Himmler's SS Traitor Hid in English Village

TL;DR

Eric Pleasants, a British Waffen SS member and traitor, escaped postwar justice and quietly retired in a Norfolk village he commemorated with a carved sign.

Key Points

• 1.Pleasants joined the SS not from ideology but for survival. A pacifist and former fascist-turned-conscientious objector, he joined the British Free Corps in 1944 after years in German internment camps, driven by promises of food, freedom, and access to women.
• 2.The British Free Corps was one of WWII's most dysfunctional units. Conceived by John Amery and taken over by the SS, it never exceeded 27 trained men, was plagued by internal mutinies, and spent more time drinking in Berlin bars than fighting.
• 3.Pleasants actively avoided combat despite wearing SS uniform. He exploited his physical training background to become the unit's PT instructor and arranged exhibition boxing matches against Max Schmeling to escape frontline deployment on the Oder.
• 4.The BFC saw brief frontline service in 1945 before collapsing. Attached to the 11th SS Nordland Division at Groß-Glienicke, they dug trenches and endured Soviet artillery before being reassigned as truck drivers under SS-Obergruppenführer Felix Steiner, disbanding on April 29, 1945.
• 5.Pleasants escaped Berlin through sewers and killed two Soviet soldiers bare-handed. Disguised in a German army uniform with head bandages, he fled with his German wife Anneliese through U-Bahn tunnels, but was later arrested by the NKVD in 1946 and sentenced to 7 years in the Vorkuta gulag.
• 6.Britain declined to prosecute Pleasants, and he quietly lived out his days in Ketteringham. Released in 1954, British authorities deemed his gulag sentence sufficient punishment; he moved to the Norfolk village in the 1960s and in 1979 carved its village sign — his only public memorial — without locals knowing his SS past.