After The War
Chapman had his wartime memoirs serialised in France to earn money, but he was charged under the Official Secrets Act and fined ₤50. A few years later, when they were due to be published in the News of the World the whole issue was pulped. However his book The Eddie Chapman Story was eventually published in 1953.
MI5 expressed some apprehension that Chapman might take up crime again when his money ran out and if caught would plead for leniency because of his highly secret wartime service. He did get into trouble with the police for various crimes including smuggling in North Africa and more than once had a character reference from former intelligence officers who confirmed his great contribution to the war effort.
Chapman and his wife later set up a health farm (Shenley Lodge, Shenley, Herts) and owned a castle in Ireland. After the war Chapman remained friends with Baron Stefan von Grunen, his Abwehr handler (also known as von Gröning, wartime alias Doctor Graumann), who by then had fallen on hard times. Von Grunen later attended the wedding of Eddie Chapman's daughter.
Chapman died on 11 December 1997 from heart failure.
Read more about this topic: Eddie Chapman
Famous quotes containing the word war:
“War is bestowed like electroshock on the depressive nation; thousands of volts jolting the system, an artificial galvanizing, one effect of which is loss of memory. War comes at the end of the twentieth century as absolute failure of imagination, scientific and political. That a war can be represented as helping a people to “feel good” about themselves, their country, is a measure of that failure.”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)