British Free Corps

The British Free Corps (Britisches Freikorps) was a unit of the Waffen SS during World War II consisting of British and Dominion prisoners of war who had been recruited by the Nazis. The unit was originally known as the Legion of St. George. Research by a British journalist, Adrian Weale, has identified about 59 men who belonged to this unit at one time or another, some for only a few days. At no time did it reach more than 27 men in strength – smaller than a contemporary German platoon.

Recruiting
Recruiting for the Free Corps was done in German POW camps. In 1944, leaflets were distributed to the POWs, and the unit was mentioned in Camp, the official POW newspaper published in Berlin. The unit was promoted "as a thoroughly volunteer unit, conceived and created by British subjects from all parts of the empire who have taken up arms and pledged their lives in the common European struggle against Soviet Russia". The attempted recruitment of POWs was done amid German fear of the Soviets; the Germans were "victims of their own propaganda" and thought that their enemies were as worried about the Soviets as they were. In one camp in Holland, the POWs were lavished with cigarettes, fruit and other such items and made to listen to Nazi propaganda officers who described the good the Germans were doing in Europe and asked the men to join them in fighting the real enemy, the Soviets.

One such individual who attempted to recruit soldiers was John Amery, son of the serving British Secretary of State for India, Leopold Amery. He was sentenced to death and hanged after he pleaded guilty at the Central Criminal Court to high-treason.

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 45
 * SS-Hauptsturmführer Dr Alexander Dolezalek: April 1945

A number of sources mention the involvement of Brigadier Leonard Parrington, a British Army officer captured by the Germans in Greece in 1941. This was based on a misunderstanding by some of the British volunteers after Parrington in the summer of 1943 had visited the POW 'holiday camp' at Genshagen, in the southern suburbs of Berlin, as representative of the Senior British POW, Major General Victor Fortune. Parrington had told the assembled prisoners that he 'knew the purpose of the camp' and the BFC volunteers who were there took this to mean that he approved of the unit. In reality, Parrington had accepted Genshagen at face value as a rest centre for POWs.

Courts martial of those involved
Newspapers of the period give details of the court-martial of several Commonwealth soldiers involved in the corps. One Canadian captive, Private Edwin Barnard Martin, said he joined the corps "to wreck it". He designed the flag and banner used by the corps, and admitted to being one of the original six or seven members of the Corps during his trial. He was given a travel warrant and a railway pass which allowed him to move around Germany without a guard. He was found guilty of two charges of aiding the enemy while a prisoner of war.

Another New Zealand soldier claimed at his court-martial that he joined the corps for similar reasons, to gather intelligence on the Germans to foster rebellion among POWs, or to sabotage the unit if the revolution failed.

In popular culture
Many readers' first acquaintance with the British Free Corps (BFC) came in Jack Higgins' World War II novel The Eagle Has Landed. In the novel, a BFC officer named Harvey Preston, who is patterned on Douglas Berneville-Claye, is attached to the fallschirmjäger unit which attempts to kidnap Winston Churchill. A convinced Nazi and petty criminal, Preston is viewed with disgust by all members of the German unit.

The 2006 film Joy Division portrays a member of the BFC, Sergeant Harry Stone, among the German troops and refugees fleeing the Red Army advance into Germany. In the film it is the aggressive Stone who appears to be the only convinced Nazi remaining among the Hitler Youth with whom he is grouped. He is seen attempting to recruit British POWs before the column is attacked by Soviet aircraft.

The British Free Corps was a subject for the final episode of season 6 of the British TV series Foyle's War, in which a British POW who had joined the BFC was tried for treason in Great Britain once he returned home after he survived the fire bombing of Dresden.

Sources of confusion
Over the years, reliable information about the British Free Corps has been remarkably difficult to obtain. There are two reasons for this. Firstly, prior to the 1990s, British Public Records law allowed British government departments to impose long periods of closure on official documents which prevented them from being released into the archives. Secondly, the private publication, in 1970 of a book entitled Yeomen of Valhalla by a Jersey-born author using the pseudonym "The Marquis de Slade". Yeomen of Valhalla is a broadly accurate account of the formation and activities of the British Free Corps and its membership; however, the author chose to apply pseudonyms to almost everyone mentioned in the book. "De Slade"'s book was subsequently effectively re-written by the British spy writer Ronald Seth as The Jackals of the Reich (New English Library, 1974). He also chose to use the same pseudonyms. Neither of these books included references or a bibliography; as a result, some subsequent writers have taken the pseudonyms to be real names.