British SS Officer, ex RAF, Pilots log books coming up for auction at work
Article about: These while not SS per say I though I would bring to your attention. They are coming up in my latest auction @bamfords as lot 2154 on June 13th. How many items belonging to a British SS man
British SS Officer, ex RAF, Pilots log books coming up for auction at work
These while not SS per say I though I would bring to your attention. They are coming up in my latest auction @bamfords as lot 2154 on June 13th. How many items belonging to a British SS man come up for sale? Very excited to offer these! The sale will go live online late this afternoon.
RAF Log Books to Pilot Officer Benson Railton Metcalf Freeman. RAF Log Books to a British RAF Officer who became a POW after being shot down over France in May 1940. He was was later convicted of treason for becoming an Officer in the SS-Standarte “Kurt Eggers” propaganda unit in WW2 and he also worked alongside William Joyce “Lord Haw-Haw” on “Germany Calling”. Pilot Officer Benson Railton Metcalf Freeman AKA SS-Untersturmführer Benson Railton Metcalf Freeman. He also went by the alias P. Royston.
121 page Mi5, Mi9 & Air Ministry (RAF Special Investigations Branch) file on him can be found in The National Archives. This contains a wealth of first hand information from both witness statements and those made by Freeman himself under interrogation, many in great detail. His main statement is 15 pages long. He mentions John Amery on several occasions and he’s clear Freeman was close to many high ranking Nazis. The intelligence file reveals British intelligence had been aware of what Freeman was up to from early on and he was immediately placed on a black list where all his letters home were copied and forwarded to Mi9 and RAF SIB and reports were made on him from the camp through the ‘Most Secret Channels’. They also sought to gather evidence though other camp inmates and later on from captured Germans. It is clear from very early on that they were gathering evidence to pursue a prosecution after the war. This file is a wealth of information and if you look closely at a signature in the file of Freeman, you will see it perfectly matches the writing of his name on the front of the Log Books.
A was statement made to the CIA, that was prepared for evidence for the Nuremberg Trial of war criminal SS-Obergruppenführer und General der Waffen-SS Gottlob Berger. Freemans evidence was in SUPPORT of Berger.
Benson Railton Metcalf Freeman, born on 6 October 1903, began his military career as an oflicer cadet at RMA Sandhurst in 1922. Two years later he was commissioned second lieutenant in the King's Own Royal Regiment. Developing an interest in flying, in 1926 and now a lieutenant he transferred to the RAF. He was posted as a flying officer to No.16 (Army Co-operation) Squadron at Old Sarum, near Salisbury on 22/08/1927. He later transferred to 26 Squadron at Catterick on 21/02/1929. This matches his Log Book and other sources.
In early 1931 he left the RAF to become a gentleman farmer in the quiet Gloucestershire village of Brockweir, near the Welsh border. He was known to be ardently anti-communist and anti-Semitic. He joined the British Union of Fascists in 1937, and was a paid up member when war broke out in 1939 but, rather than risk being called up into the ranks, he rejoined the RAF and was posted to No. 24 (Communications) Squadron at Hendon as a transport pilot. There is a detailed report from his CO in the archive files. Freeman also goes into detail about his time here. On 22nd May 1940, Freeman was ordered to fly with his squadron from Croydon to Merville in France. Whilst flying back to the U.K his aircraft was hit by anti aircraft fire over St Omer and and crash-landed near near Arques, resulting in him being captured by German soldiers. Whilst the RAF were sorting though his personal effects following his failure to return from Operations, his BUF ID card was found, which raised concerns internally and a file was opened. On 20th June, the Air Ministry wrote to the Provost Marshal - the chief of the RAF Police. The letter - marked "Secret and Personal" - states: "Amongst his kit we found the attached membership card of the British Union (of Fascists). He was a member of the Maidstone Branch. A copy of this card is in the archive file. Freeman was initially taken to Stalag IIa in Neu-Brandenburg. He was then transferred to Dulag-Luft near Frankfurt.
Interestingly he was close to Squadron Leader Roger Bushell here (Mastermind of The Great Escape). There was one occasion where Squadron Leader Bushell even praised Freeman for his presence of mind in causing a distraction when the German guards nearly discovered an escape tunnel. There were however some officers Freeman didn’t get along with as they held strong pro communist views and they frequently clashed when he made his own views well known. This caused friction and mistrust in the camp and it seemed mutually beneficial if Freeman was to leave. Freemans pro Nazi stance and BUF membership was well known to the Camp Commandant Major Theodor Rumpel with whom he often met with and referred to him as a personal and great friend, and he made arrangements for Freeman to be able to leave the camp under a parole not to attempt to escape. He initially stayed on a farm belonging to the family of a German camp officer called Lt. Eberhard, who was an ardent Nazi, before he was taken to Berlin where he met Dr Fritz Hesse where they discussed how he could be useful to the Nazi cause. Later he was recruited by the German Radio Corporation and took part in the 'Germany Calling' programme. The main presenter of this propaganda was William Joyce (Lord Haw-Haw). Freeman shared an office with another convicted British traitor, Norman Baillie-Stewart. Freemans job was to write scripts for Joyces program but also worked on one of his own. At the radio station Freeman, now using the name "P. Royston", presented a weekly programme called JAZZ Cracks, an odd mix of jazz and "wisecracks", which his former boss in Berlin described as being "anti-Jewish, and anti-Bolshevik, and criticisms of the British Government." Throughout this time he resided in Berlin and was paid a salary of 200 Marks per week. He was free to travel about and spent much of his time at lake Wannsee. He goes into great detail about this time in the statement in his files. In September 1944, whilst at a social event in Berlin, he had a chance meeting with Gunter d’Alquen, chief editor of the weekly Das Schwarze Korps, the official newspaper of the Schutzstaffel, and commander of the SS-Standarte Kurt Eggers. Taking a liking to Freeman and having joint views on the likelihood of the German defeat in the East, d’Alquen offered him a commission in the “Kurt Eggers Regiment”. Freeman joined the Waffen-SS in October 1944, where he made a declaration that he was “an Englishman of Aryan descent and have never, neither now nor previously, been a member of a free masons lodge nor any other secret society.” He was not required to command troops, but to vet propaganda material. In April 1945, as his office was being evacuated from Berlin, he was given the opportunity to fly an aircraft to Switzerland, but refused to abandon his SS comrades: 'I thanked them very much but said I would stay with them until the last day and what I had done was for the best and if certain people thought I was a traitor, I had much the same opinion of them!' Freeman gives an extremely vivid and detailed account on his final days with the Waffen-SS in the files which includes him personally flying a Fieseler Storch out of Potsdam to a Bavaria with SS officers including Gunter d’Alquen as the Soviets approached. Their plan initially was to approach the Americans and British with the hope of fighting alongside them against the Soviets. Since 1944, Mi5 had a "British Renegades Warning List" in operation, alerting Allied (SHAEF) forces in Europe to the traitors to look out for. Freeman - still using the name Royston - was eventually apprehended on May 9th when he surrendered to US forces near Lenggries in south-eastern Germany. He was brought bank to the UK where he was immediately arrested by the intelligence services. He was still hopeful that he would be able to fight against the Soviets. "The SS," he told his Mi5 interrogators, "has always been pro-English and anti-communist." His belief in the SS postwar remained absolute. He added that had he known earlier "what a sincere body, entirely pro-English" they were, he'd have joined the Waffen SS earlier”. He also offered to return to Germany in an effort to contact "the leaders of this organisation which has now gone underground" so that they could assist in what he predicted would be an inevitable war between Britain "and the Russians whose aim is to control Europe". He also said "the war would have ended long ago if Churchill, certain other leaders in this country and the Jewish financiers had been willing to fight the Bolshevik menace along with Germany". He was court-martialed at RAF Uxbridge in September 1945. He was charged under section 4(5) of the Air Force Act with voluntarily aiding the enemy whilst a prisoner-of-war and, under section 40, with accepting a salary from the enemy whilst a prisoner-of-war. He was found guilty on three out of four charges, including serving in the Waffen SS, working for the Germans and accepting money from them. He was very lucky as he initially faced the Death Sentence as reported by the Daily Mirror at the start of of trial in 1945. Freeman could have been sentenced to death for both of the first two charges, but instead was sentenced to 10 years of penal servitude and cashiered (lost his rank and dismissed from the RAF). This was an extremely lenient sentence for a traitor. Freeman was a British officer who'd not only broadcast Nazi propaganda (the crime which had cost Lord Haw-Haw his life) but had also joined the SS. You would have thought Freeman would have been relieved at not receiving the death sentence but he told his lawyer his sentence showed how "rotten" Britain was. "The Germans would have had the honesty to shoot me." In April 1947, he wrote from Wormwood Scrubs jail complaining he'd been "been imprisoned in the State's criminal establishments and my wife has been left to her own resources". Despite numerous appeals by his wife and friends to have his sentence commuted, it is believed that he served his full term in Leyhill Prison, Falfield, Gloucestershire.
Strangely, that is the last we hear of Benson Railton Metcalf Freeman. If he served his full sentence, he'd have been in his early 50s when he was released in 1955. But it is as if he just disappeared into thin air. His wife died in Ireland in the early 1970's.
It’s intriguing what may have became of him. Was he given a new identity and worked for the intelligence services? It was at a time where many people were given new lives if they were useful enough and he certainly had high level connections so that remains a possibility?
There’s also numerous articles from 1945 in the Newspaper Archives but as he was such a media sensation at the time, they are far too numerous to list. He was front page news in the Daily Mail.
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They sold yesterday for £1,700 hammer price. Pleased with the result.
Cheers, Ade.
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British SS Officer, ex RAF, Pilots log books coming up for auction at work
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