Execution of son of English Lord, prostitute & Nazi collaborator: Hitler's British idiot John Amery

The 10th of July 1940. World War II, the  skies over southern England. The German Air Forces – the Luftwaffe – launch a massive aerial  campaign against the United Kingdom in what will become known as the Battle of Britain.

For months,  German bombers and fighter planes hammer British airfields, ports, and cities such as London,  Birmingham, and Coventry, in an attempt to gain air superiority ahead of a possible invasion. Despite the odds, the Royal Air Force holds firm, and by October 1940, Hitler is forced  to abandon his plans to invade Britain. The country remains defiant, as the British  people endure the bombings with resilience, and the nation becomes a beacon of resistance  against Nazi Germany in Western Europe.

But not everyone shares this determination to  fight back. While most Britons rally behind Churchill’s call to never surrender, there are  those who look to Hitler with admiration and openly sympathize with the Nazi regime. One of  the most notorious British Nazi collaborators, who will pay the highest price for  betraying his country, is John Amery.

John Amery, one of two children, was born on  the 14th of March 1912 in London in England. His father, Leo Amery, was a British statesman,  a Member of Parliament, and later a Conservative government minister. Leo's mother was born  in the Jewish quarter of Budapest and came from an intellectual Jewish-Hungarian family. 

But Leo chose to hide his background, probably because he feared it could jeopardise his ascent  through the ranks of the Conservative Party. John’s mother was Florence Greenwood, a daughter of the Canadian barrister and younger  sister of the 1st Viscount Greenwood. From a very young age, John displayed behaviours  that deeply worried his family and baffled those tasked with his care and education.

At the  age of two, one of his nannies described him as “a very hard child” who suffered  from violent tantrums, and by five, his teacher observed that he was “an extremely  abnormal boy” with a disturbing inward focus and a “fixed attitude of an abnormal type. ” In 1922,  when John was ten years old, his father, by then a sitting Conservative Member of Parliament,  was appointed First Lord of the Admiralty. The family moved into Admiralty House on Whitehall, a  prestigious address that stood in stark contrast to the growing instability of their son.

John began his formal education at Miss Ironside’s School, a progressive private  school for upper-class children, where the headmistress quickly labelled him “unteachable. ”  He cycled through a string of private tutors, none of whom managed to bring him under  control. Eventually, like his father before him, he was sent to Harrow, one of Britain’s most  elite public schools.

But John’s rebellious nature became immediately apparent. He was caught  sneaking out at night to attend London nightclubs, engaging in behavior far beyond his years. The  1926 Harrow punishment book, records a sanction for “shop stealing and moral breakdown.

” His  housemaster remarked that he was “without doubt, the most difficult boy I have ever tried to  manage. ” Distressed by their son’s behaviour, Leo and his wife took John to see a psychologist,  Dr Maurice Wright, who concluded that the boy had “no moral sense of right and wrong. ” In a last attempt to stabilise his development, John was sent to a school for English boys in  Switzerland.

But the result was disastrous. He returned home having contracted syphilis, a  condition that would affect him for years. He told his tutor that he had caught it by prostituting  himself to men.

Despite his chaotic upbringing, John was intellectually capable and, in  1929, secured a place at Oxford University. Instead of pursuing higher education, John  turned down his place at Oxford and set his sights on the film industry. He briefly worked  as an assistant director for a small travelling company, but his ambitions quickly outpaced his  experience.

With the charm and self-confidence that would later define his reputation as a  manipulator, he convinced several friends and members of his well-connected family to invest in  a film project titled Jungle Skies, to be shot in Africa. The proposed budget was £100,000. However,  the project never materialised.

Around this time, he suddenly announced his intention to marry  Una Eveline Wing, an actress he claimed would help restore the confidence of his creditors  by virtue of her supposed wealth. In reality, Una was known to police as a common prostitute.  The two eventually married in Greece and later settled in Paris, funding their extravagant  lifestyle through a combination of borrowing from acquaintances and pawning valuables.

In Paris, John’s eccentricity only grew. He often carried his childhood teddy bear with him  to cafés, placing it beside him at the table, buying it drinks, and even comics to read.  He also began carrying a gun at all times, convinced that his creditors were trying to  hunt him down.

According to Una, John continued working as a male prostitute and engaged in  frequent visits to brothels. Politically, he began to shift. A staunch anti-Communist, John  embraced fascism as a necessary counterbalance to the spread of Bolshevism.

In 1936, he was  officially declared bankrupt. He left his wife in London and travelled to Spain, where  he supported Franco’s fascist forces during the Spanish Civil War, involving himself  in gun-running and even engaging in combat. He later claimed to have witnessed the horrors  of Communist torture chambers in Barcelona, experiences that deepened his ideological hatred.

Around this time, he came under the influence of  French fascist leader Jacques Doriot and his newly formed French Popular Party. He began travelling  with members of the movement through Austria, Italy, and Germany, eager to witness  the impact of fascist rule firsthand. The Second World War started on the 1st of  September 1939 when Nazi Germany invaded Poland.

John returned to Paris, where he had a new  girlfriend, Jeanine Barde, who worked as a prostitute. After the fall of France and the  establishment of the Vichy regime in June 1940, he initially remained in unoccupied  France. In the eyes of Nazi officials, Amery’s family name and political connections  made him an unusual asset.

In October 1942, with the assistance of German officer Werner  Plack and the support of Count Ceschi, a German armistice negotiator, John relocated  to Berlin to begin a new chapter in service of the Nazi cause. There, he was  received by Adolf Hitler himself, who approved his presence in Germany and granted  him the status of a "guest of the Reich. " Seen as a political trophy, a British  aristocrat who had turned against his homeland, John was quickly pushed into Nazi propaganda  efforts.

He was offered the opportunity to speak directly to British audiences via German  state radio, and on the 19th of November 1942, he made his first broadcast. Framing himself  as a patriotic Englishman, he declared: “A crime is being committed against  civilisation! You are being lied to, your patriotism, your love for our England  is being exploited by people who for the most part hardly have any right to be English.

Between  you and peace lies only the Jew and his puppets. ” This was the first of several broadcasts  in which John called for the overthrow of Churchill’s government, denounced the war  effort, and urged his countrymen to support Nazi Germany’s campaign against the Soviet Union. Eventually, as his usefulness to Nazi propaganda efforts waned, he returned to Paris. 

There, together with Michelle Thomas, another woman known to French police as a  prostitute, John began working on a new idea: the creation of a pro-German British military  unit. According to some sources Thomas was his lover, other sources claim that she was  his bigamously-married wife. His proposal was to recruit British prisoners of war to fight  alongside the Germans against the Soviet Union.

Even his own father would later call this plan  "undoubtedly his most heinous offence. " The project made little progress until early 1943,  when John reconnected with Jacques Doriot, with whom he had worked previously. Encouraged by  Doriot’s success in recruiting French volunteers, he revived his plan and aimed to form a core  group of fifty to one hundred men to be used for propaganda purposes and to potentially  be expanded into a larger fighting force.

John’s first official recruiting attempt took  place at the Saint-Denis prisoner-of-war camp outside Paris, where he addressed a group of 40 to  50 British and Commonwealth prisoners of war. He handed out printed material and spoke passionately  about the supposed need to fight Bolshevism, but the reception was overwhelmingly negative, with  most inmates rejecting his appeal outright. His initial recruitment drive was a failure.

Still,  he persisted and eventually found two men who showed interest. Only one of them, Kenneth Berry,  actually joined what would later be called the British Free Corps. John’s involvement with the  unit ended in October 1943, when the Waffen-SS, the military branch of the SS, decided his  services were no longer required.

After Amery, who had served as a useful idiot of Nazi propaganda  was dismissed, control of the project passed into other hands, and the unit was formally renamed. In 1944, John travelled to Italy at the invitation of the Italian dictator Benito Mussolini who  was attempting to maintain the remnants of his fascist regime with German support. However,  by this time, the Axis powers were in retreat, and Italy was descending into chaos.

While  there, John was captured by Italian partisans. He reportedly expressed relief when British forces  arrived to take him into custody. According to Captain Alan Whicker, the young officer sent  to bring him in, John greeted him by saying: “Thank God you're here.

I thought  they were going to shoot me. ” John was transferred to an internment camp in  the town of Terni, where he was interrogated by a team of British investigators. The  officers found him strangely detached from the seriousness of his situation.

John spoke at  length about personal possessions he had lost, including his childhood teddy bear and his wife’s  fur coats, appearing far more concerned about missing belongings than the charges he would soon  face. At one point, he told the investigators: “I don’t suppose for a moment they’ll  bring a charge against me, but if they did, of course, my father would see to it. ” John was eventually flown back to England.

In a symbolic moment, he arrived dressed in  full fascist uniform, complete with jackboots. He was held in a London prison to await trial and  charged with eight counts of high treason. Under British law, the penalty for treason was death,  but his family launched a desperate campaign to save him, calling in political favours and even  petitioning the King.

His younger brother Julian argued that John had taken Spanish citizenship  and therefore could not legally be guilty of treason against Britain. Meanwhile, his lawyer  attempted to present evidence of mental illness, supported by John’s father, Leo, who believed  his son was unstable. Despite these efforts, the court did not accept any argument  based on diminished responsibility.

In a dramatic and unexpected turn, on the  very first day of his trial on the 28th of November 1945, John pleaded guilty to all eight  charges of treason and was sentenced to death. The entire hearing lasted just eight minutes. John Amery was 33 years old, when on the 19th of December 1945, he was hanged by the  British executioner Albert Pierrepoint.

According to reports, Amery maintained a  strange composure until the very end and as he approached the gallows, he is said  to have turned to Pierrepoint and said: “Mr Pierrepoint, I’ve always wanted to meet you,  but not, of course, under these circumstances. ” Thanks for watching the World History  Channel be sure to like and subscribe and click the bell notification  icon so you don't miss our next episodes we thank you and we'll  see you next time on the channel.