It was an ignominious end for a man who had become a household name in the UK when war broke out in September 1939. British citizens had expected Hitler to launch a catastrophic attack immediately, but when that didn’t happen, the tense lull was dubbed the Phoney War. In those early days, the main hazard on the home front wasn’t air raids but twisted ankles. To hinder German bombers, the government enforced a blackout. By Christmas 1939, a Gallup poll found a fifth of the nation’s population had fallen downstairs, collided in the dark or suffered other, mostly minor, injuries. Road deaths almost doubled until petrol rationing cut traffic. Entertainment venues were shut and gatherings banned, so at night people had little choice but to stay at home and listen to the radio.
Many were unimpressed by the BBC’s dreary schedule of short bulletins with little to report, dull public information announcements, and filler such as Sandy MacPherson’s organ recitals. Further along the radio dial, anxious listeners found something livelier: a mystery man broadcasting via Medium Wave on the Reichs-Rundfunk-Gesellschaft (RRG), nationalised under the Nazis. In an exaggerated, nasal, upper-class English accent, he announced himself with the catchphrase, “Germany calling, Germany calling.”
The Daily Express radio critic Jonah Barrington dubbed him Lord Haw-Haw, and the nickname stuck. Barrington’s aim was to belittle the propagandist from Germany, but it turned out that many listeners enjoyed the shock value of Haw-Haw’s nasty novelty act. His style was to entertain while undermining his British audience’s morale by spreading doubt through semi-plausible rumours, exaggeration and ridicule. In one broadcast, he talked of “panic and confusion… hourly gaining ground” in Britain. “The only wonder is that the people of this doomed island took so long to realise the nature of the positions into which their politicians had led them,” he said.
In another, Haw-Haw mocked people’s fears about the threat of German bombs. He said: “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 hats out of very thin tin plate.” It doesn’t seem very amusing now, but perhaps you had to be there.
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