British Legion,representatives, visiting Berlin at the invitation of German ex-service organizations are received by Hitler. Standing side by side, British Legion officials and the man responsible for the worst atrocities in modern history. It’s unthinkable now. But four years before the start of the Second World War, a delegation of World War One veterans went on a peace-keeping visit to Nazi Germany, and was received by Adolf Hitler. We British never felt anything in retrospect for…uh…German enemies in the war years.
Photographs of the visit were recently discovered while the British Legion was moving offices. Led by the Legion’s then chairman, Major Francis Fetherston-Godley, the delegates traveled to Berlin, desperate to avoid another war. They were greeted with Nazi salutes from thousands of Germans who lined the streets.The five British officials were even taking on a tour of Germany’s first concentration camp and met the surgeon Karl Gebhardt, who later performed medical experiments on inmates of Auschwitz. That delegation actually went to Dachau,which was nothing else other than a concentration camp. They then met the doctor who performs his appalling operations on people. How interesting they were prepared to show what they were capable of doing to the British, maybe to bring and do some fear in them.
The film was unearthed by researchers for the Discovery History Channel, who also discovered this footageof 800 German ex-service men visiting London as guests of the British Legion, even going on a pleasure boat trip down the Thames, waving their swastika flags. Coincidentally on the same day, Neville Chamberlain flew to Germany for negotiations with Hitler. The delegates could never have predicted the brutality of the Führer, but as these astonishing images show, they were prepared to attempt anything to stop yet another war. |