Lord Haw-Haw - Announcers Associated With The Nickname

Announcers Associated With The Nickname

A number of announcers could have been Lord Haw-Haw:

• Wolf Mittler was a German journalist of Polish ancestry. Mittler spoke near-flawless English, which he had learned from his mother, who had been born of German parents in Ireland. His persona was described by some listeners as similar to the fictional aristocrat Bertie Wooster. Reportedly finding political matters distasteful, he was relieved to be replaced by Norman Baillie-Stewart, who stated that Mittler "sounded almost like a caricature of an Englishman". It has been speculated that it was Mittler's voice which Barrington described; if so it would make him the original Lord Haw-Haw. In 1943, Mittler was deemed suspect and arrested by the Gestapo, but he managed to escape to Switzerland. After the war, he worked extensively for German radio and television.

• Norman Baillie-Stewart was a former officer of the Seaforth Highlanders who was cashiered for selling secrets to Nazi Germany. He worked as a broadcaster in Germany for a short time in 1939. He was jailed for five years by the British after the war. For a time he claimed that he was the original Lord Haw-Haw, he did have an upper-class accent, but he later decided that it was probably Mittler whose voice Barrington had heard. He may have been the broadcaster the BBC referred to as "Sinister Sam".

• Eduard Dietze, a Glasgow-born broadcaster of a mixed German-British-Hungarian family background, is another possible, but less likely, candidate for the original Lord Haw-Haw. He was one of the English-speaking announcers with an "upper-crust accent" who were heard on German radio in the early days of the war.

• James R. Clark was a young English broadcaster and a friend of William Joyce. Clark and his pro-Nazi mother, Mrs. Dorothy Eckersley, were both tried for treason after the war. Dorothy Eckersley was born Dorothy Stephen in 1893. She later married Edward Clark, a musician, and had a son, James Clark, who was born in 1923. She divorced her first husband and was married to Peter Eckersley, a senior figure working in the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC). After ten years of marriage to Peter Eckersley, Dorothy's increasing interest in German National Socialism and Fascism led her to move to Germany with her son, enrolling him (by then aged 17 years) in a German school. Following this move, "...Dorothy Eckersley came to play a key role in William Joyce's fate in Berlin..."