Four times last week, a grim-faced, middleaged, Atlanta-born woman cursed the U.S. for entering World War II. She does it four times each week.
Dubbed "Lady Haw-Haw" by the British, Jane Anderson broadcasts over short wave to North America from the powerful Zeesen transmitter in Germany.
Sample of the Anderson technique: "The American brain trust, alien to and superimposed upon the land of Old Glory, is but a branch of the International Secret Superstate which holds equally Soviet Russia, plutocratic England, and Roosevelt's America in the hollow of its hybrid hand. . . . Roosevelt has pulled a brass band out of his hip pocket, and a concentration camp from under the coattails of the brain trust. . . . Roosevelt consolidated with Churchill in the simultaneous declaration of war upon Japan . . . so the American people have gone to war to save Stalin and the international banker which are one & the same. . . . [Roosevelt] supported the hand of Communist China, the wealth of the American nation he offered as a footstool to Stalin, the mightiest murderer of modern history. ..."
As correspondent for the London Daily Mail and Daily Express in World War I, Jane Anderson was Mrs. Deems Taylor, wife of the composer. During the Spanish Civil War (then married to the Marques Alvarez de Cienfuegos) Catholic Digest called her "the world's greatest woman orator in the fight against Communism." To Catholic University's Monsignor Fulton Sheen she was "one of the living martyrs."
The six weeks that Jane Anderson spent in a Madrid prison during the Civil War apparently changed her whole life. Before then she was an able journalist, an intimate of Historian Herbert George Wells and Novelist Rebecca West. She may or may not have been a Franco agent, as charged when she was imprisoned, but she most certainly was one when she left. As soon as the U.S. Government procured her release, she began stumping the U.S. for the Fascists. Her penny-dreadful harangues were illustrated with lurid firsthand accounts of Communist "atrocities" and "tortures" in Spain. How she got to Germany and became Lady Haw-Haw no one seems to know.