The officer who broadcast Nazi propaganda in Welsh

Raymond Davies Hughes was known as the Welsh Lord Haw Haw

He was a warrant officer who agreed to broadcast Nazi propaganda in Welsh and labelled as "The Welsh Lord Haw Haw" by the press.

It is 80 years since Raymond Davies Hughes, from Mold, Flintshire, faced court martial for his broadcasts to troops based in North Africa and Italy.

Sentenced to five years hard labour - reduced to two on appeal - many thought the Lancaster Bomber rear gunner was extremely lucky to escape the hangman's noose.

But to what extent was Davies Hughes a Nazi ideologist, or simply a useful collaborator for Hitler's chief propagandist Joseph Goebbels?

Davies Hughes' PoW Card issued to all captured servicemen

Born in Wavertree, Liverpool, in 1923, Davies Hughes grew up in Flintshire, getting in trouble with the law early.

At 11, he was cautioned for obtaining half a crown by deception.

After leaving school, he worked at a local shoe shop, and little more than a year later was promoted to run the Bangor, Gwynedd, branch of the chain.

Fired in mysterious circumstances, in 1941 he instead volunteered for the RAF.

Assigned to the Royal Australian Air Force, he carried out bombing raids from RAF Bottesford in Nottinghamshire.

RAF Bottesford was used to launch allied bombing raids over Nazi-occupied northern Europe and north Germany

Aged 20 in August 1943, on his 21st sortie he was shot down over Peenemunde on the Baltic coast, and taken prisoner.

Journalist and television producer Marc Edwards has studied Davies Hughes' life closely.

Mr Edwards thinks Davies Hughes' service record did not make him the most obvious candidate to be a Nazi collaborator, nevertheless, he said: "On the other hand, inquiries to the Flintshire Constabulary ahead of his court martial reported him to be 'cunning... very talkative and boastful... he is the type of fellow who would side with anyone. If he had landed in Russia he would have sided with them'."

Davies Hughes was taken to Oberursel Dulag Luft, near Frankfurt, where his betrayal began

Taken to a "Dulag Luft" interrogation camp near Frankfurt, Germany, he immediately offered to sell out his fellow Prisoners of War in return for more favourable conditions, Mr Edwards said.

He added: "His first bit of treachery was to convince his fellow PoWs to fill out bogus Red Cross forms, which revealed far more than the name, rank and number which they were obliged to - of course these went straight to the Germans.

"After that the Nazis realised they had someone they could make use of, and he was passed on to Professor Reinhard Haferkorn."

As English propaganda minister for the German foreign office, Haferkorn was responsible for promoting the Nazi message in its best light

Haferkorn was the German foreign office's Head of English Propaganda.

He had lectured at Aberystwyth University in the 1920s, and amongst his pupils had been outstanding Welsh journalist Gareth Jones.

But from 1933, he had been regarded in his homeland as an "unbedingt zuverlässiger Nationalsozialist" - that is, "a completely reliable Nazi".

Haferkorn lectured Gareth Jones at Aberystwyth University, and the two maintained a friendship into the 1930s, which gave Gareth an introduction to Hitler

He set Davies Hughes to work writing anti-Semitic and anti-Communist scripts, though the airman's singular failure in these tasks may well have helped to save his neck.

"Haferkorn was called as a prosecution witness - having been granted immunity from his crimes, in exchange for the information he held," explained Mr Edwards.

"Though Haferkorn painted a picture of such an inept collaborator that it almost earned Davies Hughes sympathy.

"He could not write a grammatically-correct sentence, he could not hold a coherent political argument, and his on-air performance was hampered by a stutter and a whistling sound through his missing tooth."

As one of the first post-war courts martial, Davies Hughes made headline news

After Haferkorn had dispensed with Davies Hughes, he was passed on to Goebbels - head of Nazi propaganda - who put him to work broadcasting messages to Welsh troops fighting in the Mediterranean.

For this he was given his own flat and a salary of around 500 Reichsmarks a month, roughly £2,500 in today's prices.

Joseph Goebbels was the mastermind behind Nazi misinformation

Davies Hughes' defence was that he had slipped covert messages into Hen Wlad fy Nhadau and the Lord's Prayer, urging the Allies to bomb the Berlin Sport Palace where Nazi rallies were frequently held.

Court martial evidence from BBC Monitoring confirmed that they had received four Welsh-language broadcasts between June and August 1944, from Goebbels' Nazi propaganda station Radio Metropol.

However, none had been recorded, and no Welsh-speakers had been available to confirm their content.

Another charge against him was that he had been a supporter of the British Free Corps, an SS division of British Nazi sympathisers.

Though Mr Edwards explained that, again, Davies Hughes had an answer for this.

HMP Dartmoor held both military and civilian prisoners. It is where Davies Hughes served his two years' hard labour

"He claimed he'd supplied the British Free Corps with four revolvers sourced from the anti-Nazi Dutch, so that the Gestapo would suspect his so-called friends of treachery," he said.

"He also said he'd sabotaged phones and railways and destroyed military components, and that was why he'd had his privileges revoked and had been returned to an ordinary PoW camp in November 1944.

"The truth is that, had even one part of this story been true, Davies Hughes would have been executed on the spot, not just demoted.

"The reality is that he'd become a pain in the backside to the Nazis. He was no good, he whinged about being paid late, he caused embarrassment by getting himself arrested... and - as Haferkorn testified - in the end the only use they could find for him was humping furniture away from bomb-damaged houses."

The Daily Post covered how Betty Brailsford was determined to stand by her man

Nevertheless, Davies Hughes had the wherewithal to make a post-war life for himself.

After his two years' incarceration at Dartmoor, he returned to the shoe business, rising through the ranks at Blindells and eventually becoming a financial backer of Plymouth Argyle Football Club in the 1950s.

Meanwhile Haferkorn was allowed to return to West Germany in 1946, where he resumed his academic career until his death in 1983.

Davies Hughes' wartime sweetheart, Betty Brailsford kept her promise to marry him, and he died a reasonably wealthy businessman in Cheltenham, aged 75 in 1999.