In the county of Norfolk, a few miles south of Norwich, sits the small village of Ketteringham. Like thousands of villages across Great Britain, it has its own sign. But this particular sign is unique, because it was carved by a former Waffen SS soldier who was also an Englishman and a traitor.
His name was Reginald Eric Pleasants, known by his middle name Eric. He moved to Ketteringham in the 1960s and spent the last 30 years of his life there. He was well enough liked locally that he was asked to carve the village sign, which in many ways remains his memorial today.
Pleasants was a wartime member of a curious organization called the British Free Corps, a foreign contingent of the Waffen SS intended as a British contribution to the so-called 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, and at its maximum strength in 1945 it numbered just 27 trained men.
Born on May 17, 1910, in the village of Saxlingham Nethergate in Norfolk, Pleasants left school at 14 and worked a variety of jobs, from trainee electrician to forester. His father was a gamekeeper, and the family appears to have received some patronage from the Bowes-Lyon family, the family of King George VI's wife, Queen Elizabeth. That money enabled Eric to study physical training and physiotherapy at Loughborough College, where he gained a diploma.
He went on to become a semi-professional boxer and wrestler under the name Panther Pleasants, and also a weightlifter. In the mid-1930s he was invited to join the Norwich branch of the British Union of Fascists, the organization created by Sir Oswald Mosley. He joined its Protection Squad, a group of toughs who policed political meetings.
Pleasants' interest in fascism soon waned, however, and he was basically a pacifist. As war loomed, he considered registering as a conscientious objector, but instead found the Peace Pledge Union scheme for young men who did not want to fight but still wanted to be useful. The Peace Pledge was recruiting men as agricultural laborers for the Channel Islands, and Pleasants signed up, arriving in Jersey in May 1940.
Just two months later, the Germans occupied Jersey and the other Channel Islands. Life immediately became very difficult for Pleasants. He could not return to Britain, and to support himself he found work as a potato picker. It was not easy, and he soon fell in with the wrong crowd, including a safe-cracker named Eddie Chapman, who would go on to become the infamous World War II double agent Zigzag.
Before the Germans arrived, British authorities had evacuated much of the civilian population of the Channel Islands, having chosen not to defend them. Many people had closed up their houses and businesses and taken ship to England, which meant plenty of opportunities for the unscrupulous to enrich themselves from empty properties. The Jersey police, still functioning under German supervision, arrested Pleasants, Chapman, and others for stealing from empty properties.
Prosecuted in the local magistrates' court, Pleasants was given a six-month prison sentence, and the Germans deported him to serve it at the Fort de Hautville prison near Dijon in France. As a citizen of an enemy nation, on his release he was immediately transferred to a civilian internment camp at Kreuzburg in Germany. Such camps were not pleasant places: food was often short, especially as the German war situation deteriorated, discipline could be harsh, and there was no access to women.
Pleasants and another internee, John Lyster, who would later also join the British Free Corps, were caught trying to escape in December 1942, and both spent six months in a Gestapo prison. According to Pleasants, the desire for personal freedom, the offer of plenty of food, and contact with women drove his decision to join the British Free Corps.
The idea for the BFC 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, though some sources suggest he did not arrive in Spain until 1939. When World War II broke out, Amery was living in France and ingratiated himself with the Germans, who saw value in him as a propagandist given his father's position in Churchill's cabinet.
In October 1942, Amery proposed forming a unit of British soldiers recruited from POW camps to be dispatched to the Eastern Front to fight the Soviets. He proposed calling it the Legion of St. George, a name rejected as too close to the British Legion, the World War I veterans' organization. The German army nonetheless pursued the idea, though Amery was given no command position and was instead sent to POW camps to give recruiting speeches and made radio broadcasts appealing to Britons to join.
Recruitment was spectacularly unsuccessful, but a small number of malcontents, chancers, fascists, and assorted oddballs were persuaded to join and were taken out of their camps to Berlin. Recruiting was so bad that the SS took over. The best that could be hoped for was a single platoon's worth of Britons, about 30 men, to be attached to one of the SS Foreign Legion divisions on the Eastern Front. Even that modest aim proved extremely difficult.
On January 1, 1944, the unit officially became the British Free Corps of the Waffen SS. Uniforms were issued, including a distinctive collar badge of three lions passant from the British Royal Coat of Arms, a cuff title in English, and above that a small Union Flag badge. Eric Pleasants joined the BFC in 1944 with the rank of SS Schütze, or private.
Much of what is known of Pleasants' involvement comes from his memoir, Hitler's Bastard, edited by author Ian Sayer. In it, Pleasants claimed to have been invited to make broadcasts for Germany in Berlin, a treasonable offense, and to have met two of the most influential English-language collaborators the Nazis had: William Joyce, the Irish-American former senior British Union of Fascists leader who fled to Germany in 1939 and broadcast throughout the war as Lord Haw-Haw, and John Amery. Pleasants also claimed to have had an affair with Joyce's wife, Eileen.
Pleasants' involvement with the BFC seemed to be in opposition to his own pacifism. According to historian Adrian Weale, whose book Renegades: Hitler's Englishmen is the definitive work on the subject, Pleasants managed to avoid any real military service while in the SS.
The BFC was not a happy unit. It was driven by internal rivalries between groups of recruits and was often in conflict with the German directing staff. Some members were given SS NCO rank, but its members spent a great deal of time carousing in Berlin bars and generally living the high life. The unit's bad reputation made recruitment efforts difficult.
Due to his physical training background, Pleasants became the unit's PT instructor, trying to keep the men fit. But in August 1944, Private Pleasants led a sort of mutiny against the leadership, and 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 Pleasants ended up on a road-making gang.
The BFC, meanwhile, was sent to the SS Pioneer School at Dresden to become combat ready, and a few more recruits trickled in. This recruiting drive also saw the return of Pleasants and some of the other men from the punishment camp in November 1944. Once more back in Waffen SS uniform, Pleasants again took on the role of PT instructor.
Pleasants and a Scotsman surnamed Alexander were both selected to box for the SS Pioneers against the SS police in Prague, and Pleasants won his match. In February 1945, he married the secretary of one of the German officers leading the BFC, a woman named Anneliese Nitsche.
In January 1945, the BFC reached a peak strength of 27 men, not including attached German staff. Internal problems remained, but in February 1945 Pleasants and the rest were given a rude awakening when they were sent to newly devastated Dresden, which had been bombed to destruction. It was a shocking experience as the men tried to help those trapped in the rubble and witnessed the great destruction and piles of bodies. The reality of war finally came home to many of them.
The time had come for the BFC to prove its worth in combat. Sent to quarters in Berlin in late February 1945, the unit was readied for service on the Oder front against the Soviets. Pleasants, however, managed to get himself transferred to giving exhibition boxing matches against the famous German boxer Max Schmeling in German barracks all over the Berlin area.
The rest of the BFC was sent to an emergency close combat training camp at Niemegk, northwest of Berlin, where they were made familiar with various 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 SS volunteers from across Europe.
On March 22, they joined the 11th SS Panzer Reconnaissance Abteilung at Groß-Glienicke, commanded by Sturmbannführer Rudolf Saalbach, a holder of the Knight's Cross. Assigned to the unit's third company, the BFC was issued with an Sd.Kfz. 251 armored half-track and a Schwimmwagen amphibious jeep, and 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, but despite morale problems they continued to do their jobs. Later, SS-Obergruppenführer Felix Steiner, commanding the 3rd SS Germanic Corps, of which the Nordland Division was part, decided on advice to re-role the BFC as truck drivers behind the front lines, joining Steiner's headquarters staff transport company based at Templin.
On April 16, 1945, the same day the massive Soviet Berlin Offensive began, they took up 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, 1945. On that day, Steiner decided to break out west towards the Americans and surrender, and the BFC was ordered to drive to Schwerin and await orders.
From then on, members of the BFC, realizing the war was over and greatly fearful of 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, fearing punishment for having served the Germans in uniform. Over the following weeks, most were picked up, arrested, and sent to Britain for interrogation or prosecution.
Eric Pleasants was not among them. He had switched his SS uniform for a German army one and wrapped bandages around his head in an effort 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 Pleasants had been compelled to kill two Soviet soldiers with his bare hands when they tried to arrest him.
Heading to Dresden, Pleasants hid out in his in-laws' house in the city. Dresden was then under US occupation, but was handed over to the Soviets. Pleasants made some money performing as a strongman, but 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, Pleasants 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 his seven years in a Soviet gulag was sufficient punishment, and no charges were brought against him.
He lived in Norwich in various properties until moving to the village of Ketteringham, to a house called North Lodge. There, 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 Pleasants to mark the Diamond Jubilee of the Women's Institute, his second wife, Pauline, being a member. The local WI did not have the money for the sign, so Pleasants made it free of charge.
The article made no mention of his exotic war record, and it probably was not common knowledge in the village for obvious reasons. Eric Pleasants died in 1998. His life was certainly extremely colorful, and 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.