John Amery - Trial

Trial

After the war, Amery was tried for treason; in a preliminary hearing, he argued that he had never attacked Britain and was an anti-Communist, not a Nazi. At the same time, his brother Julian Amery attempted (by producing fraudulent documents) to show that John had become a Spanish citizen, and therefore would have been technically incapable of committing treason against the UK. His counsel, meanwhile, tried to show that the accused was mentally ill.

However, these attempts at a defence were suddenly abandoned on the first day of his trial, 28 November 1945, when to general astonishment Amery pleaded guilty to eight charges of treason and was immediately sentenced to death. The entire proceedings lasted just eight minutes.

Before accepting Amery's guilty plea, the judge, Mr Justice Humphreys, made certain that Amery realised what the consequences would be, i.e. it guaranteed that he would immediately be sentenced to death by hanging, because there was no other permissible penalty. After satisfying himself that Amery fully understood the consequences of pleading guilty, the judge announced this verdict:

John Amery ... I am satisfied that you knew what you did and that you did it intentionally and deliberately after you had received warning from ... your fellow countrymen that the course you were pursuing amounted to high treason. They called you a traitor and you heard them; but in spite of that you continued in that course. You now stand a self-confessed traitor to your King and country, and you have forfeited your right to live.

This is believed to be one of only two cases of a man pleading guilty to a charge of treason in the UK, the other being Summerset Fox in May 1654. After the discovery of fresh documentary evidence, the playwright Ronald Harwood concluded that Amery's family would have been embarrassed because his father had hidden the fact that Leo Amery's mother was Jewish (antisemitism was strong in Britain during the 1930s) in order to advance in the Conservative Party.