Of all the extraordinary individual accounts that have come out of the Second World War and its aftermath, few can compare with that of Eric Pleasants, a member of the 'bastard' British wing of Hitler's SS. In this book - the first ever autobiography from within the British Free Corps - Pleasants writes of the bizarre and traumatic years he spent in the regimes of the twentieth century's most notorious dictators.A life-long pacifist, Pleasants was forced to kill in order to survive. From a vagabond life alongside infamous Triple Cross agent Eddie Chapman on occupied Jersey, Pleasants was taken by the Nazis to a series of prison camps in France. The years that followed held a whirlwind of unexpected turns; he lived a life on the run in occupied Paris, was captured and recruited into the British Free Corps of the Waffen-SS, found love with a young german woman, witnessed the bombing of Dresden and attempted to hide from Soviet troops along the sewers of Berlin. When the war ended, Pleasants found himself on the Communist side of the Iron Curtain. By now a strong man in a travelling circus, he was arrested by the KGB on charges of espionage and sentenced to 25 years slave labour in the notorious camps of Artic Russia. Only with Stalin's death in 1953 was Pleasants finally released from his unique kind of purgatory, after nearly half a lifetime of peripatetic nightmare. Pleasants died in 1998 at the age of 87. HITLER'S BASTARD remains a remarkable monument to his imperishable will to survive.

About Author : Pleasants, Eric

The book's editors, Second World War authority Ian Sayer and biographer Douglas Botting, have previously co-authored three bestselling books covering the same period: HITLER'S LAST GENERAL, AMERICA'S SECRET ARMY and NAZI GOLD, a new edition of which is to be published by Mainstream in September 2003.