Douglas Chandler

Douglas Chandler (May 26, 1889, Chicago – 1975 or later) was an American broadcaster of National Socialist propaganda during World War II. He was convicted of treason in 1947 and sentenced to life imprisonment.

Biography

Chandler was an officer in the U.S. Navy in World War I and later worked as a newspaperman in Baltimore.

In 1924 he married at Bar Harbor Laura Jay Wurts (died 1941 in Germany), daughter of Alexander Jay Wurts, a Carnegie Tech professor and Westinghouse inventor, and great-great-great granddaughter of John Jay (1745–1829), the first Chief Justice of the U.S.

He was ruined in the Wall Street Crash of 1929 and "fed up to the chin with the Depression and the miasma that was enveloping Washington" he moved from the U.S. to France and then to Germany in 1931. There he worked as a journalist showing National Socialist Germany in an ideal light and contributing on this theme to the National Geographic Magazine.

Propaganda for National Socialist Germany

From April 1941, Chandler broadcast National Socialist propaganda from Berlin for the Reichs-Rundfunk-Gesellschaft, German State Radio, working as a commentator in its U. S. A. Zone. When the United States declared war on National Socialist Germany on December 11, 1941, American citizens were repatriated by the U. S. Government but Chandler chose to stay on.

Chandler broadcast to the United States under the pseudonym "Paul Revere". His programs began with the sound of clattering hooves and the song Yankee Doodle and were mainly anti-Roosevelt and anti-Semitic in content. He appealed to Americans to 'throw off tyranny' and to isolationist sentiment. He also asserted that government in Washington was under the control of Jewish advisers.

Chandler became known as America's Lord Haw-Haw due to his cultivated American voice. Though he had become a convinced National Socialist, his activities were not motivated by idealism alone. He was paid $3,200 a month as a broadcaster, putting him in the top six on the RRG’s payroll.

Towards the end of 1943, due to the increased Allied bombing of Berlin, Chandler was relocated first to Vienna and then to Munich where he made his last broadcasts sometime in February 1945.

Arrest

Chandler was taken into custody by the U.S. Army at his home in Durach, Bavaria in May 1945, but he was released on October 23, 1945. He was then rearrested by the US Army on or about March 12, 1946, at the request of the Department of Justice.

He was then flown to the United States to stand trial, arriving on December 14, 1946.

Trial

On July 26, 1943 Chandler along with Fred W. Kaltenbach, Jane Anderson, Edward Delaney, Constance Drexel, Robert Henry Best, Max Otto Koischwitz and Ezra Pound had been indicted in absentia by a District of Columbia grand jury on charges of treason.

Chandler stood trial at the Boston Federal District Court on June 6, 1947. He entered a defense of insanity due to paranoia and did not testify at his trial. The prosecution mainly relied on the evidence provided by recordings of Chandler's wartime broadcasts from Germany recorded by the Federal Communications Commission station at Silver Hill, Maryland, to show his active participation in propaganda activities against the United States.

Chandler was found guilty of all ten counts of treason on June 28, 1947. He was fined $10000 and sentenced to life imprisonment. On conviction for treason, Chandler also automatically lost his U. S. citizenship. His subsequent appeal was denied.

Release

After 16 years’ imprisonment Chandler’s sentence was commuted by President John F Kennedy on condition he immediately leave the United States. He was released from the federal penitentiary at Lewisburg, Pennsylvania on August 9, 1963 and returned to Germany.

Chandler was still alive in 1975 and resident on Tenerife in the Canary Islands. His precise date of death is not known.

References

Part of this article consists of modified text from Wikipedia, and the article is therefore licensed under GFDL.