Helen Fry
German and Austrian Jews and the Denazification Process

Dr. Helen Fry | German and Austrian Jews and the Denazification Process | 05.17.22

Visuals displayed throughout the presentation.

- Okay, so welcome to this session, and I’m going to be talking about the contribution of German speaking refugees to the British forces, and specifically to the whole denazification process and the reconstruction of post-war Europe at the end of the war. As just by way of a starter, in case you’re new to this subject, I’ve just got three or four slides which sets the scene for what happens at the end of the war, and the incredible contribution of German speaking refugees. I haven’t concentrated on the Poles and the Czechs. The bulk of my research has been on the Germans, and that includes Austrians actually, ‘cause it was occupied by Germany. The German speaking refugees that fought in the British forces, 10,000 men and women enlisted in the British forces in the Second World War. And there’s an equivalent story in America where 14,000 Jewish refugees enlisted in the American forces, and went on to make their own incredible contribution. And many people do reach out to me, in fact, because they have a father or a grandfather or an uncle who has served in the British forces. Perhaps they fled Nazi Germany, and the families want to know, and perhaps if we’ve got time at the end, I’ll remember to mention how can you discover what your family contribution was during the wartime, and you can make progress. Next slide, please.

So I’m going to talk primarily about Britain. If we could do, thank you so much, Lauren. And in the early parts of the war, and this is a story which resonates with many people in the community. The only way that German Jewish refugees could serve in the British forces was to join the Auxiliary Military Pioneer Corps. And effectively they were sort of digging for victory. Many of them have been interned in camps like the Isle of Man in May-June, 1940. Some were transported to Australia or Canada. And one of the few ways to get out of internment early was to enlist in the British Army. And I interviewed hundreds actually, of veterans who vast majority have been in internment camps. And they said to me, “That was the way we could get out early. We’d enlist in the British forces.” And they had this huge sense that this was their war and no one was going to fight it for them. They were not going to stand back and let others do it for them. And what we need to remember in terms of Britain, it was different for America, because within about three months, refugees were given American citizenship. That did not happen in Britain. You had to have been living here for… And I’m speaking from London.

You had to be living here for five years before you could apply for naturalisation. So the vast majority of the 10,000 German Jews, a thousand of whom were women that enlisted in right across the forces, the British forces, they were technically what we called enemy aliens. I mean, it was a dreadful term. But the men that enlisted in the Pioneer Corps actually had to swear allegiance to George VI, and his descendants, and they received the king’s shilling and they became known as the king’s most loyal enemy aliens. And the point about their contribution… I mean, I think they couldn’t have told in 1940-41 when they enlisted, just how far reaching their contributions would be, because they start out on forestry work, digging for victory as I said, constructing coastal defences, building this and huts, they were all volunteers. The British government could not conscript them, they could not enlist them compulsorily, as they could with British men, for example, because they were enemy aliens. They had to volunteer. And for me, that makes their sacrifice. And there were those refugees who died fighting for the country that had saved them. They died on the battlefields. They were prepared to give their lives back to the country that had saved them.

And some of these, of course, had survived concentration camps, have been brought out to Britain before 1939, and were quite prepared to sign an oath of allegiance and fight and die for the country that had saved them. And ultimately they wanted to see the liberation of Europe. And by the middle of the war, as you can see a couple of images here, we’ve got Willy Field there. He transfers to Royal Armour Corps becomes a tank driver. He’s the sole survivor when his tank is hit in Holland, having survived Dachau in '38, incredible story. And Wilfred Lee* there who witnessed great trauma on the battlefield, losing most of the officers in his regiment. Next slide please. And so by the middle of the war, they are allowed to transfer from the Pioneer Corps to fighting forces and of course for regiments right across the forces, whether they’re in the infantry, parachute regiment, you’ve got the second guy in the top right there entering Arras, this is Ance Goodman who was living in New York until very recent times, they could transfer to any aspect of the fighting forces. And then you have Willy in the top there with his tank crew in Normandy landing after the D-Day landings. And he is the sole survivor of those men. I mean a very tragic photograph in many ways.

But of course, little did they know when it was being taken that he would be the sole survivor. Next slide, please. And of course, you also had men doing incredibly brave special operations. So you have a group particularly of Austrians, who are around 25 Austrian Jewish refugees, one of whom you’ll have heard me speak about before, Sigmund Freud’s grandson, Walter Freud, were prepared to be dropped back behind enemy lines. This photograph here of Colin Anson, he’s walking through Rome. He was there for the liberation of Rome, but he joined a special commando unit of around a hundred, originally German Jewish refugees. And they were known as 3 troop of number 10 inter-ally Commando, and their base for training was Aberdovey, Wales. And on the right hand side, you can see a very poignant, quite simplistic, very poignant memorial. It took a number of years for them to have this memorial in the town where partly where they trained. And many of them went to an incredibly dangerous operations with the commandos. They were attached to the Royal Marine Commandos, to the bicycle brigades. They’re behind enemy lines, they’re fighting of course after D-Day, but even before that, in Italy and Sicily, they’re doing raids into Yugoslavia, helping Tito’s partisans. Next slide, please. This is a backdrop of an incredible contribution. And I mentioned Anton Walter Freud. He’s picture there on the right, very charismatic. And some of his mates who were parachuted back into Austria.

Not all of them survived. These were very, very dangerous missions. Walter was parachuted into southern Austria and single-handedly, to read that elsewhere, but single-handedly captured the strategic airfield of Zeltweg. He managed to convince the commander that the Russian… Well, the Russians were coming and that de Montgomery had sent him in to take the surrender of the airfield, there were loads of British troops behind him. Might as well surrender, it’s me or the Russians. They’re quite an incredible story, which you can read in more detail in my book, “Churchill’s German Army.” Next slide, please. But they always had those refugees that I interviewed, and as I said, there were hundreds of them, always had the belief that somehow that he Hitler would be defeated. I mean, in 1940, I remember them saying that in 1940 when they first came to Britain, well, they came to Britain before that. But during 1940 when they first enlisted in the British Army, they said, “The British had this strong sense, perhaps underpinned by Prime Minister Churchill, that we were going to win the war however long it took.” And I remember one of the veterans, Harry Rosner, saying to me, “Britain had no idea. We had seen the might of Nazi Germany, the whole militarised might of Nazi Germany.”

He came originally from Königsberg but in in others from Berlin and places in Bon right across Germany, and of course Austria. How could this tiny island that almost had a dad’s army approach on the surface, how could it take on this massive war machine? But of course they did. The vast majority of them did live to see the announcement that Hitler had died in the Bunker. He’d committed suicide. And you can see in the top corner there, this is a, one of the photographs which was given me by the ex-refugee, David Brett, some of them actually went into Hitler’s bunker at the end of the war. When I come to this story, because no one was really telling their stories, I really expected to tell only the wartime story. So we have that part in the Pioneer Corps digging for victory. And then they would say to me, wow, you know, I didn’t stay in the Pioneer Corps. I actually transferred, I, you know, I was in the parachute regiment or I was in the commandos, or I was in this regiment, or I was in the Royal Navy doing secret work, whatever it was. And so I thought, all right, fine. Okay, so we came back to Britain, the war is over. “Oh no,” they said. “We were sent back.”

Often to the towns and cities where they were born because hopefully they could navigate their way. You now have thousands of German speaking, native German speaking refugees in British army uniform. Not yet British citizens who are going to be invaluable for the whole denazification and importantly the reconstruction of post-war Europe and the restoration of democracy. And I, you know, I think their contribution has not been widely recognised. And if you look, we’re going to take a look at some of the examples shortly of the kind of work they undertook. You really really wonder, you know, how could the allies have reconstituted peace? I mean, the war was over, yep, the war was over, but the peace had yet to be won and we’re sliding already into the Cold War. These are, these are tricky times. It was anything but simple. These are very, very complex times. And that whole sense that this work of restoring peace in Europe really couldn’t have been done without those Jewish refugees. And of course, as they came through, next slide, please, into Germany, some of them had returned to Germany for the first time in five or six years. And it just, there you can see the , of course there’s a very famous photograph that was taken by one of my veterans actually.

But you will have seen images similar to this on the left there. And then the utter devastation. I mean, there was saying, I think this is Hamburg, this is not Berlin. Restaurants saying, you know, they return to these places and it’s almost completely devastated. I mean, Berlin thought about 90% destroyed. So they’re trying to navigate their way around towns and cities that they once knew so well trying to point, you know, figure out familiar land places. So they have an amazing contribution now to make as fluent German speakers to military government, to all aspects of the war crimes trials as we’ll see, the hunt for Nazi war criminals, every spec in Austria, which of course for about seven years taken on the German legal system. And it wasn’t a matter of just reverting to the 1938 laws. They had to go very carefully. Often refugees with a legal background, lawyers from Vienna would be sent back in British armed uniform to help the four powers, Britain, America, the French, and the USSR, the Russians and Soviets were the four different zones of Germany. But also Austria was divided into four separate zones for the allied occupying powers. And they sort of had to work together.

And the native German speakers were absolutely invaluable to all the fabrics of life at that time. Next slide, please, but of course, oh, this is the, before I get to the next one, okay, this is the victory parade in Berlin. And one of my refugees I’ve mentioned, Willie Fields, was saying, you know, it was a very proud moment because in July, 1945, there was a victory parade along Chaussee, in the Charlottenburger District of Berlin with the allied leaders. And he said he drove his tank commander in that parade, sea squadron of the 8th, King’s Royal Irish hussars. And he said that incredible moment there was I, he said, as a little German Jewish refugee, there’s a, there’s a fought in the war, but who could ever think that I would take the salute past Churchill and the allied leaders and that he would drive his commanding officer and he’s in the lead tank there. He said, it was one of the proudest moments of my life. And don’t forget, these men are not yet British. And that’s one of a number of stories, this sense of pride. And they had a sense already that they were British, even though they didn’t have the piece of paper to say that they were British citizens or they hadn’t been naturalised.

But they said, the moment we put on our uniforms way back in 1940, primarily for them they felt British. And that moment, many of them felt that strange moment. Jeffrey Perry talked, we’ll see about him in a moment, but he talked about the moment there were goosebumps when he crossed the border into Germany and Colin Ansen talking about the shadow of a German school boy that sort of went before him and now he’s back incredibly proud having served behind enemy lines with the commandos having been very badly wounded in action. He had part of his skull shot off, but survived to go on and fight again. Incredibly brave stories, but at the heart of it, and I don’t want to make, perhaps it’s not relevant, no, it’s not, this is not relevant, but I want to be careful about straying into contemporary times. But you think about the bravery of that fight for freedom and that fight for democracy, and this particular story of the refugees I do fear is going to be forgotten. So we have those incredibly proud moments when they’re finally going into places like Hamburg and Berlin as well. They liberated, they said Belgium, Holland, France first of course, and then they talked about invading Germany and having to restore the peace. But before this victory parade, next slide please.

Many of those veterans, their regiments and units passed Belsen and some of them spent a couple of days with their regiments on relief work. And of course what they saw was totally, totally horrific. And although the likes of Willie Field himself had survived five months of pure evil in Dachau, what he saw, he was lucky to survive. You know, it was nothing on a roll call for 50 men to just drop dead in the middle of winter when they’re out standing at night in the camp. And so he’s seen such horrific things. But he said, even when it came to the liberation of the camps, those that knew what had gone on in Germany were utterly shocked to the core by what they saw. And there are some very moving stories, one particularly of Herme Rothman who said they sat and shared bread and water with the survivors, the survivors who could barely eat, surrounded by death. And so Ken Adam, who was a fighter pilot originally from Berlin, he fought in the RAF. He said when he witnessed that, that sort of death, he said there was that sweet sickly smell of death. He said, you just couldn’t get rid of it from your nostrils. He said it was, and I remember his words, he said it was utterly terrifying, could not get rid of the smell of death. And for many of them, that’s what they remember.

Not of course the visual, but what they smelled. And that memory stayed with them when I interviewed them 70 years later. And so they did their relief work and their commanding officers were incredibly kind and compassionate. And they talk about, these men talk about having compassionate leave to go and find their families. But of course there were very few examples. There were some, but very few examples where families had survived and where there was a reuniting of families and that terrible trauma of the knowing the truth that their families also had been part, had been murdered in the camps. And one of the veterans, Walter Eberstadt wrote, there was desperately little difference between the looks of the dead and the living. It was absolutely true to say that the living were just living dead. And he went on to say in his memoirs, I talked to the SS men, they knew they were going to die with the war crimes trials from what they said, it was clear that they still did not realise the enormity of their crimes.

It was almost like they were gone numb by this regime, six years or more, six years of war, but 13 years in Germany of a regime that gradually sort of stunned them for, to realise the sheer depth of what they’d done. But they were completely accustomed, he said, to what they saw around them. And of course they also, very familiar local people scratching around in the rubble of Berlin or in Hamburg for whatever they could get, coming up to British soldiers and saying, of course, you know, I wasn’t a Nazi. And several of my veterans would say to me, back in Germany, there were no Nazis. Everyone had helped Jews and were not Nazis. And that was really, really difficult. But they were there for a job. And I want to say now, in case I don’t say later, I get concerned when historians and writers talk about revenge, we might come back to this, of those veterans, and what I’ve read there is this sense that they are not, next slide please. They are not coming back to exact revenge. They were involved, posted to the cities and towns of their birth by their commanding officers or by somebody higher up in the war office or the admiralty.

It was not necessarily, well, it wasn’t their choice what they went on to do, but also there is no sense that they’re going to exact revenge. It’s about justice. And I think that is really, really important. They have the sense that the British Army uniform, there was a way to behave and it was not appropriate to go taking personal revenge. And before we move on, I do want to just flag up the work of the secret listeners. There was work here in Britain in three secret sites to bug the conversations of German prisoners of war, particularly Hitler’s top generals who admitted to war crimes. And there was a gathering of the evidence and a hope by the commanding officer of the unit. You can see there, Thomas Joseph Kendrick, that these guys would be brought to justice. Next slide please.

But the secret listeners that worked for Kendrick around 103 of them across three sites outside London, across the wartime, amassing incredible intelligence that turned the tide of the war. They also were collecting the bugged conversations where particularly the generals were boasting of war crimes and the importance of these documents, some 75,000 of them that survived in the National Archives in London are important for historians. They’re important for our history because they show that after 70 years it’s possible to see that the Wehrmacht, the German army, was complicit in war crimes for the first 70 years or so. The German army almost had a clean bill of health. Oh, it was the SS, it was the death squads, it was such and such. But the German army absolutely. was involved in war crimes. But as a twist of fate, we’re entering the Cold War. You can read elsewhere how this material couldn’t be legally admissible in Nuremberg. And not only that, the bug conversations couldn’t be used because we were using similar techniques in the early Cold War that we couldn’t admit to.

So dilemma between justice and intelligence gathering. But you see there three secret listeners, of those 103, they were sent back to Germany after the war. So they’ve worked at secret sites outside London, but they were posted to an interrogation centre at Bad Nenndorf in the British zone. And there they were listening into or recording interrogations and conversations at this camp of technologists and scientists. So these were not the top Nazi scientists, these were those sort of just below. But we needed, we needed evidence, we needed to know the German capability at this point. There was a smash and grab, if you like, for technology ahead of the Russians because we knew this could be used in the next war. And of course the atomic bomb programme too, so some of the other, not the secret listeners, but some of the other refugees were involved in guarding and transferring those 12 top Nazi scientists, atomic scientists, to a secret site outside Cambridge where they were held for nine months. And those secret listeners bugged their conversations, trying to pick up atomic secrets from them.

They eventually, these top scientists were transferred to America and became involved in the Manhattan project. So there’s lots of sort of layers here, unexpected stories and ways in which these German Jewish refugees were important for the allies to have an understanding to work through the documentations of various ministries, the German Ministry of Defence or the equivalent or the Naval Department. We are impounding tonnes and tonnes, I mean millions of documents and texts we have to sift for intelligence, but also we have to get an understanding of what German scientists were up to and what kind of weaponry technology was actually being developed. This is a crucial stage ahead of the Cold War. Next slide, please. There were others in this country, in England, if you think about it, who were involved in the denazification of POW’s, prisoners of war. Part of that took place at Wilson Park. You can see there on, on the right, that’s about 20 miles outside London in Buckinghamshire. Some of the prisoners on the left there that have come off the Bruneval raid earlier in the war. We have hundreds of thousands of prisoners of war who have to be processed. We had to, the Americans as well, but at the end of war. So they’ve been in prisoner of war camps.

If you were a top general, you’d be living a life of relative luxury in a house. Trent Park in North London, your conversations being bugged. But if you were lower ranks, you will have moved through Kendrick’s bugging operation to regular prisoner of war camps where your conversations were not bugged and they would be working on the land. They’re not going to escape. I mean there were some escape attempts, but very few. But there are, in all of these prisoner of war camps all around Britain, you’ve also got tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of prisoners of war captured after D-Day who are not transferred to England that are in interment camps and civilian interment camps in Germany. You can’t just release them back to Germany, to where they’ve come from. And so there was this whole programme run primarily by German Jewish refugees in British army uniform. They are conducting a programme of reeducation in democracy. And some of those young prisoners, if they were conscripted towards the end of the war, we know Hitler conscripted, whoever they could, you know, really young 16, 17 year olds.

There are stories from some of my veterans about, you know, soldiers coming out from behind their tangle. Well, one of 'em is just sort of 15 and a half, 16, just a child. They said, you don’t be scared, you know, nothing’s going to happen to you. We are going to be shot if we’re captured. No, you’re not going to be shot. You know, these are very young youngsters in German uniform who have been conscripted. They’re very well, they’re not very well trained. And of course, if you think about their education, they’ve primarily only lived under a Nazi regime. They do not know what democracy is. And so this is a very important dimension of the work of some of these ex German Jewish refugees that they are involved in running classes and programmes, which could take two to three months. And teaching them how to have discussions and debates and how it’s important and possible for you to have your own opinion. And I guess in a free world, we take that for granted.

But teaching them really to be free thinking and to be able to step back into a new Germany, a new Austria that’s so completely different from the one that they grew up in. And at the heart of it are those German Jewish refugees. Next slide please. But there are some incredible stories amongst those. And I interviewed, well him very, close to this man on the left. Well he is actually using in both photographs, this is Herme, was Herme Rothman. He passed away a couple of months ago, bless him. Herme Rothman had come to Britain on the Kinder transport. He’d enlisted in the British Army later in the war. So he didn’t make it into the Pioneer Corps because he could, he was at an age in 1944 when he could just go at that point into any aspect of the British Army. He ended up in counterintelligence in the Intelligence Corps in post-war Germany. And he’s pictured here at his desk in Fallingbostel. Fallingbostel was a camp, it had been used by the Germans and now we were using it to hold German prisoners of war. And now you’ve got, wherever these camps are, they’re holding German prisoners of war that have just come off the battlefields. We’re not talking about prisoners who may have been captured a few months ago or a couple of years ago in Britain or even in Germany.

We’re talking about newly captured. And there are thousands. They’re coming up from Italy because they’ve all been housed in northern Italy. They’ve all got to be processed for intelligence. It’s an enormous task. But not only that, there’s huge lists of who’s in what camp. There are searches, and we’re going to come to the Nazi war criminal shortly. But there are searches and there’s a huge thick book of some 60,000 names, at least, of the most wanted. I mean, not the higher echelons of the Nazi regime, of course were already well up on the list, but you have around 60,000 others in this book. And all of these prisoners had to be checked off to see if there were any Nazi war criminals hiding or potential war criminals hiding amongst ordinary soldiers that were not necessarily going to face war crimes trials. And amongst those prisoners, of course, occasionally something doesn’t look right and you’ll see a man who’s looks quite well fed and you think, ah, he’s probably not, you know, and his hands are quite clean, they’re not, you know, scratched, he doesn’t look as though he is actually been fighting, but he is amongst younger fighting graduates. And sometimes the generals would hide amongst not only civilian refugees, but amongst lower rank prisoners of war, their own soldiers, so you had to be really vigilant.

So we’ve got this huge task of interrogating and that largely fell to the German Jewish refugees in British Army uniform sent back to the different areas of Germany. Now, where does Herme Rothman come in? Well, he was part of a small group around half a dozen German Jewish refugees working in Fallingbostel precisely for that. And they just had, just as he arrived within a few hours, there was that whole buzz that Himmler committed suicide. And this was in Fallingbostel. So he arrives there. This has just happened, of course, Himmler being one of the most wanted Nazi war criminals, now wanted him to face justice, but he had managed to commit suicide. And they’re kind of like going through these various prisoners of war. And one of Herman’s group looks at one of the prisoners and says his shoulder pads don’t look right. And this colleague had been a tailor in the East end. He was a trained tailor. And so they ripped open the shoulder of his uniform and there was this parchment, original parchment, that was Hitler’s will. And this was Han Lorenz.

The prisoner had fake papers on him, but he was Hitler’s press attache who’d come out of the bunker with the copy of the will, of course leaving everything to Germany and of whole diatribe of blaming international jury for the fate of Germany and what had gone wrong in Germany. So nothing changed at the end in Hitler’s will. And Herme said we were locked in these rooms, each of us separately, and we had a portion of Hitler’s will to translate. So you think about it, their commanding officers realised this was a proper document and they had to verify Hitler’s signature. And of course they couldn’t read it. So the German Jewish refugees has it, you know, what does this say? And the likes of Herme would then go on to conduct an investigation in the coming months. Next slide please. On whether Hitler really did die in the bunker. And I’ve worked on files, counterintelligence files where it wasn’t clear as late as November, 1945, the allies wanted to be absolutely clear that Hitler really had died in the bunker. And to a man, all of those veterans that went back said for them in their investigations, the evidence was conclusive.

And they believed that the conspiracy theories though, you know, hit Hitler, did die in the bunker. And I was one day in a coffee shop with some of these veterans that used to meet regularly. And one of them would say to him, wow, you know, you don’t want my story. I was, you didn’t do anything particularly brave. Well, you know, you only survived 11 months on the frontline fighting. But he wasn’t particularly brave, according to him. You want to speak to that man over there? He became Churchill’s bodyguard. This is John Langford, of course, that’s not his original name. His surname was originally , when they’re going into British Army, uniform abroad, fighting abroad, they change their names to English sounding names so that they, if they’re captured, they’d be treated as prisoners of war by the Germans. And hopefully their background would not be discovered and they would not be treated as traitors. And that was the concern. The British government was really concerned that these guys, they’re going back to enemy occupied territories and even at the end of the war, it’s dangerous for them to go back with their original name.

So they have new papers and new, almost new identities really, and their British Army uniform. And John Langford, I chatted with him and he said, you know, we’re again at a very proud moment that he was one of Churchill’s bodyguards at the Potsdam Conference in July, 1945. And that took a huge level of trust, of course, for him to be given that role. Next slide please. Yeah, this one is, apologies, this one’s slightly out of order. I talked earlier about Bad Nenndorf, where the interrogation centre, where they’re bugging, this is Bad Nenndorf in Germany, they’re bugging the conversations of Hitler’s technologists, scientists, whoever’s coming in with technological knowledge of anything, not just scientific, but any kind of technological knowledge, which could be of help. And that’s Fritz at his desk, Fritz Lustig, who’d worked as a secret listener during the wartime in Britain there in Bad Nenndorf. And there’s a group of them in the bottom of the screen there. Some of the women had actually transferred from Bletchley Park and were involved in duties at Bad Nenndorf. Next slide, please. And you know, I keep saying it was an extraordinary period of their lives, and they were aware, really aware of how strange this was for them.

This is Jeffrey Perry. I spoke earlier about how when he crossed into Germany that border, he said it was a feeling of like goosebumps, not quite goosebumps at gun bumps. A very strange feeling of coming back to a country that was of course so very, very different now that they’d left country of their birth. And he was part of T force. T force were groups that were to go to particular areas to snatch perhaps some technology. But one of the most important things you should do, one of the earliest things you should do is to restore the media to democracy. And so Jeffrey and his small team had to impound, had to take Radio Hamburg. As it happens, they had no resistance. They were very lucky. They didn’t know that they thought they were going to have to fight their way in, that it would be defended. But they had to work to restore Radio Hamburg, but not only Radio Hamburg, but the newspapers so that they could give all kinds of information on curfews on allied occupation. But also they would give news to encourage people to listen. They would give news about lists of dead or missing people and that kind of thing. Now the irony for Jeffrey Perry originally, Horse Pinschaver was his original name, from Berlin. He said he found himself giving the first radio broadcast on behalf of the Allies.

Here, and this is an original photograph of him giving this first address for the allies. Again, a very, very proud moment for him. But what’s the irony? Just three days late beforehand, he said, this is three days after William Joyce, the traitor. Lord Haw-Haw had given his final broadcast in Germany. He had a very distinctive voice, sort of haw-haw. He was called Haw-Haw because of his distinctive voice. And he would have these series of broadcasts against the allies from Germany. And of course at this point, as we’ve crossed, the forces have crossed into Germany. There a warrant out for his arrest. Lord Haw-Haw is one of Britain’s greatest traitors in this time, an ardent fascist, even more fascist and right wing than Oswald Mosley who had headed the British Union of fascists. And you know, Jeffrey saying, who could believe that he’d returned and given his first allied broadcast. But the irony goes even deeper because having reconstituted this, the radio system in Hamburg and actually started the printing and oversight of newspapers in Hamburg. He and his team move north to Flensburg just on the Danish border. Next slide please.

And he said to me, the moral of the story really is never argue with your wife because this particular man had had an argument with his wife and had gone into the forest to sort of cool off and was walking through the forest and Jeffrey Perry with his colleague Bertie Licorice, this is the end of May, 1945 now. They come across this man in the woods and he sees that they’re collecting firewood. And he says to them, I know where you can get some firewood, come and follow me. And it’s Bertie Licorice, he says, I recognise that voice. And Jeffrey looks at him and he says to him, you wouldn’t happen to be William Joyce, would you? And of course Joyce at that point puts his hand in his pocket, and Jeffrey thinks he’s going to pull a pistol and shoot them. So Jeffrey pulls his pistol first, and aims low, one bullet, four holes. So he shot him straight through the buttocks, one bullet, four holes. He said actually Joyce had, did have difficulties sitting down, but he, and they arrested him. So that irony. Next slide please. That a German Jewish refugee, he, you know, he would say that to me.

The irony for us that Joyce in the end, William Joyce Haw-Haw, was actually captured by a German Jewish refugee in British army uniform. And it’s not a story often told. Often you hear in in documentaries, you know, the British captured whoever, next slide please, Rudolph Hoss, we’ve got coming up. But if you look in detail who exactly arrested these top Nazis, you discover that it’s German Jewish refugees who’ve Anglicised their names. They’ve had to change their names and, but that I hadn’t interviewed them, I don’t think these stories would ever really have come to light unless families themselves have these stories and start to tell them. And of course there was an arrest warrant out for Rudolph Hoss, the commandant of Auschwitz. He wasn’t the only one. And again, a group of German Jewish refugees had been hunting for a long time, calling at different places, getting tip-offs and intelligence on where he might be held. Of course, like William Joyce, he was living under false identity and papers. Hoss was eventually found and one of the chaps that headed it was Hans Alexander. And of course his nephew’s written that marvellous book on Rudolph and Han. So if you haven’t read that, do, really do.

So Hans Alexander, who I interviewed just a couple of weeks before he passed away, it wasn’t the best time to interview him. He wasn’t at his best, but he does remember the day that they brought in Rudolph Hoss, who of course hanged for his crimes. He was handed back to the Poles and hanged at Auschwitz for his crimes. So a whole raft of top Nazi war criminals are brought in by the German Jewish refugees. They are arrested and they are preparing for justice. Next slide, please. So we’ve heard quite a lot in past decades about the Nuremberg trials and at the heart of it, those German speaking refugees were absolutely invaluable as translators in the courts translating documents that were preparing for the war crimes trials. It wasn’t just Nuremberg. Next slide please. It was also war crimes trials in Essen, in Hamburg. This is a Lunaberg Heath where the British were conducting a number of war crimes trials. Next slide please. Irma Grese agrees at the top there. She was the beast of Belsen. She was interrogated several times by Hans Alexander on the left from one of my veterans, an original photograph of the Hamburg trials, war crimes trials.

And this brings me to a really important point actually, that you’ve got two to three years of intense investigations. Obviously for Nuremberg it’s much swifter cause the trial opens in October, 1945 for the year. But the sheer volume of legality and paperwork that was required to bring these Nazi war criminals to justice was enormous. And when I was looking through some of the papers recently in the last six months, I’ve been in the National Archives looking at some of the testimonies that were taken, the sworn statements that were taken from Nazi war criminals, often their version of events. You’ve got something that’s legally admissible in court, but gathering the evidence. And it was the first time I’d appreciated just what was at stake to bring Nazi war criminals to trial. And often, you know, people will comment and say, well, why did we let so many go?

But if you look at the sheer volumes of trying, first of all, to trace all of these Nazi war criminals, it’s a huge task. And then to gain the evidence, not only, it wasn’t a matter of capturing them and just interrogating them, there were teams going into Norway to gather war crimes evidence. There were teams going into France and of course in Germany they were interviewing eyewitnesses, any number of eyewitnesses who all had to have sworn statements that had to be typed up. And I realised for the first time the monumental task, I was asked to do some research into the war crimes trials of Neuengamme concentration camp with horrific medical experimentation were going on there. It was one of the camps that was investigated by Anton Walter Freud. You remember, he was parachuted behind enemy lines into Austria. He was tasked with investigations not only into the crook factory, but also the, and Zico Cylon B gas manufacturer and Bruno Tesch, he interrogated it, would not fit to stand trial in the end, Tesch, but others were.

So he was involved in that, the most horrific war crimes at Neuengamme. And I went through this for a German documentary company and there are thousands of files just on a handful of Nazi war criminals from Neuengamme. And I realised the sheer enormity of the task and we didn’t have the capability. That’s not to say these guys did not, should not have been brought to justice. I think it’s important as historians and for us to appreciate some of the challenges and to understand history and the complexity of history. And I think that’s why a concerted effort was made to hunt down the worst. Of course, it wasn’t only the top Nazis that stood trial, others were brought to justice. But you just think it was not possible to bring to justice if every single one of those in that 60,000 names, the volume is called CROWCASS, it stood for some really long name. But this 60,000, they could never bring 60,000 even if they were real all war crimes subject to war crimes trials. It just physically was not possible.

And that gave me an understanding of the level and the detail of work, the forensic work, if you like, the investigative work that the German Jewish refugees were now doing in the country that was once their home. Next slide please. I have talked before in a different lecture about the Secret Interrogation Centre in London, in the heart of London. I’m not going to talk about its wartime part. I’m going to talk now because this is often overlooked and it’s all part of the whole denazification programme. I’m talking about the period from 1945 to 1948. These here are the gates to Kensington Palace Gardens. They’re at the Bayswater Road end. You can see houses on the left, sort of misty in the left. Those luxury houses as they are still there now, one of them’s a Russian embassy today, why not? Secret interrogation centre in the Second World War, they interrogated, all kinds of prisoners in the Second World War. Those whose will to resist could not be broken. The Israeli embassy, by the way, is down the far end of this road. I think it’s number three, almost opposite Kensington Palace Garden.

So you get a sense of where we are in London. The commanding officer pictured there, Colonel Scotland, the nephew of George Bernard Shaw, very colourful character, who towards the end of the war realised that his unit that had been interrogating German prisoners of war and diehard SS officers for intelligence now had a really new and important role. And that was war crimes investigations. And why it’s significant is because there were German Jewish refugees working for him from 1944, primarily from 1944 until 1948 when the London cages, it was called cages, slang for interrogation quarters. The London Cage was described. It became the War Crimes Investigation Unit. So that was its new name, the War Crimes Investigation Unit. And this was described in the official files. They’re now declassified.

I’ve worked on them for my book on the London Cage. It was described as the most important war crimes investigation centre outside Germany. And we think of all that work at Nuremberg, of course, absolutely vital to this whole denazification to the justice that had to be done at the end of the war, but tucked away in London at this top secret location behind this kind of facade of a beautiful, you know, white staccato building is a secret interrogation centre where now you have got, by the spring of 1946, next slide please, a hundred diehard SS officers. The whole place is teaming with SS officers who’ve been transferred from camps in Germany where they’re being held as prisoners of war. They are known Nazi war criminals. And if it wasn’t for the work of Colonel Scotland and his interrogators who now become investigators alongside German Jewish refugee investigators to bring to justice Nazi war criminals, including commandant, concentration, of commandant’s concentration camps like Oswald Paul, he comes through this site, they amass evidence that there is not capability to be able to do within Germany. It’s an extraordinary story and it really tests the patience of those interrogators. And there are stories of potentially crossing the line and potentially contravention to the Geneva Convention. I don’t have time to go into that today.

Most of it was psychological rather than physical. But it was incredibly important to get these guys, these Nazi war criminals, these diehard SS. And they were proud, completely no sense of remorse for what they’d done, strutting around, still giving the Hitler salute. And they are boasting. And I’ve seen the interrogation reports in so much graphic detail about what, what went on in the concentration camps. I have not read anything so horrific as what I read in those files. Even from the bug conversations within those three secret sites outside London. Yes, a lot of it was graphic, but it’s nothing compared to the sheer graphic, horrific detail of what went on in concentration camps. And I think not all of this treatment has come out. And it was just so horrific. I didn’t feel like I could quote it in the book. I just felt it wasn’t right to do that. But historians, next slide please, do need to go through this material. I’m keeping an eye on time and got about five or six minutes left. And they’re giving you a sort of overview into what was an extraordinary period of history with those German Jewish refugees. And across the London cage in October, 1946 comes this man Fritz Knocklein.

He had been guilty of all kinds of SS atrocities in 1940, particularly May, 1940 when he had been responsible, he had given the command. We didn’t know that at the time, but Colonel Scotland and those German Jewish refugees finally nailed the evidence that this man had shot a hundred or given the command and that’s part of his unit on the left that carried it out. That shot a hundred of our surrendering soldiers in cold blood. They’d come out with a white handkerchief and they’d shot them in cold blood. Now, Colonel Scotland, he hated it. I mean the two of them just looked at each other. And Colonel Scotland said to me, you are not even having the luxury of being interrogated. And it was the start of 615 days for Knocklein in internment at the hands of the British, 64 days, at least in solitary confinement. He couldn’t break his will to resist, an absolutely horrifying man. And he was finally brought to justice thanks to Colonel Scotland and his team. And Knocklein was hanged in Hamlin Prison in 1948. Next slide please. And those teams of German Jewish refugees were sent out to France where the massacre had taken place south of Calais . And I discovered some of these original photographs, they are just so horrifying in themselves.

They’re just desolate photographs of the scenes of war crimes. The top one was a massacre at Wormhoudt in this farmer’s kind of barn. And again in the bottom near . And you can see those dark stains above the sticks that when the war crimes teams went back, those refugees went back to investigate this six years or so later, there was still evidence of that massacre and parts of bodies. It just horrific and the blood stains still visible. And this was some of the evidence that was given to the war crimes trials. Next slide please. I’m going to sort of pull some pieces together. I mean this is just some vignettes really and a sense of an overview of the contribution. It’s an absolutely enormous topic and if you’re interested you can probably still get, I think, my book Denazification and probably, you know, you can also borrow it from the library. I mentioned Colin Anson earlier, Claus Ascher, that wonderful photograph on the left with his father. His father had that sense, he’d fought in the first World war, sense of a very strong Prussian officer who was proud of Germany, who’d fought in, as I said, the first World War had been awarded the Iron Cross.

He absolutely, he was Jewish of course, but tried to get up an anti-Nazi party in Germany in 1937. He tried to get the Generals to mutiny. He was quite high level, Colin Anson’s, father at that time. He was denounced and murdered in Dachau in October, 1937. He survived just four weeks, died, not because he was Jewish, but because he was trying to get an anti-Nazi party to overthrow Hitler. Now you have Colin on the right there, highly trained commando officer. He’s the guy that had his head shot off and survived and went back to fight. He’s tough, he’s hardened. I know he’s just enlisted there. He’s still got a soft baby face. But when he comes to the end of the war, he’s back in Frankfurt where he was born. And he finds his mother, who was a Protestant who’d lived in hiding. And he said that proud moment when he rushed up the stairs was reunited with his mother, who was no Nazi. She’d lost her husband in Dachau. And there was this boy, this man, he left as a boy really at 17, this man in British Army uniform. And of course they just wept. They just wept.

And Colin said he had to impound a lot of the documents from the local police station and local military offices. You had to get all that kind of information for intelligence and he said he had access to the files in the police station for the man who had betrayed his father. And he said to me, I could have taken that he was a wood cutter, this man who’d betrayed him. I could have taken him out into the forest on a walk in which only one of us would’ve come back. He said, but it was not my place to take his life in revenge. That’s not my place, that’s for God, that’s nothing to do with me. And this I want to underline. It’s so important. It’s not about revenge. There were opportunities. And there are examples, particularly in interrogation, when these guys could have pretty much, you know, roughed up pretty nastily, those Nazi war criminals. But like Colin, that sense that the British Army uniform had imbued in them, that it had to take, justice had to take its course.

You have to forgive, as one of them said, but never forget. My last slide, please. And this is very poignant and I’ll leave you reflecting on this, particularly in the current world we are in. You know, that fight for democracy. This is what they fought for. They fought for democracy and the restoration of peace. And they were part of that. We must not forget their legacy. And Ernest Goodman said to me, and I use this quote at the end of my book, is so poignant. He said, wherever one meets refugees today, and of course, we don’t, do we, none of my veterans are alive anymore. We’ve lost this, this year too, of my last surviving veterans. We’ve lost those eyewitnesses to history. We still have kinder transport, yes, we’ve lost the vast majority of these veterans. And he said, where everyone meets refugees today, who fought as members of the great Allied liberation armies, one senses the pride of a people who were part of a glorious time when civilization was given another chance.

And I just want to finish with another part of his quote, because that’s what they were fighting for. He said, we did what we thought we had to do. These are the German Jewish refugees enlisting voluntarily in the British forces. They didn’t have to. They’ve put their lives on the line. And so he says, we did what we thought we had to do. My conduct was deemed exemplary in the demobilisation document as with that of others too. And this is it. We tried to fight for the redemption of the human race and to give history another chance. Let’s not forget their legacy.

Thank you.