Revealed: How SAS heroes murdered by the Nazis were compensated by German government 20 years later

Monday, 20th March 2017, 23:01 pm
Updated Friday, 6th September 2019, 18:05 pm
An SAS jeep of the type used in Operation Loyton. Some 30 commandos with the crack regiment were captured and executed, prompting a post-war investigation to bring the Nazis responsible to trial. The families of several of those murdered later received compensation from a fund set up on behalf of the West German government for victims of Nazi persecution.

As he was driven under armed guard with a group of his SAS comrades towards a Nazi prison camp in November 1944, Captain Andy Whately-Smith was presented with an opportunity to save himself from a firing squad.

Several of fellow detainees slashed the canvas of the lorry carrying them to the Gaggenau concentration camp on the French-German border and jumped. But Whately-Smith stayed put because his colleague, Major Dennis Reynolds, was too badly wounded to make the leap. Such had been the inhuman punishment meted out to Reynolds by his Gestapo and SS interrogators that bones had pierced the skin where he had been beaten.

£22 - the sum which it was decided should be paid to British victims of Nazi persecution for every week spent in a concentration camp

Bomb crater

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Two days later both Britons were lined up with 12 men, including four other SAS commandos, at the edge of a bomb crater behind a factory making Mercedes-Benz trucks for the Third Reich and shot.

It was the murderous conclusion to a typically daring SAS mission which had begun three months earlier when dozens of commandos were parachuted behind enemy lines into the Vosges Mountains in eastern France to disrupt Germany’s faltering war machine with a guerrilla campaign.

Operation Loyton ran into trouble after the Nazis unexpectedly reinforced the area. By its end, some 30 SAS troopers had been captured and murdered in apparent accordance with Hitler’s notorious “Commando Order” requiring all soldiers caught behind enemy lines to be executed in contravention of the Geneva Convention.


An unusual postscript to these atrocities has now been unveiled which casts fresh light on how nearly 1,000 Britons, from hardened killers of the special forces to British Jews and innocent civilians caught up in the tumult of war, were compensated for their suffering - while thousands of others were not.

Previously unpublished files released on Tuesday at the National Archives in Kew, west London, reveal how a £1m fund provided by the then West German government some 20 years after the war for British victims of Nazi persecution was distributed.

The files show how Foreign Office officials punctiliously applied a set of rules agreed with the Germans in 1964 to pay compensation only to Britons who had been persecuted by way of detention in a concentration camp or “an institution where the conditions were comparable”.

Behind enemy lines

Among those denied a share of the fund, worth some £20m in today’s terms, was Jack Finken-McKay, a British serviceman who, like the SAS soldiers, was captured while working behind enemy lines.

He was deployed as an agent for the Special Operations Executive but was arrested in Paris in 1942 and subjected to brutal incarceration, including two years in solitary confinement before he was sent to Colditz Castle, which left him partially blind and suffering from mental health issues.

But after writing an application for compensation worth up to a maximum £4,000 (equivalent to £77,000 today), he was rejected. A note from officials told him: “The reason for this is that the prisons and camps in which you were detained were not Nazi concentration camps or comparable institutions.”


Guidelines issued to those overseeing the scheme dictated that “hardship” suffered in civilian prisons or POW camps was ineligible for compensation, along with atrocities committed on soldiers against the rules of war “even though resulting in permanent injury or death”.

Another individual turned down was an Anglo-Polish doctor Edward Michalik, who had come to England and served as a medical officer to the Polish pilots who played a crucial role in winning the Battle of Britain. His gynaecologist wife, Ernestine, had remained in Poland as a resistance worker and was imprisoned in Auschwitz where she worked as a doctor, saving the lives of hundreds before she herself perished. Dr Michalik’s request was turned down on the basis that his wife was not British at the time of her death.

But the files show that other British service personnel were granted compensation, including the families of Whately-Smith, Reynolds and others from Operation Layton who perished at the hands of their Nazi captors. Among the documents is the file of Captain Victor Gough, another SOE operative who was murdered beside Whately-Smith and Reynolds. Despite being judged eligible for compensation his widow turned down the money.

Documents relating to several of the SAS cases, including Whately-Smith, have been redacted or withheld but it seems likely that officials decided the men were eligible because they were held in an SS facility inside two Nazi concentration camps, including Gaggenau where thousands perished.

Great Escape

The relatives of the SAS men received £2,293 in each case - the same sum received by the families of four heroes of the Great Escape who were executed by the Gestapo after their famous attempt to flee Stalag Luft III in 1944. The files show that other escapees who were not executed, however, were denied compensation.

Lauren Willmott, records specialist at the National Archives, said the Foreign Office had faced an impossible task because officials were following rules which required documentary or eye-witness proof of persecution and incarceration in concentration camps.

She said: “The files show that some people did miss out, but they only had that £1m to distribute so it was a sort-of impossible task for the Foreign  Office on a case-by-case basis.

“It was a bureaucratic process. There was no way around having eligibility criteria when there were so many victims.”

A final report on the scheme by officials noted that they had received 50 letters of protest but 184 letters of appreciation concerning their handling of the scheme.

In total, some 868 applications for compensation were accepted and 3,046 rejected. The payments were in part calculated according to the amount of time spent in a concentration camp - a figure which was eventually calculated to be worth £22 per week.