“Tokyo Rose”, “Axis Sally”, “Lord Hee-Haw” were nicknames given to radio broadcasters of English language and programming from Germany, Italy and Japan, aimed at demoralizing the Allied troops by making them fearful and/or homesick and in the latter days, hoping to promote reaching a negotiated truce short of an unconditional surrender. They gained their audiences by playing popular music from “back home”, along with reading out lists of ships or airplanes downed by the Axis, even including the names of POWs (and sometimes, reading purported letters from them casting their captors in a positive light).
Surely there were similar counter-broadcasts by the Allies as well? Was there a “Brooklyn Fritz” or “Seattle Eiko” known to the Germans and Japanese, or was this a strategy only aimed at the Allied troops sent to foreign shores to fight in Europe and Asia?
For that matter what about the Russians? Was there a “Moscow Sergei” encouraging Russians to make peace with the Germans? Considering what happened in Poland and in the Nazi controlled areas of Ukraine that seems hard to believe. I know the Russians eventually used captured Friedrich Paulus (the German field marshal at the Battle of Stalingrad) in anti-Nazi propaganda campaigns, but that’s not quite the same sort of thing as the “Tokyo Rose” type of strategy.
Allied programs targeted at a German audience were widely used, the most popular being from the BBC. One notable difference was that there could not be popular nicknames of spokespersons as you could not discuss the programs with others. Hearing enemy stations was a criminal offence (Rundfunkverbrechen), punished with a prison term if you were caught listening, and concentration camp or death for spreading heard content to others. Every time you paid your radio license fee at the post office you were served notice of that, on the back of the receipt form.
Can you cite that claim? I don’t think I’ve ever heard that it was illegal to listen to the Nazi propaganda broadcasts. There’s no indication of it in this article, for example.
[QUOTE=Wikipedia]
Although the broadcasts were widely known to be Nazi propaganda, they frequently offered the only details available from behind enemy lines concerning the fate of friends and relatives who did not return from bombing raids over Germany. As a result, Allied troops and civilians frequently listened to Lord Haw-Haw’s broadcasts in spite of the sometimes infuriating content and frequent inaccuracies and exaggerations, in the hopes of learning clues about the fate of Allied troops and air crews. Mass Observation interviews warned the Ministry of Information of this and as a result more attention was given to the official reports of British military casualties.[2]
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Re: the Lord Hee-Haw jokes: the above-cited Wikipedia article mentions there apparently was a lesser-known figure called Lord Hee-Haw at one point (perhaps predictably, a Yank).
[QUOTE=Wikipoedia]
Origin of the name
Somewhat unusually for a term in popular culture, it is possible to pinpoint when it was created. The pseudonymous radio critic Jonah Barrington of the Daily Express applied the phrase in describing a German broadcaster [3], in an attempt to reduce his possible impact: “He speaks English of the haw-haw, dammit-get-out-of-my-way-variety”.[4][5] In practice, the name was applied to a number of different announcers and even soon after Barrington coined the nickname, it was uncertain exactly which German broadcaster he was describing. Some British media and listeners just used “Lord Haw-Haw” as a generic term to describe all English-language German broadcasters, although other nicknames, like “Sinister Sam”, were occasionally used by the BBC to distinguish between obviously different speakers. Poor reception may have contributed to some listeners’ difficulties in distinguishing between broadcasters.[6]
In reference to the nickname, American pro-Nazi broadcaster Fred W. Kaltenbach was given the moniker Lord Hee-Haw by the British media.[7] The Lord Hee-Haw name, however, was used for a time by The Daily Telegraph to refer to Lord Haw-Haw, generating some confusion between nicknames and broadcasters.[8]
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