John Amery

John Amery, 1932

John Amery (* 14. March 1912 ; † 19th December 1945 in London ) was a British fascist who during World War II for Nazi Germany against the government Churchill (who is also his own father, the politician Leopold Amery as Minister of India affairs belonged to) agitated.

Life

John Amery was born the son of the conservative politician Leopold Amery, who held various offices in the Lloyd George , Bonar Law and Baldwin governments between 1916 and 1929 . Amery's mother was a Protestant from Hungary of Jewish descent - it is still unclear whether Amery himself knew anything about his Jewish origins. As a child, Amery attended the Harrow Elite School. In the 1920s, Amery developed into a staunch anti-communist and began to develop strong sympathies for the ideas of European fascism .

In the early 1930s, Amery relocated to France after various economic failures in Great Britain . There he was temporarily close to the French fascist leader Jacques Doriot , with whom he traveled to Austria , Czechoslovakia , Germany and Italy in order to study the forces of fascism at work there. Amery claimed to his family that he had fought in the Spanish Civil War in 1936 as an espionage officer in an Italian volunteer brigade on the side of the nationalists under General Franco and had been awarded a medal of honor for his achievements. This claim, which is still widespread in the literature today, is incorrect: Amery first visited Spain in 1939 after the end of the civil war.

After the invasion of France by the German Wehrmacht in 1940 and the establishment of German occupation, Amery initially lived in Vichy France . Following an offer made by the German armistice negotiator, Count Ceschi, and with the help of the officer Werner Plack, Amery finally went to Germany in October 1942 in order to be politically active in the interests of the National Socialist regime and against the government of his native country. In Berlin , Amery met Adolf Hitler , who allowed him to stay in Berlin as a “guest of the Reich”. Here Amery initially joined the German-British committee consisting of British defectors.

From 1942 he worked on the formation of an association of British prisoners of war , who were to fight against the Soviet Union as defectors on the German side, modeled on the French Legion des Volontaires Français , which Doriot helped to create . This association, which Amery dubbed "The British Legion of St George" in its original drafts and which later went down in history as the British Free Corps , was only able to attract very few British prisoners of war and ultimately remained politically and militarily insignificant.

In 1943/44 Amery read various radio appeals to the British people in which he called for the overthrow of the Churchill government, for an end to the war against Germany and for the German side to join the war against Russia. In the spring of 1944, Amery was sent to Italy to assist Benito Mussolini in the puppet government of the Republic of Salò . In the last weeks of the war, Amery was captured by Italian partisans. Extradited to the British Government, Amery was charged with high treason in the fall of 1945 and sentenced to death by hanging on November 28, 1945 . The sentence was carried out on December 19 in Wandsworth Prison by the executioner Albert Pierrepoint . Amery is believed to be the only defendant in British judicial history to be found guilty of treason charges.

Works

• John Amery Speaks , ISBN 1-904197-00-0 .
• England and Europe , ISBN 1-899435-64-6 .

literature

• Adrian Weale: Patriot Traitors: Roger Casement, John Amery and the Real Meaning of Treason , ISBN 0-670-88498-7 .
• Rebecca West: The Meaning of Treason by Rebecca West , ISBN 0-670-46443-0 .

Individual evidence

1. ^ Paul Callan: A very English Nazi . In: Express.co.uk . February 16, 2008 ( express.co.uk [accessed February 1, 2018]).