Personalities

William Brooke Joyce, also known as “Lord Haw-Haw,” holds the distinction of being the last man ever to be hanged for high treason by the British Crown. Joyce was born an American and grew up in western Ireland. He was hanged for high treason by the British Crown at Wandsworth Prison, London, in the early morning of January 3, 1946. His offense was that he had given “aid and comfort to the King’s enemies” and assisted Germany “in her war against our country and our King” by making pro-German radio broadcasts during World War II. By the end of the war, Joyce was, after Adolf Hitler, the most detested man in Britain. This article discusses the life and career of William Joyce, and whether he should have been hanged for high treason after World War II.

Otto Skorzeny was one of the most colorful men of the Third Reich and its most successful special-operations commander. Skorzeny made it clear that, after the Allied demand at Casablanca for an unconditional German surrender, he had no other alternative but to fight to the bitter end. This article examines some of Skorzeny’s special missions and his good fortune in surviving World War II and its aftermath.

Admiral Wilhelm Canaris headed Adolf Hitler’s military intelligence service for nine years. He is one of the most enigmatic figures of the Third Reich. Robert Kempner, the U.S. deputy prosecutor at Nuremberg, said that Canaris had a Jekyll and Hyde split personality. Kempner wrote that Canaris was “the man who organized the National Socialist fifth column, who… introduced the murderous weapons of sabotage and surreptitious infiltration and sent German soldiers on suicide missions and who, on the other hand, permitted individual officers to conspire against the regime.” This article discusses the career of Adm. Canaris, and also attempts to uncover the motives of this extremely controversial German.

Read Part one of this paper here Embroiling America in War — Again In September 1939, Britain went to war with Germany, pursuant to the guarantee which Chamberlain had been panicked into extending to Poland in March. Lloyd George had termed the guarantee “hare-brained,” while Churchill had supported it. Nonetheless, in his history of the…

Churchill as Icon When Professor Harry Jaffa proposed that Winston Churchill was not only the Man of the Twentieth Century but The Man of Many Centuries,[1] he found that many agreed with him. I did not. Personally, Man of Many Centuries sounds absurd. Was Winnie greater than Bismarck, than Washington or Jefferson, than Isaac Newton…

Knut Hamsun[1],[2] ranks as one of the most influential and innovative European authors of all time. On December 10, 1920 his literary career was crowned with the award of the Nobel Prize for literature by the Swedish Academy for his monumental work, Growth of the Soil. His attachment to the land and family as a…