Hitler's Foreign Executioners by Christopher Hale Page A

has proved them right! As he finishes, an egg splatters on his immaculate black coat. Then the party men march up Whitehall to Trafalgar Square, closely pursued by protestors. Scuffles erupt, banners are trampled underfoot. Tourists and passers-by scratch their heads, puzzled. Who on earth were these ‘heroic’ anti-communists?
    In August 1942, an odious public school dropout called John Amery and his companion Jeannine Barde arrived in Berlin masquerading as ‘Mr. and Mrs. Browne’. Amery was very well connected: his father was Secretary of State for India and his brother, Julian, an illustrious war hero. 2 John Amery’s hosts, the ‘England Committee’ at the German Foreign Office, hoped that his defection would provide them with a propaganda coup. They were grossly mistaken. Rebecca West, who witnessed Amery’s post-war trial for High Treason at the Old Bailey, concluded that he ‘was not insane … but his character was like the kind of automobile that will not hold the road’. 3 Although his odious personal ideology perfectly fitted theGerman world view, John Amery was no great catch. His grandmother had been a Hungarian Jew who had found refuge in Britain, but the Amery clan were all diehard conservatives. Given this bigoted cradling, it is not surprising that John became a fervent anti-communist whose views, at least to begin with, mimicked those of his father and brother. But unlike them, he became an outspoken and virulent anti-Semite who was in thrall to the vicious ‘Jew hatred’ of French ultranationalist culture. John Amery spurned his well-to-do family and became a dedicated bohemian. He contracted syphilis at the age of 14 and by the time he arrived in Berlin was an alcoholic bigamist, burdened by massive debts. But Hitler and the German Foreign Office had a crass understanding of English social mores and it took them a long time to understand that John Amery had little to offer the Reich.
    For a year, Amery and Jeannine boozed and rowed in the capital of the Reich, sending their bills to Hitler’s personal office. Amery made a few radio broadcasts and narrowly escaped a manslaughter charge when Jeannine choked to death on her own vomit. Then in January 1943, the French fascist leader Jacques Doriot, who had formed the Légion des Volontaires Français contre le Bolchévisme (LVF), persuaded the German military authorities to give Amery access to British prisoners of war. Most gave Amery short shrift and he succeeded only in recruiting a tiny band of about thirty-eight turncoats, the majority of whom were former members of the British Union of Fascists (BUF). By the end of 1942, Amery’s bizarre antics had exhausted German tolerance and he was effectively sidelined by the England Committee. The baton passed to one Thomas Cooper, a former resident of Chiswick – who was already serving as SS Corporal Thomas Haller Cooper. Cooper had spent time as an SS camp guard in Sachsenhausen and fought on the Eastern Front. In early 1943, he was transferred to a British POW camp at Genshagen where he busily promoted the German cause. In September 1943 Gottlob Berger, the SS head of recruitment, formerly took over Cooper’s band of converts as the Britisches Freikorps (British Free Corps or BFC). At the end of April 1944, SS officer Hans Werner Roepke formally inspected Cooper’s dozen or so men and issued them with SS identification papers and side arms. The SS provided uniforms sporting heraldic leopards and a Union Jack shield.
    The contribution of the BFC to the Reich’s ‘crusade against Bolshevism’ was not even trivial. SS General Felix Steiner reported that ‘they were suffering from an inner conflict … they were depressed’. Steiner refused to use them in combat – and last saw the sorry band shambling westwards along an autobahn. In May 1945 the relics of the BFC surrendered to American troops near Schwerin. 4 John Amery, who had inspired German recruitment of British prisoners, fled to