1940 [Berlin]
It burns
me up that I
cannot mention a raid that is going on during my broadcast. Last night the anti-aircraft guns protecting
the Rundfunk made
such a roar while I was broadcasting that I couldn’t hear my own words.
The lip
microphone we are now forced to use at night prevented the sound of the
guns accompanying my words to America, which is a pity. Noticed
last night too that instead of having someone talk to the studio below to keep
our transmitter modulated for
the five minutes before I began my talk, the RRG substituted loud band
music. This was done to drown out the
sound of the guns.
As soon as I had finished my broadcast at one a.m., the Nazi air-wardens forced
me into the air-raid cellar. I tried to
read but the light was poor. I became
awfully bored. Finally Lord Haw-Haw and his wife suggested we
steal out. We dodged past the guards and
found an unfrequented underground tunnel, where we proceeded to dispose of a litre of the schnapps which ‘Lady’ Haw-Haw had
brought. Haw-Haw can drink as straight
as any man, and if you can get over your
initial revulsion at his being a traitor, you find him an amusing
and intelligent fellow. When the bottle
was finished we felt
too free to go back to the cellar.
Haw-Haw found a secret stairway and we went up to his room, opened the blinds, and watched the fireworks.
Sitting there in the black of the room, I had a long talk with
the man. Haw-Haw, whose real name is William Joyce, but who in Germany
goes by the name of Froelich (which in German means ‘Joyful’), denies
that he is a traitor. He argues that has renounced his
British nationality and become a German citizen, and that he is no more a traitor than thousands of
British and Americans who renounced their citizenship to become comrades in the
Soviet Union, or than those Germans who gave up their nationality after 1848
and fled to the United States. This doesn't satisfy me, but it does him. He kept talking about ‘we’ and ‘us’ and I
asked him which people he meant.
‘We
Germans,” of course, he snapped.
William L. Shirer, Berlin Diary 1934-41
Note: This isn’t the
synoptic, “significant” Lord Haw-Haw post I’ve been intending to create for a
long time, but William
L. Shirer’s Berlin Diary entry
from 73 years ago today paints
a perfect, horrible and fascinatingly familiar portrait of the über-ghastly William Joyce.
With America currently hoving to and being politician-tractor-beamed into fascism’s grip, reading Shirer’s
entry I thought (alternatively): “bull’s-eye,”
“drastic emetic” or “both.”
They hanged William Joyce at Wandsworth Prison, London, as shown below
in the Telegraph’s Lord Haw-Haw
post-mortem news photo. I’m against capital punishment
personally, but
Joyce’s failings were profound and affected
the heart and soul of a nation.
He was “all about” (as they
say) hurting people deeply
and disorienting them
utterly. I’m still disoriented.
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