Eric Pleassants was the kind of man who could have remained completely ordinary, a village craftsman known only for his woodworking and his quiet ways. But the village sign he carved in Ketteringham, a small cluster of houses and bungalows surrounded by Norfolk farmland, carried a secret that made it unlike any other in England. It had been made by a former soldier of the Waffen SS, and that soldier had been an Englishman. The sign stands today as his memorial, a curious tribute to a life that veered from English countryside to the heart of Nazi Germany.
Pleassants had moved to Ketteringham in the 1960s and spent the last three decades of his life there, carving this sign in his elder years as a gift to the local Women’s Institute. Whether the neighbors knew what he had done during the war remains unclear, but they liked him well enough to accept his work, never suspecting that the man who made it had once worn the uniform of Hitler’s elite. Born on the 17th of May, 1910, in the village of Saxlingham Nethergate in Norfolk, Eric Pleassants left school at fourteen. He drifted through a series of jobs, from trainee electrician to forester, until his father, a gamekeeper, secured him some patronage from the Bowes-Lyon family, the same family that had given Britain its Queen Elizabeth.
The connection brought money enough for Pleassants to study physical training and physiotherapy at Loughborough College, where he earned a diploma. From there, he became a semi-professional boxer and wrestler under the name Panther Pleassants, and a weightlifter of considerable strength. In the mid-1930s, he was invited to join the Norwich branch of the British Union of Fascists, the movement founded by the aristocrat Sir Oswald Mosley. Pleassants signed on and served in the Protection Squad, the group of hard men who policed political meetings.
But his interest in fascism faded quickly. At heart, he was a pacifist, and when war approached, he considered registering as a conscientious objector. Instead, he found the Peace Pledge Union, which offered young men who refused to fight a way to still serve their country. The scheme sent men to the Channel Islands as agricultural laborers, and in May 1940 Pleassants arrived on Jersey as a farm worker.
Two months later, the Germans occupied the Channel Islands, and life changed for him completely. He could not return to Britain. To support himself, he took work as a potato picker, but times were hard, and he soon fell in with the wrong crowd. Among his companions was a safe-cracker named Eddie Chapman, a man who would later become the infamous wartime double agent known as Zigzag.
When the British authorities decided not to defend the islands, the civilian population was largely evacuated. Thousands of people had shut up their houses and businesses and sailed for England, leaving behind homes full of valuables. For men without scruples, the empty properties were an invitation. Pleassants, Chapman, and others were arrested for stealing from abandoned houses.
The Jersey police, now operating under German supervision, prosecuted them in the local magistrates’ court. Pleassants received a six-month prison sentence, and the Germans deported him to a prison near Dijon in France. Upon his release, as a citizen of an enemy nation, he was transferred directly to a civilian internment camp at Kreuzburg in Germany. Conditions there were brutal.
Food was scarce, especially as the German war situation worsened, discipline was harsh, and there was no access to women. In December 1942, Pleassants and another internee named John Lyster attempted to escape. Both men were caught and spent six months in a Gestapo prison. According to Pleassants’ own account, the desire for freedom, the promise of plentiful food, and the opportunity for contact with women drove him toward a decision that would brand him a traitor.
He joined the British Free Corps, a strange and largely unsuccessful foreign unit of the Waffen SS, created to be Britain’s contribution to the so-called crusade against Bolshevism. The idea for the British Free Corps had originated with John Amery, the wayward son of Leo Amery, Churchill’s Secretary of State for India. John Amery was a committed fascist who had fought on Franco’s side in the Spanish Civil War, or at least claimed to have done so, and had been decorated by both the Italians and the Germans. When war broke out, he was living in France and ingratiated himself with the Germans, who saw propaganda value in the son of a British cabinet minister.
In October 1942, Amery proposed that the Germans raise a unit of British soldiers from prisoner-of-war camps, to be sent to the Eastern Front to fight the Soviets. He wanted to call it the Legion of St. George, but the name was rejected for being too close to the British Legion, the World War I veterans’ organization. The German army pursued the idea, but Amery was given no command.
He was sent to POW camps to make speeches and to the airwaves, appealing to British soldiers to join the Legion. The recruitment drive was a spectacular failure. A small collection of malcontents, chancers, fascists, and oddballs signed up, and those few were taken from their camps to Berlin. The number of volunteers was so small that the SS eventually took control of the project, hoping to raise at least a single platoon of about thirty Britons.
On the first of January 1944, the unit officially became the British Free Corps of the Waffen SS. The men were issued uniforms with a distinctive collar badge showing three lions passant from the British Royal Coat of Arms, a cuff title in English, and above that, a small Union Flag badge. Eric Pleassants joined the corps in 1944 with the rank of SS Schütze, a private. Much of what is known about his time in the unit comes from his memoir, Hitler’s Bastard, which was edited by the historian Ian Sayer.
In that book, Pleassants claimed to have been invited to make broadcasts for Germany in Berlin, an act of treason, and to have met two of the most influential English-speaking collaborators the Nazis had: William Joyce, the Irish-American former senior British Union of Fascists leader who had fled to Germany in 1939 and broadcast throughout the war as Lord Haw-Haw, and John Amery himself. Pleassants also claimed, rather scandalously, to have had an affair with Joyce’s wife, Eileen. His involvement with the corps sat oddly with his earlier pacifism. But according to the historian Adrian Weale, whose book Renegades: Hitler’s Englishmen is the definitive study of the subject, Pleassants managed to avoid any real military service while in the SS.
The unit was deeply unhappy, torn apart by internal rivalries between different groups of recruits and by frequent conflict with its German directing staff. Some men were given non-commissioned ranks, but most of their time was spent carousing in Berlin bars, living the high life at Nazi expense. The unit’s terrible reputation made recruitment even harder. Because of his background in physical training, Pleassants became the corps’ PT instructor, tasked with keeping the men fit.
But in August 1944, Private Pleassants led a kind 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. They stripped the mutineers of their uniforms and sent them to an SS punishment camp near Schwerin, where Pleassants was put to work on a road-building gang. Meanwhile, the British Free Corps was sent to the SS Pioneer School at Dresden to become combat ready, and a trickle of new recruits arrived.
In November 1944, Pleassants and some of the other mutineers were brought back. Once again in Waffen SS uniform, he took up his role as PT instructor. He also boxed for the SS Pioneers against the SS police in Prague and won his match. In February 1945, Pleassants married Anneliese Nitsche, the secretary of one of the German officers leading the British Free Corps.
The unit had reached its peak strength of twenty-seven men in January of that year, not counting attached German staff. Internal problems remained, but shortly afterward, the men were given a rude awakening. They were sent to Dresden, which had just been bombed into ruin. The men helped pull survivors from the rubble and witnessed the piles of bodies, the sheer devastation of a city destroyed.
For many of them, the reality of war finally struck home. Their time to prove themselves in combat was approaching. In late February 1945, the corps was quartered in Berlin, being readied for service on the Oder front against the Soviets. But Pleassants, ever resourceful, managed to get himself reassigned.
He was sent to give exhibition boxing matches against the famous German boxer Max Schmeling in barracks across the Berlin area. While he dodged the front, the rest of the British Free Corps was sent to an emergency close combat training camp at Niemegk, northwest of Berlin, where they were familiarized with German weapons and issued with the StG 44 assault rifle. On the fifteenth of March, the unit was sent by truck to join the 11th SS Volunteer Panzergrenadier Division Nordland, a division made up of Norwegian, Danish, Dutch, and other European SS volunteers. On the twenty-second of March, they joined the 11th SS Panzer Reconnaissance Battalion at Groß-Glienicke, commanded by Sturmbannführer Rudolf Saalbach, a holder of the Knight’s Cross.
Assigned to the battalion’s third company, the British Free Corps was issued with an Sd. Kfz. 251 armored half-track and a Schwimmwagen amphibious jeep, then told to dig trenches on the company perimeter. For a month, the corps sat in position, waiting to be thrown into combat.
From their trenches they could see Red Army positions, and they came under sporadic Soviet artillery fire. Despite low morale, they continued to do their jobs. Then SS-Obergruppenführer Felix Steiner, commanding the 3rd SS Germanic Corps, decided on advice to re-role the British Free Corps as truck drivers behind the front lines. They were attached to Steiner’s headquarters transport company based at Templin in Berlin, starting on the sixteenth of April 1945, the very day the massive Soviet Berlin Offensive began.
They drove military trucks, directed traffic, and helped evacuate civilians, moving with Steiner’s headquarters to Neustrelitz as the front collapsed around them. This continued until the twenty-ninth of April 1945, when Steiner decided to break out west toward the Americans and surrender. The British Free Corps was ordered to drive to Schwerin and await orders. At that point, the unit began to dissolve.
The men realized the war was over and were terrified of capture. Many deserted, scattering across the countryside and trying to pass themselves off as recently released British prisoners of war, knowing they would face punishment for having served the Germans in uniform. The US Army reached Schwerin on the second of May 1945, the day Berlin surrendered. Over the following weeks, most of the corps members were picked up, arrested, and sent back to Britain for interrogation and possible prosecution.
Eric Pleassants was not among them. He had switched his SS uniform for a German army one and wrapped bandages around his head, disguising himself in the chaos of Berlin’s final days. With his German wife, he tried to escape through the U-Bahn railway tunnels and later through the sewers. They made it out, but not without incident.
At one point, Pleassants was forced to kill two Soviet soldiers with his bare hands when they tried to arrest him. The couple headed for Dresden, where Pleassants hid in his in-laws’ house. The city was under American occupation at the time, but soon after it was handed over to the Soviets. Pleassants made a little money performing as a strongman.
But in 1946, the NKVD realized he was British, and they suspected he was a spy. He was tried, convicted, and sentenced to a gulag at Vorkuta in the high Arctic, where he spent seven years. In 1954, he was released and allowed to return to England. He was filmed and interviewed as he arrived at his mother’s house in Norwich.
Despite his treason, the British authorities decided that seven years in a Soviet gulag was punishment enough, and no charges were ever brought against him. He lived quietly in Norwich for years, then moved to the village of Ketteringham, where he settled 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 sixty-six-year-old Pleassants to mark the Diamond Jubilee of the Women’s Institute, of which his second wife, Pauline, was a member.
The local WI had no money for a sign, so Pleassants had made it free of charge. The article made no mention of his wartime record, and it probably was not common knowledge in the village, for obvious reasons. Eric Pleassants died in 1998. Despite searching, his grave has never been found, and it is likely he was cremated and his ashes scattered by his family.
His life was certainly colorful, and the sign he carved remains the only place his name is commemorated, a name forever linked to Hitler’s British SS unit, one of the most unsuccessful of all the Nazi foreign legions.