Also media, Welcome back to Behind the Bastards podcast about the very worst people in all of history.

And this week we are on part two of our episodes on Lord Haha and this is Reverse Bastards.

I am sitting in the guest chair this week and our host and topic expert is Padrick or Rourke.

Welcome back to the show.

Thank you so much for doing this, and yeah, I'm excited to see how this guy becomes the mouthpiece of the German fascist movement in the UK.

Thanks very much, Robert, I hope, and thanks for having me back.

I'm hoping part one.

Your ears aren't bleeding from all my terrible British impressions that I'm not loading them on to.

Things they're much better than mine.

My poor wife is upstairs putting the kids to bed and they can hear me doing the accents.

So now both of my sons are like doing their best attempts at posh British accents and terrifying them.

Or mother just absolute hell for her.

Absolutely so she has it in surround sound anyway, So we're back for more bastardy.

What do you think you're excited for?

Joyce's escapade so far?

And see where he's going to end up, right, sure, yeah so Iheart's lawyers reached out to me after the last recording and demanded I make no more Prince Andrew jokes, So no sweat.

Returning to this week's bastard, William Joyce.

When we left at the end of Heart One, all of his political projects that he had ever gotten involved in had ended in disaster.

In the early nineteen thirties, he was an insignificant and embittered high school teacher, spouting conspiracy theories to anyone who would listen, whiles cheating on his wife with one of his students when he found another would be Messiah enter stage right, Sir Oswald Mosley.

Now.

Regular listeners to the podcast will know that Oswald Tommy Moseley six foot two was a British aristocrat who became the youngest ever sitting member of Parliament in the nineteen eighteen British general election.

Roberts, did you know that in the mid nineteen twenties Moseley was a fishing body of future American President FDR.

I did not know that.

Yeah.

I just sent you an email there with a photo if you want to open it up.

This is their beach party.

How would you describe this to the listeners?

It looks like a Christian rock album cover.

It looks like a Christian rock album.

What would what would they call their band?

Oh my god, geez, I don't know, Yeah, the Apostles.

I don't know what you do?

It looks like I don't know how else to describe it, like you have.

I think that's FDR there in the middle, who's like sitting in the water with his arm up in like a prayer gesture.

You have which one of those is that Crosby in the right or is that Mosley?

I think that's I think that's Moseley.

Yeah, he's like half kneeling with again his hands up in prayer.

And then the third guy, Crosby I guess, is laying on his back with his legs in the air, and they're all just kind of like like flat against like right in the like the tidepool level of the ocean.

It looks like, Yeah, do you imagine the kind of selfies they would have taken if they had had smart.

Who No, no, but it would have gotten them all canceled, Like FDR would never have been the president.

They would have all gotten in horrible trouble.

Yeah.

Basically, Mosley's first wife, Lady Cynthia Curzon, was totally fucking famous.

She was the daughter of a really famous British lords, So that's probably how they met.

But they's vacation together for a month in Florida in February of nineteen twenty six.

However, their bodying political romance fell apart when the two men adopted rad different positions on Hitler.

FDR would end up being yeah, would definitely end up being anti Hitler, while Moseley remained very much pro Hitler, so much so that in nineteen thirty two, Moseley founded the British Union of Fascists or BUF.

Sure did, and you've done I think two episodes on this guy, Robert or three even so obviously check those out listeners if you want more on on Moseley.

Moseley attempted to merge all of the veterans of the Nassian fascist movement in the UK together in the BUF.

Now, the British Union of Fascists or BUF was heavily influenced by Italian fascists.

The buf's uniform consisted of a black fencing jacket and black trousers.

The BUF also adopted the so called Roman salute in the nineteen twenties.

The Italian Fascists were the first political movement to adopt the salute, which was later made famous by the Nazis and recently brought back into vogue by Richard Spencer, Steve Bannon and Elon Musk.

Moseley's Black Shirts adopted the salute, but added their own unique British element to the gesture by shouting pj whilst giving it short not for pajamas but perish Judah.

The motto of Moseley's new organization was loyalty to the King and Empire and the building of the Greater Britain.

And of course William Joyce loved all of this and he joined immediately.

Throughout his life, Joyce had one phenomenal, godlike talent which he used frequently but never used for good.

He was an incredible orator, a unique talent, possibly one of the greatest speakers of his generation.

He could speak without notes for several hours if necessary, without faltering or losing his train of thought.

Once, at one BUF rally in Eveson, he spoke for over four hours, but one raptured onlooker commenting.

People stayed for the whole length of the speech out of sheer curiosity to see how long he could keep it up.

There wasn't a lot going on back then.

I didn't have Netflix or anything, you know, there wasn't Yeah, it was easy to keep people in a line.

Yeah.

Everyone, political opponents, rivals in the fascist movement.

Everyone agrees.

This man is an incredible speaker.

And the journalist makes sense.

Cecil Roberts, who witnessed him speak, recalled quote.

I have been a connoisseur of speechmaking for over a quarter of a century, but never before had I met a personality so terrifying in its dynamic force, so vituperative, so vitriolic.

The words poured from him in a corrosive state.

We listened in a kind of frozen hypnotism to his cold, stabbing voice.

There was a gleam of marat in his eyes, and his eloquence took on a satanic ring, with which he invoked the rise rat of his audience against the festering scum who, by cowardice and sloth, had reduced the British Empire to a marabaud thing.

So Joyce's fame as a speaker spread well beyond the BUF, and even political opponents came to here.

One such was John Beckett, former Labor Party Member of Parliament quote.

I first saw him in nineteen thirty three at a crowded meeting at Paddington Bats.

I had left political life and the Labor Party in disgust two years previously, but within ten minutes of this twenty seven year old taking the platform, I knew he was one of the finest orators in the country.

He had the trade unionist and Labour MP Philip Snowden's close reasoning and on nurring instinct for words, combined with the Scottish pacifist James Maxton's humor and the conservative Winston Churchill's dairy His great audience assembled to hear a speaker quite unknown in the political world, and the enthusiasm he created was an eye opener for me.

Beckett was the son of a Christian father and a Jewish mother.

He had come to the meeting as a curious left wing opponent, and he departed a committed fascist and soon joined the BUF after hearing Joyce speak, that's a rare holy talent.

Joyce's oratory brilliants led his fellow black Shirts, hailing him as quote the Mighty Atom, the Master, the Professor, and most chillingly, the man without a soul.

Yeah.

I mean they like the boot licking goes down all the way with these people, right like they're they're that's kind of key to the fascist things.

You have to have someone that you're like embarrassingly dick writing for and in this case like that's that's what it means to be a leader within these movements is to have a bunch of people making up the most cringe worthy praise in nicknames for you.

They possibly could.

It's the it's the old timey equivalent of fucking having an AI make Donald Trump look jacked.

Yeah, the man without his soul.

The only other nickname I can compare it to for the time is Hitler calling Reinhart Heydrich the man with the iron heart.

The man with the iron heart.

Yeah, yeah man.

Anyway.

Amongst Moseley's adoring fascist fans was Margaret White, an organizer of the women's section of the BUF, and within days of first meeting the two began an affair.

Joyce eventually dumped his first wife, Hazel, to take Margaret as his second wife.

His pet name for her was mother Sheep, and she in turn referred to him lovingly as the old Ram.

Margaret later boasted that she was like a dom and Joyce was her sub and that he was pathologically devoted to her.

She did not know, of course, that Joyce, true to form, soon started an affair with another fascist fangirl named Sylvia Morris.

So these two, Margaret and William choice are just one of the most toxic couples ever and they both constantly cheat on the other.

Now, look, I'm not judging people.

If that's their thing, open marriages as a couple or whatever, that's your thing, fine, But according to their joint biographer Nigel Farndale, this was done by each of them without the consent of.

Yeah, they were.

Part of the point was that they were cheating on each other.

That was important to both of them that they be cheating.

Yeah, presumably that gives them the trill or whatever.

She was constantly cuckolding him and altered between pouring affection on him mocking him, making him sexually jealous and frustrated.

He responded by screaming verbal abuse at her, conducting his own illicit affairs and inflicting occasional bouts of domestic violence on her.

The fact that both of them were increasingly dysfunctional alcoholics did not help matters in their very very fucked up relationship with just got it increasingly worse the longer they were together.

Yeah, that scance makes sense now.

Moseley himself was no stranger to extramarital affairs, mistresses and multiple spouses, and he also, of course shared Joyce's talent for oratory.

Moseley appointed Joyce the bus director of Propaganda, which was a full time paid position paid about three hundred pounds per year at a time when the average construction worker would have made about one hundred and thirty pounds per years.

So he's doing quite well and this allows Joyce to quit his teaching job and the vote himself full time to politics.

Mosley of course, never joined in the adulation for Joyce, even though he respected his abilities.

He referred to Joyce as the little man now for reference as well, Tommy Moseley, as we know, was six foot two whilst Joyce was just five foot five, and as Moseley's catty nickname for Joyce implies, the two men had a fraud hyper para citic relationship, which was the best term I could find online to describe their dynamic.

Not a psychologist, but they're just two guys who were grifting off each other in an unending competition.

Whilst Joyce had been drawn to the Leader or Moseley by his strong man image and the promise of a new fascist British empire, he felt that Moseley was too soft on the Irish question because Moseley was not calling for the British Army to reinvade Southern Ireland.

On a political level, Moseley admired Joyce's manic energy, his intelligence and dedication to the b UF, but an issue arose because of Joyce's fanatical, uncompromising and unhinged anti Semitic rhetoric.

As the BUF grew in popularity, its public image was increasingly tarnished by a wave of anti Semitic attacks by the BUF in the East End of London, and of course the rising tide of anti Jewish Violin and Pilgrims in Nazi Germany.

In response to this, Moseley turned down his own anti Semitic remarks and repeatedly had to urge Joyce to do the same.

And let's face it, you have a serious problem if Oswald Moseley, the British hitler, is telling you to dial down the anti Jewish stuff.

Yeah, yeah, you're going a little hard man.

Moseley, on a personal level, was wary of Joyce's popularity within the movement, and he viewed him as a potential threat to his leadership.

Regular bad the weaknesses these movements always have.

When you have two guys who are really good at the whole being charismatic thing, they inevitably fall out, right, you can't have two fewers.

Yeah, they love a good furor fight.

Yeah, regular bastards.

Bad listeners will recall that Moseley served in World War One as a member of the Royal Flying Corps and he crashed his aeroplane whilst doing a loop the loop to show off to his mother and sister who were watching him fly an aeroplane in an aerobatic display.

As a result of this self inflicted war wound, Moseley developed phlebiatis in his leg, which flared up from time to time.

On one occasion, phlebiatis was so painful that he was not able to walk or stand to deliver a speech.

At a major black.

Shirt Rather, what is phlebiitis?

Because my only reference point is a joke they made with the Nixon character and Futurama.

What what are we talking about here?

It's basically if you get a now, not a medical doctor, but my understanding because I looked it up for this is if you get a broken bone and it doesn't heal properly, it can affect the nerves in the area around it, and the nerves and the muscle can swell, so your leg could swell up so much so that it's painful to move the joint.

Gadget, gadget.

Not a medical doctor.

But that's that's what I could figure out from from a quick a quick google.

P H L E B I T I S.

Don't make my word first, go google it yourself, or ask your physician.

Or say the word while doing a Nixon accent.

You'll you'll appreciate why it's such a good bit.

Okay, that's think that now.

On one occasion, it was so painful he was not able to walk or stand to deliver a speech at a major Backshirt rally.

Joyce took his place at the last moment, giving a rousing oration as good, if not better than anything Moseley could have delivered.

Joyce was such a good stand in that Moseley increasingly saw him as a threat and was now determined to keep the little man in line or to get rid of him altogether.

Moseley got the opportunity to dismiss Joyce in late thirteen six, in the wake of the Fascist defeat at the Battle of Cable Street.

Between nineteen thirty three and nineteen thirty six, Mussolini had sent Moseley a secret annual stipend of sixty thousand pounds per annam again remember Jesus, Yeah, Jesus had no.

That's a lot of money back then.

Yeah, it's you're talking again.

One hundred and thirty pounds for a construction workers annual wage and Mosley is getting sixty grand.

And that's a shitload back then.

Yeah, So it gets laundered to Moseley through the London Bank account of William Allen, who's a former Belfast Loyalist member of Parliament who had joined the British Union of Fascists.

So but after the Battle of Cable Street, Mussolini regarded Moseley as a failure and he cut off the funds in nineteen thirty seven.

Though Moseley did later get financial support from the Nazis, it never matched Mussolini's generosity, and this left Moseley in financial difficulty.

So when he announced cutbacks, the very first thing that had to go was the bus Department of Propaganda, which Joyce had been director of with an annual salary of three hundred pounds.

The loss of this wage was the last straw for Joyce, who already suspicious that Mosley was quote too soft on the Jewish question.

So in nineteen thirty seven, Joyce adopted friend of the Pod Adolf Hitler as his new political messiah, and he left the BUF to form his own organization called the National Socialist League with John Beckett, the secretly half Jewish former Socialist MP that I mentioned earlier.

Now, Rob, what is the one thing that the Nazis in particular have always been streets ahead of compared to other political movements.

I mean, I guess I would say, like turning political violence into electoral success.

Yeah, that's that's that's one thing.

I was thinking more along the lines of style.

Oh my god, Yeah, the outfits Jesus Christ.

They looked so I mean fucking just look at the fascists we're dealing with today, Like yeah, and honestly, Mussolini's brow.

Mussolini not a great looking movement, weird looking outfits.

But the Nazis they had tailors.

They had it.

Hugo Boss was making their their uniforms.

Yeah.

So I think again of how powerful the swastka was as a symbol, and I think you covered this before, And think of how evil, cool and genocidely stylish the SS look in their black uniforms.

And that was a big reason why people joined them, right, You get a lot of early sessmen were like, well, I thought the uniforms looked cool, like that kind of my politics descended from me wanting to look cool.

Of many such cases, unfortunately, that's it.

So speaking of of of you know, brilliant symbolism and style, I have sent you the if you look in the emails the logo that that William Joyce designed for the National Socialist League.

Yes, so I'm looking at it, and honestly it it looks more like the logo for a prey away the gay camp.

There's a bunch of like I would I know what it supposed to be.

It looks like like about four or five four to six rolling pins are are forming like like almost like a Star of David type design with like a blue circle around them, and then the words steer straight underneath it.

I know that the rolling pins are actually supposed to be like a like a ship's and ships right, yeah, what with England and the Navy being such a big deal, But just the whole steer straight thing, it looks like it's a It looks like a prey away the gay camp logo.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely, and I mean think of it even steer straight as a motto like the Nazis have deutschkan de ervach, you know, Germany awake, and these guys have steer Straight.

But Roberts.

Do you know who else has a dogshit logo?

Well, I mean look, it was a long time ago when we got the logo for this podcast.

I've done all right for us.

I was going to say, not the sponsors of this of this podcast.

Oh yeah, yeah, good logos only unless it's the Washington State.

I would patrol again.

So in nineteen thirty eight, Joyce hoped that his movement with a shitty ships wheel logo would grow to replace Moseley's and that he would become the future British fuelure.

The problem was that Moseley had forty thousand black Shirts, whilst Joyce's splinter group had just forty one.

Former comrade from the BUF came to see Joyce and Beckett speaking one day and recalled quote.

They were at a street corner, with Joyce standing on a platform and speaking from it, with Beckett the only spectator pretending to be an opposition Heckler.

It was their way of trying to attract some controversy and to generate an audience for their open air meeting.

What a terrible come down.

It was from the great BUF meetings attended by thousands that I had seen the men speaking at.

So Joyce writes the party's policy document entitled National Socialism Now, in which he declared his devotion to Hitler but stressed that an indigenous form of Nazism was required for Britain.

Quote, we are the only one hundred percent British organization working with British people and British funds for the rebuilding of Britain in a modern British way.

So basically he just wants it to be made very clear.

That he is definitely not Irish.

From the foundation of the party until the outbreak of the Second World War, Joyce organized public meetings in London at which he disseminated Nazi propaganda, but he failed to attract many supporters.

Joyce's meetings were mainly attended by hostile audiences.

Joyce in flame matters by singing God Save the King as a means of ending each meeting, which was fairly customary across most political parties in Britain at the time, but Joyce would follow the national anthem by giving the Nazi salute and shouting the National Socialist League.

Sure, yeah, see how that could come in nineteen thirty nine England.

Yeah, and you're on the pulse man.

The National Socialist League's lack of success meant that it was soon de registered as a political party, and Joyce re registered it as a drinking club.

I didn't realize you could formally found one of them in Britain, but I suppose it's kind of like what the Proud Boys have now.

So he became increasingly depressed about the looming prospect of war with Nazi Germany and was growing even more dependent on alcohol.

His last public meeting of the National Socialist League in May of nineteen thirty nine ended in chaos, with Joyce stood on stage giving the Nazi salute and repeatedly screaming seek Hyle, before stage diving into his audience in an attempt to punch Heckler.

Joyce was brought to court twice for assault, but neither case ever proceeded to trial.

Sounds like a screwdriver, gig or something.

In the autumn of nineteen thirty nine, as the threat of war with Nazi Germany loomed, the British government passed Regulation eighteen B to allow for the internment without trial of potential fascist fifth columnists.

On the afternoon of twenty fourth of August nineteen thirty nine, Joyce received a phone call warning him that he's internment had been approved and that Five had been ordered to arrest him within forty eight hours.

It is widely believed that the tip off to Joyce had come from Maxwell Knight, the head of I five, who not only was the main source of inspiration for the character m in Ian Flemings James Bond series, he was also former friend and comrade of Joyce's from their time together in the early years of the British fascisty, Joyce simply picked up the receiver and listened to the caller for some minutes without replying.

He and his second wife, Margaret, then immediately left for London.

When Special Branch of the London Metropolitan Police raided his flat four days later, they found Joyce's mother Gertrude and his mistress Sylvia Marris, both of whom he had chosen to abandon, along with his two daughters, whom he would never see again, because just one week later, when Britain declared war on Nazi Germany, Joyce was already safely in Berlin looking for a way to serve the Nazi war effort.

William and Margaret Joyce arrived in the Third Reich without a plan.

Joyce had not been in contact with the Nazis beforehand, and unlike Moseley's the UF, the Nazis had no idea who this guy was.

The Joyces were quickly running out of money, and for a while it looked as if they would be interned as enemy aliens.

But luckily for Joyce, some other British Nazi sympathizers had fled to Germany earlier and had established close ties with the Nazi regime.

Through this network, Joyce got a job broadcasting propaganda to Britain.

During World War II, the Nazis set up dozens of radio stations in a multitude of languages, broadcasting all over Europe.

For example, Nazi propaganda was broadcast in minority indigenous languages such as Irish, Gaelic, Scott's, Gallic and Welsh in the hope of encouraging separatists in Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales to rebel against the English dominated British government.

In London, Joyce was given a job broadcasting in English to the populace of Britain and Ireland.

Each night, he bombarded his audience with anti Semitic propaganda and assured them of the impending victory of Nazi Germany and urged the British to see peace terms.

His broadcasts always began the same way, and I think we've were recording there the first one of how it starts.

People haven't heard it before.

Germany calling, Germany calling, Germany calling.

Here are the rights in ambush Station Bremen and Station dx B.

On the faty one meter Ben.

You are about to hear our news in English.

The British Ministry of Misinformation has been conducting a systematic campaign of frightening British women and girls about the danger of being injured by splinters from German bombs.

The women have reacted to these suggestions and alarms by requesting their milliners to shape the spring and summer heads out of very thin tin plate which is covered with silk, velvet or other draping material.

Okay, yeah, so this was unbelievably successful.

At the time, listening to Joyce's pro Nazi broadcast in Britain was not illegal, but it was very much discouraged.

Nonetheless, his broadcasts were, as I said, of phenomenal success.

At a time when official BBC news broadcasts had a radio listenership of eighteen million listeners, Nightly Joyce had a listenership of nine million.

Okayce Britz.

Yeah, so he's kind of giving the people what they want.

It drew a large audience in part because it usually had more accurate war news than the heavily censored BBC.

I mean, this guy can say anything he wants once it causes chaos in Britain.

So he entertained them with humor at a time when BBC broadcasts were strictly scripted, stuffy and fairly boring.

But most of all, he terrorized.

He's fascinated listeners by sowing fear, doubt and demoralizing rumors aimed at undermining the British war effort.

So at a time when there were thousands of British men serving in the Royal Navy or flying against the Luffaffe in the RAF, the BBC refused to report any war losses out of fear of demoralizing the nation and undermining the war effort.

In an effective effort to fill this vacuum, Joyce regularly broadcast nightly lists of dead and captured British servicemen, and of course millions of people tuned in to learn if their husband's sons, fathers and brothers were mentioned.

God, that's bleak, I mean, it's why Also that that's a bad propaganda idea, just pretending like nothing's bad happening while you're fighting a war.

Like people will be aware that things are like, you know, they'll stop hearing from their loved ones.

They'll see that, like the notes are going out to neighborhoods in town, Like you can't hide that sort of shit.

Really yeah, And this is one of the things he does, like his most famous kind of catchphrase, One of the big British battleships is the Arc Royal.

The guys on board it can't send home, you know, mail and stuff and the results kind of security opsec you know things, you know, they can't report much about it or what it's doing, or even if it's still a float or if it's been sunk.

So Joyce's catchphrase that he'd repeat every few episodes was where is the Aarc Royal?

Where is the act Royal?

You don't know that we do, and we can sink it any time we choose.

So he also specializes in informing like, think of what's happening in the early stages of the war.

It just looks like rolling Nazi victory after Nazi victory, and he's happily broadcasting accurate information about it.

And this is terrifying people in Britain.

And he's saying stuff like, you know, and the invasion is coming Hitler the time, the hour, the place.

These are Hitler's secrets.

But bear in mind he is coming, will be with you.

I'll be broadcasting from London soon.

He also knew Britain very well because he had traveled all over England making speeches at different fascist rallies, and he exploited, like his brilliant photographic memory to strike fear into people, so he might broadcast to some English town saying, dear listener, in Sophie's Town, Robertshire, where miss Smith serves tea in the yellow Daw cafe, where the mallard swim and the duck pond off the village green, and the town hall pluck runs three minutes slow, And of course this made it seem like he had a local secret Nazi spy, or if he had just parachuted in yesterday, because he's describing the place so well when in fact he hadn't been there for years.

And of course there's a very good chance that one thing that keeps coming up in these listeners is the detail about the clock being three minutes slow.

And of course there's a very good chance that somebody locally had a watch that's three minute fast, and they look at the town hall clock and think, fuck, he's right, or else the town hall clock is two minutes slow, and people ignore the discrepancy when down, when they're down the pub or else somebody spread a conspiracy theory saying, ah, but the clock was three minutes slow yesterday.

But then the Home Guard were sent in to synchronize the time to undermine Joyce.

And of course all these rumors spread and it creates sheer panic, and there are some verified cases of Joyce's listeners actually being so terrified of his of his shows and the prospect of an immediate Nazi invasion, that they commit suicide.

Joyce would announce that a specific armaments factory in some city would be bombed the following night, and of course what happens is it might be bombed coincidentally he doesn't know what the Love Draft are planning, or it might be bombed five nights later, and again people forget the discrepancy.

It's like Alex Jones prediction.

People just remember the hits and forget all the misses has or munitions.

Workers will listen to the broadcasts and they just won't turn up at work the next day.

They don't want to be bombed.

And then the factory has to close, so the rumor goes out that, oh it's been closed, and that's why the bombing raid didn't arrive.

So basically panic, fear and rumor filled the vacuum of information left in the wartime censorship.

And that's of course what fascism drives on, you know, on fear.

Yeah, fear, isolation.

Yeah yeah.

And he's so successful that the British government actually considers blocking the cross channel radio signal.

But the problem is if they broadcast a block he's incoming broadcasts, they are also stopping their outgoing broadcasts and communications with the Royal Navy, the Royal Air Force, the OSS and the French Resistance and so on, so they can't do anything about it.

And for the first few years he's broadcast Joyce through mained completely anonymous.

He's nasal tone earned him the nickname Lord Hahall because of he's perceived haughty, haughty, posh Mayfair accent.

Now Joyce, we don't know what kind of accent this guy had as a kid, because remember he's born either in America or in Ireland.

Yes, father is Irish, his mother is English.

And when he comes to when he comes to Britain and starts making political speeches, I mean he was from Galway.

I'm from County Claire, which is the next county down.

So like, you couldn't stand on a stage in Britain to give a political speech to the Conservative Party with my accent.

You know, we jar with people, so he basically gets received pronunciation lessons and that is that's that's where the accent seems to come from.

There's a myth that you'll find online and it's popular in Galway that remember remember I said in episode one about how he used to make speeches against the ira and against Bolshevism and stuff, and yeah, he was supposed to have gotten into a lot of fights.

So there's a myth about it that some other kid broke his nose so badly that he had a nasal tone for the rest of his life, which.

Is a great impossible not impossible I talked.

To as in depth research for this.

I phoned up a friend of mine who's a consultant optomologist and he said, no, that is, that is not really possible.

And even if you can find early accounts of William Joyce, he always seemed to have a kind of nasal or high voice, even because.

People always talked about him being yeah, well, yeah nice, you can still believe it.

You can still believe it.

Anyway, Eventually, when a Nazi victory seemed inevitable in nineteen forty one, Lord Haha, as he was known out of himself on air as William Joyce, ending years of feverish speculation as to his identity.

People didn't and actually the term ha god applied.

It's kind of like the dread Private Roberts.

It gets applied to several different speakers.

But Joyce is the guy who becomes Wesley.

He's the guy who goes on to kind of personify it.

So but the tide of war, of course, after he outs himself and the tide of public opinion soon change because with rapid Soviet Russian advances on the Eastern Front, the D Day Landings, the Allied reconquest of Africa, and the invasion of Italy, Lord haw Hall became less a figure of dread and more a figure of ridicule as he's in passion.

Broadcasts about the inevitable Nazi victory rang more and more hollow.

So Looney Tunes produced a cartoon called Tokyo Jokio as a piece of propaganda and is mocking the Japanese, but also features Joyce as Lord Heehaw, depicting him as a braying Nazi donkey at a microphone.

Absolutely, I remember this cartoon.

Yeah, and the comment are the British Pathay who would produce newsreels also made like they start playing Joyce at his own game, and you know, doing comedy, which is something that you know, British Pathey and the BBC would never have have done before.

But they have nasty Nazi news featuring Lord haw Haw and they depict him as a wealthy buffoon in the comedy clips, you know, going around saluting Hitler's picture on the wall and all this kind of stuff.

And they would show these before, you know, newsreels and movies in the in the cinema.

And I think that we have an audio clip.

There's also a song by the Western Brothers that is that is written about Lord Hahaw the Humbug of Hamburg, and I think I've sent you a link to that, Robert, maybe the forty first forty five seconds or as much.

But as you can stand, because it's atrocious.

This is not a banger, Okay, not a banger.

All right, Well let's let's let's make that judgment for ourselves.

Let's see how I feel about it.

Maybe this guy's going to be my new my new obsession.

Oh well, referring to this fellow, Lord hare Hole, this is Germany calling so Bin Tillero.

Who is the chap who hits the high spot, the greatest comedian now of the lot, the definite radio star number one, the life of the party, the Bundle of Puth, Lord hall Hol, the Humburg of Hamburg, the bloke with the tonsils and tone his Hamburg.

He raises in Hamburg.

His top lip is quite overgrown, and yet in the winter it's rather pathetic.

He's frozen to death cause his pants are synthetic.

The whole hold the Humbug of Hamburg.

Well do you think you could?

You could, you could have proper someone dropped some beats behind us and.

Yeah, yeah, you could remix that into something good.

No you.

That also reminds me, but you mentioned a Pathay which distributed a movie.

It's one of my favorite, like fringe little British comedies that has some like fake uh uh like comedy music bits like this in there that's made to sound like it's stuffed.

From the forties.

There's this film called Churchill The Hollywood Years with Christian Slater and nev Campbell, where Christian Slater plays Winston Churchill, and it was kind of like, there's this movie he made in the nineties called U five seventy one I think we made in the nineties, and it was basically it was about the capture of the Enigma machine by the British, but since it was an American movie, we just replaced all the British soldiers with Americans.

So there's the bit in the movie is that like, no, no, no, all British heroes have been Americans throughout history, you know, like it's it's it's a grand conspiracy to convince the British that they can have heroes, but it's really just Americans the whole time.

Yeah, is we get the British kind of stealing Irish celebrities.

They come along and they say that, oh, sir Charon and she's Irish, or they'll say, you know, Brendan Leeson or Colin Farrell or someone.

And the award winning Irish actress Brenda Fricker said, when you're when you win an oscar, they call you British, and when you're drunk in an airport they call you Irish.

You know, was Daniel Day Lewis's mother in My Left Foot.

That's the movie you want to ask her for?

Oh?

Okay, yeah good.

I think I think we need to take our revenge by just stealing British successful British actors with no Irish heritage like Bennett, cumber Patch and just.

I would say, you guys are already ahead because you have cale Meeni, obviously one of the greatest actors of all time, Chief O'Brien.

He also beat the absolute shit out of James Bond in the movie Layer Cake, just really absolutely annihilated it.

And of course the famous Star Trek episode with the United Ireland, which is very relevant.

We've gone the sidetrack from Lord Star Trek.

But anyway, I can talk about col Meani all day.

But yes, let's get back to Lord Haha.

Yes.

Facing ridicule for his day job as a radio DJ, Joyce began increasingly turning his hand to writing propaganda leaflets in a failed attempt to recruit captured British prisoners of war as members of the British Free Corps or the British Free Corps, a unit of the SS.

He also published a book on Anglo German relations entitled Damer Ubert England or Twilight Over England, which was promoted by the German Ministry of Propaganda.

It has compared the alleged evils of supposedly Jewish dominated Britain with the purported wonders of Nazi Germany.

The book was a publishing success, and it was reprinted three times.

Doctor Joseph Goebbels was delighted with Joyce's propaganda efforts so much that he had Hitler bestowed the German war Merit Cross first Class on Joyce.

However, Hitler did not bestow the medal in person, and though Goebbels was often in the same radio broadcast center as Joyce and regularly left him gift baskets of cigars and brandy, he never met him in person.

He did refer to Joyce, however, as the finest horse in our stable, but he never regarded him as an equal.

He never met Joyce to Shakey's hand or to pose for a photo with him.

But he was a big fan of He's writing, so much so that in nineteen forty three he commissioned Joyce to write a detective novel.

Now, Robert, I regret to inform you that when I looked in all the dark corners of the Internet was unable to find a copy of Joyce's weird Hitler fanfic Murderer.

That's tragic.

That's tragic, But I think it's remarkable that in nineteen forty three, as the Battle of you know, Stalingrad is coming to an end, Goebel's thought, Hey, I know what will turn the whole war efforts around.

Let's commission the detective novel championing national socialist principles.

That does make sense for these guys.

I mean, Hitler sent a bunch of cowboy novels to his generals in the Ast Front when things were slowing down.

They had a lot of faith in fiction.

Well, Rabert, you some very talented listeners.

So somebody wants to design a title and cover art for this send it on anyway.

As the military and political situation went to shit in Nazi Germany in late nineteen forty four and early ninety five, so too did William and Margaret's marriage.

Now, this had never been a Hollywood romance with a heavy dose of cheating, alcoholism, verbal shacking, domestic violence engaged in by boat spouses by now, but amazingly living in a war zone with almost nightly aerial bombardment, widespread food shortages, and increasing societal collapse actually made their relationship worse.

The pair got divorced on the twelfth of August nineteen forty one, but later reunited and remarried almost immediately.

As soon as they remarried, they just dive back into their previous toxic behaviors.

Margaret started a long term affair with a Wehrmacht officer, and when he caught a bullet on the Eastern Front, she had a string of shorter affairs and one night stands, while Joyce fucked about every secretary who was willing in the radio center.

And for some fucking reason, they just would not call it quits or go to therapy or marriage counseling, and they just seemed to take joy in making each other increasingly fucking miserable.

Even towards the end of the war, Joyce, creepy fucker that he was began fantasizing again about Mary Ogilvy, the teenage students that he had cheated on his pregnant wife with when she was just fifteen or sixteen years old, and Joyce wrote in his diary quote I think I was luckier in the marriages I did not contract, then in those I did.

The exception was Mary, with whom I am sure success would have been certain.

In the last years and months of the war.

Joyce is just pounding schnaps all day, every day, and he was such a dedicated Nazi that when he was offered extra food rations or extra pay because of his privileged position as a broadcaster, he doggedly refused to accept it.

But he did, however, take all the cigarettes and snaps that he could get, and he was able to use his influence to dine out as often as possible in the Press Club, one of Berlin's few remaining functioning restaurants.

One evening, he was coming home from the club and he had gotten so fucking cabbage drunk that he started a fist fight with one of the wardens in charge of the air raid shelter where he and Margaret were sheltering from an area on.

So Roberts is strength for Boton in deutsch Land.

I don't know if you know this, but the Germans are said to be pretty big on rules and discipline at the best of times.

Yeah, and in the dying days of the Third Reich.

They are not cool with anybody, including state employees like Joyce, assaulting air raid wardens, which they see as a subversive act, undermining the national role at the national morale and the Nazi war effort.

Look, I very rarely say the Nazis have a point on this one, but you probably shouldn't start a fist fight with an air raid warden.

That might be anti social behavior basically everywhere.

Also, you should probably listen to their directions and take cover.

Yeah, anyway, they're an air raid warden.

Joyce wags up the following morning in prison with the mother of all hangovers and that he was a broadcaster and Nazi radio.

He did not have enough influence to talk his way out of this situation.

He did get bail, but was due to be brought to trial for undermining the war effort.

Potential penalty if he was found guilty was death.

Joyce's case did not go to trial because the night before he was due to appear in court, the RIF did him with favor of killing the judge and obliterating the court records in an air raid, leaving Joyce free to return to the airwaves for the remainder of his increasingly pointless broadcasting career.

So this is the second time that Joyce has escaped a death sentence.

But he really owes the favor here.

But his luck is about to run out.

But Roberts, do you know whose luck won't run.

Out our sponsors?

No?

Absolutely not now absolutely.

I remember your old ad pivot and the joke you had about the child hunting island with blue apron.

Yeah, but you would always in trouble.

You would always beep out blue apron.

But for me, listening in Ireland, I wasn't familiar with blue apron.

And it's the exact same length of time and syllables starting off.

I always thought you were saying Bill Clinton's childhound.

If you know, ifwhere, if these, if these emails have taught us anything, it's that he used someone else's child hunting island.

He didn't maintain his own.

That's not the way it works when you're the president.

And we're back, okay.

So the Joycees were evacuated from Berlin March of nineteen forty.

Five to a time to get out of Berlin, yeah, to.

A broadcasting station in Hamburg, and by April of nineteen forty five, it was clear to pretty much everyone that the Nazis had lost the war, but I continued to broadcast every night.

He was repeatedly assured that he would not be captured by the Allies because the Nazis would take him and Margaret by submarine to Ireland, which had remained neutral during World War Two.

The reality was that Hitler had a very packed schedule in April and May of nineteen forty five.

He was running a government, fighting a war on two fronts, planning his fifty sixth birthday party, he had to get his favorite dog put to sleep.

He was planning his wedding and two funerals, so he'd probably did not know who Joyce was, and any available submarines they had were being loaded with gold bars and looted Renaissance masterpieces, and if they were going anywhere, it was the South America with senior Nazis on board and not saving sailing to Ireland to save the Joyces.

Joyce made his final broadcast on the thirtieth of April nineteen forty five, same day as Hitler's suicide.

Joyce's last broadcast was a rambling monologue during which he was so rubber drunk that He slurred his words repeatedly and struggled to string sentences together.

Joyce used this last opportunity to admonish Britain for declaring war on Germany and warned of the global menace that the USS or POST the whole world.

So again, thankfully our recording of this survives.

You just want to pay like I think the last forty five seconds of it, Robert.

A tremendous, well shattering conflict.

It's been way good.

I would want to say.

The men of Guy is a battle.

Of Marrier, have liven their lives to show that whatever else happened, Germany will live.

And never, I say you in these last word you may not hear from me again for a few minutes, I say, es leba goddam.

I like that, And well, yeah, I think that's probably better enough.

Yeah.

How half hearted did that last hile Hitler sound, Robert?

It does not sound motivated.

It sounds like a guy who just got evacuated from Berlin in March of nineteen forty five, and it is aware that, like, we lost about as badly as we could have lost.

Yeah.

After the fall of Berlin, Joyce fled to Flinnsburgh, where Hitler's successor, Admiral Donuts, had established a makeshift government and was busy teaching people how to show shout Hile Donuts whilst he plotted increasingly desperate strategy to try and keep the few steps scraps of territory that he had together under Nazi control as the Third Reich.

And you had that work for him.

Yeah.

Four days after Joyce made his last broadcast, Nazi Germany surrendered and the British Army took control of the Hamburg Broadcasting Center.

A German Jew named Horst Pincher, who had fled Nazi Germany for Britain at the age of seventeen, walked into Joyce's former studio and turned on the transmitter.

Lieutenant Pincher had survived the D Day landing and was present at the liberation of Belzen.

He picked up Joyce's old microphone and made this broadcast.

This is Germany calling for the last time from Station Hamburg tonight.

You will not hear William Joyce, or Lord Hawhaw, as he is known to most of us in Britain.

He has been most unfortunately interrupted in his broadcasting career, and at present he has left Rader hurriedly for vacation, an extremely short vacation if the British Army has anything to do with it.

After tonight's great news of the surrender of the German forces, I wonder what now our Lord Hawhaw's views on the news.

Incredibly, just over three weeks later, the two met in person.

William and Margaret Joyce were hiding in the town of Flinsburgh, near the German Danish border, in the hope of escaping to neutral Sweden.

On the twenty eighth of May, Joyce left to search for some firewood with which to cook and keep the couple warm.

Emerging from a forest clearing carrying a bundle of sticks, he was stopped when he met two British officers who were out on the same errand one was Pincher, who was accompanied by his commanding officer who had the most English name ever, Captain Bertie Licorice.

Oh my god, wow wow.

Yeah, there's actually a British company, Bassetts, a sweet company like a candy company, who make licorice all sorts and have done for like one hundred years.

And their their mascot is called Bertie the fuck that his parents given this name.

Yeah, that's that's that's shockingly English.

Let's let's also just pause here to remember that Joyce is literally carrying the symbol of fascism a bundle of sticks when he encounters.

The British Army.

Yeah, also that that facial scar is no longer doing him any favors, because he is pretty recognizable anyway.

Joyce decides to bluff it out, and he pretends to be a displaced Belgium and speaks to the two British officers in French, shouting idea, which I'm told is the French for there is more firewood over here.

So the trio collected some firewood together and exchanged a few pleasantries in German before Joyce broke into English.

He began critiquing the two soldiers on their technique for gathering firewood, and then launched into an impromptu lecture on the difference between deciduous and coniferous trees, before starting on about which types of timber were the best fuel.

Lieutenant Pincher later recalled he was insufferable.

He would just not talking.

Does he get himself caught because he's a fucking dry heard.

Yeah.

The more he spoke, the more his voice sounded familiar, and eventually our hero, Captain Bertie Licorice, grew suspicious and said to him, you you wouldn't happen to be William Joyce, would you choice immediately reached for a fake German passport he had.

You wouldn't happen to be the British guy we're looking for, would you?

You know, the one who's a huge asshole and as a scar on his face.

Boss.

So he reaches for the fake German German passport.

I think it's going to get him out of it, but Lieutenant Pincher, thinking he was reaching for a weapon, immediately drew his own gun and shot Joyce twice.

First bullet awesome, it gets better, lovers.

The first bullet went through and through both cheeks of Joyce's ass.

The second lodged in his shoulder and knocked him off he's feet.

Neither wound looked fatal, but Pincher was immediately worried that he might have shot an innocent civilian.

But when they searched him, as well as the German passport with a fake name, they found a Volkstorm Militia pass issued in the name of William Joyce, and they knew they had captured Lord Hall Joyce.

Throw that thing out, man.

Joyce was taken to hospital in a Royal Army Medical Corps ambulance.

It was a memorable journey for Joyce, who lay in the back of the vehicle with four bullet wounds in his ass and another round lodged in his shoulder.

Couldn't it happen to a nicer guy?

It gets better.

When the ambulance driver discovered who the wounded patient he had was, he drove as hard and as fast as he could, deliberately aiming the wheels of his vehicle at every rot, at every rot, pothole and shell crater he could find.

Meanwhile, Lieutenant Pincher, who was guarding the wounded prisoner in the back of the vehicle, took great delight in revealing to him that the British Army officer who had shot him was in fact not an English Christian but a German Jew.

In due course, Joyce was extradited to Britain, where he was put on trial for treason.

Now Joyce was extradited the day after the Felony Treason Act, which was a medieval law, had been updated to make his prosecution more likely, a legal issue arose because of a lack of evidence.

BBC had only kept transcripts and recordings of Joyce's Lord haw Hall radio broadcasts in the latter stage of the war, and Joyce became a German citizen in nineteen forty two, so after that point his support for Nazi Germany couldn't legally be considered a treason.

They managed to find a police officer who claimed he had heard Joyce broadcasting in nineteen thirty nine and had previously heard him at Fascist meetings, so he could identify the voice, but the problem is that hearsay evidence they couldn't play the recording in court.

Matters were further complicated by the fact that Joyce was now claiming American citizenship, and of course the USA had been neutral until nineteen forty one.

The British government's prosecution lawyer, however, was able to prove that Joyce had sworn allegiance to the British king when he joined the British Army to escape from Ireland in nineteen twenty two, and he had claimed the protection of the British crown when he traveled to Germany on a British passport.

Just before the outbreak of war in nineteen thirty nine, and therefore had committed treason by making pro Nazi broadcast between thirty nine and forty two when he became a German citizen.

At his trial, Joyce did not deliver an impassioned, rousing speech from the dock to defend his life.

He merely spoke two words when entering a plea not guilty.

After the death sentence was passed, he merely smiled and bowed his head, but otherwise remained silent.

Joyce's last recorded words were mailed to his friend John McNabb, who had been a member of the National Socialist League.

Quote, I do not, in the most infinitesimal degree regret what I have done for me underlined there was nothing else to do.

I am proud to die for what I have done.

I shall not die in vain and suspect my service in dying maybe greater than my service in living.

May it be so so A Nazi to the end.

There is another cool story about him that when they hanged him, that the facial scar actually burst open because of the pressure, which is a very cool story and I was going to include, but again until I talked to my friend, the consultant optomologist, and he said, no, scar tissue was incredibly strong.

There is no way that happened.

Yeah, you'd have to get something like a scurvy or whatever to exactly that happened.

Again, great story.

There's loads that about Joyce everywhere.

But anyway, Joyce was executed by hanging at Wandwert Prison on the third of January nineteen forty six.

If he made a speech from the gallows, it was not recorded by his executioner, Albert Pierpoint, who had also executed Irma Greece and other Nazi war criminals convicted at Nuremberg.

Joyce's body was initially buried in an unmarked grave within the prison walls, but in the nineteen seventies his eldest daughter, Heather, began a successful campaign to get his body exhumed.

Nineteen seventy six, it was reinterred at Bohmore Cemetery in Galway City.

His widow, Margaret, had vowed to William Joyce one of her last prison letters to him that she would write his biography after he's martyrdom.

When she died in nineteen seventy two, all she left as a manuscript were a few scant biographical details about Joyce scribbled on a piece of cardboard.

That didn't prevent Joyce, however, becoming an inspiration to new generations of Nazis.

First editions of Joyce's book Twilight Over England are collector's items, often prized by neo Nazis and sell for up to ten thousand dollars online today.

In the nineteen sixties, American Nazi Party leader George Lincoln Rockwell inspired Terry Byrne, an overweight Irish house painter who lived with his mom in Dublin, to found the Irish Nazi Party.

Burne said yeah.

Burne said that his political heroes were Adolf Hitler and William Joyce.

Like he's hero, Commander Byrne was, like Joyce, repeatedly stabbed on more than one occasion by anti fascist opponents in the IRA, but incredibly he survived until the nineteen eighties.

For almost twenty years, he echoed Joyce by continually encouraging his followers to harassed Dublin's tiny Jewish community and attacked Jewish owned businesses there.

Joyce also remains popular on the British phara right scene.

Members of the British Neo Nazi Movement, or sorry, the Neo Nazi British Movement, founded by Rockwell's English pal Colin Jordan, who incidentally was once convicted of shoplifting women's underwear, visited Joyce's grave in Galway City earlier this year.

To Lao reached him on the anniversary of his execution.

So that Robert is the Nazi bastard I have for you, he continues.

Yeah, he continues to inspire hate from beyond the grave.

But hey, at least he eventually got what he deserved after he was brought to justice by a Jewish refugee who shot him in the ass.

So I consider that a happy end.

Hey, you know what, We so rarely get a happy ending like this, where it's like, and then the Nazi died, and then the Nazi was killed, you know, before he could get rehabilitated or enjoy a peaceful life.

He just somebody took that fucker out.

And that's nice, that's happy.

I'm happy to hear that.

There's your Christmas wish, Robert.

Yeah, okay, well, what a beautiful story.

Thank you so much.

I think that's going to do it for us.

Do you want to plug your pluggables down at the end here?

Yeah, so my pluggable really is my book Burned Them Out.

It is a history of fascism and the far right in Ireland.

It's published by Bloomsbury head of Zeus.

So just google burn them Out Fascism Ireland and it should come up.

And yeah, if you convite us, that would be great.

Thank you very much, Mila Margat excellent.

All right, well, thank you so much.

And yeah, everybody, that has been our week.

We're back next week with another piece of shit who probably lives a long life and dies in bed or is still alive one of the two.

But at least this week there was a happy ending.

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