Early life Thomas Cooper was born on 29 August 1919 in
Chiswick to a British father, Ashley Cooper, and a German mother, Anna Maria (née Simon). His father was a photographer and commercial artist who had met Thomas's mother in
Berlin. Cooper attended
Latymer Upper School,
Hammersmith, and upon leaving in 1936 attempted to find work. He was rejected by the
Metropolitan Police, the
Royal Navy and the
Royal Air Force, and on each occasion the reason given was that he had a German mother. Extremely resentful of his treatment, Cooper joined the
British Union of Fascists in September 1938. A fluent German-speaker, Cooper contacted the German Academic Exchange Organisation in
Russell Square,
London. After a short period, he was offered a place at the
Reich Labour Service (RAD) office in
Stuttgart during the summer of 1939. Finding himself in Germany during the outbreak of the
Second World War on 3 September 1939, Cooper was arrested as an enemy alien. However, he was released after producing a certificate that his mother had obtained classifying him as an ethnic German or
Volksdeutscher.
Military life Cooper was offered an opportunity to join the
SS, which he eventually accepted. He was ordered to return on 1 February 1940 at the Berlin
Lichterfelde Barracks, the home of the
1st SS Panzer Division Leibstandarte SS Adolf Hitler. While at this camp, Cooper told his superiors that his father was now serving with British armed forces, and that he thought it was no longer appropriate to be serving with the SS. After being placed under arrest, Cooper reconsidered his position and announced that he would remain with the SS. In July 1940, Cooper was transferred to the 8th Company, 5th
Totenkopf Infantry Regiment based at
Oranienburg to the north of Berlin, tasked with training recruits in the use of machine guns. He remained with this regiment until February 1941. At this time, Cooper had been moved to
Płock, near the River
Vistula, in
German-occupied Poland. Promoted to SS-
Rottenführer, he left the regiment to go to the SS NCO School at
Lauenburg,
Pomerania, for training which finished in May 1941. Cooper was then moved to a subunit based at the
Dębica training area near
Kraków. His detachment centred on the security and administration of the training area. Cooper was also promoted to SS-
Unterscharführer in November 1941. It has been stated that "the circumstantial case is compelling" that Cooper was involved in the
Holocaust. According to fellow BFC members, Cooper had bragged about committing atrocities in Poland. Roy Futcher said Cooper claimed that "he had been in the parties that had rounded up Jews in Poland and thrown women out of top storey buildings." Another BFC member, Francis Maton, discussed a "purge" supposedly conducted by Cooper in the
Warsaw Ghetto."One story which always stands out in my mind, told by Cooper, is one he told me about Warsaw. He said he was at that time in charge of a squad of Ukrainian volunteers and they were conducting a purge through the ghetto. His attention was drawn to a house by reason of loud screams issuing from the back of it. On going inside the house he found in the top flat a bunch of these Ukrainians holding at bay with pistols some twenty Jews. On asking them what the noise was about they told him in broken German that they had found a new way of killing Jews. This was done simply by opening the window wide and two men each grabbing an arm and a leg and flinging the Jew through the open window. The small children and babies followed their parents because they said they would only grow into big Jews." and was soon promoted to
Oberscharführer, assigned to a transit camp for new recruits at a villa in the
Grunewald, Berlin. In November 1944 he was dismissed from the British Free Corps, arrested for "various heinous anti-Nazi crimes", and taken to the depot of the
Panzergrenadier training battalion of the
Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler, where he spent the next six months working for the
Feldjägerkorps.
Prosecution After the war, Cooper was tried for
high treason at the
Central Criminal Court in January 1946 and
sentenced to hang. At his trial, according to the judge, Cooper admitted that he had "trained people to kill our sons and those of our Allies and our soldiers." An appeal failed, but days before his scheduled execution, the sentence was
commuted to life imprisonment "on the grounds that [he] had been [a follower] in treason rather than [a leader]." The trial is covered in
Rebecca West's
The Meaning of Treason. The
depositions from Cooper's trial are held at the
National Archives under reference CRIM 1/484 and his
pardon is held under reference CRIM 1/585/142. The
Home Office and
Security Service files on Cooper are held by the National Archives under references HO 45/25805 and KV 2/254 1939 Nov 01-1946 Jul 20 respectively.
Later life Cooper was released in January 1953 and is believed to have emigrated to Japan. Author Adrian Weale states that he subsequently returned to England and died in early 1987, aged 67. Another book, ''Hitler's Bastard'', claims he died in the late 1990s. ==See also==