Читать книгу The Great Cat Massacre - A History of Britain in 100 Mistakes - Gareth Rubin - Страница 17

William Joyce, the most famous British collaborator with the Nazis, was not British. He was born in New York to Irish parents and the family moved back to Ireland when he was young. Although his father was a Catholic, they were staunch unionists and the young Joyce joined the Unionist special constables, the Black and Tans. After moving to mainland Britain in 1921, he became involved with Oswald Mosley’s Fascists and Mosley took a liking to Joyce, inviting him to join a group travelling to Nazi Germany in 1933 to see what Britain would be like if they were to come to power. Joyce jumped at the chance but, since he didn’t have a passport, he fraudulently applied for a British one, claiming to be a United Kingdom citizen. This petty crime would cost him his life.

Six years later, while still in Britain, Joyce was tipped off by a Fascist sympathiser in British military intelligence that he was about to be arrested as a Nazi and he fled to Germany, where he was recruited to a German propaganda radio station, Rundfunkhaus (the same one that P.G. Wodehouse worked for), to broadcast to Britain. He soon became known to British listeners as Lord Haw-Haw.

On 30 April 1945 Joyce fled the advancing Allied forces but was arrested near the Danish border and returned to Britain to be tried. As an American citizen, legally, he should have been tried in America but his trivial act of fraud a decade earlier meant he had a British passport and that meant Britain had the right to try him – and hang him.

The historian A.J.P. Taylor points out that the normal penalty for a fraudulent passport application was £2 – Joyce’s sentence was somewhat harsher, making him the last man in Britain to hang for treason. His colleagues at Rundfunkhaus received short prison sentences – except for Wodehouse, who got a slap on the wrist and was eventually awarded a knighthood.