The first authoritative account of a well-kept secret: the British Fifth Column and its activities during the Second World War.

Hitler's British Traitors is the first authoritative account of a well-kept secret: the British Fifth Column and its activities during the Second World War.

Drawing on hundreds of declassified official files - many of them previously unpublished - Tim Tate uncovers the largely unknown history of more than 70 British traitors who were convicted, mostly in secret trials, of working to help Nazi Germany win the war, and several hundred British Fascists who were interned without trial on evidence that they were working on behalf of the enemy. Four were condemned to death; two were executed.

This engrossing book reveals the extraordinary methods adopted by MI5 to uncover British traitors and their German spymasters, as well as two serious wartime plots by well-connected British fascists to mount a coup d'etat which would replace the government with an authoritarian pro-Nazi regime.

The book also shows how archaic attitudes to social status and gender in Whitehall and the courts ensured that justice was neither fair nor equitable. Aristocratic British pro-Nazi sympathizers and collaborators were frequently protected while the less-privileged foot soldiers of the Fifth Column were interned, jailed or even executed for identical crimes.

Contents

List of Illustrations

Prelude

Introduction

1..A Wake-up Call
2.Target Britain
3.A Nation Unprepared
4.'The Shadow of the German Sword'
5.The Last Spies of Peace
6.Phoney War
7.Perish Judah!'
8.Lords Traitorous
9.Two Weeks in May
10.Assisting the Enemy
11.The Kensington Conspiracy
12.'A Revolutionary Dictatorship Should be Imposed'
13.Password 'Peter Leigh'
14.Witch-Finding
15.Humble Tools and Real Criminals
16.Treachery and Death
17.'Most Frank and Attractive'
18.'Rosebud' and the Road to Entrapment
19.Dorothy, Dormouse and Jack
20.The Marita Network
21.After the War

Afterword
Acknowledgements
Selected Bibliography
Notes
Index