The village sign at Ketteringham looks like a thousand others scattered across England. A few carved words, a bit of local pride, a name or two. But this one is different. It was made by an Englishman who wore the uniform of the Waffen SS.
And that makes it a monument to a traitor. The man’s name was Reginald Eric Pleassants, known to everyone as Eric. Ketteringham is a small village a few miles south of Norwich in Norfolk, just a handful of lanes with houses and bungalows surrounded by farmland. The main local landmark is Ketteringham Hall, which served for years as the headquarters of Lotus Cars.
During the war, it was the base for the American 2nd Division of the Eighth Air Force, coordinating the bomber squadrons spread across eastern England. Pleassants moved there in the 1960s and spent his last three decades in the village. How much the locals knew about his past isn’t clear, but they liked him well enough to ask him to carve their sign. It still stands there today, the only public trace of his name.
Pleassants was born in the village of Saxlingham Nethergate, also in Norfolk, on the 17th of May, 1910. He left school at fourteen and worked as an electrician’s apprentice and later as a forester. His father was a gamekeeper, and the family enjoyed a degree of patronage from the Bowes-Lyon family, the same family that produced Queen Elizabeth, wife of King George VI. That connection paid for Eric to study physical training and physiotherapy at Loughborough College, where he earned a diploma.
He then became a semi-professional boxer and wrestler, using the ring name Panther Pleassants, and he also competed as a weightlifter. In the mid-1930s, he was invited to join the Norwich branch of the British Union of Fascists, the movement created by the aristocratic Sir Oswald Mosley. Pleassants joined the Protection Squad, a group of hard men who kept order at political meetings. But his enthusiasm for fascism faded quickly, and by inclination he was something of a pacifist.
As war approached, he considered registering as a conscientious objector. Instead, he signed up with the Peace Pledge Union, which was recruiting young men to work as agricultural laborers in the Channel Islands. He arrived in Jersey in May 1940. Two months later, the Germans occupied the islands.
Pleassants was stuck. He couldn’t get back to Britain, so he found work as a potato picker. It wasn’t easy, and he soon fell in with a bad crowd, including a safe-cracker named Eddie Chapman, who would later become the famous wartime double agent known as Zigzag. Before the Germans arrived, the British authorities had encouraged the evacuation of the islands’ civilian populations, and many people had left their homes and businesses shuttered for the duration.
That left plenty of empty properties for the unscrupulous, and Pleassants and his companions helped themselves. The Jersey police, still operating under German supervision, arrested them for stealing from vacant houses. Pleassants was sentenced to six months in prison, and the Germans deported him to serve his time at Fort de Hauteville near Dijon in France. Once he was released, being an enemy citizen meant he was transferred immediately to a civilian internment camp at Kreuzburg in Germany.
Conditions in these camps were poor, food was scarce, especially as the German war effort began to fail, and discipline was harsh. There was no contact with women. In December 1942, Pleassants and another internee named John Lyster, who would later also join the British Free Corps, tried to escape. They were caught and spent six months in a Gestapo prison.
According to Pleassants, what drove him toward the British Free Corps was simple. He wanted freedom. He wanted food. He wanted female company.
The organization that offered him those things was one of the strangest units of the entire war. The British Free Corps was the idea of John Amery, the wayward son of Leo Amery, who served as Secretary of State for India in Winston Churchill’s cabinet. John Amery was a convinced fascist who claimed to have fought for Franco during the Spanish Civil War, decorated by the Italians and Germans who supported the Nationalist cause, though some accounts suggest he only reached Spain in 1939 after the fighting was over. When war broke out, Amery was living in France and ingratiated himself with the Germans, who saw propaganda value in the son of such a prominent British figure.
In October 1942, he proposed the formation of a British unit recruited 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 Germans rejected that name as too close to the British Legion. The idea survived anyway, though Amery was given no command role.
He was sent to POW camps to give speeches and make radio broadcasts appealing to British prisoners to join up. Recruitment was a disaster. But a small number of malcontents, chancers, fascists, and oddballs were persuaded, and they were pulled out of their camps and brought to Berlin. The SS eventually took over the project, hoping at best to raise a single platoon of about thirty men to attach to one of the SS foreign divisions on the Eastern Front.
Even that modest goal proved nearly impossible. On the 1st of January 1944, the unit officially became the British Free Corps of the Waffen SS. Its members were issued uniforms with a distinctive collar badge showing three lions passant from the British Royal Coat of Arms, an English-language cuff title, and a small Union Flag badge above it. Pleassants joined in 1944 with the rank of SS Schütze, or private.
Much of what is known about his time in the unit comes from his memoir, Hitler’s Bastard, later edited by the author Ian Sayer. In that book, Pleassants claimed to have been invited to Berlin to make propaganda broadcasts for Germany, which was of course a treasonable offense. He also claimed to have met the two most important English-speaking collaborators the Nazis had. One was William Joyce, the Irish-American former senior British Union of Fascists leader who had fled to Germany in 1939 to avoid arrest and who broadcast throughout the war as Lord Haw-Haw.
The other was John Amery himself. Pleassants also claimed, perhaps less reliably, to have had an affair with Joyce’s wife, Eileen. Joining the SS sat oddly with Pleassants’ earlier pacifism. According to the historian Adrian Weale, whose book Renegades: Hitler’s Englishmen is the definitive account of this unit, Pleassants managed to avoid any real military service while in the SS.
The British Free Corps was not a happy unit. It was torn by rivalries among its recruits and frequently clashed with its German officers. Some members were given NCO rank, but most of them spent a great deal of time carousing in Berlin bars and living the high life. The unit’s bad reputation made recruitment even harder.
Because of his background in physical training, Pleassants became the unit’s PT instructor, responsible for keeping the men fit. But in August 1944, he led something of a mutiny. He and seven other members demanded to be sent back to their POW or internment camps. The SS had other ideas.
They stripped the men of their uniforms and sent them to a punishment camp near Schwerin, where Pleassants was put to work on a road-building gang. Meanwhile, the rest of the British Free Corps was dispatched to the SS Pioneer School at Dresden to become combat ready, and a few more recruits trickled in. In November 1944, Pleassants and some of the other mutineers were brought back into the unit. He put the Waffen SS uniform on again and resumed his role as PT instructor.
There were brief moments of something like normal life. Pleassants and a Scotsman named Alexander were both selected to box for the SS Pioneers against an SS police team in Prague. Pleassants won his match. In February 1945, he married Anneliese Nitsche, the secretary of one of the German officers leading the unit.
In January 1945, the British Free Corps reached its peak strength of twenty-seven trained men, not counting attached German staff. The problems inside the unit continued, but in February they were all given a harsh wake-up call. They were sent to Dresden, which had just been bombed to destruction. The men helped dig through the rubble, pulled out the trapped, and saw piles of bodies.
For many of them, the reality of war finally hit home. The time had come for the unit to prove itself in combat. In late February 1945, they were sent to Berlin and readied for service on the Oder front against the Soviets. Pleassants, however, managed to wangle a transfer.
Instead of fighting, he was sent around German barracks in the Berlin area giving exhibition boxing matches against the famous German champion Max Schmeling. The rest of the British Free Corps was sent to an emergency close combat training camp at Niemegk, northwest of Berlin, where they were made familiar with German weapons and issued with the StG 44 assault rifle. On the 15th of March, the unit was trucked to join the 11th SS Volunteer Panzergrenadier Division Nordland, composed of Norwegian, Danish, Dutch, and other European SS volunteers. A week later, on the 22nd of March, they were attached to the 11th SS Panzer Reconnaissance Abteilung at Groß-Glienicke, commanded by Sturmbannführer Rudolf Saalbach, a holder of the Knight’s Cross.
The unit was assigned to the third company and issued with an armored half-track and a Schwimmwagen amphibious jeep. Their orders were to dig trenches along the company’s perimeter. They stayed there for a month. They could see Red Army positions from their own trenches and came under sporadic Soviet artillery fire, but they were never sent into battle.
Then SS-Obergruppenführer Felix Steiner, who commanded the corps of which the Nordland Division was part, decided on advice to re-role the British Free Corps as truck drivers behind the lines. They joined Steiner’s headquarters transport company at Templin in Berlin. On the 16th of April 1945, the same day the massive Soviet Berlin Offensive began, they took up the job. They drove military trucks, directed traffic, and helped evacuate civilians, moving with Steiner’s headquarters to Neustrelitz.
This continued until the 29th of April. On that day, 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. From that point on, the men began to desert.
The war was obviously over, and they were terrified of being captured. The US Army reached Schwerin on the 2nd of May 1945, the same day Berlin surrendered. By then, the members of the British Free Corps were widely scattered, many trying to pass themselves off as recently released British prisoners of war. Over the following weeks, most of them were picked up, arrested, and sent back to Britain for interrogation and prosecution.
Eric Pleassants was not among them. He had swapped his SS uniform for a German army one and wrapped bandages around his head, hoping to pass as a wounded soldier in the chaos of Berlin’s last days. With his German wife, he tried to escape the city through the U-Bahn tunnels and later the sewer system. They made it out, but not without incident.
Soviet soldiers attempted to arrest him, and Pleassants was compelled to kill two of them with his bare hands. They headed to Dresden, where Pleassants hid in his in-laws’ house. The city was under American occupation at that point, but control soon passed to the Soviets. Pleassants made a little money performing as a strongman.
In 1946, the NKVD arrested him when they realized he was British. They assumed he was a spy. He was tried, convicted, and sent to a gulag at Vorkuta, far above the Arctic Circle. He spent seven years there.
In 1954, he was released and allowed to return to England. The British authorities decided that seven years in a Soviet gulag was punishment enough for his membership in the British Free Corps, and no charges were brought against him. Newsreel cameras caught him arriving home at his mother’s house in Norwich. He lived in Norwich for years, moving at last to the village of Ketteringham, where he settled into a house called North Lodge.
In November 1979, he was briefly back in the news. The Eastern Evening News reported that a new village sign had been made by sixty-six-year-old Eric Pleassants to mark the Diamond Jubilee of the Women’s Institute. His second wife, Pauline, was a member, and the local WI didn’t have the money for a sign, so Pleassants made it free of charge. The article made no mention of his wartime record, and for obvious reasons, it probably wasn’t widely known in the village.
Eric Pleassants died in 1998. His grave has never been found, and it’s likely he was cremated, his ashes scattered by his family. The only place his name is commemorated today is on that village sign, carved by the hand of a man who once wore the uniform of Hitler’s SS.
It stands in Ketteringham as an odd, quiet memorial to an Englishman who joined one of the most unsuccessful foreign legions the Nazis ever raised.
