Mar 08 2010
Spyclists
I read a very interesting article from the BBC about so-called Spyclists – worth checking out!
In the summer of 1937, when tension was rife in Europe, when satellite photographs weren’t invented yet and in a time when Ordinance Survey (OS) Maps were hard to come by, English country lanes were full of foreigners cycling their way between historic monuments and spending their nights out under the stars in fields (Famous Five style).
The only problem with an idyllic thought like that is that some of those groups were teenagers who belonged to the Hitler Youth.
Their itineraries were usually built round visits to the great English historic sites – Oxford, Cambridge, London, though one party was touring Scotland and another finished in Wales.
In May 1937, British newspaper the “Daily Herald” published an article based on a translation of the Nazi Cycling Associations’ guidelines for cycling abroad:
“Get into your head all landmarks like steeples and towers and all fords and bridges and acquaint yourself with them in such a way that you will be able to recognise them by night”
And one of the senior figures in the Hitler Youth had moved to London at the start of the year, ostensibly to study. MI5 suspected that Joachim Benemann’s real object however was to develop the Hitler Youth in the UK.
He tried to develop links between the Hitler Youth and the Boy Scouts, albeit unsuccessfully.
The Hitler Youth who travelled to Britain had been specially selected – a number had even had been to training camps before the visit. Some of them met or shared camps with British Boy Scout groups. The most striking was the Tamworth Scout troop – for whom this was a return visit. They had already been guests of the Hitler Youth in Hamburg earlier in the summer, thanks to their very pro-German Scoutmaster.
“It was like a Roman legion”
-Les Fardon, former Boy Scout
They had stayed at a Hitler Youth camp and even taken part in a torchlight rally. One of the boys, Les Fardon, told Radio 4’s Document Programme ten years ago: “It was like a Roman legion,” he said. “You had these long banners and you were marching to tune… it was very stirring and frightening”
Poster wording translates into: “Youth serves the leader. All ten year-olds into the Hitler Youth.”
















