Frederick Wilhelm Kaltenbach (March 29, 1895 – c. October 1945) was an American who broadcast Nazi propaganda from Germany during World War II.
After graduating from East High School, Waterloo, Kaltenbach and his brother Gustav went on a cycling tour of Germany and were there when World War I broke out in August 1914.
Kaltenbach then left for Germany where he worked as a freelance writer and translator and on occasion for the Reichs-Rundfunk-Gesellschaft, German State Radio.
There he took every opportunity to speak in favor of the Nazi cause, but, after a hostile confrontation at a lecture he gave at the Russell-Lamson Hotel in Waterloo in May 1939, he hastily returned to Germany.
Kaltenbach believed that his role was also to warn Americans of the dangers of Bolshevism and saw himself as one who could clarify the Nazi philosophy while minimizing criticism of Hitler.
[5] On July 26, 1943, Kaltenbach, along with Max Otto Koischwitz, Jane Anderson ("The Georgia Peach"), Edward Delaney, Constance Drexel, Robert Henry Best, Douglas Chandler and Ezra Pound, was indicted by a District of Columbia grand jury on charges of treason.
This alienated his fellow American collaborators and resulted in confrontation, especially with their British colleague, William Joyce,[1] on whom the Lord Haw-Haw nickname had finally settled.
[1] After Germany surrendered on May 8, 1945, his wife reported to the US Army that her husband had been arrested at the family home in Berlin by Soviet troops on May 15, 1945.