Collaborator, Puppet, Sycophant
A brief review of three Nazi collaborators from World War II offers clarity on the traitors of today
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Collaborator
The Nazi-collaborator William Joyce was an American reporting from Germany during World War II. He and other collaborator-reporters earned the nickname Lord Haw Haw, as they broadcast pro-German reports to a UK audience, affecting an upper-class English accent.
The Reich Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda used the broadcasts as a way to demoralize listeners and traffic despair to the Allied troops. The broadcasts began in 1939 and continued for nearly five years.
Joyce was captured by British forces just as the war ended, spotted while hiding out in a German forest. He was put on trial and hanged for treason on January 3, 1946.
Puppet
Vidkun Quisling was a Norwegian military officer, politician and Nazi collaborator, who headed the puppet government of Norway during the country’s occupation by Nazi Germany during World War II.
Quisling was the founder of the fascist Nasjonal Samling party, and under his pro-Nazi puppet government, his collaborationist regime deported Jewish people out of Norway to concentration camps in occupied Poland, where most of them perished.
After World War II, Quisling was put on trial and found guilty of high treason against the Norwegian state — also convicted of embezzlement and murder.
He was sentenced to death and executed by firing squad in Oslo, on October 24, 1945.
Among the most prominent traitors in European history, his last name is now synonymous for ‘collaborator’ or ‘traitor.’ To be called a ‘quisling’ is to be identified as a collaborator for an enemy state.
Sycophant
Joachim von Ribbentrop was a German diplomat and war criminal, who served as Minister of Foreign Affairs of Nazi Germany from 1938 to 1945.
Universally loathed within the Nazi regime for his sycophancy toward Hitler, Ribbentrop was known for his monologues in praise of Hitler, as well as offering his home and liaising for the secret meetings in 1933 that led to Hitler’s appointment as Chancellor of Germany.
Ribbentrop brown-nosed his way into Hitler’s inner circle, having been a champagne salesman in the early part of his career, using flattery and memorizing Hitler’s ideas to later present as his own, thus impressing Hitler, who thought him an ideal Nazi diplomat. Ribbentrop became Hitler’s favorite foreign-policy adviser, despite not knowing anything about foreign policy.
Due to what can only be described as an abundance of stupidity (it’s worth reading about his gaffes during his time as the Ambassador to the UK, where his Nazi salutes nearly knocked over royals or appeared during hymns he mistook for the German national anthem), Hitler wearied of Ribbentrop and began avoiding him, causing him to be sidelined during the final years of the war. Interestingly, friends who knew him in the 1920s noted that before he wormed his way into Hitler’s orbit, he didn’t exhibit signs of anti-semitism.
In June 1945, Ribbentrop was arrested, convicted and sentenced to death at the Nuremberg trials for his role in starting World War II in Europe and enabling the Holocaust. On October 16, 1946, he became the first of the Nuremberg defendants to be executed by hanging.
Today’s Traitors
Today, I am thinking of Joyce and his fellow Lord Haw Haws, Quisling, and Ribbentrop as I see the unlimited supply of useful idiots and agents of influence peddling Russian propaganda and sucking up to US fascists.
So many so-called reporters raging against immigrants in their countries, ginning up old hatreds to pave the way for authoritarian leaders. Nothing new under the sun.
Then there are the promoters of traditional values shilling for Russia, ignoring the ICC arrest warrants for Putin and members of his regime trafficking children. Or ignoring the extrajudicial murders in the US occurring under and with approval from the Trump regime.
In addition, there are the sycophants — the flatterers and brown-nosers — who normalize the human rights violations that are occurring with greater frequency and less outrage.
All along the way, social media enables the vitriol and the normalizing to spread through telegenic upstarts, who don’t have to identify their funding sources.
And when their funding sources are revealed — as was the case for Tenet Media, who took ten million dollars through RT cutouts linked to Russian military intelligence — the facts don’t reach the population being duped by their reporting. And in the transfer of power from Biden to Trump, the influencers paid millions by Russia for their pro-Kremlin propaganda reporting get invitations to the White House rather than indictments for treason.
I invite you to look at the following quotes: the first is from William Joyce, aka Lord Haw Haw, and the others are from contemporary politicians, reporters, and influencers.
“The people of England will curse themselves for having preferred ruin from Churchill to peace from Hitler.”—William Joyce, Broadcast, Radio Bremen (2 August 1940)
“Well, I was wrong. Putin has gone much further than I thought he would. A consequence of EU and NATO expansion, which came to a head in 2014. It made no sense to poke the Russian bear with a stick. These are dark days for Europe.”—Nigel Farage, Twitter, 24 February 2022
“I have officially confirmed a meeting with Kirill Dmitriev, Special Envoy to the President of Russia, for later this month. It is important, not just for my fellow Americans, but to the world, that we continue to foster the relationship and conversations of peace and trade.”—Rep. Anna Paulina Luna, Twitter, 8 October 2025
“I suggest every American who wants to know what’s *actually* going on in Russia and Ukraine, read this transcript of Putin’s address. As I’ve said for month — NATO (under direction from the United States) is violating previous agreements and expanding eastward. WE are at fault.”—Candace Owens, Twitter, 22 February 2022
“The most radicalizing thing for me in the eight days I spent in Moscow was not just the leader of the country (who he called ‘capable’)… what was very shocking, very disturbing was the city of Moscow, where I’d never been … it was so much nicer than any city in my country.”—Tucker Carlson, World Government Summit, 12 February 2024
Today’s fascist collaborators can be found in the media, in state capitals, and engaged in business.
Eighty years ago, democratic nations took treason seriously, as you can see by how things ended for Nazi collaborators.
I learned about the Lord Haw Haws, Quisling, and Ribbentrop in my reading of William Shirer’s Berlin Diary. A colleague of Edward R. Murrow’s at CBS during the rise of Nazi Germany, Shirer ends his diary as he sails from Europe back to America in December of 1940. Nazi censorship had made truthful reporting impossible, and the Nazis were building an espionage case against him.
His last diary entry, December 13, 1940, he talks about the bond he made with Murrow during the war, the “kind you make only a few times in your life.” He met up with five other American correspondents, who were also leaving Europe, at the ship’s bar, finding “alcohol a good way of cushioning your farewell.” He determined that “alcohol isn’t always enough.”
And then he writes:
“I stood against the rail watching the lights recede on a Europe in which I had spent all fifteen of my adult years… they had been happy years, personally, and for all people in Europe they had meaning and borne hope until the war came and the Nazi blight and the hatred and the fraud and the political gangsterism and the murder and the massacre and the incredible intolerance and all the suffering and the starving and cold and the thud of all the bombs blowing the people in a house to pieces, the thud of all the bombs blasting man’s hope and decency.”
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