John Amery - The British Free Corps

The British Free Corps

The idea of a British force to fight the communists languished until Amery encountered Jacques Doriot during a visit to France in January 1943. Doriot was part of the LVF (Légion des Volontaires Français), a French volunteer force fighting with the Germans on the eastern front. Amery rekindled his idea of a British unit and aimed to recruit 50 to 100 men for propaganda purposes, and to establish a core of men with which to attract additional members from British prisoners of war. He also suggested that such a unit could provide more recruits for the other military units made up of foreign nationals.

Amery's first recruiting drive for what was initially to be called the British Legion of St. George took him to the Saint-Denis POW camp outside Paris. Amery addressed between 40 and 50 inmates from various British Commonwealth countries and handed out recruiting material. This first effort at recruitment was a complete failure, but he persisted. Amery ended up with two men, of whom only one, Kenneth Berry, joined what was later called the BFC. Amery's link to the unit ended in October 1943, when the Waffen SS decided his services were no longer needed, and it was officially renamed the British Free Corps. Amery continued to broadcast and write propaganda in Berlin until late 1944, when he travelled to Northern Italy to lend support to Italian dictator Benito Mussolini's Salò Republic. Amery was captured by Italian partisans in the last weeks of the war, who handed him over to the British authorities. The British army officer sent to take him into custody was Captain Alan Whicker, later a prominent British broadcaster.