The Secret Hunters

When the Second World War ended in Europe, numerous members of the Special Air Service and Special Operations Executive did not return home. They had vanished after capture behind enemy lines, and the German records that might explain their fate were incomplete, concealed or awaiting discovery in offices whose former occupants had developed an urgent interest in civilian clothing.

The Secret Hunters tells the story of the postwar effort to discover what happened to these missing men and women and to identify those responsible for their deaths. Former SAS and SOE personnel, intelligence officers and war-crimes investigators followed trails through liberated concentration camps, abandoned headquarters, witness statements and captured documents. The shooting had stopped, but the paperwork had become unusually dangerous.

Many of the missing commandos and agents had been murdered under Hitler’s notorious Commando Order, which directed that captured Allied special-forces personnel should be executed rather than treated as prisoners of war. Men and women operating in uniform or as clandestine agents could therefore disappear into prisons and camps, leaving families and comrades with official uncertainty where a grave ought to have been.

The investigators reconstructed missions, traced prisoners through the Nazi security system and located witnesses among survivors, guards and local residents. Their work led them across France and occupied Germany to sites where captured personnel had been interrogated, transported and killed. Each answer depended upon fragments: a name in a register, an exhumed body, a remembered vehicle or an official whose wartime efficiency became less impressive when somebody began reading his files.

Anthony Kemp also examines the fate of SOE agents, including women sent into occupied Europe to organise resistance networks and communications. After the war, figures such as Vera Atkins worked relentlessly to establish what had happened to missing colleagues. They faced not only destroyed evidence and evasive suspects but official reluctance, because governments that had enthusiastically sent agents into danger were sometimes less energetic about explaining why they had not returned.

The hunt for the killers continued for several years and resulted in arrests and war-crimes trials. Yet the story is not one of flawlessly administered justice. Some perpetrators were convicted, others escaped, and changing political priorities gradually weakened the determination to pursue remaining suspects. Once the Cold War began, yesterday’s enemy could possess useful knowledge about tomorrow’s, and moral clarity encountered the administrative advantages of selective memory.

Kemp draws upon official reports, including early documentation of Nazi concentration camps and investigations that remained little known outside military and intelligence circles. The book reveals a curious continuation of special operations after victory: the surviving members no longer parachuted behind enemy lines, but they still relied upon secrecy, persistence and the refusal to abandon their comrades.

Published by Michael O’Mara Books in 1986, The Secret Hunters is a concise, illustrated account of war-crimes investigation, the SAS, the SOE and the unresolved human consequences of clandestine warfare. It will appeal to readers interested in special forces, intelligence history, Nazi crimes and the difficult transition from winning a war to deciding what justice after it should mean.

This copy is in Good condition. It shows the ordinary signs of previous reading but remains sound, complete and ready for inspection. No missing agents, concealed documents or former Gestapo officials have been found inside.

Sold by Crappy Old Books, where secret hunters are welcome, although all searches of the stockroom must be authorised in advance.

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