A question mark hanging over the true nationality of wartime traitor Lord Haw Haw may have saved him from the gallows, says Illtyd Harrington

Haw-Haw: The Tragedy of William and Margaret Joyce by Nigel Farndale, Macmillan, £20

HORST Pinschewer is not listed in the annals of those who stumble into history. A German Jewish refugee, he was an interpreter in the British Army.
He was advised to change his name for his own safety to Captain Bertie Lickorish. On May 28, 1945, three weeks after Victory in Europe Day, he and another officer came across a short man collecting wood in a forest near the German-Danish border. They spoke in German. Lickorish remained alert and wary, becoming suspicious when the man reached into his pocket. He drew his revolver, fired and punctured the suspect in both buttocks.
In minutes he realised they had caught Lord Haw-Haw, William Joyce, former number two to Sir Oswald Mosley in the British Union of Fascists. He had a reputation as a vicious streetfighter, handy with knuckle-dusters. Shortly afterwards his wife Margaret was caught. It was a sensation.
Joyce with his affected upper-class drawl had been a massive nightly attraction to millions of listeners in wartime Britain.
His programme, Germany Calling, attracted an audience of 9 million a night. Sounding like a PG Wodehouse aristocrat, his seductive and sneering nasal tones alarmed but intrigued his listeners. Even Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret listened. His was an insidious and constant attempt to undermine morale and advance the virtues and invincibility of Hitler.
His was a cult show and spread urban myth with partial truths.
Sixty years have gone by since that day in the woods, and Nigel Farndale, a Daily Telegraph feature writer, gives a straightforward account of Joyce’s life and his wife Margaret, who embraced fascism enthusiastically.
She broadcast too, but without his impact. Her speciality was to contrast living under Hitler and than Churchill.
Joyce appeared at Bow Street on June 18, 1945, where he was charged with high treason. The basis of the case against him was challenged by his solicitor, a sharp-tongued hunchback. Was he a British subject? It had to be proven. Born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1906 to Irish parents, he was reared in Ireland between 1909 and 1921, where he spied for the occupying British Army and their most vicious elements, the Black and Tans. He applied for a British passport in 1933, and got a one-year renewal on August 29, 1939, a few days before World War II broke out.
Quickly he decamped for the Fatherland. Did he lie about his true nationality? And would that lie have saved him?
It is now clear that he was an agent for MI5 where his handler was Maxwell Knight – in later years a TV naturalist.
Knight headed an autonomous MI5 unit from Dolphin Square. Oddly enough, as late as 1942 Joyce’s bank was still being credited with £10 a month for snitching on his Mosley-ite mates in the 1930s. Knight was the prototype for M in the James Bond stories.
On September 17, 1945, Joyce faced three counts of treason at the Old Bailey. Hartley Shawcross, Labour’s dashing attorney general, led the prosecution, while Gerard Slade represented Joyce.
Slade was a teetotaller with a handsome Edwardian moustache, but he was a fearsome opponent.
Two of the three charges were dropped, but it took the jury only 23 minutes to come in with a guilty verdict on the third. The black cap was placed on the judge’s head, and the sentence of death passed.
The first appeal failed, but when it got to the House of Lords, only Lord Justice Porter found for Joyce, although it appears there was division amongst the five senior law lords in private discussion.
He was hanged in Wandsworth Jail on January 3, 1946, the last civilian to be hanged for treason. Then began two and a half years of uncertainty for the political and intelligence establishment. They did not know what to do with Margaret Joyce. She claimed German nationality. She and Joyce had been granted it in 1940. But if Joyce was guilty, so was she. It baffled them.
The author, who has had access to new sources and formerly restricted documents, and Joyce’s daughter gave her approval. He believes Joyce did a deal. He would not declare his double dealing, if MI5 and Maxwell Knight arranged his wife’s departure and release. It is hard, with no natural sympathy for either, to understand Farndale’s use of the word tragedy in the title or indeed his advocacy of Joyce’s political justification in warning of the “Red Menace” from Russia.
Elderly fascist sympathisers, still near the establishment, have a lot to explain about Rudolf Hess, Hitler’s deputy, who arrived in Scotland to be met by the Duke of Hamilton and the Duke of Kent on the former’s estate. He had flown there in 1940.
Following that, Hitler postponed his invasion plans for Britain. Joyce’s voice echoed amongst those who wanted “a negotiated peace” in the west before Operation Barbarossa against the Soviet Union on June 4, 1941, in the east.
The plan did not succeed because Churchill stymied it.