by Jimmy Burns
By the autumn of 1944, the Allies had been advancing rapidly across Europe, overrunning towns and villages with minimum resistance, watched by a civilian population that had spent most of the war believing in Hitler’s invincibility. The reports filed by Sentís and Fernández Armesto conveyed some of the horror while making clear that Hitler’s Germany had been resolutely defeated.
And yet even at this late stage in the war the British embassy in Madrid found itself immersed in fresh controversy from an unexpected quarter. It was around this time, in early May 1945, that Burns heard the news that the wayward – some thought him degenerate – thirty-year-old oldest son of Leo Amery, a close friend of Samuel Hoare, had had his brief career as a Nazi propagandist cut short by his capture by Italian partisans at the end of the war.
John Amery was interned in northern Italy before being brought back to the UK, under arrest, by Leonard Burt, a Scotland Yard detective on secondment to MI5. Four months later, in early September, his brother Julian, later a prominent Conservative MP, arrived in Madrid in a desperate attempt to save John from the gallows.
John, or ‘Jack’ as he was known to family and friends, had told his defence lawyers that while in Spain during the civil war he had been granted Spanish citizenship. The legal advice he received was that such an admission, if supported by evidence, would make it difficult if not impossible for the British government to proceed with a case of treason against him in a British court.
The Amery case was further complicated by the unpublicised involvement of Hoare. In March 1942, while serving as ambassador in Madrid, Hoare had received a letter from Leo Amery expressing his gratitude for the ‘parcel of warm things’ that Lady Maud had sent Jack. The letter also thanked Hoare for the contacts he had provided Jack in unoccupied France.
The close friendship which bound Samuel and Maud Hoare to Leo and Florence Amery (John’s parents) dated back to the early part of the century when the heads of each family made their way, thanks to privileged upbringings and a common political allegiance to the Conservative Party, effortlessly into the higher echelons of power. Samuel Hoare was ten years younger than Leo Amery, but both had long mixed in similar social circles, having been educated at the exclusive boy’s school Harrow, as Churchill had also been. Later, both Hoare and Amery served in Andrew Bonar Law’s government, then in that of Stanley Baldwin (another Old Harrovian), Hoare as Secretary of State for Air, Amery as First Lord of the Admiralty and subsequently as Colonial Secretary. When the Conservatives joined the National Government of Ramsay MacDonald in 1931, Hoare became Secretary of State for India while Amery pursued an active political career, as an MP, a director of several companies and a member of the Empire Industries Association.
When Hoare was later forced to resign over his apparent ‘sellout’ to Mussolini over Abyssinia and another clash with Churchill following their disagreement over the India Act, Amery was again at his side.
After the outbreak of war, it was Hoare (the appeaser) who became exiled from Churchill’s cabinet, while Amery returned as Secretary of State for India. Amery was disappointed not to form part of Churchill’s war cabinet, but made the most of the position he was offered, while maintaining his close personal ties with Hoare once his friend had been posted as ambassador to Madrid.
By then both Jack and his young brother Julian had become embroiled in the politics of Spain. Of the two, Julian had the more high-profile involvement in the civil war, on Franco’s side. Julian was a first-year Oxford undergraduate when, in 1937, a year after the outbreak of war in Spain, he met Franco’s representative in London, the Duke of Alba, and arrangements were made for him to go to Spain as an observer attached to Nationalist forces.
Once across the Spanish border, Julian travelled extensively, visiting a military hospital in San Sebastián and the Nationalist headquarters in Burgos. From there he joined the international press corps on the Aragón Front, with Franco’s troops poised to cut Barcelona off from Republican-held Valencia, a defining moment of the war. In Huesca, Julian came across ‘apocalyptic horror’: a cemetery which had been desecrated by Republicans, with some of the skeletons rearranged round a card table, a bottle of wine in one hand, a glass in the other. Other skeletons had been entwined, as if dancing in a grotesque embrace of death.
Joining the Nationalist advance near Lérida, and coming under bombardment from Republican artillery, Julian shared cover in a shell hole with Peter Kemp, another of the few Englishmen who had volunteered to fight for Franco. Julian then drove south to Seville, before returning to England via Gibraltar. Once back in Britain, Julian found himself very much in demand from Conservatives and Catholics in universities, publishing and the media as a public speaker, his pro-Franco utterances fuelling the propaganda war against the left.
He returned to Burgos as an accredited correspondent with the Daily Express, reaching Madrid just a few hours after the city was ‘liberated’ by Franco’s advance troops, continuing to write articles broadly sympathetic to the Nationalist cause. Jack was also in Spain during the civil war, although the precise nature of his activity became a subject of dispute. According to Julian, his brother joined the Spanish Foreign Legion in mid-March 1937, although entries in his passport showed him departing from Lisbon and arriving in Genoa at that time. He later suggested to his father that he may have been involved in running German guns to Spain, and had spent some time in secret on Spanish soil.
When Hoare was appointed ambassador to Spain in 1940, Jack was living in Portugal, desperately short of money and under pressure from his father to report for service for King and Country, while secretly suspected by MI5 of being involved in diamond smuggling. Within two years, it was Jack’s collaboration with Nazi Germany which was becoming of growing covert interest to British intelligence.
The contents of the diplomatic bag from the British embassy in Madrid, secretly intercepted by MI5, showed that both Hoare and his wife had agreed to act as conduits for clothes, money and letters sent by Leo to his oldest son. Jack was by then living in France, actively broadcasting on behalf of Nazi Germany even as his health deteriorated from alcoholism and TB.
‘I wonder if I might trouble you to put a stamp on the enclosed letter and have it dropped into a letterbox in France,’ Leo had written to Hoare. A father’s protective love for the prodigal son meant that Leo had yet to come to terms with the perception in the corridors of power in Whitehall that Jack was an enemy of the state. Similarly, Hoare appears to have been in denial about the security implications of his actions and those of his wife in deliberately choosing not to use the legal channels open to them for communicating with their son, via the International Committee of the Red Cross.
The suggestion Hoare made in a letter to Leo that Jack might be useful as a semi-official agent of the British embassy in unoccupied France defied credibility given Jack’s record of collaboration with Vichy. Hoare’s misuse of diplomatic privilege in a gesture of solidarity with an old political chum was at best a serious misjudgement, at worst a conspiracy of betrayal of the Allied cause.
One person who openly admitted many years later to have been with Jack in Burgos was Burns. It was in 1938, at the height of the Munich crisis, and Burns, together with Gabriel Herbert, had driven to the Nationalist headquarters with an ambulance donated by English Catholics. Burns described how one evening he found himself in a room reserved for the foreign press, ‘glued to the radio, in the company of John [Jack] Amery and a tall blond man with a Nazi buttonhole badge’, listening to the latest BBC bulletins about the invasion of Czechoslovakia. Burns recalled the ensuing conversation thus: ‘“We’ll squash those dwarfs flat,” said the Nazi at one point. I glared at him and retorted that in that case he would eventually be squashed flat himself and the swastika banished from the earth. John Amery, the only witness to this clash, was silent, withdrawn.’
Burns described Amery as a ‘romantic figure who had taken up the Nationalist cause, leading him into later and deeper involvement with the A
xis as a propagandist in Italy’. He was, in Burns’s view, ‘misguided but never malevolent and certainly not guilty of any bloody act’.
It was on such sympathies in the British embassy in Madrid, together with the friends in the Franco regime he had made during the civil war, that Julian Amery counted when he came to Spain to plead on his brother’s behalf.
While Hoare had left Spain in January, the Amerys depended on at least two allies among those who had served under him. One was Burns, the other his most recent recruit, Laing, the young ex-Grenadier guardsman turned spy.
How much Burns knew of Hoare’s contacts with the Amerys is uncertain. However, given his close working relationship with his ambassador, it is at least possible that Burns did know and felt comfortable about not reporting it to London. Burns not only had enormous respect for Julian’s pro-Nationalist stance during the civil war, he also shared common friends in SOE, which Julian had joined after the outbreak of war.
Now that Julian had ‘gallantly’ come to Madrid to try and save his brother, Burns was willing to give him all the support he could muster. He had no doubt – for that is what he had been told by his own sources in the Franco regime – that Jack had indeed been granted Spanish nationality, as he had informed his lawyers, and that any trial for treason in a British court was a miscarriage of justice.
Nonetheless, the Foreign Office regarded the Amery case as one of great sensitivity and insisted that Julian’s trip to Madrid be handled with maximum discretion. So, rather than booking him into the Ritz or the Palace where the embassy had reserved rooms, Burns arranged for him to stay in the flat of his deputy, Laing. Laing and Julian knew each other from Oxford and had mixed in similar social circles in London. But the accommodation served an added operational purpose which was to keep Julian’s visit carefully monitored. Laing’s flat was a block away from the embassy and even nearer to a separate building used by British intelligence. It was the best ‘safe’ house the embassy could offer.
Laing and Burns were more than happy to facilitate his access to senior figures in the Spanish regime in the hope that they might help to save Jack’s life. Soon after Julian’s arrival, they succeeded in getting Ernesto Giménez Caballero, the regime’s main ideologue, to arrange a meeting with Franco, with Laing providing his car and chauffeur. Laing forgot to tell the chauffeur to remove the Union Jack before he set off, so that the visit took on an official note, much to the embarrassment of the Foreign Office.
London was furious and Burns was instructed to give Laing an official reprimand. What Julian was unaware of was that the entire visit was being secretly tracked by a sector of British intelligence with a very different agenda from that of Julian’s official chaperones – one that was uncompromisingly anti-Francoist and that wished Jack Amery to stand trial and subsequently to be be found guilty.
This sector was heavily influenced by Philby. By the spring of 1944, Philby, highly regarded by his colleagues and moving fast up the promotion ladder, had been moved from the Iberian section to a new department within SIS with responsibility for setting up anti-Russian networks in Eastern Europe. But he kept a watching brief on Spain, using the influence he enjoyed across Whitehall to counter the British embassy’s attempt to engage with leading members of the Franco regime and dissident Nazis.
It is almost certain that Philby would have strongly approved of, if not had a more direct role in, the decision to have the resident SOE officer in Madrid, Squadron Leader Park, join the embassy team officially assigned to accompany Julian Amery while in Spain. Unknown to Amery, Park’s mission was to pass as much politically incriminating evidence as he could back to SIS and MI5 to be used in court against Jack. Thus the MI5 officer in charge of Jack Amery’s case made much of the fact that his brother not only met with fascist ideologues such as Giménez Caballero but also General Muñoz Grandes, the man who had been in charge of the Spanish Blue Division that had fought alongside the Germans on the Russian front.
Julian pushed on regardless, obtaining sworn affidavits from people who had known Jack during the civil war, a document purporting to show that he had indeed enlisted on 17 March in the Spanish Foreign Legion, and a separate witness statement, supported by Burns, from Serrano Súñer, Franco’s former foreign minister, confirming Jack’s Spanish citizenship. A defence lawyer in the Spanish embassy regarded the statement as ‘conclusive evidence according to Spanish law’.
But such efforts were to no avail. MI5 came up with their own document listing Jack as a passenger on board a Dutch merchant ship sailing from Lisbon to Genoa during a ten-day period in March 1937. MI5 claimed that the ship’s log showed Jack to be the only passenger on board, and that the vessel was at sea on the day of his ‘enlistment’ in the Spanish Foreign Legion. Days later, Major Henry Pakenham, an MI6 officer in Madrid, filed a report to MI5 accusing Julian, and by implication those helping him in his investigation in Spain, of being involved in a conspiracy to manufacture evidence and documents.
In the end the fate of Jack Amery was sealed by the machinations of Spanish politics and the intrigue of international diplomacy. The shifting post-war power balance in the Franco regime, and pressure exercised by sectors of the Foreign Office, resulted in the Spanish Ministry of the Interior and the Spanish embassy in London refusing to back the defence’s claim. Franco realised that ditching Amery was perhaps a price worth paying in order to maintain some sort of relationship with the generally antagonistic post-war Labour government. Within Whitehall there were those who did not relish the idea of a protracted trial airing in public the dirty linen of Amery’s contacts with the Nazis, and the potentially even more embarrassing tensions and contradictions of British policy towards wartime Spain.
On 28 November 1945 Jack Amery pleaded guilty, having convinced himself and his family that he would be spared the death penalty. In fact being found guilty of treason carried an automatic death penalty in those days. His barrister advised him to plead not guilty and the trial judge went to great lengths to ensure he knew the consequences of ignoring the advice. It has been argued that Amery was dying of TB and wanted to spare his parents the embarrassment of a trial. He never appealed the death sentence, nor did he ask for the sentence to be commuted. He was hanged at Wandsworth prison, three weeks later, on 19 December after the Home Secretary resisted a last-ditch campaign for clemency from family, friends and lawyers, based on a claim of insanity. One member of Jack’s family, his uncle-in-law, Hamar Greenwood, made a personal appeal to Clement Attlee based on the apparent inhumanity of executing someone for his opinions rather than his actions. That was also rejected. Jack Amery was condemned on his record of broadcasting Nazi propaganda on a regular basis and also of trying to raise battalions among British POW’s to fight the Soviets.
In the end those closest to Jack, led by his father Leo, remain convinced that he had been a victim of political necessity. Having seen the wider conservative establishment saved the embarrassment of a trial, a Labour government was in the mood to teach it a severe lesson, that no one is above the law. Samuel Hoare was nevertheless undoubtedly lucky to have escaped from the whole Amery debacle without having to answer in public for his collaboration. So, too, were Burns and Laing.
On 8 May, VE Day, there were no euphoric mass street gatherings in Madrid, as occurred in other European and American cities. Days earlier, the news of Hitler’s suicide had prompted an outpouring of sympathy among certain elements of the Falange and Spanish military. Spaniards in blue shirts and military uniform had turned up at the German embassy in Madrid and its consulates around the country to sign the book of condolence.
‘It was a bleak day. It wasn’t really sunny … I felt the atmosphere was funereal, and terribly distressing … It was an oppressive feeling to be surrounded by people who seemed not to be pleased with the fact that we had won,’ Helen Rolfe, a secretary at the British embassy, recalled.
VE Day caught the Anglo-Spanish Enriqueta Harris, deputy head of the MoI’s Iberian section, on a short wor
k-related visit to Madrid. She had long come to the conclusion that the British embassy was dominated by pro-Franco Catholics led by Burns. She chose, however, to delay the confrontation she had planned to have with Burns, electing instead to accept his invitation to the embassy’s modest ceremony to mark the defeat of Nazi Germany.
The victory party took the form of a gathering, organised by the chargé d’affaires, Jim Bowker, and Burns in the main embassy building, of all the British and local staff and small numbers from the expatriate community. They included a large group of English nannies who had spent the last four years looking after the children of Spanish aristocrats. Cakes and sandwiches were laid on at Mrs Taylor’s Embassy Bar and bottles of sherry by Ann Williams, one of the embassy secretaries from a family in the wine trade who had married a member of the Domecq sherry family.
Harris later recalled: ‘Part of me was furious that I was in Madrid on VE Day. I felt it unfortunate to be caught there with so many people not really caring about the fact we had won. But we celebrated in the embassy … singing “God Save the King”. It was very emotional in its own way … Afterwards I rushed out to the local florist who managed to come up with some red, white and blue flowers – just like I imagined the colour of the bunting back in the UK. I took them like a flag to my Spanish aunt. Do you know what she did with them? She put each colour in a different vase. She didn’t have a clue what they meant …’
In the Marañón household the celebrations for the end of the war were overshadowed by a particular piece of news that filled Mabel and her father with horror. Four days before Hitler’s suicide, and four days before the unconditional surrender of Germany, a squadron of RAF Typhoons had attacked and sunk the Cap Arcona, the ship on which they had sailed to South America and back during the civil war. The luxury liner, converted to military use during the war, was in the Baltic transporting both hundreds of SS guards and officers and several thousand prisoners released from concentration camps. While German trawlers rescued most of the SS, only 350 of the 4500 or so prisoners survived.