The Traitors

“Unlike the Cambridge spies, the British renegades who threw in their lot with Hitler are not much written about,” said Adrian Weale in the Literary Review. Doubtless this is because the likes of Burgess and Blunt had a “meretricious Establishment glamour”, while those who wound up on Hitler’s side were “broadly cranks, weirdos and petty criminals”. In this “very readable” book, Josh Ireland tells the story of four British Nazis: William Joyce, John Amery, Harold Cole and Eric Pleasants. And of this quartet, Joyce – better known as Lord Haw-haw – is much the most interesting, said Lucy Hughes-hallett in The Times, not least “because his obnoxious political convictions were at least sincere”. A fervent Irish Unionist who “loved Britain”, Joyce joined Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists before emigrating to Germany in August 1939, where he achieved fame broadcasting in English from Berlin. Captured by the British after the War, he was hanged in 1946, declaring: “I am proud to die for my ideals.”

The other three were essentially unprincipled opportunists, said Alan Judd in The Spectator. Amery, son of a minister in Churchill’s war cabinet was, as Ireland puts it, an “amalgam of Reinhard Heydrich, Sid Vicious and Sebastian Flyte”. Cole, a Cockney conman, briefly worked for the Allies in Occupied France prior to switching sides; his betrayals “sent 150 or more Resistance fighters to their deaths”. Pleasants, a boxer and wrestler from Norfolk, was captured by the Germans and joined the Nazis primarily “to escape camp life”. Unusually for a history book, this is written mainly in the present tense, said Simon Heffer in The Daily Telegraph: the effect is disconcerting. That said, Ireland gives a “good flavour of the personality defects that caused men to betray their country”.