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December 18, 2025 63 mins

Padraig explains how Lord Haw-Haw became an agent of the Third Reich...and how it all came crashing down for him at the end of the war.

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Speaker 1 (00:01):
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

(00:22):
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.

Speaker 2 (00:37):
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.

Speaker 1 (00:46):
Things they're much better than mine.

Speaker 2 (00:48):
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.

Speaker 1 (01:00):
Or mother just absolute hell for her.

Speaker 2 (01:03):
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.

(01:30):
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

(01:52):
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

(02:13):
general election. Roberts, did you know that in the mid
nineteen twenties Moseley was a fishing body of future American
President FDR.

Speaker 1 (02:23):
I did not know that.

Speaker 2 (02:24):
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?

Speaker 1 (02:34):
It looks like a Christian rock album cover. It looks
like a Christian rock album.

Speaker 2 (02:40):
What would what would they call their band?

Speaker 1 (02:43):
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

(03:04):
that Crosby in the right or is that Mosley?

Speaker 2 (03:09):
I think that's I think that's Moseley.

Speaker 1 (03:11):
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.

Speaker 2 (03:25):
It looks like, Yeah, do you imagine the kind of
selfies they would have taken if they had had smart.

Speaker 1 (03:31):
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.

Speaker 2 (03:39):
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.

(04:03):
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

(04:26):
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

(04:47):
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

(05:07):
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.

(05:32):
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

(05:52):
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.

Speaker 1 (06:09):
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.

Speaker 2 (06:18):
Yeah. Everyone, political opponents, rivals in the fascist movement. Everyone agrees.
This man is an incredible speaker.

Speaker 1 (06:25):
And the journalist makes sense.

Speaker 2 (06:27):
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,

(06:51):
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

(07:11):
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

(07:31):
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

(07:55):
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.

(08:23):
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.

Speaker 1 (08:38):
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

(09:00):
the old timey equivalent of fucking having an AI make
Donald Trump look jacked.

Speaker 2 (09:04):
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.

Speaker 1 (09:13):
The man with the iron heart. Yeah, yeah man.

Speaker 2 (09:16):
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

(09:39):
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

(10:02):
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.

Speaker 1 (10:20):
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.

Speaker 2 (10:26):
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.

(10:47):
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.

Speaker 1 (10:58):
Yeah, that scance makes sense now.

Speaker 2 (11:01):
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

(11:21):
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.

(11:44):
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.

(12:06):
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

(12:28):
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

(12:52):
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

(13:13):
Oswald Moseley, the British hitler, is telling you to dial
down the anti Jewish stuff.

Speaker 1 (13:18):
Yeah, yeah, you're going a little hard man.

Speaker 2 (13:23):
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.

Speaker 1 (13:32):
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.

Speaker 2 (13:42):
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

(14:02):
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.

Speaker 1 (14:17):
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?

Speaker 2 (14:26):
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

(14:47):
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.

Speaker 1 (15:04):
Or say the word while doing a Nixon accent. You'll
you'll appreciate why it's such a good bit.

Speaker 2 (15:10):
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

(15:32):
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

(15:56):
annam again remember Jesus, Yeah, Jesus had no.

Speaker 1 (16:00):
That's a lot of money back then.

Speaker 2 (16:02):
Yeah, it's you're talking again. One hundred and thirty pounds
for a construction workers annual wage and Mosley is getting
sixty grand.

Speaker 1 (16:10):
And that's a shitload back then.

Speaker 2 (16:13):
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

(16:33):
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

(16:56):
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

(17:20):
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.

Speaker 1 (17:33):
I mean, I guess I would say, like turning political
violence into electoral success.

Speaker 2 (17:40):
Yeah, that's that's that's one thing. I was thinking more
along the lines of style.

Speaker 1 (17:46):
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.

Speaker 2 (18:03):
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.

Speaker 1 (18:22):
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.

Speaker 2 (18:35):
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.

Speaker 1 (18:51):
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

(19:12):
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.

Speaker 2 (19:28):
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?

Speaker 1 (19:42):
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.

Speaker 2 (19:50):
I was going to say, not the sponsors of this
of this podcast.

Speaker 1 (19:53):
Oh yeah, yeah, good logos only unless it's the Washington State.
I would patrol again.

Speaker 2 (20:07):
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

(20:30):
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.

(20:53):
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

(21:15):
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

(21:37):
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

(22:00):
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.

Speaker 1 (22:14):
Yeah, and you're on the pulse man.

Speaker 2 (22:17):
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

(22:38):
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

(23:01):
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

(23:21):
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

(23:45):
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,

(24:07):
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,

(24:30):
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,

(24:53):
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

(25:16):
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

(25:39):
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

(26:02):
haven't heard it before.

Speaker 3 (26:04):
Germany calling, Germany calling, Germany calling. Here are the rights
in ambush Station Bremen and Station dx B.

Speaker 1 (26:15):
On the faty one meter Ben.

Speaker 3 (26:17):
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

(26:40):
to shape the spring and summer heads out of very
thin tin plate which is covered with silk, velvet or
other draping material.

Speaker 2 (26:52):
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

(27:12):
official BBC news broadcasts had a radio listenership of eighteen
million listeners, Nightly Joyce had a listenership of nine million.

Speaker 1 (27:22):
Okayce Britz.

Speaker 2 (27:24):
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,

(27:47):
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,

(28:08):
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.

Speaker 1 (28:32):
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.

Speaker 2 (28:50):
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

(29:10):
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

(29:31):
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,

(29:53):
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,

(30:19):
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,

(30:41):
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

(31:02):
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,

(31:26):
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

(31:47):
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

(32:09):
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,

(32:29):
on fear.

Speaker 1 (32:31):
Yeah, fear, isolation.

Speaker 2 (32:33):
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

(32:55):
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

(33:17):
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

(33:37):
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

(33:59):
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.

Speaker 1 (34:16):
Is a great impossible not impossible I talked.

Speaker 2 (34:19):
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.

Speaker 1 (34:40):
People always talked about him being yeah, well, yeah nice,
you can still believe it. You can still believe it.

Speaker 2 (34:46):
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

(35:08):
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

(35:31):
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

(35:54):
also features Joyce as Lord Heehaw, depicting him as a
braying Nazi donkey at a microphone.

Speaker 1 (36:03):
Absolutely, I remember this cartoon.

Speaker 2 (36:05):
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

(36:25):
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

(36:51):
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.

Speaker 1 (37:02):
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.

Speaker 4 (37:13):
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

(37:36):
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.

(38:00):
He's frozen to death cause his pants are synthetic. The
whole hold the Humbug of Hamburg.

Speaker 2 (38:11):
Well do you think you could? You could, you could
have proper someone dropped some beats behind us and.

Speaker 1 (38:15):
Yeah, yeah, you could remix that into something good.

Speaker 3 (38:18):
No you.

Speaker 1 (38:19):
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

(38:42):
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

(39:04):
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.

Speaker 2 (39:11):
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

(39:32):
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?

Speaker 1 (39:43):
Oh? Okay, yeah good.

Speaker 2 (39:45):
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.

Speaker 1 (39:56):
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.

Speaker 2 (40:12):
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.

Speaker 1 (40:22):
But anyway, I can talk about col Meani all day.
But yes, let's get back to Lord Haha.

Speaker 2 (40:25):
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

(40:45):
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

(41:07):
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

(41:28):
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

(41:49):
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.

Speaker 1 (42:04):
That's tragic.

Speaker 2 (42:05):
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.

Speaker 1 (42:22):
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.

Speaker 2 (42:32):
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,

(42:52):
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

(43:13):
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,

(43:35):
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

(43:59):
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

(44:20):
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

(44:42):
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

(45:04):
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

(45:25):
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.

Speaker 1 (45:40):
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.

Speaker 2 (45:50):
Also, you should probably listen to their directions and take cover.

Speaker 1 (45:53):
Yeah, anyway, they're an air raid warden.

Speaker 2 (46:00):
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

(46:21):
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

(46:41):
second time that Joyce has escaped a death sentence.

Speaker 1 (46:45):
But he really owes the favor here.

Speaker 2 (46:49):
But his luck is about to run out. But Roberts,
do you know whose luck won't run.

Speaker 1 (46:54):
Out our sponsors?

Speaker 5 (46:56):
No?

Speaker 1 (46:57):
Absolutely not now absolutely.

Speaker 2 (46:59):
I remember your old ad pivot and the joke you
had about the child hunting island with blue apron.

Speaker 1 (47:05):
Yeah, but you would always in trouble.

Speaker 2 (47:07):
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.

Speaker 1 (47:21):
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.

Speaker 2 (47:40):
And we're back, okay. So the Joycees were evacuated from
Berlin March of nineteen forty.

Speaker 1 (47:46):
Five to a time to get out of Berlin, yeah, to.

Speaker 2 (47:49):
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

(48:10):
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

(48:32):
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

(48:55):
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.

(49:16):
So again, thankfully our recording of this survives. You just
want to pay like I think the last forty five
seconds of it, Robert.

Speaker 5 (49:24):
A tremendous, well shattering conflict.

Speaker 2 (49:30):
It's been way good. I would want to say. The
men of Guy is a battle.

Speaker 5 (49:38):
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

(50:03):
again for a few minutes, I say, es leba goddam.

Speaker 1 (50:18):
I like that, And well, yeah, I think that's probably
better enough.

Speaker 2 (50:22):
Yeah. How half hearted did that last hile Hitler sound, Robert?

Speaker 1 (50:27):
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.

Speaker 2 (50:40):
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

(51:05):
together under Nazi control as the Third Reich.

Speaker 1 (51:08):
And you had that work for him.

Speaker 2 (51:09):
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.

(51:32):
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

(51:53):
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,

(52:16):
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

(52:40):
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.

Speaker 1 (52:57):
Oh my god, wow wow.

Speaker 2 (53:00):
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.

Speaker 1 (53:15):
Yeah, that's that's that's shockingly English.

Speaker 2 (53:18):
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.

Speaker 1 (53:26):
The British Army. Yeah, also that that facial scar is
no longer doing him any favors, because he is pretty
recognizable anyway.

Speaker 2 (53:34):
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

(53:56):
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.

Speaker 1 (54:22):
Does he get himself caught because he's a fucking dry heard.

Speaker 2 (54:25):
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.

Speaker 1 (54:44):
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.

Speaker 2 (54:53):
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

(55:15):
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.

Speaker 1 (55:41):
Throw that thing out, man.

Speaker 2 (55:45):
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.

Speaker 1 (55:58):
Couldn't it happen to a nicer guy?

Speaker 2 (56:01):
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

(56:23):
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

(56:46):
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

(57:08):
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

(57:29):
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

(57:52):
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,

(58:14):
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

(58:35):
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

(58:55):
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

(59:18):
is no way that happened.

Speaker 1 (59:20):
Yeah, you'd have to get something like a scurvy or
whatever to exactly that happened.

Speaker 2 (59:25):
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

(59:49):
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

(01:00:12):
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

(01:00:36):
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,

(01:01:02):
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

(01:01:23):
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

(01:01:44):
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.

Speaker 1 (01:02:00):
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.

Speaker 2 (01:02:20):
There's your Christmas wish, Robert.

Speaker 1 (01:02:22):
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?

Speaker 2 (01:02:31):
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.

Speaker 1 (01:02:50):
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.

Speaker 6 (01:03:08):
Behind the Bastards is a production of cool Zone Media.
For more from cool Zone Media, visit our website Coolzonemedia
dot com or check us out on the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Behind the
Bastards is now available on YouTube, new episodes every Wednesday
and Friday. Subscribe to our channel YouTube dot com slash

(01:03:29):
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