On the 10th of July 1940, the skies over southern England became the stage for one of the Second World War’s defining struggles. The Luftwaffe launched a massive aerial campaign against the United Kingdom, hammering British airfields, ports, and cities such as London, Birmingham, and Coventry in a relentless attempt to gain air superiority ahead of a possible invasion. Against the odds, the Royal Air Force held firm. By October 1940, Hitler was forced to abandon his invasion plans, and Britain remained defiant, becoming a beacon of resistance against Nazi Germany.
Yet not everyone in Britain shared this determination to fight on. While most rallied behind Churchill’s call never to surrender, there were those who looked to Hitler with admiration and openly sympathized with the Nazi regime. One of the most notorious of these British collaborators, and the one who would pay the highest price for his betrayal, was John Amery. Amery was born on the 14th of March 1912 in London, the older of two children.
His father, Leo Amery, was a British statesman, a member of Parliament, and later a Conservative government minister. Leo’s own mother came from an intellectual Jewish Hungarian family, born in the Jewish quarter of Budapest, but Leo chose to hide this background, likely fearing it could jeopardize his rise through the ranks of the Conservative Party. John’s mother, Florence Greenwood, was the daughter of a Canadian barrister and the younger sister of the first Viscount Greenwood. From a very young age, John displayed behavior that deeply worried his family and baffled those tasked with his care and education.
At the age of two, a nanny described him as a very hard child who suffered from violent tantrums. By five, a teacher observed that he was an extremely abnormal boy with a disturbing inward focus and a fixed attitude of an abnormal type. In 1922, when John was ten, his father, now a sitting Conservative member of Parliament, was appointed First Lord of the Admiralty. The family moved into Admiralty House on Whitehall, a prestigious address that stood in stark contrast to the growing instability of their son.
John began his formal education at Miss Ironside School, a progressive private school for upper-class children, where the headmistress quickly labeled him unteachable. He cycled through a string of private tutors, none of whom managed to bring him under control. Eventually, like his father before him, he was sent to Harrow, one of Britain’s most elite public schools. His rebellious nature became immediately apparent.
He was caught sneaking out at night to attend London nightclubs, engaging in behavior far beyond his years. The 1926 Harrow punishment book records a sanction for shop stealing and moral breakdown. His housemaster remarked that he was without doubt the most difficult boy he had ever tried to manage. Distressed by their son’s behavior, Leo and his wife took John to see a psychologist, Dr.
Maurice Wright, who concluded that the boy had no moral sense of right and wrong. In a last attempt to stabilize his development, John was sent to a school for English boys in Switzerland. The result was disastrous. He returned home having contracted syphilis, a condition that would affect him for years, telling his tutor he had caught it by prostituting himself to men.
Despite his chaotic upbringing, John was intellectually capable and in 1929 secured a place at Oxford University. Instead of pursuing higher education, he turned it down and set his sights on the film industry. He briefly worked as an assistant director for a small traveling company, but his ambitions quickly outpaced his experience. With the charm and self-confidence that would later define his reputation as a manipulator, he convinced friends and members of his well-connected family to invest in a film project titled Jungle Skies, to be shot in Africa with a proposed budget of one hundred thousand dollars.
The project never materialized. Around this time, he suddenly announced his intention to marry Una Wing, an actress he claimed would help restore the confidence of his creditors by virtue of her supposed wealth. In reality, Una was known to police as a common prostitute. The two eventually married in Greece and later settled in Paris, funding their extravagant lifestyle through borrowing from acquaintances and pawning valuables.
In Paris, John’s eccentricity only grew. He often carried his childhood teddy bear to cafés, placing it beside him at the table, buying it drinks and even comics to read. He also began carrying a gun at all times, convinced that his creditors were trying to hunt him down. According to Una, John continued working as a male prostitute and made frequent visits to brothels.
Politically, he began to shift. A staunch anti-communist, John embraced fascism as a necessary counterbalance to the spread of Bolshevism. In 1936, he was officially declared bankrupt. He left his wife in London and traveled to Spain, where he supported Franco’s fascist forces during the Spanish Civil War, involving himself in gun-running and even engaging in combat.
He later claimed to have witnessed the horrors of communist torture chambers in Barcelona, experiences that deepened his ideological hatred. Around this time, he came under the influence of French fascist leader Jacques Doriot and his newly formed French Popular Party, traveling with members of the movement through Austria, Italy, and Germany, eager to witness the impact of fascist rule firsthand. The Second World War began on the 1st of September 1939, when Nazi Germany invaded Poland. John returned to Paris, where he had a new girlfriend, Janine Bard, who worked as a prostitute.
After the fall of France and the establishment of the Vichy regime in June 1940, he initially remained in unoccupied France. In the eyes of Nazi officials, Amery’s family name and political connections made him an unusual asset. In October 1942, with the assistance of German officer Werner Plack and the support of Count Ceschi, a German armistice negotiator, John relocated to Berlin to begin a new chapter in service of the Nazi cause. There he was received by Adolf Hitler himself, who approved his presence in Germany and granted him the status of a guest of the Reich.
Seen as a political trophy, a British aristocrat who had turned against his homeland, John was quickly pushed into Nazi propaganda efforts. He was offered the opportunity to speak directly to British audiences via German state radio, and on the 19th of November 1942, he made his first broadcast. Framing himself as a patriotic Englishman, he declared that a crime was being committed against civilization, that the British people were being lied to, and that their patriotism and love for England were being exploited by people who hardly had any right to be English. Between the British people and peace, he claimed, stood only the Jew and his puppets.
This was the first of several broadcasts in which John called for the overthrow of Churchill’s government, denounced the war effort, and urged his countrymen to support Nazi Germany’s campaign against the Soviet Union. Eventually, as his usefulness to Nazi propaganda efforts waned, he returned to Paris. There, together with Michelle Thomas, another woman known to French police as a prostitute, John began working on a new idea: the creation of a pro-German British military unit. According to some sources, Thomas was his lover; other sources claimed she was his bigamously married wife.
His proposal was to recruit British prisoners of war to fight alongside the Germans against the Soviet Union. Even his own father would later call this plan undoubtedly his most heinous offense. The project made little progress until early 1943, when John reconnected with Jacques Doriot, with whom he had worked previously. Encouraged by Doriot’s success in recruiting French volunteers, he revived his plan and aimed to form a core group of fifty to one hundred men, to be used for propaganda purposes and potentially expanded into a larger fighting force.
His first official recruiting attempt took place at the Saint-Denis prisoner of war camp outside Paris, where he addressed a group of forty to fifty British and Commonwealth prisoners of war. He handed out printed material and spoke passionately about the supposed need to fight Bolshevism, but the reception was overwhelmingly negative, with most inmates rejecting his appeal outright. His initial recruitment drive was a failure. Still, he persisted and eventually found two men who showed interest.
Only one of them, Kenneth Berry, actually joined what would later be called the British Free Corps. John’s involvement with the unit ended in October 1943, when the Waffen-SS, the military branch of the SS, decided his services were no longer required. After Amery, who had served as a useful idiot of Nazi propaganda, was dismissed, control of the project passed into other hands and the unit was formally renamed. In 1944, John traveled to Italy at the invitation of Benito Mussolini, who was attempting to maintain the remnants of his fascist regime with German support.
However, by this time, the Axis powers were in retreat and Italy was descending into chaos. While there, John was captured by Italian partisans. He reportedly expressed relief when British forces arrived to take him into custody. According to Captain Alan Whicker, the young officer sent to bring him in, John greeted him by saying, “Thank God you’re here.
I thought they were going to shoot me. ” John was transferred to an internment camp in the town of Terni, where he was interrogated by a team of British investigators. The officers found him strangely detached from the seriousness of his situation. John spoke at length about personal possessions he had lost, including his childhood teddy bear and his wife’s fur coats, appearing far more concerned about missing belongings than the charges he would soon face.
At one point, he told the investigators, “I don’t suppose for a moment they’ll bring a charge against me, but if they did, of course, my father would see to it. ”
John was eventually flown back to England. In a symbolic moment, he arrived dressed in full fascist uniform, complete with jack boots. He was held in a London prison to await trial and charged with eight counts of high treason.
Under British law, the penalty for treason was death, but his family launched a desperate campaign to save him, calling in political favors and even petitioning the king. His younger brother, Julian, argued that John had taken Spanish citizenship and therefore could not legally be guilty of treason against Britain. Meanwhile, his lawyer attempted to present evidence of mental illness, supported by John’s father, Leo, who believed his son was unstable. Despite these efforts, the court did not accept any argument based on diminished responsibility.
In a dramatic and unexpected turn, on the very first day of his trial, the 28th of November 1945, John pleaded guilty to all eight charges of treason and was sentenced to death. The entire hearing lasted just eight minutes. John Amery was thirty-three years old when, on the 19th of December 1945, he was hanged by the British executioner Albert Pierrepoint. According to reports, Amery maintained a strange composure until the very end.
As he approached the gallows, he is said to have turned to Pierrepoint and said, “Mr. Pierrepoint, I’ve always wanted to meet you, but not of course under these circumstances. “