In the quiet English village of Ketteringham, a handful of lanes of houses and bungalows south of Norwich, stands a carved wooden sign marking the entrance to the community. It was made by a local man in 1979 as a gift for the Women’s Institute. What the villagers likely did not dwell on was that the carver, Reginald Eric Pleassants, was a former soldier of the Waffen SS, and an Englishman who had served the enemy in Hitler’s war. Pleassants was born on the 17th of May 1910 in the Norfolk village of Saxlingham Nethergate.
He left school at fourteen and worked his way through several trades, from electrician to forester. His father was a gamekeeper, and through the family’s connection to the Bowes-Lyon family, the same family as Queen Elizabeth, the future consort of King George VI, Eric received the means to study physical training and physiotherapy at Loughborough College. He later made a living as a semi-professional boxer and wrestler, fighting under the name Panther Pleassants, and as a weightlifter. In the mid-1930s, Pleassants was invited to join the Norwich branch of Sir Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists.
He served in the Protection Squad, the group of toughs responsible for policing political meetings, but his enthusiasm for fascism faded quickly. Fundamentally a pacifist, he considered registering as a conscientious objector. Instead, he joined a Peace Pledge Union scheme that sent young men to the Channel Islands as agricultural laborers, allowing them to be useful without fighting. He arrived on Jersey in May 1940, just two months before the Germans occupied the islands.
Stranded under occupation, Pleassants took work as a potato picker. In the chaos that followed the British decision not to defend the islands, many residents had abandoned their homes and fled to England, leaving property unguarded. Pleassants fell in with a crowd of opportunists, among them a safe-cracker named Eddie Chapman, who would later gain notoriety as the double agent Zigzag. The group was arrested for stealing from empty properties.
Pleassants was sentenced to six months in prison, and the Germans deported him to serve the term at a prison near Dijon in France. On release, as a citizen of an enemy nation, he was transferred to a civilian internment camp in Germany. Conditions there were harsh, food was scarce, and there was no contact with women. In December 1942, Pleassants and another internee named John Lyster, who would later follow the same path, were caught attempting to escape.
Both men spent six months in a Gestapo prison. According to Pleassants, the desire for personal freedom, the promise of plentiful food, and the prospect of female company were the driving forces behind his decision to join a strange new organization, the British Free Corps. The idea for this unit had originated with John Amery, the wayward son of Leo Amery, Winston Churchill’s Secretary of State for India. A committed fascist who claimed to have fought on Franco’s side in the Spanish Civil War, Amery had ingratiated himself with the Germans as a propagandist, a man of some value given his father’s place in the British cabinet.
In October 1942, he proposed the formation of a British unit recruited from prisoner of war camps to fight Bolshevism on the Eastern Front. Amery suggested calling it the Legion of St. George, but the Germans rejected the name. Recruitment proved spectacularly unsuccessful, and eventually the SS took over the project, raising at best a single platoon of about thirty men, to be attached to an SS foreign legion division.
On the 1st of January 1944, the unit was officially designated the British Free Corps of the Waffen SS. Its members were issued uniforms distinguished by a collar badge of three lions from the British Royal Coat of Arms, a cuff title in English, and a small Union Flag badge. Eric Pleassants joined the British Free Corps in 1944 with the rank of private. Much of what is known of his time in the unit comes from his memoir, Hitler’s Bastard, edited by the author Ian Sayer.
In it, Pleassants claimed to have made broadcasts for Germany in Berlin, a treasonable offense, and to have met two of the most significant English-speaking collaborators in German service: William Joyce, the former senior British Union of Fascists leader who broadcast throughout the war as Lord Haw-Haw, and John Amery himself. Pleassants also claimed, incidentally, to have had an affair with Joyce’s wife. Despite his involvement, the historian Adrian Weale, author of the definitive study of the unit, Renegades: Hitler’s Englishmen, concluded that Pleassants managed to avoid any real military service while in the SS. The British Free Corps was not a happy unit.
It was plagued by internal rivalries and conflict with German directing staff, and its members spent much of their time carousing in Berlin bars. As a trained physical fitness instructor, Pleassants became the unit’s PT instructor, responsible for keeping the men in shape. In August 1944, however, he led something of a mutiny. He and seven others demanded to be returned to their prisoner of war or internment camps.
The SS responded by stripping them of their uniforms and sending them to a punishment camp near Schwerin, where Pleassants ended up working on a road gang. The British Free Corps, meanwhile, was sent to the SS Pioneer School at Dresden to become combat ready, and a few new recruits trickled in. By November 1944, Pleassants and some of the other mutineers had been returned to the unit and issued SS uniforms once more. Pleassants resumed his role as PT instructor and even boxed for the SS Pioneers against the SS police in Prague, winning his match.
In February 1945, he married Anneliese Nitsche, the secretary of a German officer leading the unit. That same month, the men of the British Free Corps were sent to Dresden, which had just been bombed to destruction. The experience was a shock. As they helped pull the wounded from the rubble and saw the piles of bodies, the reality of war finally reached them.
By late February 1945, the unit was quartered in Berlin and prepared for service on the Oder front against the Soviets. Pleassants, however, managed to have himself transferred to exhibition boxing matches against the famous German boxer Max Schmeling, performing in barracks around Berlin. The rest of the unit was sent to an emergency close combat training camp at Niemegk, where the men were familiarized with German weapons and issued the StG 44 assault rifle. On the 15th of March, the British Free Corps was sent by truck to join the 11th SS Volunteer Panzergrenadier Division Nordland, composed of Norwegian, Danish, Dutch, and other European SS volunteers.
On the 22nd of March, they were assigned to the division’s reconnaissance battalion near Groß-Glienicke. Issued an armored half-track and an amphibious jeep, they were told to dig trenches on the company perimeter. The British Free Corps remained in that position for a month, waiting for combat. They could see the Red Army positions from their trenches and came under sporadic Soviet artillery fire, but they continued their work.
Eventually, General Felix Steiner, commanding the 3rd SS Germanic Corps of which Nordland was part, decided on advice to re-role the unit as truck drivers behind the front lines. On the 16th of April, the same day the great Soviet Berlin offensive began, they joined Steiner’s headquarters transport company. They drove trucks, directed traffic, and helped evacuate civilians until the 29th of April, when Steiner decided to break out west toward the Americans and surrender. The British Free Corps was ordered to drive to Schwerin and await further orders.
Realizing the war was over and fearing capture, the members began to desert. The American army reached Schwerin on the 2nd of May 1945, the day Berlin surrendered. By then the British Free Corps members were widely scattered, many attempting to pass themselves off as released British prisoners of war. Over the following weeks, most were picked up, arrested, and sent to Britain for interrogation and prosecution.
Eric Pleassants was not among them. In the final days of the Battle for Berlin, Pleassants had exchanged his SS uniform for a German army uniform and wrapped bandages around his head as a disguise. With his German wife, he attempted to escape the city through the U-Bahn tunnels and later the sewers. He made it out, though according to his account, he was compelled to kill two Soviet soldiers with his bare hands when they tried to arrest him.
He hid at his in-laws’ house in Dresden, which was then under American occupation before being handed over to the Soviets. He made money performing as a strongman, but in 1946 the NKVD, realizing he was British, arrested him, suspecting him of being a spy. He was convicted and sent to the gulag at Vorkuta in the high Arctic. In 1954, after seven years in the gulag, Pleassants was released and allowed to return to England.
He was filmed and interviewed on his arrival at his mother’s house in Norwich. Though he had committed treason through his membership in the British Free Corps, the British authorities decided that his seven years in a Soviet gulag had been punishment enough, and no charges were brought against him. Pleassants lived in Norwich for years before settling in Ketteringham, where he became a familiar figure. In November 1979, he briefly returned to the news when a local paper reported that the sixty-nine-year-old had made a new village sign to mark the Diamond Jubilee of the Women’s Institute, of which his second wife Pauline was a member.
He made the sign free of charge. The article made no mention of his wartime record, and it was probably not common knowledge in the village for obvious reasons. Eric Pleassants died in 1998. His grave cannot be found; it is possible he was cremated and his ashes scattered by his family.
The sign he carved for Ketteringham remains the only place where his name is commemorated, a name forever attached to Hitler’s British SS unit, one of the most unsuccessful of the Nazi foreign legions.