Here is the conclusion of "The Martyrdom of William Joyce, an American who worked as a journalist within the Third Reich during World War II:
THERE IS A GREEN HILL FAR AWAY
The beginning of the end came on Monday morning on May 28th. Joyce had climbed to his favourite spot, the crest of the hill overlooking Flensberg's beautiful harbour. There, to use his own words, he seemed to have "fallen into a trance-like state and with the utmost earnestness (I) prayed for help and guidance." Later, realising that his wife would be searching for him, Joyce took one final look at his beloved harbour below before turning to search for her.
Following the path down the hill, the former broadcaster encountered two British army officers gathering wood. Perhaps realising that silence would be regarded as suspicious, Joyce speaking in French to the servicemen said, "here are a few more good pieces."
Whatever aroused their suspicion we may never know. Captain Alexander Adrian Lickorish of the Reconnaissance Regiment, and Lieutenant Perry, an interpreter, followed and overtook the limping man.
"You wouldn't happen to be William Joyce, would you?" Perry asked. The conditioned response for anyone so challenged was to do as Joyce did. Reaching into his pocket he fingered the official document that would disprove the officer's suspicion.
Before he could present it, Perry drew and fired his revolver. It was never felt necessary to explain why such a standard response to a simple request should have resulted in Joyce being shot down. The bullet entered Joyce's right thigh and then through his left leg, causing four wounds. As he fell to the ground he cried: "My name is Fritz Hansen."
The grim irony is that the "officer" who shot Joyce, Lieutenant Perry, was no Englishman, nor was he a soldier. Perry was not his real name; the Lieutenant was an armed German-Jew serving with the British forces. The wounded fugitive was handed over to the guard commander at the frontier post where his true identity was revealed.
During the ensuing raid on the couple's lodgings, a lieutenant and a party of ten infantrymen, two Bren gun carriers and a lorry, arrested his wife, Margaret. "Your husband has been arrested," he snapped, adding that he was to arrest everyone in the house, including the children.
"WOUNDED MEN ARE NOT PEEP SHOWS"
Held at the frontier post for several hours, a door was eventually flung open and the sight of soldiers confronted Margaret as they emerged, carrying her husband on a stretcher. He looked pale, his face sunken. As the party passed, he looked up and waved. "Erin gro braa!" ("Ireland forever!") she called out to him.
Her claim that the occupants of their lodgings had not known their true identity brought the group's release. On returning to their home, the family discovered that it had been ransacked by the troops; even their meagre food supply had been "liberated".
Joyce's arrest and subsequent imprisonment were treated as something of a freak show for the entertainment of his captors. To one of his tormentors the wounded fugitive responded: "In civilized countries wounded men are not peepshows." Newspaper hacks, unable to afford the slightest dignity to the captured pair, referred to Margaret as "his alleged wife" or "the woman who claims to be his wife".
THE MACABRE DEATH PROCESSION OF BRITISH JUSTICE
The macabre death procession of British justice, a parade of grim reapers garbed in the accoutrement of state legislature, now began the long march to the gallows. The subsequent trial ran its murderous course and few today question that it was a judicial lynching.
Joyce was not of course British and much of the rest of the proceedings were equally questionable. Never from the moment of his arrest to his present predicament had Joyce ever denied his role, his purpose or his belief in National Socialism. To the end he took the view that friendship with Germany being in the best interests of the English people, he could not therefore be a traitor. On the contrary, those who conspired with Jewish Bolshevism to subvert and overrun civilization were indeed the traitors.
In a letter to his friend, Miss Scrimgeour, he wrote:
"One day, I hope, it will be recognized that, whether or not I aided the King's enemies (and who made them enemies?) I was no enemy to Britain: But I had no intention of offering any apology or excuse for my conduct, which history will surely vindicate . . . As the days go by, it will become more and more obvious that the policy which I defended was the right one.
PEERS THE REAL TRAITORS
Well aware that he was being hanged for opposing a war, which cost the British Army alone 350,000 dead, whilst England's bunker-bound warmongers lined their pockets and gained their peerages through war profiteering, Joyce ended his letter:
"I cannot quite restrain my contempt for those who would hang me for treason. Had I robbed the public and impeded the war effort by profiteering on ammunitions, a peerage would now be within my reach if I were willing to buy it."
In a later letter to the same recipient Joyce wrote: "You may be sure that the Jewish interests in this country will make every conceivable effort to liquidate me."
Whatever the rituals of the court procedure, its day-to-day events were a parody, a judicial circus for the mob who, inflamed by Fleet Street, wished nothing other than the gallows (for words he never uttered). Joyce's fate had already been decided upon, despite the illegality of the charge laid against him.
Undeniably, he was an American citizen and therefore could not be subject to England's hastily improvised Treason Act, 1945.
It must be said that Joyce's defence counsel under the circumstances acquitted themselves well. Joyce recounted afterwards how in the cell below the court, he had discussed his prospects with his counsel.
They remarked in unison that they had both been threatened with assassination if the court found in his favour. Counts1 and 2. were dismissed on the grounds that Joyce was undoubtedly an alien. The crucial legal ruling as to whether he owed allegiance to the Crown had yet to come.
J.A Cole described how "the sparkling display of mental agility and legal erudition fascinated him (Joyce) as lawyers argued over nationality matters of mind-numbing complexity. Rumours swept the streets and public ignorance in legal complexities caused a near riot when misinterpretation (the first two charges, the assumption that he was British, being dropped) of findings suggested that the hangman had been thwarted.
Joyce however was convinced that a state lynching was quite certain. He was under no illusions. He was a spectator and a foil; he was lending his presence to the fabrication of the spurious legitimacy of a show trial.
In the outcome Judge Justice Tucker decided that Joyce's passport, obtained fraudulently on 24th August 1939 for the purpose of making his escape from England caused the defendant to owe allegiance to the Crown. No doubt the same judge would have regarded an Irish Kerry Blue to be a British bulldog had its owner falsified its Kennel Club papers!
In respect of the single remaining charge, a particular broadcast deemed to be (treasonous), there was considerable doubt. The prosecution's case hung (if you will excuse the expression) on what a detective-inspector "thought he had recognized". In fact, the inspector's case was afterwards undermined. But it was on this third count that Joyce was found "guilty - "assisting the King's enemies by a specific broadcast".
THE JUDICIAL LYNCHING OF JOYCE
"William Joyce! The sentence of the court upon you is; that you be taken from this place to a lawful prison and thence to a place of execution, and that you be there hanged until you are dead; and that your body be afterwards buried within the precincts of the prison in which you shall have been confined before your execution. And may the Lord have mercy on your soul."
The chaplain murmured: "Amen!"
Joyce stared defiantly at Judge Tucker as he pronounced the death sentence, then turned sharply and walked as smartly from the dock as he had entered it. Joyce . . . was denied the right to express an opinion as to why the death sentence should not be carried out. In a letter to his wife, he wrote: "I thought of interrupting the judge and demanding my undoubted right to make a reply, but my contempt for the judgment, combined with a somewhat belated respect for my own dignity, kept me silent."
JUDGE TUCKER'S "VAMPIRE CHAPEAU"
Joyce afterwards reflected on the judge's reluctance to hold his gaze as he donned the black cap and read out the sentence:
"It gave me no small degree of satisfaction to see that His Lordship, complete with vampire chapeau, after once meeting my eyes, read his precious sentence into his desk. Ah! My dear, those were a proud few minutes of my life." He added: "Some papers, I am told, have stated that my expression was contemptuous: it probably was. But whether I bore myself becomingly is, after all, for others to judge: but I do believe that I did nothing to shame me in the eyes of my lady: and I am therefore content."
Whilst the condemned cell in London's grim Wandsworth prison was being prepared, William Joyce was held in a Wormwood Scrubs cell. Though his counsel began the appeal procedure, Joyce was under no illusions.
"Distinguished lawyers were laying 50 to 1 on an aqquittal: I was not," he wrote.
Initially the date for Joyce's execution was set for November 23rd, 1945, and on the 17th of that month his wife Margaret was transferred from the Belgian gaol, where she was being held, to Holloway Prison, the womens gaol in London.
The execution date having passed due to the appeals process, Joyce retracted nothing of his original statement, and he advised his wife not to amend hers.
"Morally, if not legally," he wrote, "it is highly pertinent that we firmly believed ourselves to be serving the best ultimate interests of the British people - a fact which was appreciated and respected by the best of our German chiefs. And it was always our thesis that German and British interests were, in the final analysis, not only compatible but mutually complementary."
The Manchester Guardian was not alone in expressing doubt as to the legality of Joyce's forthcoming hanging.
"One can say that this document, which he ought never to have possessed, has been - unless the Law Lords judge differently - the deciding factor in Joyce's sentence. One would wish that he had been condemned on something more solid than a falsehood, even if it was one of his own making . . . Even in these days of violence, killing men is not the way to root out false (unpopular) opinions."
RESIGNED TO GOD'S WILL
Despite the dangers of association, William Joyce was far from alone in his beliefs and he received many letters of support. He wrote: "I feel overwhelmed by the generosity of my friends and these tributes from complete strangers. I am really embarrassed." A couple living on the Plimsoll line in Kensington, seeking to preserve the bygone decencies, had sent a cheque for £50. Typically a small Suffolk farmer contributed ten-shillings "for a very brave gentleman".
On the morning of December 18th the appeal was heard and dismissed. The death sentence was to be carried out on January 3rd 1946.
On December 28th, he wrote to his friend, Miss Scrimgeour:
"I trust, like you, that the works of my hand will flourish by my death; and I know there are many who will keep my memory alive. The prayers that you and others have been saying for me have been and are a great source of strength to me: and I can tell you that I am completely at peace in my mind, fully resigned to God's will, and I am proud of having stood by my ideals to the last.
"I would certainly not change places either with my liquidators, or with those who have recanted. It is precisely for my ideals that I am to be killed. It is the force of ideals that the Hebrew masters of this country fear; almost everything else can be purchased by their money: and, as with the Third Reich, what they cannot buy, they seek to destroy: but I do entertain the hope that, before the very last second, the British public will awaken and save themselves.
"They have not much time now."
In his last letter to his wife on New Year's Day, 1946 he wrote:
"As I move towards the Edge of Beyond, my confidence in the final victory increases. How it will be achieved, I know not: but I never felt less inclined to pessimism, tho, Europe and this country will probably have to suffer terribly before the vindication of our ideals . . . Tonight I want to compose my thoughts finally: the atmosphere of peace is strong upon me: and I know that all is ready for the transition."
"A SPIRITUAL SENSE OF PEACE"
Visitors beside his wife found Joyce in a spiritual sense of peace. Angus MacNab expressed his feelings with these words: "In his last days, although in perfectly good health, his actual body seemed spiritualised, and without what you would call pallor, his flesh seemed to have a quasi-transparent quality. Being with him gave a sense of inward peace, like being in a quiet church."
William Joyce in a letter to his wife recalled the spiritual visitation he had experienced at Ryde just before the outbreak of England's war. "It was, in those hours, as if some shadowy foreknowledge were given to me, causing a convulsion of what you might rightly call "burning of energy". I knew that all I had and more was required of me: and I suppose I was in an emotional state arising out of "knowledge" hidden from the conscious mind.
"My fear on each occasion was that you would be physically torn from me: but far stronger was the feeling that we should never be spiritually separated. And the hill - our hill - over Flensburg harbour provides the final clue."
(Joyce was a firm believer in the soul outliving mortal existence).
Such was the esteem with which Joyce was held that on the night of his execution former teachers at Birkbeck College, who remembered their likeable, hardworking, although strange student, sent a message to the Governor of Wandsworth Prison. "They recalled him as they had known him and if it were within the rules they would like the Governor to tell him that they wished him well."
FAITH WILL TRIUMPH OVER TEARS
In the last letter, which his wife would receive posthumously, the condemned American wrote: "I never asked you if you wanted to receive posthumous letters: the question was too delicate, even for me: but I assumed your wish. For I think you are sufficiently strong now to overcome the grief of this blow, and that your faith will triumph over tears. For my part, I want to write as long as I can and then mend the snapped cable in an eternal way."
At this point his letter was interrupted by his wife's final visit. When she had gone he continued in a smaller, neater hand.
"Oh, My dear! Your visit! With no words can I express my feelings about it: I want the children to take leave of me, of course, as they will this afternoon: but now I am anxious to die. I want to die as soon as possible, because then I shall be nearer to you.
"With the last glimpse of you, my earthly life really finished. With you, dear, it is otherwise, because you are destined to stay for a time and will have me with you to help: I am more confident than ever that we shall be together: but, after I have seen the children, the lag-end will be of no use to me except in one way; that I can still write some lines to you. Let me tell you, though, that spiritually, an unearthly joy came upon me in the last instants of your visit. And you will know exactly why.
"You would not blame me for being impatient to go Beyond. Still, despite my impatience, I shall be glad to talk this evening to my kind, good Chaplain, who has done so much for me and who will give me Communion tomorrow morning. There will be a great chorus of prayer as I pass beyond."
He advised his wife to read the Gospel of John repeatedly. . . To me it has recently been a revelation. It has contributed much to my understanding. Try it. I need hardly say that I have no fear of dying: for there will be no 'death'. (...)
"In death, as in this life, I defy the Jews who caused this last war: and I defy the power of Darkness which they represent. I warn the British people against the aggressive Imperialism of the Soviet Union.
"May Britain be great once again. . . I am proud to die for my ideals; and I am sorry for the sons of Britain who have died without knowing why."
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Notes for the preceding eight ZGrams:
(1) Winston Churchill. Illustrated Sunday Herald. Feb. 8th, 1920.
(2) Witness to History, Michael Walsh. Historical Review Press, Uckfield.
(3) The Italian leader had been honoured as a British Knight of the Bath. The knighthood was removed in 1942. .
(4) William Joyce and his wife became a naturalized German citizens on 28t September, 1940)
(5) Lord Haw-Haw and William Joyce, J.A Cole. Faber and Faber, London. 1964.
(6) Bremen, 2nd August 1940 22.15 BST. Repeated Zeesen, 3rd August, 1940.
(7) Advance to Barbarism, F.J.P Veale. Mitre Press, London. 1948. USA (1953) Hamburg (1954) Wiesbaden (1962).
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Thought for the Day:
"The great happenings and thoughts - and the greatest thoughts are indeed the greatest happenings - are the slowest in winning understanding. The generations who witness them never live these happenings, they live past and beyond them.
Something befalls, as in the realm of the stars, but the light of the farthest star reaches man behind that of others, and not until it reaches him does he know that any such star exists.
How many hundreds of years does it take an idea to be grasped? From this we can form our yardstick, and place in perspective our scale of values and behaviour, both for Star and Idea."
(- Friedrich Nietzsche )