Haw-Haw of Zeesen

Unlike Germans, Britons may listen to any foreign broadcast they can tune in. To reach British ears with the Nazi side of World War II, Germany broadcasts in English, sometimes as much as eight hours a day. Most familiar voice from Germany, to most British listeners, speaks daily from Zeesen in exaggerated pip-pip English, caning British high-ups and war policies; deploring the blockade with: "Rehly, you British, it isn't manlah!" Some listeners think this hyper-Oxonian voice is Traitor Norman Baillie-Stewart's, some think it is Dr. Helmut Hoffman's, who once lectured on Naziism in Scotland; some, that it is a renegade member of Sir Oswald Mosley's Fascist blackshirts. But most Britons refer to Zeesen's voice as Lord Haw-Haw.

Jonah Barrington, whimsical, curly-laired young radio columnist of the London Daily Express, gave him the name early in the war. Barrington's resourceful notion was that, by daily and well-aimed ridicule, this No. 1 Nazi radio propagandist might be turned into: 1) high comedy, 2) good copy for the Express.

Barrington pictured Lord Haw-Haw as "rather like P. G. Wodehouse's Bertie Wooster . . . with a receding chin, a questing nose, thin, yellow hair brushed back, a monocle, a vacant eye, a gardenia in his buttonhole." Fancying a creature like this at the Zeesen mike, Britons nowadays consider it a great gag when Lord Haw-Haw says, sententiously: "Britain, your naval prestige is destroyed. We Germans now command the seas. A submarine can dive many times; a capital ship only once."

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