British Free Corps

The British Free Corps or BFC (German: Britisches Freikorps) was a unit of the Waffen-SS in World War II consisting of British and Dominion prisoners of war who had been recruited by the Germans. Adrian Weale's research has identified about 59 men who belonged to this unit at one time or another, some for only a few days, and at no time did it reach more than 27 men in strength — smaller than a contemporary German platoon. These numbers are highly underestimated by modern-day historians. Other sources, like author and historian Robert A. Best, claim around 1,500 men, including 400 Irish of a SS Irish Brigade. After the war, there were several court-martials and at least one death sentence.

History

British SS-Volunteers during World War II

Founding and structure

The German Waffen-SS "British Free Corps" was the creation of John Amery, the son of the serving British Secretary of State for India, Leo Amery. John Amery was a staunch anti-Communist and came to embrace the National Socialist doctrines of Germany. Confronted with money problems, he left Britain and met the French fascist leader Jacques Doriot. Following the Spanish Civil War, Amery and Doriot travelled together to Austria, Czechoslovakia, Italy and Germany before residing in Vichy France. He pretended to have joined Franco's Nationalists during the Spanish Civil War in 1936, and awarded a medal of honor while serving as an military intelligence officer with Italian volunteer forces. Displeased with their mindset, Amery ran afoul of the Vichy government. He made several attempts to leave France, but was unsuccessful until September 1942, when Hauptmann Werner Plack brought Amery to Berlin to speak to the German English Committee. It was at this meeting that Amery suggested that the Germans form a British anti-Bolshevik legion. Adolf Hitler was impressed by Amery and allowed him to remain in Germany as a guest of the Third Reich, where he made a series of pro-German radio broadcasts to Britain.

The idea of a British force to fight the Communists languished until Amery met with two Frenchmen, who were part of the LVF (Légion des Volontaires Français) in January 1943. The two LVF men lamented the situation on the Eastern Front, where only Germany was battling the Soviet Union. They felt that they should lend support with their LVF service. Amery rekindled his idea of a British unit and aimed to recruit fifty to a hundred men for propaganda purposes. He wanted to seek out a core of men with which to gain additional members from British POWs. He also suggested that such a unit could provide more recruits for the other military units made up of foreign nationals. (However, the Germans had already raised a number of such units, which were operating under the command of the Waffen-SS.)

So Amery began his recruiting drive for a unit he named "The British Legion of St. George". He made the rounds of POW camps, addressing 40 to 50 inmates from Britain and various Commonwealth countries, and handed out recruiting material. His first efforts at recruitment were complete failures, but he persisted and eventually was rewarded with four recruits: an elderly academic named Logio, Maurice Tanner, Oswald Job, and Kenneth Berry (a 17 year old deckhand on the SS Cymbeline, which was sunk). Logio was released, while Job was recruited by German intelligence, trained as a spy, caught while trying to get into England and hanged March 1944. Thus, Amery ended up with two men, of which only Berry would actually join what was later called the BFC. Amery's link to what became the BFC ended in October 1943 when the Waffen-SS decided Amery's services were no longer needed.

With the failure of Amery's recruiting efforts, another idea was tried in an attempt to woo POWs into joining the BFC. Given the harsh conditions of POW camps in Germany and the occupied areas, it was decided to form a "holiday camp" for likely recruits. Two holiday camps were set up, Special Detachment 999 and Special Detachment 517, both under the umbrella of Stalag IIId, near Berlin. English-speaking guards were used, overseen by a German intelligence officer, who would use the guards as information gatherers. But a Briton was needed as a possible conduit for volunteers and for this duty, Battery Quartermaster Sergeant John Henry Owen Brown of the Royal Artillery was selected.

Brown had been a member of the British Union of Fascists (BUF) before the war, but was also a devout Christian. Captured on the beaches of Dunkirk in May 1940, Brown eventually ended up in a camp at Blechhammer. Given his rank, he was made a foreman of a work detail where he successfully won the confidence of the Germans. With his status, the Germans made him the camp leader of Special Detachment 517.

In reality, Brown had been setting up a black market scheme, smuggling in contraband to give to his men and also to buy off the guards. Later Brown learned the POW message codes created by MI9 and began to operate as (in his words) a "self-made spy". Once he understood his role concerning the "holiday camps", he determined that he was in a unique position to both hinder the formation of this unit and to obtain intelligence — while also making sure the men who came to the camp actually got a holiday.

At this time, another Briton, Thomas Cooper (who used the German version of Cooper – Boettcher – as his last name), arrived at the camp. Cooper, unable to obtain public service employment in Britain due to his mother's German nationality, joined the BUF and during a visit to Germany in 1939 was trapped there by the war, and joined the Waffen-SS. He was posted to the SS Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler (LAH), where he eventually was transferred to the SS "Totenkopf" infantry training battalion, and became a machine-gun instructor with the 5th Totenkopf Regiment and was made an NCO. Following the German invasion of the Soviet Union, he was assigned to the Wachbattaillon Oranienburg outside Kraków in Poland, where he allegedly told BFC men that he committed atrocities against Soviet POWs, Polish civilians and Jewish prisoners. Later, he served as transport driver in the SS-Polizei-Division, which was posted to Schablinov, a town on the Leningrad front, replacing the mangled forces of the Spanish Blue Division. The division was subjected to a Soviet attack on 13 February 1943, Cooper was hit in the legs by shell splinters, evacuated, and awarded the Wound Badge in Silver, becoming one of the only Englishman to obtain a German combat decoration.

Besides Cooper and the young Berry, a handful of other Britons had drifted into this group. Most notable was Roy Courlander, who also used the pseudonym of Reg. The son of a Lithuanian Jew and an English woman, he was serving in the New Zealand army in Greece when captured in 1941. He expressed extreme anti-Russian views, and had participated in German broadcasts for England before he joined.

When the first batch of 200 POWs arrived in the camp, Brown and his men did their best to entertain the prisoners while Cooper and other pro-National Socialist men worked the crowd, seeking ex-BUF members or other ex-Fascist group members as well as finding out attitudes about the Communists. This treatment displeased many of the POWs, who demanded to be sent back to their camps. To try and calm this, the most senior British POW, one Major-General Fortune, was asked to send a representative to the holiday camp to inspect it; he selected Brigadier Leonard Parrington, who inspected the facilities, and reported it was indeed a holiday camp and the POWs should not worry. Brown did not feel safe in informing Parrington of the purpose of the camp. While Parrington's visit was successful in calming the POWs, this recruiting effort gained only one confirmed recruit, Alfred Vivian Minchin, a merchant seaman whose ship, the SS Empire Ranger, was sunk off Norway by German bombers. Brown, following the first batch, learned of the full scope of the project from Carl Britten, who said he'd been forced into the BFC by Cooper and Leonard Courlander. Brown was unable to persuade Britten to quit the BFC, but MI9 got a very revealing transmission from Brown.

In March of 1945, a BFC detachment was deployed with with the 11th Waffen-SS division "Nordland", which was composed largely of Scandinavian volunteers. Although most of the Corpsmen were dispersed throughout the division, a squad-sized unit was assigned to the 3rd company of the reconaissance battalion, which consisted primarily of Swedish SS men. The BFC contingent was commanded by SS-Scharfuehrer "Hodge" ("Scharfuehrer" is sergeant; "Hodge" is mostly likely a nom de guerre and not his real name.) "The Britons were sent to a company in the detachment that was situated in the small village of Schoenburg near the west bank of the Oder River. "On March 22, as the company was entrenching, it was partially overrun by an advance element of the Red Army which had blundered into its position by accident. Although taken by surprise, the SS troopers, including the BFC volunteers, quickly regained their wits and launched a vigorous counterattack, driving off the Soviets. One BFC fighter, a Cornishman named Kenneth Edward Berry, was captured during the brief but fierce battle, and was subsequently interned. Another Corspman who distinguished himself during the battle for Berlin was Eric Pleasants, of Norwich. Pleasants is easily the most colorful figure in a formation that was full of colorful figures. Before the War he had been a Blackshirt security officers in Sir Oswald Mosley's British Union of Fascists. Unwilling to fight against Germany when war broke out, he aligned himself with the Peace Pledge Union, and was assigned agricultural work on the Channel Islands as an alternative to military service. Pleasants was interned with the other adult males when the Germans occupied the islands in 1940. He was an early volunteer in the BFC. Pleasants was naturally strong and athletic, and he had an iron constitution. He had experience in boxing, wrestling and the Oriental martial arts. Unsurprisingly, he became the physical instructor for the BFC. As part of his duties, he represented the BFC in exhibition boxing matches with the other Germanic SS units, and in time became the middleweight boxing champion of the SS. During the climactic battle for Berlin, he managed to fight his way through the Soviet encirclement, killing two Communist soliders in hand-to-hand fighting in the process. He surrendered to the Americans, but after further adventures, he was interned by the Russians and spent seven years in a Siberian slave labor camp. Shortly before his death, he returned to England and died peacefully in Hethel, near his home town of Norwich, at age 87.

Aftermath

While British intelligence had been aware of this unit since Brown's first reports, and had the names of all of its members, it took several weeks for MI5 and Special Branch to track down and detain those involved. Cowie had begun training as a military policeman in Britain when he was arrested. Amery was arrested in northern Italy. Pleasants ended up in the Soviet Occupation Zone of Germany, and was arrested by the Soviets in 1946 on espionage charges, and spent seven years in a prison camp, then returned home to boast of his status as the reigning middle-weight boxing champion of the Waffen-SS until his death in 1997. Amery and Cooper were tried for high treason alongside William Joyce (also known as "Lord Haw Haw") and Walter Purdy, and sentenced to death. Amery and Joyce were both hanged (by Albert Pierrepoint in Wandsworth Prison on 19 December 1945 and 3 January 1946 respectively).

Cooper's and Purdy's sentences were commuted to life imprisonment. Cooper was released from prison in 1953, and lived in the Far East for a number of years. He returned to the UK in the 1970s and died in 1987. The rest were dealt with under military law: MacLardy was sentenced to life, reduced on appeal to 15; Cowie was sentenced to 15 years, but was released after seven; Wilson got ten years; and Berry, the first recruit, served nine months. Courland was court-martialled by the New Zealand military, sentenced to 15 years, also served only seven. Freeman successfully defended himself on all charges, and was acquitted; MI5 stated his only purpose for joining the BFC was to escape and also to sabotage this unit. Berneville-Claye was acquitted due to lack of evidence, served another year in the army before being discharged for theft, and left the UK to eventually end his days in Australia.

In the middle of 1946, it was learned that three former BFC members had somehow been demobilised and escaped punishment; rather than recalling them to service to face a court-martial, they were merely summoned to an MI5 office, and given a severe warning concerning their future conduct. Freeman, after the war, said he had seen a list of over 1,100 British who applied to fight against the USSR. Asked why the BFC remained rife with problems and short of recruits despite opportunities like this, he summed it up that the core base of the BFC were "poor types", which contributed to a lack of any respect for the BFC from the start. Historians like Richard W. Landwehr Jr. deny these postwar propaganda judgements:

The story of the British volunteers of the Waffen-SS has long been treated with scorn and derision by the establishment media. After all there weren’t many of them and their small unit, the British Free Corps, was somewhat comic-opera in nature. This publication at least will try and change that perception. The hard core nucleus of the BFC consisted of serious, committed individuals who deeply believed in what they were doing and stayed on until the end. Therefore they deserve to be treated with respect; they were a part, however minuscule, of the vast Pan-European Army that was the Waffen-SS and no one can take that away from them. In future generations that fact will be treated as a true badge of honor. The BFC was an effort to navigate “uncharted waters”; no one in the Waffen-SS was quite sure if it was possible or even “legal” to recruit POWs from an active belligerent to use as soldiers of the German Armed Forces, albeit even though their service was to be directed against the Soviet Bolsheviks. That meant that the whole undertaking to recruit British and other Allied soldiers was a tentative one and was never developed as fully as it possibly could have been. The post-war British socialist government made it clear that the Free Corpsmen were to be treated as traitors by executing the founder of the BFC and bringing the rest to trial. They were, in modern day vernacular, “political criminals” or “prisoners of conscience." The story of the British volunteers of the Waffen-SS was however a unique and honorable one—if it can be divorced from the travesty of British domestic politics—and it deserves telling in a fair-minded manner.

Commanders

The BFC did not have a "commander" per se as it was the intention of the SS to appoint a British commander when a suitable British officer came forward. However, three German Waffen-SS officers acted as the Verbindungsoffizier ("liaison officer") between the SS-Hauptamt Amtsgruppe D/3, which was responsible for the unit and the British volunteers, and in practice they acted as the unit commander for disciplinary purposes at least. These were:

• SS-Hauptsturmführer Hans Werner Roepke: September 1943 – November 1944
• SS-Obersturmführer Dr Walter Kühlich: November 1944 – April 1945
• SS-Hauptsturmführer Dr Alexander Dolezalek: April 1945

See also

• Waffen-SS foreign volunteers and conscripts