British Free Corps

[debra]

Does anyone know or have a list of names of military personnel who was in the British Free Corps.

Thank you!!

Deb

[Saracen]

Unit History of the British Free Corps

[Saracen]

There are a few names mentioned in these threads and the book plus other interesting info.


Waffen-SS "British Free Corps"

Adrian Weale. British Free Corps in SS-Waffen

Britisches Frei-Korps / British Free Corps


The Traitor (Paperback)
by Guy Walters

$15-00 from Amazon.com
.

[spidge]

Originally Posted by debra

Does anyone know or have a list of names of military personnel who was in the British Free Corps.

Thank you!!

Deb

This was discussed in detail on this forum on 31/7/05 and might provide some of what you are looking for.

http://www.ww2talk.com/forum/general...sh+german+army

[Harry Ree]

I have to agree with the previously posted comment in the thread of 2005 of being a publicity stunt.Some POWs joined from an extrinsic motivation,a skive and never intended to take up arms.But there were others who had been turned and were drawn into the spirit of their captors and were seduced by the uniform and so called eliteness of the SS and their equipment.

Whether these people would have fought is a different matter.Some did and were renegades from continental countries which the Nazis had overrun and despite the treatment meted out by the Nazis to their fellow counrtymen, served their new masters to the end.

[debra]

Thank you all for the information. Deb

[von Poop]

Worth a look:
www.bills-bunker.de*
(It apparently won't link direct to the article on the BFC, just enter and it's about 1/3rd of the way down the left menu)

Some interesting stuff on allied nationals serving in the SS too.

I was once in email contact with the daughter of one hyphenated 'gent' mentioned in the above site (she runs a WW2 related site but I can't think of the name of it). Having no illusions about the character of her father she said one of the biggest problems with researching them was that they were near all of a certain shady type to begin with, and it was thus hard to believe anything they said about any subject.

Cheers,
Adam.

[uksubs]

I read the book Hitler's Bastards about the British SS
Of all the extraordinary individual accounts that have come out of World War II and its aftermath, few can compare with that of Eric Pleasants, a member of the "bastard" British wing of Hitler's SS. In this book, Pleasants writes of the bizarre and traumatic years he spent as a prisoner of the 20th century's most notorious dictators. A life-long pacifist, Eric Pleasants was forced to kill in order to survive. From a vagabond life alongside infamous Triple Cross agent Eddie Chapman on occupied Jersey, Pleasants was taken by the Nazis to a series of prison camps in France. The years that followed held a whirlwind of unexpected turns: he lived a life on the run in occupied Paris, was captured and recruited into the British Free Corps of the Waffen-SS, found love with a young German woman, witnessed the bombing of Dresden and attempted to hide from Soviet troops along the sewers of Berlin. When the war ended, Pleasants found himself on the Communist side of the Iron Curtain. By now a strong man in a travelling circus, he was arrested by the KGB on charges of espionage and sentenced to 25 years' slave labour in the notorious camps of Arctic Russia. Only with Stalin's death in 1953 was Pleasants finally released from his unique kind of purgatory, after nearly half a lifetime of peripatetic nightmare. Pleasants died in 1998 at the age of 87.

[soren1941]

Hi,

This is interesting, I wonder if the occupied channel Islands had any trials/hangings of the officials/Police who rounded up the Jewish populace when the Germans requested it.

From memory I understand that they were told to attend specific Police stations and the transported as opposed to the police booting the door in getting them, still not palatable thoughis it? - I suppose this detracts from what the thread was initially about- just a thought.

I suppose what I'm saying is that the 25 or so Brits that joint the British SS from an account recently on TV they were mainly getting drunk and putting it about with the German women - whereas the Police and authorities in the Channel Islands were compliant to the Germans in their round ups.

Either way I would have thought that the Police/Officials were in a difficult position

[spidge]

This is from a previous post:

http://www.ww2talk.com/forum/war-eur...html#post93205

This document may interest some, the treatment of the Jews in the Channel Islands. It's something of an eye opener and shows the local authorities in two different lights.

http://www.jerseyheritagetrust.org/o...hresidents.pdf