It was an ignominious end for a man who had become a celebrity in Britain when war broke out in September 1939. The British public expected Hitler to launch a devastating attack right away, but when that didn’t happen, the tense lull was called a false war. At that time, the main danger on the home front was not air raids, but ankle sprains. To deter German bombers, the government implemented a blackout. By Christmas 1939, a Gallup poll found that: one-fifth of the country’s population They fell downstairs, crashed in the dark, and suffered other, mostly minor, injuries. Before gasoline rationing reduced traffic, the number of road fatalities nearly doubled. Entertainment venues were closed and public gatherings were banned, leaving people with little choice but to stay home and listen to the radio at night.
Many were unimpressed by the BBC’s tedious schedule of short bulletins with little to report, boring public relations announcements, and interludes such as: Sandy McPherson organ recital. Further down the radio dial, anxious listeners found something even livelier. It was a mysterious man broadcasting on medium wave from the German Reichstag (RRG), which was nationalized under the Nazis. He announced himself in a big, nasal, upper-class English accent with the catchphrase: “Germany is calling, Germany is calling.”
Daily Express radio critic Jonah Barrington dubbed him Lord Hau Hauand the nickname stuck. Although Barrington’s aim was to make light of the propaganda coming from Germany, it turned out that many listeners enjoyed the shock value of Hau Hau’s mean-spirited novelty act. His style was to entertain while undermining the morale of British audiences by spreading suspicion through semi-plausible rumors, exaggerations, and ridicule. In one broadcast, he said there was “panic and chaos… growing stronger by the hour” in Britain. “The only wonder is that it took the people of this doomed island so long to understand the nature of the position they were placed in by the politicians,” he said.
In another story, Hau Hau mocked people’s fears About the German bomb threat. He said: “The UK Ministry of Misinformation is running a campaign to systematically scare British women and girls about the risk of injury from German bomb fragments. In response to these suggestions and warnings, women are asking milliners to fashion hats for spring and summer out of very thin sheets of tin.” It doesn’t seem very interesting now, but maybe you needed to be there.
Source: BBC Culture – www.bbc.com
