The Story of the SS: Hitler's Infamous Legions of Death [Fully Illustrated] by Nigel Cawthorne

Author:Nigel Cawthorne [Cawthorne, Nigel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: new
ISBN: 9781848587915
Amazon: B008AK75BO
Goodreads: 18944475
Publisher: Arcturus Publishing
Published: 2017-05-17T04:00:00+00:00

Dutch SS volunteers with their version of propaganda magazine Signal, which was published fortnightly in 25 languages across Europe

Months later, he had only come up with four volunteers: 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 and Job was recruited by German intelligence and trained as a spy. He was caught while trying to get into England. Only Berry would actually join.

The Waffen-SS decided that they could do better themselves, so they dropped Amery and came up with a new recruitment plan. They created two ‘holiday camps’ near Berlin, where English-speaking guards would gather information about likely recruits once they were relaxed and off their guard. Quartermaster Sergeant John Brown was put in charge of the operation. A former member of the British Union of Fascists, he had been captured at Dunkirk. The Nazis did not know that he was a double agent.

Also in the camp were two genuine pro-Nazi recruits, Thomas Haller Cooper and Roy Courlander.

Cooper was also a member of the BUF. He called himself Boettcher, the German equivalent of his name. He had been visiting Germany, his mother’s birthplace, when war was declared in 1939. At that point, joining the Waffen-SS had been the line of least resistance. After being injured in battle, he had received the Wounded Badge in silver, the only Briton to be awarded a German combat decoration.

Courlander had been captured while serving with the New Zealand army in Greece. His mother was English and his father was a Lithuanian Jew.

Two hundred British prisoners of war then turned up at the camp. Delighted at their windfall, Cooper and Courlander attempted to make as many converts as possible, while Brown tried to subvert the exercise. But out of the first batch they only managed to recruit one man, Alfred Vivian Minchin, a merchant seaman from the SS Empire Ranger that had been sunk off the coast of Norway.

Meanwhile two more recruits arrived – Francis George MacLardy of the Royal Army Medical Corps, who had been captured in Belgium, and Edwin Martin of the Canadian Essex Scottish Regiment, who had been captured at Dieppe in 1942 – bringing the strength of the Legion of St George to seven.

Weary of waiting, the Germans decided to try a different tack. A new camp was set up at Luckenwalde, where freshly captured, disorientated prisoners were brought, rather than men who had spent months or years in captivity. First they were maltreated and then they were interviewed by Germans pretending to be Americans, or other British prisoners of war. If that failed, they were threatened with solitary confinement. This approach brought in a further 14 recruits, including Trooper John Wilson of 3 Commando and some members of the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders. The volunteers were told that they were going to join thousands of their countrymen. Some were fascists but the others were just pretending in order to gain their freedom.

Like Brown, Edwin Martin had also joined to disrupt the operation.

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