DrHelen Fry (born 1967) is an English bestselling historian, author and biographer, who specialises in the history of the Second World War, with a particular focus on espionage and the Intelligence services of the Allies.
She has authored and edited over 25 books covering the social history of the Second World War, including topics covering women in Intelligence, the 10,000 German and Austrian Jewish refugees who fought for Britain, and wider coverage of espionage and spy networks.
Helen Fry was born in North Devon and graduated with a B.A. Hons and Ph.D. from the University of Exeter.
During the 1990s, she was active on the international stage in the youth movement of The Council of Christians and Jews, and in promoting inter-faith relations. She has written over 25 books, with special expertise on the 10,000 German-speaking refugees who served in the British forces during the Second World War, especially the Royal Pioneer Corps. [1]
She is an Honorary Research Fellow in the Dept of Hebrew & Jewish Studies at University College London and Honorary member of The Association of Jewish Refugees. She teaches at the London Jewish Cultural Centre. [2] Reviewer Martin Rubin described her book Freud's War as taking readers into the "unusual corners of global conflicts" and described her book as a detailed portrait of different military experiences during World War II. [3]
Helen is an ambassador for the National Centre for Military Intelligence (NCMI) and serves as a trustee of both the Friends of the Intelligence Corps Museum and the Medmenham Collection.
Helen is a recent recipient of the Lifetime Contribution Award for Jewish Military History and Education, awarded by The Jewish Military Association (AJEX).
Helen is currently writing her next book, with a projected publication in the autumn of 2025.
Sicherheitsdienst, full title Sicherheitsdienst des Reichsführers-SS, or SD, was the intelligence agency of the SS and the Nazi Party in Nazi Germany. Established in 1931, the SD was the first Nazi intelligence organization and the Gestapo was considered its sister organization through the integration of SS members and operational procedures. The SD was administered as an independent SS office between 1933 and 1939. That year, the SD was transferred over to the Reich Security Main Office, as one of its seven departments. Its first director, Reinhard Heydrich, intended for the SD to bring every single individual within the Third Reich's reach under "continuous supervision".
Walter Friedrich Schellenberg was a German SS functionary during the Nazi era. He rose through the ranks of the SS, becoming one of the highest ranking men in the Sicherheitsdienst (SD) and eventually assumed the position as head of foreign intelligence for Nazi Germany following the abolition of the Abwehr in 1944.
Intelligence assessment, or simply intel, is the development of behavior forecasts or recommended courses of action to the leadership of an organisation, based on wide ranges of available overt and covert information (intelligence). Assessments develop in response to leadership declaration requirements to inform decision-making. Assessment may be executed on behalf of a state, military or commercial organisation with ranges of information sources available to each.
In customary international law, an enemy alien is any alien native, citizen, denizen or subject of any foreign nation or government with which a domestic nation or government is in conflict and who is liable to be apprehended, restrained, secured and removed. Usually, the countries are in a state of declared war.
The Sonderfahndungsliste G.B. was a secret list of prominent British residents to be arrested, produced in 1940 by the SS as part of the preparation for the proposed invasion of Britain. After the war, the list became known as The Black Book.
The Jewish Enemy: Nazi Propaganda During World War II and the Holocaust is a 2006 book by University of Maryland professor Jeffrey Herf, in which the author postulates that the Nazi government maintained its hold on the German people by controlling the press and claiming that Germans were already being attacked by an international Jewish conspiracy. Herf offers in the book a thorough study of the propaganda material disseminated by the National Socialist regime.
The Royal Pioneer Corps was a British Army corps used for light engineering tasks. It was formed in 1939, and amalgamated into the Royal Logistic Corps in 1993. Pioneer units performed a wide variety of tasks in all theatres of war, including Northern Ireland. They were used for full infantry, mine clearance, guarding bases, laying prefabricated track on beaches, and effecting various logistical operations. Many pioneer companies took part in the Normandy landings and after the Second World War, the corps was given the designation "Royal".
The Ritchie Boys, part of the U.S. Military Intelligence Service (MIS) at the War Department, were an organization of soldiers in World War II with sizable numbers of German and Austrian recruits who were used primarily for interrogation of prisoners on the front lines and counter-intelligence in Europe. Trained at secret Camp Ritchie in Washington County, Maryland, many of the total 22,000 men and women in service were German-speaking immigrants to the United States, often Jews, who fled Nazi persecution. After the war, many former Ritchie Boys rose to important positions in the military and in the intelligence community. In addition to interrogation and counter-intelligence, they were trained in psychological warfare to study and demoralize the enemy, and they later served as prosecutors and translators in the Nuremberg trials.
After Adolf Hitler came into power in 1933 and enacted policies that would culminate in the Holocaust, Jews began to escape German-occupied Europe and the United Kingdom was one of the destinations. Some came on transit visas, which meant that they stayed in Britain temporarily, while waiting to be accepted by another country. Others entered the country by having obtained employment or a guarantor, or via Kindertransport. There were about 70,000 Jewish refugees who were accepted into Britain by the start of World War II on 1 September 1939, and an additional 10,000 people who made it to Britain during the war.
Bryan Mark Rigg is an American military historian.
Anton Walter Freud was a chemical engineer and a member of the Royal Pioneer Corps and the British Special Operations Executive. He was a grandson of Sigmund Freud and escaped with him and other family members from Vienna after the Anschluss.
Josef Albert Meisinger, also known as the "Butcher of Warsaw", was an SS functionary in Nazi Germany. He held a position in the Gestapo and was a member of the Nazi Party. During the early phases of World War II Meisinger served as commander of Einsatzgruppe IV in Poland. From 1941 to 1945 he worked as liaison for the Gestapo at the German embassy in Tokyo. He was arrested in Japan in 1945, convicted of war crimes and was executed in Warsaw, Poland.
The Bunce Court School was an independent, private boarding school in the village of Otterden, in Kent, England. It was founded in 1933 by Anna Essinger, who had previously founded a boarding school, Landschulheim Herrlingen in the south of Germany, but after the Nazi Party seized power in 1933, she began to see that the school had no future in Germany. She quietly found a new home for the school and received permission from the parents of her pupils, most of whom were Jewish, to bring them to safety in England. The new school was called New Herrlingen School, but came to be known as Bunce Court. The school closed in 1948. Alumni, who sometimes stayed on at the school even after finishing, were devoted to the school and organized reunions for 55 years. They have referred to its "immense effect" on their lives, as "Shangri-La" and to being there as "walking on holy ground".
Friedrich Franz von Hohenlohe-Waldenburg-Schillingsfürst was an Austrian prince who served as a military attache in Saint Petersburg. Later he was chief of German propaganda and director of German espionage in Switzerland. He also served with his regiment on the Russian front.
Richard David Breitman is an American historian best known for his study of The Holocaust.
Geoffrey P. Megargee was an American historian and author who specialized in World War II military history and the history of the Holocaust. He served as the project director and editor-in-chief for the Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos, 1933–1945 produced by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Megargee's work on the German High Command won the 2001 Distinguished Book Award from the Society for Military History.
Wendy Lower is an American historian and a widely published author on the Holocaust and World War II. Since 2012, she holds the John K. Roth Chair at Claremont McKenna College in Claremont, California, and in 2014 was named the director of the Mgrublian Center for Human Rights at Claremont. As of 2016, she serves as the interim director of the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC.
Rachel Dübendorfer was an anti-Nazi resistance fighter. During the Second World War, her codename was Sissy, and she was in a section of the Red Three Swiss resistance movement.
On 30 January 1939, Nazi German dictator Adolf Hitler gave a speech in the Kroll Opera House to the Reichstag delegates, which is best known for the prediction he made that "the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe" would ensue if another world war were to occur.
Zofia Poznańska, also known as Zosia, Zosha, or Sophia was a Polish antifascist and resistance fighter of the Soviet-affiliated espionage group that the German Abwehr intelligence service later called the "Red Orchestra".
...Ms. Fry paints a detailed portrait of these very different military experiences.