Revealed: day SAS wore Nazi uniforms to penetrate German lines.

File closed for one hundred years opened.

by Damien Lewis

The WWII-era folder was stamped “CLOSED UNTIL 2064”. Covered in hand-
written scribbles, what could justify giving file F16564/4, held in the British
Government’s dusty archives, such secrecy?
The answer is the unbelievable story it contained.
On 13 September 1942 a convoy of German Army trucks approached the
fearsome defences surrounding General Rommel’s desert stronghold, Tobruk. The
Desert Fox’s panzer divisions had smashed British forces, leading Churchill to lament:
‘Defeat is one thing: disgrace is another!’
Britain’s wartime leader had demanded action. Those trucks were the answer.
Riding in them were members of an elite unit whose role is so secret and explosive it
warranted a hundred years secrecy.
Made up of SAS and Commandos serving under Churchill’s Special Operations
Executive – his Ministry for Ungentlemanly Warfare – this elite band of warriors were
dressed in Nazi uniforms, armed with German weaponry, and exhaustively trained to
goosestep and to sing German marching songs.
They were given masterly cover stories, backed up by expertly-forged
documents. Each carried a photo of a Germanic-looking sweetheart – in reality pretty
blondes serving in the Auxiliary Territorial Service, British’s WWII female corps, with
suitably Germanic backgrounds – Berlin, Munich, Hanover – faked in.
The lead truck ground to a halt at the checkpoint, menaced by a phalanx of
Schmeisser machineguns. A figure leant out of the cab, waving about official looking
papers. Dressed in the battle-worn uniform of a Lieutenant in Rommel’s Afrika Korps,
complete with the iconic swastika over a black palm tree symbol, this was in truth SAS
man and do-or-die adventurer Captain Henry Cecil Buck.
Months earlier Buck had won a Military Cross, when executing a daring escape
from enemy captivity dressed in a dead Nazi officer’s uniform. Speaking fluent German –
he’d attended boarding school in Germany – Buck had bluffed his way across hundreds
of miles of enemy territory, to reach British lines.
That experience had led him to found the war’s greatest-ever deception force. It
was given the cover name the Special Interrogation Group, or SIG for short. Their
mission tonight was to lay waste to Rommel’s key stronghold – that’s if they could bluff
their way through the defences.
Buck’s driver – a German Jew who’d fled the Holocaust – yelled for the guards to
get the barrier open. They were frontline troops bringing back a consignment of enemy
POWs, he explained. With darkness approaching, they needed to deliver them to the
POW cages. So why the cursed delay?
He flung insults at them. ‘Dummkopf! Schweinhund! Flachwichser!’
A brief glance in the rear of the trucks confirmed his story. Dozens of seemingly
bloodied and bandaged figures, heads bowed in defeat, squatted in the rear - captured
British soldiers, menaced by what appeared to be heavily armed German guards.
In reality all were SAS and Commandos, acting their carefully-rehearsed parts.
Moments later, the barrier was raised and the convoy waved through.
The trucks rumbled into Rommel’s key fortress.
First blood fell to the SIG. The convoy was nearing its objective - the isolated
Sciausc bay, their landing beach for what was coming. A German guard stepped forward,
weapon at the ready. What business did they have here, he demanded? No road
movements were allowed after dark, plus the POW cages were back the way they’d
come.
A figure jumped down from the trucks. Tall, dashing, with his slicked back hair
and Afrika Korps uniform he looked every inch a German officer. Lieutenant David
Russell, SAS, better known to all as The Flying Scotsman due to his boyhood love of
speed, steeled himself.
He was not one for killing in cold blood. But they’d been sent here to execute a
most ungentlemanly kind of warfare, and the man who hesitated was very likely a dead
man.
They’d trained exhaustively in close quarter and hand-to-hand combat. Russell
killed the guard, dragged the body aside, took his rifle and strode back to the waiting
trucks.
He threw the gun to those inside. ‘Hang on to this. He won’t be needing it
anymore.’
 Minutes later, the convoy reached its destination. Throwing off their disguises,
eighty elite fighters swarmed up the slopes, moving stealthily and silently in the dark.
They burst into a cliff-top command centre, seizing a terrified Italian officer.
After weeks crossing the burning wastes of the Sahara Desert, the raiders were
unwashed, bearded and wild. At one glance the Italian knew this had to be the dreaded
pattagulia fanatasma - the ghost patrols, as the desert raiders were known.
The Italian was forced to reveal exactly where the garrisons were billeted on the
clifftops. The raiders surged ahead. Door were booted open and grenades hurled inside,
and then they swept the wooden huts with blasts from powerful tommy guns.
Screams rent the night. It was dark, murderous work. Scores were killed in their
sleep. But their orders were clear: none were to be left alive, to give warning of what
was coming.
Lying just off-shore, hundreds of marines crowded the decks Royal Navy motor
torpedo boats and destroyers. They were to land upon the beaches seized by the
raiders, and lay waste to Tobruk. The harbor was Rommel’s key supply port. Without it,
his war here was lost.
The raiders seized the heavy shore guns, blowing them to pieces. They fought
running duels with an enemy that outnumbered them massively, but fled before their
ferocity. They caught dozens in underground bunkers, hurling grenades down the
ventilation shafts. At one stage they used makeshift slingshots made from old sacks, to
hurl explosives onto the enemy defences.
The assault on Tobruk and the epic escapes that followed – some raiders
survived for weeks on end in the desert, crossing hundreds of miles of enemy terrain –
earned a rash of high-valour medals.
But the citations each ended with the same warning: ‘No details of operations
may be published owing to their secrecy and that fact that they were dressed in German
uniform.’
It was that sensitivity – that a British unit had been formed with Churchill’s
blessing, to break all the rules of war – that resulted in these documents being locked up
for one hundred years.
Until now.
File F16564/4 contains the story of one of those raiders – German Jew and SIG
supremo Maurice Tiefenbrunner, nicknamed ‘Tiffin’ in the British Army. Fleeing Hitler’s
Nazi regime, he signed up to fight, being one of the last to be evacuated from the
beaches at Dunkirk.
It was then, at just eighteen years of age that he was recruited into Churchill’s
ultimate deception force. ‘In July 1941 he was transferred to the Special Air Service, and
served on missions behind the German lines,’ the file notes. ‘Due to his knowledge of the
German language posed as a German soldier.’
When Hitler learned that there were German nationals fighting in the Allied
cause, and posing as German soldiers, he flew into a towering rage. He issued written
orders that the SIG should be hunted down and mercilessly wiped out.
Tieffenbrunner was captured in the aftermath of the Tobruk raid, but his cover
apparently held. He survived his time as a POW, and after the war and took British
citizenship, stating: ‘Had fought side by side with British soldiers. Felt more British than
anything else.’
During the SIG’s incredible behind-the-lines exploits the key players – Buck,
Russell, Tiffin and others – camped with German troops, ate dinner in the German’s
officer’s mess, set up road-blocks posing as German military police, and so much more.
They fought their way out of some of the most hair-raising scrapes imaginable,
and raided airfields seen as being immune to attack by the Germans, destroying dozens
of enemy warplanes.
The breathtaking true story of the most secret outfit ever formed during WWII is
revealed in Damien Lewis’s new book, SAS Ghost Patrol – the ultra-secret unit that posed
as Nazi Stormtroopers.

Sidebar: How I cracked top secret file

There was a record of the file alright. Aliens Department T 16564/4, held in the
British National Archives. Trouble was, it was closed for another forty-seven years –
until 2064!
Secret WWII-era files tend to be closed under a fifty, seventy or one-hundred-
year rule. The greater the length of time, the more sensitive – and sensational – the files
contents tend to be. But that just quickened my appetite to get the darn thing opened.
What warranted Aliens Department file T 16564/4 being closed for so long? The
Aliens Department was the arm of government that dealt with the so-called ‘Enemy
Aliens’ – those Germans, Austrians and Italians who happened to find themselves in
Britain at war’s outbreak.
Interned in ‘Enemy Alien’ camps, many were used as manual labour to help build
Britain’s defences, when the threat of Nazi invasion loomed. But over time they won the
right to join Britain’s armed forces and to fight in freedom’s cause.
That, I felt certain, was what T 16564/4 concerned – a unit of such fighting men.
I filed a Freedom of Information request with the National Archives. Could file T
16564/4 be opened early? Ideally quickly, so I could use its contents in the book that I
was writing.
I was banking on the fact that those who had closed the file for one hundred
years were no longer with us. That those tasked to handle such requests now wouldn’t
be able to remember why it had been shut and locked away in the first place. I hoped
the reasons would be lost in the mists of time.
I’d pretty much given up all hope, when the good news arrived: ‘Thank you for
your inquiry … We are pleased to tell you it has been decided that this document can
now be made available at The National Archives, Kew. The document will be opened by
21 June 2017.’
Bingo!
My hunch proved right. The file concerned one of the most secret units of the
war, set-up to train fluent German speaker to masquerade as units of German soldiers,
to bluff their way deep behind enemy lines.
Given the cover name the Special Interrogation Group, their exploits read like the
stuff of a Hollywood movie, yet they were all entirely true.