me. She protests to the contrary but I am sure that if I had not taken this step she would not have taken it either."
His avowal of his wife's innocence was telling. Already a plan was forming in his mind that might enable him to secure her freedom. By the time Margaret was taken in an open-top jeep to Lüneburg airport a week later, she had firmed up her story. The flight was to Brussels and it proved to be a white-knuckle one. According to Robert Bruce, who was serving with the signals section of an RAF squadron at Wunstorf, the aeroplane carrying her was, following engine trouble, forced to do an emergency landing.
.........................
It fell to Commander Leonard Burt of British Intelligence to bring William Joyce home on June 16, 1945. The two men sat together on the plane smoking and, as Burt later recalled, "talking as though we had been boyhood friends". Joyce, for his part, later said he found Burt a "singularly fine chap".
As the Channel glinted below them he turned to Burt and said: "I have the courage of my convictions, you know. I can stand up to the consequences."
"I like you for saying that," Burt said. "I'm not the thug people always think I am," Joyce replied.
Moments later he craned forward and said: "Look! The White Cliffs of Dover!" before adding under his breath, "God bless old England. God bless old England." Such comments may seem strange, coming as they did from the lips of a traitor, but Joyce had always regarded himself as a patriotic Englishman, believing from the early 1930s onwards that it was in the best interests of the British Empire to form an alliance with Germany against the forces of world communism. Whatever else he might have been, he was not politically fickle.
.........................
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml?xml=/arts/2005/05/09/bftjoyce09.xml&menuId=564&sSheet=/arts/2005/05/10/ixartright.html