RAF officer who was shot down ..& joined Nazis
Traitor wrote scripts for Lord Haw-Haw
THE logbooks of a treacherous RAF officer who helped the Nazis after being shot down are due to go under the hammer.
Pilot Officer Benson Freeman graduated from Sandhurst Military Academy before joining the RAF.
But his commanding officers did not know he was a fascist.
The upper-class airman secretly joined Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists (BUF) in the 1930s.
At the start of the Second World War, Freeman – a former public schoolboy – joined 24 squadron piloting transport planes to France.
In May 1940, while flying back from Merville, in northern France, his plane was hit by anti-aircraft fire and crash-landed.
Freeman was captured by the Germans and sent to a PoW camp near Frankfurt. RAF staff looking through the missing airman’s belongings found his BUF membership card. Freeman’s Nazi sympathies became known to his German camp commandant and he was released and sent to live on a farm.
He was then taken to Berlin and used by the German Radio Corporation for its “Germany Calling” propaganda programme.
He worked with William Joyce – nicknamed Lord Haw-Haw
– to write scripts and produce Englishspeaking programmes.
In October 1944, as Germany retreated across Europe, Freeman joined the Waffen-SS and helped to vet Nazi propaganda material.
In April 1945, he fled Berlin and flew to Bavaria, where he was captured by the Allies.
Freeman was returned to the UK, where he was arrested and charged with aiding the enemy whilst a PoW and accepting a salary from the enemy. He was found guilty and jailed for 10 years. Freeman was released in 1955 and was never seen or heard of again. His wife Muriel died in her native Ireland in the 1970s. Two of Freeman’s pre-war flying logbooks are now being sold by Bamfords Auctioneers, of Derby, with a pre-sale estimate of £1,500. The logs chart RAF training flights in the 1920s as well as civilian flights in various aircraft. Adrian Stevenson, of Bamfords, said: “They came to us via a person who collects RAF logbooks. He did some research into Freeman. They are the possessions of a traitor.” The auction will be held on Monday.