At the height of World War Two, the eldest son of a British statesman
would shock the establishment by declaring his support for the Nazis.
John being John, he tended to completely ignore the consequences of his actions.
And actively attempting to recruit
his fellow countrymen to fight for the Führer too.
You wouldn't want him running a bath for you let alone setting up a military unit.
This is the true story of John Amery, Britain's Nazi traitor.
John Amery was born on 14 March 1912 in Chelsea, London.
The first of two sons, John's father, Leopold, was then a high-ranking British statesman
and would later go on to serve in Winston Churchill's wartime cabinet.
Although it was clear, even at an early age,
that John would go against the grain of his dutiful father.
John Amery's behaviour was pretty extreme.
From a very early age, John showed abnormal patterns of behaviour.
He would get drunk at any opportunity
and this was a feature of his life from early teens onwards.
But sexually he was firstly extremely promiscuous.
He had an obsession with prostitutes and having sex with prostitutes.
Eventually, he entered into forms of marriage
with three prostitutes over the course of his life.
In 1936, following a period of bankruptcy,
the 26 year old John Amery fled to France
where he would experience his first dalliance with fascism.
He tended, as many Nazi sympathisers do, to conflate bolshevism - communism,
with Jewishness, despite the fact he had a Jewish background.
With the outbreak of World War Two, John, still residing in France,
had found himself caught in a precarious position
between his home country and his increasingly far right leanings.
John was rather taken aback by the fact
that Britain had formed an alliance with the Soviet Union,
which his worldview absolutely precluded any kind of
dealing with with a communist country.
And he started looking for ways
in which he could help the effort against the Soviet Union.
John soon made contact with the German Foreign Office
to express interest in helping their war effort.
The really interesting thing for the Nazis about John was his father.
He was serving in Churchill's cabinet as the Secretary of State for India and Burma.
The Nazis believed that John would be
listened to by the highest levels of British government.
Their plan would be to use their newly acquired renegade
to record a series of propaganda talks to be broadcast on German radio.
Included within John's own rhetoric
would be specially inserted paragraphs to communicate with the British
that the Nazis were still open to a previously rejected peace agreement.
We are now going to hear Mr John Amery.
The Amerys were absolutely devastated by the broadcasts.
John's mother, Bryddie, she refused to believe it was him.
She said the Germans just found somebody who sounded like him.
John was not an effective broadcaster
so he had a rather sort of drawly, squeaky, aristocratic voice.
He couldn't pronounce his 'R's properly.
Secondly, the content of the talks was just garbage.
It was really sort of anti-Semitic catcalling.
The listening figures just dropped like a rock thereafter
because he wasn't saying anything that people wanted to hear.
With Amery's broadcasts failing to cause an impact back home,
John offered the Nazis a second and more ambitious proposal.
The second part of John's offer to the Nazis was a military unit to fight
against the Soviet Union, composed of British ex-POWS.
And this was something he wanted to call the British Legion of St George.
And this idea was eventually passed up to
Hitler at the Führer headquarters, who thought it was a tremendous idea.
However, the Nazis by now were under no illusion of
John Amery's severely limited capabilities.
You wouldn't want him running a bath for you,
let alone setting up a military unit.
So Amery was out of the picture as far as the military unit was concerned
but it was still being pushed forward by the Waffen SS.
And so in the autumn of 1943, they'd got about five or six ex-fascist volunteers
and came up with its name, The British Free Corps.
The British Free Corps were a military unit used
primarily for propaganda purposes.
The Nazis had expected a few hundred British POWs to join
but only managed around 30 at any one time.
By military standards, a failure.
In the spring of 1945, as Allied forces began their final assault on Berlin,
John had accepted an offer by Italy's fascist leader Benito Mussolini,
to relocate to northern Italy.
It was in Milan, where John's situation quickly took a turn for the worse.
John attempted to escape and was caught by a group of partisans
and handed them over to a representative of the British army,
one Captain Alan Whicker of the Army Film and Photographic Unit,
later to be the famous TV correspondent.
John was very pleased to have been captured by Alan Whicker.
He said to him, "I'm so glad to see you.
I thought they were going to kill me," and they probably were.
Now, back in London, the 33 year old John Amery entered the dock
at the Old Bailey with charges of high treason,
a charge that, if convicted, would be punishable by death.
It's normally hotly contested that
people clearly don't want to be hanged and so they fight.
They fight tooth and nail these charges.
When John went in front of the Old Bailey,
the charges were read out and he pleaded guilty to all of them.
On the morning of 19 December 1945,
John Amery placed in a holding cell at Wandsworth Prison,
met with the infamous executioner Albert Pierrepoint for the first and last time.
John gave one final repartee.
"I've always wanted to meet you Mr Pierrepoint but not,
of course, under these circumstances."