London - MI5 papers released yesterday showed how the wartime authorities spared the widow of "Lord Haw Haw" from prosecution out of pity. Margaret Joyce (28) fled to Germany with her husband William, Sir Oswald Mosley's right-hand man in the British Union of Fascists, in 1939.
Joyce, nicknamed Lord Haw Haw because of the sneering manner of his speech, became a reviled broadcaster of English language programmes for the Nazi propaganda ministry.
They were both captured after the war and William Joyce (40) who had founded the British National Socialist League, was tried and found guilty of treason. He was hanged in 1946, while his wife, "Lady Haw-Haw", awaited trial in Holloway Prison. But Capt W. Skardon, her MI5 interrogator, showed the compassionate side of the security services in files opened yesterday for the first time by the Public Record Office.
He wrote in a secret memo: "There is no lack of evidence implicating her in the treasonable activities of her late husband, but the authorities do not think that she need be punished further."