Page 184 - They Also Served

In July 1939, he commented on the poor quality of the German English language propaganda broadcasts and, after a successful voice test in Berlin, was employed by the Reich Broadcasting Corporation (Reichs-Rundfunk-Gesellschaft), making his first broadcast Germany Calling a week before Britain declared war on Germany.
It is likely that Baillie-Stewart’s exaggerated pronunciation led to the Daily Express coining the nickname ‘Lord Haw Haw’. However, William Joyce, his understudy, was more effective, and Baillie-Stewart was edged out and later dismissed, so the nickname passed forever to Joyce. By now a German citizen and working as a translator for the German foreign ministry, Baillie-Stewart made a brief return to propaganda broadcasts in 1942. He then returned to Vienna, where he was arrested at the end of the war wearing, according to his POW file, ‘chamois leather shorts, embroidered braces and a forester’s jacket’.
Avoiding a charge of high treason and the death penalty that awaited Joyce, he was, nevertheless, convicted of ‘committing an act likely to assist the enemy’ and sentenced to five years. MI5 wanted him sent for trial in the Soviet sector where there would be no ‘namby-pamby legal hair-splitting’. After his release, Norman Baillie-Stewart moved to Ireland, where he married and had two children. He had just completed his autobiography when he collapsed and died of a heart attack in a Dublin bar in June 1966.
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