The atmosphere inside the prisoner-of-war camp was electric.
Packed into a wooden theatre were several hundred Allied prisoners of war watched over by their German guards. Suddenly, heads turned and a hush fell. Two men, dressed in the uniform of the dreaded Waffen-SS, entered the room and walked down the aisle.
Some noticed that there was something strange about their SS uniforms. On the men’s left sleeves had been sewn Union Flag shields. There were three lions from the Royal Standard on their right collar tabs and the words “British Free Corps” had been stitched on their left cuffs.
The two men mounted the stage and one of them started to speak in perfect English. The POWs listened in dumbstruck silence as it became clear that they were both British and were exhorting them to join the German cause.
The younger of the two repeated the words from the flimsy recruiting leaflet in his hand and said: “In order to fight the menace of Jewish Communism, we ask you to join the British Free Corps and take up arms with Germany in our fight against the common enemy.”
His words were soon drowned out by jeers. Before long, the guards escorted the two British SS men out of the theatre trying to shield them from punches and the odd projectile. The prisoners were stunned. Many were tempted to tear up the leaflets but others advised against it, suggesting that with the shortage of lavatory paper they could be put to better use.
It was the spring of 1944, and the Germans were so desperate to find soldiers to fight on the Eastern Front they had launched a campaign to recruit from the ranks of Allied POWs. This camp in northern Germany was no exception. Although many of the prisoners had endured the hardships of camp life since Dunkirk, it seemed inconceivable that they would fight for the hated Nazis, and even more so as part of the SS. Yet some of them did.
This weekend, as we commemorate the 80th anniversary of the Great Escape – the mass breakout from the Stalag Luft III camp in 1944 – we should remember that the story of the POW experience is not all the stuff of patriotic guts and glory. The recent revelation made by the National Archives that Desmond Plunkett, one of the Great Escapers, suspected that the breakout was compromised by two treacherous Englishmen, is proof that the prisoners were well aware that collaborators and traitors were among them.
And while we rightly remember the heroism and sacrifice of those on the Great Escape, immortalised by Steve McQueen, Richard Attenborough et al in the 1963 war film, we should also realise that escaping was a minority activity, as only a third of prisoners took part in escape plans.
Uncomfortable though it is to consider, most were happy to sit out the war behind the safety of the barbed wire. And at a number of camps, it was known that some prisoners deliberately informed their German captors of forthcoming escape attempts in order to keep camp life quiet, and to avoid any collective punishments when escapes were mounted. According to Will Butler, the head of military records at the National Archives, “There is evidence across the war of the Nazis putting in ‘stooges’, placing them in prisoner-of-war camps to gather intelligence to stop escape attempts.”
However, the real villains were undoubtedly those prisoners of war who went the whole hog and decided to join the enemy by enlisting in the Waffen-SS. So who were these men who joined this mysterious unit called the British Free Corps (BFC)?
The POWs would have been surprised to find that its members had been born into decent, middle-class families, and had been educated at grammar or private schools in places such as London, Harrogate and Edinburgh. They were men with quintessentially British names such as Nightingale, Pleasants, Purdy and Cooper.
For the most part, BFC members were either fascists or simpletons, pathetic individuals for whom concepts such as decency held little currency. Of all of them, the example of Thomas Cooper serves well to illustrate the treacherous journey these renegades took.
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