Douglas Chandler

Douglas Chandler (May 26, 1889 – unknown) was an American broadcaster of Nazi propaganda during World War II. He was convicted of treason in 1947, sentenced to life imprisonment and released in 1963.

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

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 Nazi Germany in an ideal light and contributing on this theme to the National Geographic Magazine.

From April 1941, Chandler broadcast Nazi 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 Nazi 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 Nazi, 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.

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.

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