“Heil Hitler and see you soon.” With these words, William Joyce drunkenly dismissed his latest program a few hours after his beloved Führer shot herself and on the same day that Allied troops stormed his Hamburg studio. It was the beginning of the end for the best known of the American Nazi broadcasters who spent the war trying to convince the allies, in perfect English, to give up the fight.
Each had their audience: Joyce, a British-raised American, imitated an upper-class British accent as “Lord Haw-Haw” and blamed everything on the Jews. Frederick Kaltenbach, a German-American, was addressing his former Iowa farm neighbors to tell them that they had not lost anything in another European war. Announcers like “Sally la del Axis” or “Rose la de Tokio” played romantic music and told the American soldiers that their girlfriends were not going to wait for them.
Some were convinced Nazis, others said they were forced to, and many simply found themselves in a difficult position or couldn’t say no to German, Italian, or Japanese propaganda money. Almost all of them paid a high price after the war: Joyce was recognized by his voice as a British soldier of Jewish origin and ended up hanged; Kaltenbach disappeared after being captured by the Soviets; Mildred Gillars and Iva Toguri (“Sally” and “Rose”) returned to the US for trial and spent several years in prison.
Hitler’s Propaganda Minister, Joseph Goebbels, already knew firsthand the ability of radio to manipulate the masses. He had been instrumental in the rise of the Nazis to absolute power in Germany, but, in order to influence beyond its borders, he soon realized that his messages would have more traction if they were transmitted by voices that did not sound German, but American. or British.
This is how a diverse cast of Anglo-Saxon broadcasters began to be recruited between frustrated actors, exiled far-rightists and children of German immigrants who had returned to the Reich. They came to occupy more than 12 hours of daily programming that could be heard throughout Great Britain and in millions of American homes, but also reached Allied soldiers stationed in Europe.
Goebbels also knew that propaganda, by itself, was unattractive; that’s why its English-language stations played the latest music and slipped their messages discreetly into comedy shows. His first objective was to convince the British that confronting Germany “because of the Jews” was a mistake, and the Americans that “removing England’s chestnuts from the fire again” was not worth it, but the contents were changing. as the war progressed.
Early in the war, Lord Haw-Haw’s irreverent attacks on Prime Minister Churchill were all the rage, with up to six million Britons listening to each programme. This doesn’t necessarily mean they agreed with the German propaganda, but the announcer’s informal tone and humor contrasted with the BBC’s corseted style. His popularity waned as the Luftwaffe began bombing Britain, as public radio struggled to offer more entertaining content.
Unlike the Germans, who risked ending up in a concentration camp if they eavesdropped on the BBC, the British and Americans were free to be entertained by Nazi broadcasts. Even soldiers fighting on the front lines tuned in to “Axis Sally” to hear jazz, even though they heard her tell them in between that she was very sorry they would never see her families again.
Even so, it remains to be seen whether his tricks had the desired effect on the Allied troops advancing across Europe. In the words of one soldier: “In Berlin, Minister Goebbels believes that Sally is quickly breaking the morale of the American recruits, but our sergeant knows that the opposite is true, he encourages them. All US troops want it.”
According to documents from prosecutors who prosecuted her after the war, “Sally” was the highest-paid broadcaster among Americans serving Hitler. She was also careful to personally correct the scripts she received to try not to say anything that might constitute treason, since she never renounced her American citizenship despite the fact that she had wedding plans with several German lovers.
Despite her calculations, “Sally” ended up convicted of treason for having participated in a radio drama written by her then partner. She played an Ohio mother who had premonitory dreams about her son’s death landing as a soldier in Europe. She spent 12 years in prison and, when she came out of it, converted to Catholicism, she dedicated herself to teaching German and French in a convent.
Worse luck had Lord Haw-Haw, who had been much less cautious and had called the British soldiers “rats”, “thieves” or “harassers”. He tried to get rid of the treason charge by saying that he had never been British, that he had lied to get his passport, but that he was still an American born in New York. A London jury needed just 23 minutes of deliberation to send him to hang.
Of all the Axis American broadcasters, only “Tokyo Rose” received any understanding at home, though it did not come until many years after the war. Iva Toguri always defended that she had gone to Japan to take care of a relative of hers and that she tried to return to the US, but that the outbreak of the war forced her to stay there and collaborate with the Japanese authorities. President Gerald Ford pardoned her in the 1970s.
All those voices that broadcast fascist propaganda in English were, to a greater or lesser extent, victims of their time. However, most knew what they were doing and some hoped that Hitler’s victory would take them to positions of honor in their countries, the US and Great Britain reconverted into totalitarian states. They bet on the losing horse, put their voice at the service of the Axis and paid for it.
