Army of Evil: A History of the SS (43 page)

The next day, Steiner sent Claye to visit the British Free Corps, who were still with the
Nordland
Division at this stage. They had been through a series of surprises. The first of these was the return of Thomas Cooper, who had been summoned by the SS-Main Office from his job with the
Leibstandarte
to take control of the BFC. Cooper had by then persuaded senior officers of the Germanic Panzer Corps that the BFC could only be a hindrance in battle and had organised a non-combatant role for them. The next shock was the appearance of Claye and they were even more surprised when he announced that he was the son of an earl and a captain in the Coldstream Guards and was going to lead them against the Russians. He also told them that they would be in no trouble with the British authorities, because Britain would be at war with Russia within a few days. None of this went down well with his audience: “You’ve come to drop them back in the shit after I just got them out of it!”
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Cooper shouted. Apparently taken aback, Claye commandeered a vehicle and made his way westwards, eventually meeting a British unit in the vicinity of Schwerin.

A few days later, the other British volunteers were withdrawn to the corps headquarters, where they were employed as drivers and on traffic control duty. As Germany collapsed around them, they were ordered further west. They surrendered to a US Army unit at the beginning of May.

After the war, John Amery pleaded guilty to high treason and was sentenced to death. He was executed in December 1945. Thomas Cooper was given the same sentence at his trial, but this was commuted to life imprisonment on account of his youth and his German ancestry. He eventually served just seven years. The majority of the British volunteers were given sentences ranging from life imprisonment to a few months. A few got away scot-free, including Claye, who flatly denied ever having served in the Waffen-SS.

Of the handful of Britons who served elsewhere in the Waffen-SS, only one, an RAF officer and former member of the British Union of Fascists, faced a court-martial. Railton Freeman had served for six months in the Kurt Eggers Regiment at the end of the war, having previously broadcast propaganda on German radio. During his interrogation in May 1945, he claimed to have seen a file containing more than eleven hundred applications from British POWs who wanted to fight the Russians but were not prepared to join the British Free Corps. He also suggested that the Waffen-SS hierarchy had seriously considered forming a British SS “regiment”—separate from the corps—possibly to be called the Oliver Cromwell Regiment.
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He was ultimately sentenced to ten years in prison.

T
HE
I
NDIAN
L
EGION
was perhaps the most bizarre foreign contingent within the Waffen-SS. Its existence was due largely to the efforts of one man: Subhas Chandra Bose.

Bose was born in India in 1897, the son of an affluent lawyer and Indian nationalist. After education in India and at Cambridge University, he joined the Indian civil service but soon resigned to become a
full-time activist in the independence movement. In contrast to the non-violence espoused by Mohandas Gandhi and his followers, Bose advocated a confrontational approach to the British rulers. As a result, he spent most of the inter-war years in prison or in exile. Nevertheless, he established himself as one of the leading radicals within the Indian National Congress, and he was a prominent politician in Calcutta.

However, the outbreak of war in 1939 caused deep divisions in the Indian independence movement. Most Indian politicians were hostile to the Axis and wished to help the Allied cause while still moving towards independence. A minority led by Gandhi opposed any Indian involvement in the war because of their adherence to non-violence, while an even smaller group, centred on Bose, argued that the Axis should be supported because the British were the real enemies of India. Bose was never a fascist, but he had travelled extensively in Europe in the 1930s, was married to an Austrian woman,
*
and admired the European dictatorships: for instance, he believed that an authoritarian political model would be required in the early stages of Indian independence.

Bose organised several anti-British demonstrations in Calcutta in October 1939, and as a result he was placed under house arrest. However, on 19 January 1941, he slipped away from his house, drove to Peshawar on the North-West Frontier, and was then spirited across the border into independent Afghanistan. From Kabul, he travelled to Moscow, then Rome and finally Berlin, where he arrived at the beginning of April. He was reunited with his wife and started work on his “Free India” movement, under the sponsorship of the German Foreign Office.

Just as Bose was doing this, General Erwin Rommel’s forces in North Africa managed to capture the 3rd (Indian) Motorised Brigade—which was attempting to defend Allied gains in Libya—almost
intact. When news of this reached Berlin, Bose sensed an opportunity to canvass support for a Free India force within the German armed forces. A Luftwaffe intelligence officer was dispatched to speak to all of the English-speaking Indians in the brigade in mid-May, and twenty-seven were transported to Berlin a few days later. Meanwhile, plans were made to move the rest of the brigade, together with other Indian prisoners, to a special camp at Annaberg.

Bose and other members of the Free India Committee spent the next six months trying to persuade the prisoners to join their cause. Finally, in January 1942, the committee, the German Foreign Office and the OKW jointly announced the formation of the Indian National Army at a ceremony in Berlin. Some six thousand potential recruits were moved to a new camp,
Arbeitskommando
(Labour Unit) Frankenburg, where military training commenced under the cover that the soldiers were still a prisoner-of-war labour unit. Then, in July, approximately three hundred of these Indians were moved again, this time to Königsbrück, where they were issued with German Army uniforms. These had a flash on the right sleeve depicting the green, white and orange tricolour of India with a leaping tiger superimposed on it, as well as the motto “
Freies Indien
”—“Free India.” Several Hindi-speaking German NCOs were drafted in to act as interpreters, but primarily English was used as the working language of the formation.

Over the following months, recruitment continued—using a combination of persuasion and compulsion—and by the spring of 1943 the Indian National Army (which was now also known as the Free India Legion) consisted of some two thousand men organised into three battalions and formally designated as Infantry Regiment 950.

Bose’s original hope had been that this new force would spearhead a German invasion of India, but this fantasy had been dispelled as soon as Germany had launched its attack on the Soviet Union. Instead, the Indian soldiers’ first assignments, in May and August 1943, were to construct defences on the Dutch North Sea coast and the west coast of France. Thereafter, they cooled their heels until
August 1944, when they joined the general evacuation of German forces from France, heading east until they reached the comparative safety of Hagenau, in Alsace. It was during this retreat that the legion saw its only action of the war—a series of skirmishes with resistance elements that left three Indian soldiers dead and a number of others wounded.

In September, control of the legion was handed over to the Waffen-SS, but this had minimal practical impact. SS-Senior Colonel Heinz Bertling was appointed commanding officer, but he took little interest in his new role and
de facto
command remained in the hands of the army’s Lieutenant Colonel Kurt Krappe, who had commanded the legion since its first deployment in the Netherlands. However, personnel records show that several Indians formally became officers of the Waffen-SS on 1 September,
⁴⁴
and new insignia—comprising an embroidered tiger’s head collar patch
⁴⁵
—were worn by both Indian and German members of the legion. The unit travelled on to Heuberg and remained there until the very last stages of the war, when it retreated towards Lake Constance before disintegrating.

Bose himself had left Germany in March 1943, before the legion had even been deployed for the first time. He managed to reach Japan, from where he sponsored the vastly more credible Far East version of the Indian National Army and set up the provisional government of “Free India” in Singapore. It is believed he died in an airplane crash in the last days of the war, although his body was never found.

Hitler gave his opinion of the German version of the Indian National Army in March 1945, when the Red Army was poised to cross the Elbe:

He was right. Once the German campaign had stalled in the Soviet Union, there was really no justification in maintaining the Indian National Army. With no prospect of it ever entering India, it was simply an insignificant work detail of dubious loyalty in possession of weapons and equipment that could have been better employed elsewhere. Furthermore, there was considerable internal strife between the true volunteers and those who had been press-ganged into the unit, and even more between Muslim, Sikh and Hindu recruits. At least one NCO—Corporal Mohammed Ibrahim, who had been an enthusiastic volunteer—was murdered by his own men.

A
SIDE FROM
H
OWARD
Marggraff, only a handful of US volunteers joined the Waffen-SS. Bizarrely, two of them were from Missouri.

Martin James Monti came from a prosperous, middle-class St. Louis family, descended from Swiss and Italian immigrants on his father’s side, and German immigrants on his mother’s. They were staunchly Catholic and isolationist, rather than pro-Axis or anti-American. Monti joined the US Air Force in January 1943 and was posted to Karachi in August 1944, aged just twenty-two. However, he became unpopular in his unit because of his views on the war in Europe, and on 2 October he went AWOL before hitching a lift on a military aircraft flying to Cairo.
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From there, he travelled to Naples and managed to steal a P-38 fighter, which he piloted behind German lines near Milan. He convinced his captors that he was a genuine defector, and at the end of November was transferred to Berlin. After more interrogation, this time by the Abwehr, he was released from captivity to work as a propaganda broadcaster. He recorded a few
programmes—using his mother’s maiden name, Wiethaupt—but these were deemed unsuccessful by the authorities.

With his broadcasting career seemingly over as soon as it had begun, Monti fell in with another Missourian Waffen-SS officer. The self-styled “Comte Pierre Louis de la Ney du Vair” had been born Perry Regester De Laney in Holcomb in 1907. De Laney’s father died when he was just seven years old but his uncle paid for his education at a military high school in Bell Buckle, Tennessee. During this time, he came under the influence of an aunt, a Frenchwoman who emphasised his own French origins (the De Laney family had emigrated to North America in the early eighteenth century), taught him French and called him “Pierre.” After high school, while working on the St. Louis
Post-Dispatch
, De Laney converted to Catholicism, having been raised a Lutheran, and was eventually offered a scholarship to study in Rome, which he duly accepted. He returned to St. Louis in 1932 and became Professor of Theology at Fontbonne College. However, while in Rome, he had applied for and been granted French citizenship via the French Embassy. Consequently, in 1935, he was called up for military service in the French Army. By now, he was going by the grandiose name of Pierre de la Ney du Vair and claiming lineal descent from the counts of Vair. He undertook his military service with great enthusiasm, gaining a reserve commission and serving with the 152nd Infantry Regiment at Colmar, Alsace. In May 1940, he and his family were living in Lausanne, Switzerland, where du Vair was supposedly operating as a French military intelligence agent. However, after the German invasion, they moved to occupied France.

Du Vair could best be described as a monarchist, French nationalist reactionary, but he was also a supporter of the anti-Semitic Charles Maurras, leader of
Action Française
, and was strongly Anglophobic. As such, his political views were quite in tune with those of the Vichy regime. He resigned his French Army commission in 1941, joined Pétain’s
Légion Française des Combattants
(a paramilitary ex-services organisation) and then transferred to the
Légion des Volontaires
Français
—the French legion within the German Army—with whom he saw action in the Soviet Union. After returning from the Eastern Front, he served with the collaborationist Vichy militia, the
Milice Française
, before transferring to the Kurt Eggers Regiment and working as a radio propagandist.

In Berlin, it seems that the sophisticated, highly educated du Vair took the immature Monti under his wing. He arranged for Monti to visit the scenes of Soviet atrocities in Hungary and compile reports to broadcast to American audiences. Monti formally joined the Waffen-SS at the beginning of April 1945, just as the Kurt Eggers Regiment was starting to disintegrate in the face of the Soviet advance. Du Vair was killed in an American air raid a few days later,
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while Monti left the German capital at the end of the month. Accompanying him were the Kurt Eggers Regiment’s commander, Gunter D’Alquen, SS-Major Anton Kriegbaum, Railton Freeman and several others. Commandeering an aircraft in Potsdam, they flew south-west before going their separate ways: Freeman remained in Bavaria, where he was arrested by the British; the Germans headed towards the mythical “Alpine Redoubt”;
*
while Monti travelled through Austria and into Italy, where he surrendered to an American unit. Tried and convicted initially for “desertion and misappropriation of government property,”
⁴⁹
and later for treason, he was eventually sentenced to twenty-five years’ imprisonment. He was paroled in 1960.
⁵⁰