Book description
Of all the extraordinary individual accounts that have come out of
the Second World War and its aftermath, few can compare with that of
Eric Pleasants, a member of the 'bastard' British wing of Hitler's SS
- the British Free Corps. In this compelling autobiography, Pleasants
writes of the bizarre and traumatic years he spent as a prisoner of
the twentieth century's most notorious dictators.
A life-long pacifist, Pleasants spent the early years of the war on
occupied Jersey. He was imprisoned by the Nazis for petty crimes and
the years that followed held a whirlwind of unexpected turns. He lived
life on the run in occupied Paris, was captured and recruited into the
British Free Corps of the Waffen SS, found love with a young German
woman, witnessed the bombing of Dresden and attempted to escape from
Soviet troops along the sewers of Berlin. When the war ended,
Pleasants found himself on the Communist side of the Iron Curtain. By
now a strong man in a travelling circus, he was arrested by the KGB on
charges of espionage and sentenced to 25 years' slave labour in the
notorious camps of Artic Russia.
Only with Stalin's death in 1953 was Pleasants finally released from
his unique kind of purgatory, after nearly half a lifetime of
peripatetic nightmare. He died in 1998 at the age of 87. Hitler's
Bastard remains a remarkable testimony to his imperishable will to survive.
The book's editors, Second World War authority Ian Sayer and
biographer Douglas Botting, have previously co-authored three
bestselling books covering the same period:
Hitler's Last General
,
America's Secret Army
and
Nazie Gold
.
