TREASON: American Lord Haw-Haw

For 17 days in Boston’s federal district court, twelve jurors had sat and watched the thin, arrogant face of Traitor Douglas Chandler, the first man in U.S. history to be tried for giving “aid and comfort” to the enemy by broadcasting propaganda.

Chicago-born Defendant Chandler had been an officer in the U.S. Navy in World War I, worked as a newspaperman in Baltimore. He had married a wealthy woman. In 1931, ruined by the depression, he left the U.S., talking bitterly of the “unAmerican fog spreading over the land from the swamp of imported Jewish-Bolshevik subversion.” With his wife and two small daughters, he had settled in Germany. Soon, Douglas Chandler embraced Naziism.

The U.S. heard nothing of him until 1941. Then, to an obbligato of fifes and clopping hoofs, the Berlin radio introduced him to its U.S. audience as “Paul Revere.” During four years of war, Chandler’s cultivated American voice spewed forth the propaganda line of Joseph Goebbels. He was known as America’s Lord Haw-Haw. He was captured in 1945, brought home to stand trial.

He listened in court while 16 Germans who had worked with him testified against him. He tried to repudiate a long statement which he had made to FBI Agent J. Eldon Dunn in Germany. “Dunn, the blond beast, possessed hypnotic powers,” he said. His only defense was a plea of insanity, and that he thought he was helping his country.

Last week the twelve jurors found arrogant Douglas Chandler guilty of treason. The minimum sentence is five years in prison and a $10,000 fine; the maximum penalty, death. Solemn and mute, his two daughters, Laurette, 21, and Patricia, 18, watched him led away to wait for the court to fix his punishment.