"Lord Hee Haw" Arrested By Russians

KALTENBACH

Posted By: Marilyn Holmes
Date: 7/26/2013 at 15:26:49

The Grinnell (IA) Herald-Register
July 12, 1945

"LORD HEE HAW"
ARRESTED BY RUSSIANS

Fred Kaltenbach,
Former Grinnell College
Student, Is Caught

Press dispatches Tuesday announced the arrest by the Russians in Berlin of Fred W. Kaltenbach, the Nazi "Lord Hee Haw" to the Americans. The news is of interest here on account of the fact that Kaltenbach is an Iowan and at one time was a student in Grinnell college. His home is now listed as Waterloo but with the exception of one brief visit there he had been in Germany since 1933.

Kaltenbach entered college in Grinnell in 1915 and in 1918, during World War I he became a second lieutenant in the coast artillery. He was on his way to France when the armistice was signed and after he was mustered out of the service entered Iowa State Teachers college in Cedar Falls, where he received a B.A. degree in 1920. He taught school for a time in Dubuque but came into disfavor there for organizing high school boys on the model of Hitler youth clubs.

Press dispatches state that Kaltenbach's arrest was reported by his German wife, whom he married in Berlin Feb. 18, 1939, who said that two Russian secret policemen called at their apartment on June 14 and ordered her husband to go with them. He was not permitted to take anything with him, she said, and she has been able to find no race of what became of him. A large handmade sign bearing the word "Amerikanaki" hung on the door of the apartment.

Mrs. Kaltenbach said that she and her husband had agreed that he would report himself to the Americans as soon as they arrived. She denied that either of them had ever been Nazis and insisted that Kaltenbach had been violently opposed to the Nazi government for the last two years. She admitted that Kaltenbach's only income was from Nazi radio broadcasts but said that her husband often engaged in violent quarrels with Nazi radio officials.

"He refused to broadcast what they wanted and often went on strike, sometimes for months at a time," Frau Kaltenbach declared. "He upset Lord Haw Haw (William Joyce) more than once with things he said about Hitler and the Nazis. Joyce would have liked to have killed my husband." (Joyce is now under arrest in England.)