Should Lord Haw-Haw really have been hanged?
AT ABOUT 7pm on April 24, 1941, a familiar cut-glass English accent began its nightly broadcast from Nazi Germany. Six million Britons had tuned in to his sneering tones, some entertained, many frightened, others simply intrigued by the latest instalment of “Germany Calling” from Nazi propagandist “Lord Haw-Haw”.
In one London home, however, the motives for listening were somewhat different and when the voice announced: “Today is my birthday,” a young girl leapt from her seat and squealed: “It is daddy, of course it is!”
Now an 82-year-old widow, Heather Iandolo, the daughter of William Joyce, the man nicknamed Lord Haw-Haw by the Daily Express, is making an appeal to the British authorities to have her father’s guilty verdict for high treason, for which he was executed in 1946, overturned.
Aged just 17 at his death, she has just put her name to an application to the Criminal Cases Review Commission (CCRC) which asserts that not only was her father not technically British, and therefore unable to be a traitor, but he was also a double agent for MI5 throughout the war, a protégé of the spy master who inspired Ian Fleming to create the Bond character M.
The latter is an extraordinary claim which, if true, would mean he duped both Goebbels and Hitler, and would raise new questions about the anti-communist sympathisers in Britain’s secret services....