In the quiet English village of Ketteringham, a few miles south of Norwich, stands a wooden village sign. Such signs are common across Britain, but this one is unique. It was carved by a former Waffen SS soldier.
That soldier was an Englishman, and by serving Hitler, he was also a traitor.
His name was Reginald Eric Pleassants, and he spent the last three decades of his life in the village, dying in 1998. The sign he made remains his only public memorial.
Pleassants was born on May 17, 1910, in Saxlingham Nethergate, Norfolk. His father was a gamekeeper, and the family received some patronage from the Bowes-Lyon family, the family of Queen Elizabeth, wife of King George VI. That support allowed Eric to study physical training and physiotherapy at Loughborough College.
After graduating, he became a semi-professional boxer and wrestler, fighting under the name Panther Pleassants. He also worked as a weightlifter.
In the mid-1930s, Pleassants was invited to join the Norwich branch of the British Union of Fascists, the organization founded by Sir Oswald Mosley. He joined the Protection Squad, a group of toughs who policed political meetings. But his interest in fascism soon faded.
He was, at heart, a pacifist.
As war loomed, Pleassants considered registering as a conscientious objector. Instead, he found the Peace Pledge Union, which was recruiting young men as agricultural laborers for the Channel Islands. He signed up and arrived in Jersey in May 1940.
Just two months later, the Germans occupied Jersey and the other Channel Islands. Pleassants was trapped. Unable to return to Britain, he found work as a potato picker to support himself.
He soon fell in with the wrong crowd, including a safe-cracker named Eddie Chapman, who would later become the infamous double agent Zigzag. Before the Germans arrived, many islanders had evacuated to England, leaving their homes and businesses empty. Pleassants, Chapman, and others were arrested for stealing from these empty properties.
The Jersey police, now under German supervision, prosecuted them. Pleassants received a six-month prison sentence and was deported to a prison near Dijon in France.
As a citizen of an enemy nation, he was transferred to a civilian internment camp at Kreuzburg in Germany upon his release. Conditions were harsh, food was short, and there was no access to women.
In December 1942, Pleassants and another internee, John Lyster, were caught trying to escape. Both spent six months in a Gestapo prison.
According to Pleassants, the desire for personal freedom, the offer of plenty of food, and contact with women drove his decision to join a strange organization called the British Free Corps. This was a foreign contingent of the Waffen SS, intended to be the British contribution to the fight against Bolshevism. Its members were a ragtag assortment of pre-war fascists, fantasists, criminals, and oddballs.
About 54 men were involved at various times, but at its maximum strength in 1945, it had just 27 trained men.
The idea for the British Free Corps originated with John Amery, the wayward son of Winston Churchill’s Secretary of State for India, Leo Amery. John Amery was an avowed fascist who had fought on Franco’s side during the Spanish Civil War. In October 1942, he proposed forming a unit of British soldiers recruited from POW camps to fight the Soviets on the Eastern Front.
Amery proposed calling it the Legion of St. George, but the name was rejected. The German army ran with the idea, though Amery was not given a command.
Instead, he was sent to POW camps to give speeches and make radio broadcasts appealing to Britons to join.
Recruitment was spectacularly unsuccessful. A small number of malcontents, chancers, and fascists were persuaded to join and were taken to Berlin. The SS took over, but the best they could hope for was a single platoon of about 30 men.
On January 1, 1944, the unit became officially the British Free Corps of the Waffen SS. Uniforms were issued with a distinctive collar badge of three lions passant from the British Royal Coat of Arms, a cuff title in English, and a small Union Flag badge.
Eric Pleassants joined the BFC in 1944 with the rank of SS Schütze, or private. Much of what is known about his involvement comes from his memoir, Hitler’s Bastard, edited by author Ian Sayer.
In his memoir, Pleassants claimed to have been invited to make broadcasts for Germany, a treasonable offense. He said he met two of the most influential English-language collaborators the Nazis had: William Joyce, known as Lord Haw-Haw, and John Amery. Pleassants also claimed to have had an affair with Joyce’s wife, Eileen.
Pleassants’ involvement with the BFC seemed to contradict his pacifism. According to historian Adrian Weale, author of Renegades: Hitler’s Englishmen, Pleassants managed to avoid any real military service while in the SS.
The BFC was not a happy unit. It was driven by internal rivalries and often in conflict with German directing staff. Members spent a great deal of time carousing in Berlin bars and living the high life.
The unit’s bad reputation made recruitment efforts difficult.
Because of his physical training background, Pleassants became the unit’s PT instructor. But in August 1944, he led a sort of mutiny against the leadership. He and seven other members demanded to be returned to their prisoner of war or internment camps.
The SS had different ideas. Stripping them of their uniforms, they sent the men to an SS punishment camp near Schwerin, where Pleassants ended up on a road-making gang.
The BFC, meanwhile, was sent to the SS Pioneer School at Dresden to become combat ready. A few more recruits trickled in. In November 1944, Pleassants and some of the other mutineers were returned to the unit.
Once more in Waffen SS uniform, Pleassants again took on the role of PT instructor. He and a Scotsman named Alexander were selected to box for the SS Pioneers against the SS police in Prague. Pleassants won his match.
In February 1945, Pleassants married Anneliese Nitsche, the secretary of one of the German officers leading the BFC.
That same month, the BFC was sent to newly devastated Dresden, which had been bombed to destruction. The men tried to help those trapped in the rubble and witnessed the great piles of bodies. The reality of war finally came home to many of them.
In late February 1945, the BFC was sent to quarters in Berlin, readied for service on the Oder front against the Soviets. But Pleassants managed to get himself transferred to giving exhibition boxing matches against famous German boxer Max Schmeling in barracks around Berlin.
The rest of the BFC was sent to an emergency close combat training camp at Niemegk, northwest of Berlin. There they were made familiar with German weapons and issued with the StG 44 assault rifle.
On March 15, the unit was sent by truck to join the 11th SS Volunteer Panzergrenadier Division Nordland, made up of Norwegian, Danish, Dutch, and other European SS volunteers. On March 22, they joined the 11th SS Panzer Reconnaissance Abteilung at Groß-Glienicke.
Assigned to the unit’s third company, the BFC was issued with an Sd. Kfz. 251 armored half-track and a Schwimmwagen amphibious jeep.
They were told to dig trenches on the company perimeter.
The BFC remained in this position for one month, waiting to be sent into combat. They could see Red Army positions from their trenches and came under sporadic Soviet artillery fire. Despite morale problems, they continued to do their jobs.
Later, SS-Obergruppenführer Felix Steiner, commanding the 3rd SS Germanic Corps, decided to re-role the BFC as truck drivers behind the front lines. They joined Steiner’s headquarters staff transport company based at Templin in Berlin.
On April 16, 1945, the same day the massive Soviet Berlin Offensive began, they performed this job, moving with Steiner’s headquarters to Neustrelitz. The BFC continued to drive military trucks, direct traffic, and help evacuate civilians until April 29.
On that day, Steiner decided to break out west towards the Americans and surrender. The BFC was ordered to drive to Schwerin and await orders.
From here on, members of the BFC, realizing the war was over and greatly fearing capture, began to desert. The US Army reached Schwerin on May 2, 1945, the day Berlin surrendered.
By now, the BFC members were widely scattered, many trying to pass themselves off as recently released British prisoners of war. Over the next few weeks, most were picked up, arrested, and sent to Britain for interrogation and prosecution.
Eric Pleassants, however, was not among them.
Pleassants had switched his SS uniform for a German army one and wrapped bandages around his head to disguise himself during the last days of the Battle for Berlin. With his German wife, he attempted to escape Berlin via the U-Bahn railway tunnels and later the sewer system.
They made it, but not before Pleassants was compelled to kill two Soviet soldiers with his bare hands when they tried to arrest him.
Heading to Dresden, Pleassants hid out in his in-laws’ house. Dresden was at that time under US occupation but was then handed over to the Soviets. Pleassants made some money performing as a strongman.
In 1946, he was arrested by the NKVD when they realized he was British. They thought he was a spy. He was placed on trial, convicted, and sent to a gulag at Vorkuta in the high Arctic.
In 1954, Pleassants was released after seven years in the gulag and allowed to return to England. He was filmed and interviewed arriving back home at his mother’s house in Norwich.
Though a traitor for his membership in the British Free Corps, the British authorities decided that his seven years in a Soviet gulag was sufficient punishment. No charges were brought against him.
He lived in Norwich until moving to the village of Ketteringham, where he lived in a house called North Lodge. In November 1979, he briefly returned to the news. The Eastern Evening News reported that a new village sign had been made by 66-year-old Pleassants to mark the Diamond Jubilee of the Women’s Institute.
Pleassants’ second wife, Pauline, was a member.
The local WI didn’t have the money for the sign, so Pleassants made it free of charge. The article made no mention of his exotic war record, and it probably wasn’t common knowledge in the village for obvious reasons.
Eric Pleassants died in 1998. His grave has never been found, and it is thought he was cremated with his ashes spread by his family.
His life was certainly colorful. The sign he made is today the only place where his name is commemorated, a name forever associated with Hitler’s British SS unit, one of the most unsuccessful of the Nazis’ foreign legions.