Army of Evil: A History of the SS (42 page)

Recruitment continued at Genshagen and was also launched at Stalag IIIa, Luckenwalde. Here, a different approach was taken. Luckenwalde was a large POW camp near Berlin, but it also served as a tactical interrogation centre, where a small team of renegade British and Canadian soldiers were used as “stool pigeons” to wheedle intelligence out of newly captured military POWs. In October and November 1943, this interrogation team succeeded in browbeating fifteen or twenty British, Canadian and South African soldiers into “volunteering” for the British Free Corps. However, when these men arrived at the fledgling unit’s accommodation block in Pankow, Berlin, they protested so strongly that most were allowed to return to Luckenwalde. Thereafter, the Luckenwalde operation was abandoned; instead, it was decided that existing members of the British Free Corps would concentrate their recruitment efforts on the general POW population.

On 1 January 1944, the British Free Corps was formally established as a unit of the Waffen-SS. The following month, the ten or so members moved to Hildesheim to begin their training. Meanwhile, desultory recruitment efforts continued until April 1944, primarily focusing on known fascist sympathisers. However, only a couple signed up. The recruiters also had no success with James Conen and William Celliers. They had been prisoners of war in Italy, had escaped after the armistice in 1943, but had been recaptured by a German unit to find themselves prisoners of the
Leibstandarte
Adolf Hitler. Thereupon, they had been sworn in as auxiliary volunteers and taken to Russia, where they were employed as drivers. On the
Leibstandarte
’s return
from the Eastern Front, Conen and Celliers were sent to the British Free Corps, but both declined the offer to join.

Towards the end of April 1944, the dozen members of the unit were issued with special insignia: three heraldic leopards on the right collar patch, a Union Flag shield on the left sleeve, and a cuff-title reading “British Free Corps” in English. On the 20th, they paraded in front of Roepke in their new uniforms and were issued with SS identity documents and sidearms. Roepke announced a series of promotions and then the members of the unit were dispatched on a full-scale recruitment drive. Over the next few months, usually working in pairs, they visited the majority of POW and civilian internment camps. They left fliers and wherever possible spoke to potential volunteers. Anyone who came forward was immediately transported to a house in Berlin, supervised by Cooper, while a cursory background check was conducted. If they passed, they then joined the unit in Hildesheim. By June, all of this effort had yielded about eleven new recruits.

On 13 June, a meeting was convened to discuss these recruitment difficulties. One of the attendees was SS-Major Vivian Stranders, an Englishman who had served in the British Army in the First World War before becoming a naturalised German in 1933.
*
He had done some propaganda broadcasting to England at the beginning of the war and was now the “England Desk Officer” at the Germanic Administration in the SS-Main Office. Astonishingly enough, this long-standing British member of the NSDAP and SS was also Jewish—a fact known to at least some of his colleagues
³⁶
—and was widely suspected of being a British spy. At the meeting, he suggested that the “German” leaders of the British Free Corps—Roepke and Cooper—were incompetent, and proposed using carefully selected English-speaking Germans as recruiters. After all, they could do no worse than the British had over the spring.

Meanwhile, the unit itself was already rupturing. One of its first recruits had been a captured British commando called Thomas Freeman. He had volunteered from Stalag XVIIIa in Austria along with two friends: an Australian called Lionel Wood and a Belgian civilian named Theo Menz. However, these three had joined with the intention of either escaping or sabotaging the unit from within. Freeman especially worked hard to split the unit into those who had joined for ideological reasons and those who had more materialistic motives. The idealists, led by MacLardy, were characterised as the “Nazi Party,” while Freeman himself formed a faction that called itself the “
Kohlenklau
” (Coal Snaffler), after a German propaganda character. By June, Freeman had managed to persuade fifteen out of the twenty-three members of the unit to sign a petition requesting that they be allowed to return to their POW camps. He and Menz were identified as the ringleaders and dispatched to Stutthof concentration camp.
*
Roepke then decided that the only way to keep the unit intact was to get rid of the genuine fascists, too: MacLardy was transferred to a Waffen-SS medical supplies depot in Berlin, while Courlander and Maton went to the Kurt Eggers Regiment, the Waffen-SS’s war correspondent and psychological operations unit. Nevertheless, disciplinary problems continued in the British Free Corps throughout the summer, and only a handful of new members were recruited. No more than twenty-nine British and Commonwealth soldiers served in the unit at any one time, while the total number associated with it in any way—including those who “volunteered” from Luckenwalde—never reached sixty.

The tiny unit remained in Hildesheim until October 1944, when it was transferred to the Waffen-SS combat engineering school in Dresden. Shortly after this move, both Roepke and Cooper were removed from their posts. Roepke was replaced by SS-Lieutenant Kühlich, a former member of the
Das Reich
Division who was no longer fit for active service after being wounded on the Eastern Front. Unlike his
predecessor, he did not command his new charges personally, opting instead to remain at the British Free Corps liaison office in Berlin. Roepke went on to serve in a Waffen-SS special forces unit, while Cooper was sent to the depot of the
Leibstandarte
Adolf Hitler, where he remained until April 1945. Recruitment under the new commander was as poor as ever, but a few new volunteers turned up during the autumn and winter of 1944. Among their number were three South Africans and five New Zealand Maoris. The latter were rejected on the basis that it was a “whites only” unit.

In January 1945, six of its members attempted to escape. They headed east in the hope that they would be able to hide out and then surrender to the Russians. However, they were detained by military policemen in German-controlled Czechoslovakia and eventually returned, under armed escort, to Dresden. Three of them were immediately sent to an isolation camp that had been established for British Free Corps “rejects” at Drönnewitz, while the other three rejoined the unit. They were still there when Dresden was bombed by a massive Allied air strike on 12–13 February. Only one member of the unit was slightly injured during the raid, and thereafter took part in the rescue and clear-up operation alongside other soldiers from the barracks. However, a few days later, an ex-girlfriend of one of the members denounced the unit to the Gestapo for having signalled to the RAF bombers. These ludicrous accusations were taken seriously, and the whole corps was arrested and briefly detained. On 24 February, they left Dresden for Berlin and all attempts to recruit any new members ceased. Kühlich remarked to his British senior NCO: “The British Free Corps has had a damned good run, now they must prove they are sincere.”
³⁷

They hung around in Berlin for two weeks until a decision could be made about where they should go next. In the end, each member of the unit was given a choice: the isolation camp at Drönnewitz or the front line against the rapidly advancing Soviets. Amazingly, twelve of them—not one of whom was an ideological fascist or a National Socialist—opted
to fight. Another member of the unit recalled: “They didn’t want the Jerries to think they were frightened, so they just went.”
³⁸
Over the next few days, they were fitted out with new combat equipment and sent on a hurried close-combat course. Then, on 15 March, they were transported to the Germanic Panzer Corps, in reserve at Stettin on the Baltic Coast. They waited there for a further week before being assigned to the 3rd Company of the Armoured Reconnaissance Battalion of the 11th SS-Panzer-Grenadier
Nordland
Division, in reserve on the western bank of the River Oder, awaiting the next Soviet offensive.
³⁹
This battalion was probably the most cosmopolitan in the German armed forces, including volunteers from all over Scandinavia, the Baltic States, the Low Countries, as well as native Germans and ethnic Germans from throughout Europe, but even they had not expected to see a British unit joining their number.

Their commanding general, Felix Steiner, was equally surprised by the British Free Corps’ appearance at the front:

It was while the British Free Corps were suffering their “inner conflict” at the front that the last British volunteer joined the Waffen-SS. Douglas Berneville Webster Claye was a bizarre character. Born in south London in 1917, his father was a regular soldier in the Royal Army Service Corps. Claye himself spent three years at the Army Apprentices’ College in Chepstow, but he left the army in 1935 and spent the next five years in a variety of jobs, including riding instructor and journalist. Soon after the outbreak of war, he volunteered for the RAF as an aircrew trainee, but he was discharged after going absent without leave to marry his pregnant girlfriend bigamously. At this point, his behaviour became more erratic. He joined a Home Guard unit in Leeds, and took to wearing an officer’s uniform adorned with RAF pilot’s wings (neither of which he was entitled to wear, of course). Before
long, he was involved in a traffic accident while wearing his bogus uniform and was sent to an officers’ hospital to recover, whereupon he stole some money from a fellow patient. An investigation revealed his true identity and he was fined for impersonating an officer. At that point, he joined the army as a private soldier. Once in the ranks, he claimed he had been educated at Charterhouse and had attended both Oxford and Cambridge universities. He also subtly changed his name to the more aristocratic Douglas Webster St. Aubyn Berneville-Claye. This social-climbing ruse worked, and he was soon selected for officer training and commissioned as a second lieutenant. Sent to Egypt in 1942, and now calling himself “Lord Charlesworth,” he served in the Special Air Service commando unit. He was captured during an operation behind enemy lines in December 1942, and was eventually sent to Oflag 79 in Braunschweig.

By the end of 1944, Claye’s fellow prisoners suspected that he was acting as an informer. He was removed from the camp early the next year and then volunteered for the Waffen-SS. Given the rank of SS-captain, he was sent to the headquarters of the 3rd Germanic Panzer Corps, much to the bemusement of Steiner: