On the morning of January 3, 1946, William Joyce, the man known to millions as the Nazi propagandist Lord Haw-Haw, was executed at Wandsworth Prison. The 39-year-old’s death was not the clean, clinical affair the authorities had planned. As the trapdoor opened and the rope snapped taut, the force of the drop caused an old scar on his face to violently burst open, sending blood gushing across the gallows floor. The grotesque spectacle left onlookers shaken, a brutal end for a man who had betrayed his country.
Joyce’s journey to the gallows began decades earlier. Born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1906 to Irish parents, he was raised in a staunchly unionist household. During the Irish War of Independence, the teenage Joyce worked as a courier for British Army intelligence and developed close ties with the Black and Tans. He was even suspected of involvement in the murder of a priest, though no charges were ever brought due to his age. Forced to flee Ireland after an IRA assassination attempt, he settled in England, where his academic brilliance earned him first-class honors at the University of London.
His political radicalization was swift. After a razor attack left a permanent scar on his cheek, Joyce claimed he had been attacked by a Jewish communist, a story that became central to his public persona. He joined the British Union of Fascists in 1932 and rose to become its director of propaganda, but his virulent anti-Semitism and admiration for Hitler soon put him at odds with leader Oswald Mosley. By 1937, he was pushed out and founded his own splinter group, which never gained traction.
As war loomed, Joyce made his choice. In August 1939, tipped off about his impending arrest, he fled to Berlin with his wife. Days later, he began broadcasting for the Nazi regime, opening each transmission with the chilling phrase, "Germany calling, Germany calling." His mocking, sneering tone earned him the nickname Lord Haw-Haw from a British radio critic, and his broadcasts became a morbid curiosity for millions of Britons living under wartime censorship. He ridiculed Allied leaders, blamed the war on the Jews, and urged the public to surrender.
Joyce’s propaganda work earned him German citizenship and a War Merit Cross from Hitler, though the two never met. He continued broadcasting until the final days of the war, giving his last, slurred transmission on April 30, 1945, as Soviet troops closed in on Berlin. He and his wife fled north, but were discovered by British soldiers in late May 1945. When Joyce reached into his pocket for his passport, a soldier shot him, fearing he was drawing a weapon.
Brought back to Britain, Joyce was charged with treason. The case was legally complex, as he was an American citizen by birth, not a British subject. But the prosecution argued that by obtaining a British passport under false pretenses and using it until it expired in 1940, he had owed allegiance to the Crown. The argument held, and Joyce was convicted and sentenced to death.
His execution was carried out by Albert Pierrepoint, Britain’s chief hangman. But what should have been a routine hanging turned into a scene of horror. The old scar on Joyce’s face, a relic of his youth, ruptured under the pressure of the drop, creating what witnesses described as a grotesque second mouth. Blood poured from the wound, soaking the floor beneath the gallows. Within minutes, his body was removed to the prison mortuary, where a coroner confirmed the cause of death as injury to the brain and spinal cord, consequent upon judicial hanging.
To the very end, Joyce remained unrepentant. His final words were a defiant attack on the Jews, whom he blamed for the war. For a man who had spent years spewing hatred over the airwaves, his death was a grim and fitting finale, a moment of violence that echoed the brutality of the regime he had served.