In Popular Culture
Many readers' first acquaintance with the British Free Corps (BFC) came in Jack Higgins' World War II novel The Eagle Has Landed. In the novel, a BFC officer named Harvey Preston, who is patterned on Douglas Berneville-Claye, is attached to the fallschirmjäger unit which attempts to kidnap Winston Churchill. A convinced Nazi and petty criminal, Preston is viewed with disgust by all members of the German unit.
The 1985 novel The Auslander Brigade by Colin D Evans, centres around the recruitment and deployment of the British Free Corps to fight on the Eastern Front.
In Terrance Dicks' novel Timewyrm: Exodus, the Seventh Doctor briefly finds himself in a timeline in which the Nazis won WW II. He meets two BFC soldiers, who harass him and Ace briefly. (When the timeline is restored, the same two men appear, but this time are common thugs who are not in the military.)
The 2006 film Joy Division portrays a member of the BFC, Sergeant Harry Stone, among the German troops and refugees fleeing the Red Army advance into Germany. In the film it is the aggressive Stone who appears to be the only convinced Nazi remaining among the Hitler Youth with whom he is grouped. He is seen attempting to recruit British POWs before the column is attacked by Soviet aircraft.
In 2009, the BFC also featured in the last episode of the ITV series Foyle's War, "The Hide" (Series 7, episode 3).
The 2010 novel SS Englander: The Amazing True Story of Hitler's British Nazis is a fantasy novel about an Englishman who fights in the Waffen SS, seeing limited action at Stalingrad as a special advisor, before joining the BFC during its formation.
Read more about this topic: British Free Corps
Famous quotes containing the words popular culture, popular and/or culture:
“Popular culture entered my life as Shirley Temple, who was exactly my age and wrote a letter in the newspapers telling how her mother fixed spinach for her, with lots of butter.... I was impressed by Shirley Temple as a little girl my age who had power: she could write a piece for the newspapers and have it printed in her own handwriting.”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)
“Both gossip and joking are intrinsically valuable activities. Both are essentially social activities that strengthen interpersonal bonds—we do not tell jokes and gossip to ourselves. As popular activities that evade social restrictions, they often refer to topics that are inaccessible to serious public discussion. Gossip and joking often appear together: when we gossip we usually tell jokes and when we are joking we often gossip as well.”
—Aaron Ben-Ze’Ev, Israeli philosopher. “The Vindication of Gossip,” Good Gossip, University Press of Kansas (1994)
“Children became an obsessive theme in Victorian culture at the same time that they were being exploited as never before. As the horrors of life multiplied for some children, the image of childhood was increasingly exalted. Children became the last symbols of purity in a world which was seen as increasingly ugly.”
—C. John Sommerville (20th century)