Harry Rossney was one of over 10,000 refugees from Nazism who took the unprecedented step of swearing allegiance to King George VI and served in the British Army during the Second World War. Theirs is an extraordinary story, and one that is unique in British military history. Like fellow refugees, Harry had seen too much in Germany, the country of his birth, to sit back and do nothing. He had witnessed firsthand the brutality of the Nazis and the massive military force that was being built up to use against Europe.
Harry had a difficult life but one he always faced with optimism and strength. He remembers in the recession of the 1920’s being a child and having to beg for bread for the family from the bakery. In the 1930’s Harry’s friend and acquaintances in Germany avoided him as he was half-Jewish. Threatened with arrest by the German police he knew he had to leave the country of his birth.
Harry escaped to England in March 1939, as he himself often says, in a one in a million chance. He was initially amongst two hundred refugee craftsmen from Germany and Austria engaged in the reconstruction of a derelict First World War camp called Kitchener Camp, near Sandwich on the Kent coast. The camp was being rebuilt to accommodate 3,500 refugees from Nazi oppression from Germany, Austria and Czechoslovakia. At the outbreak of war on 3 September 1939, along with other refugees from Nazism he became technically an ‘enemy alien’. In early 1940, whilst he was still in Kitchener Camp, he volunteered to join the British Army. He enlisted in the only unit open to enemy aliens at that time: the Auxiliary Military Pioneer Corps. Six alien Pioneer companies were formed in Kitchener Camp that Spring, five of which were sent to France to join the British Expeditionary Force. They were all later evacuated after Dunkirk. Harry was not amongst those who went to France but remained in Kitchener Camp. When France, Holland and Belgium fell to Hitler’s forces in May 1940, the remaining refugees in Kitchener camp, including Harry, were moved immediately away from the Kent coast in case they were infiltrated by Nazi spies parachuting into the country. They were moved overnight to the damp, wet moors of Dartmoor in the heart of Devon. After nine weeks, the Pioneers in training were moved once again - this time to Westward Ho! on the North Devon coast.
Because Harry was already in the Pioneer Corps, he escaped Churchill’s policy of mass internment in May/June 1940 when around 30,000 other refugees from Nazism were interned behind barbed wire on the Isle of Man, Australia and Canada. When over the summer of 1940, they were gradually released, over 4,000 internees volunteered for the British Army. They could only enlist in the Pioneer Corps. With so many new recruits coming out of internment camps, the alien Pioneer Corps training centre was moved from Westward Ho! to the Victorian seaside town of Ilfracombe. Harry moved with it to Ilfracombe, where the men were billeted in requisitioned hotels. His task for nearly 18 months was to kit out every new recruit with their army uniform. After his time in Ilfracombe, he served with 249 Pioneer company.
On D-Day, 6 June 1944, the Allied forces began their massive invasion of Normandy. Within a couple of weeks, Harry’s unit landed in Normandy. His life took an unexpected turn. He was called away from the royal Pioneer Corps for a special, but difficult task which would involve using his skills on a daily basis as a sign-writer. He was assigned to 32 Graves Registration Unit, with the job of burying the Allied dead and training a labour force consisting of German POWs and local French people to carry out sign-writing on all the temporary markers on the graves in the Allied cemeteries of Normandy. He was eventually demobbed after a total of six and a half years in the army.
Harry returned to England where he became a British citizen and settled into civilian life. During the writing of Helen Fry’s books about this period Jews in North Devon during the Second World War and The King’s Most Loyal Enemy Aliens: Germans who Fought for Britain during WWII, Harry provided an amazing amount of material. Without his help and insights, the two books would lack the depth of emotional reflection which comes from oral testimony.
It is almost 70 years since the outbreak of the Second World War. For many refugees from Nazism the memories were too painful to bear. They had lost most, if not all, of their family and friends in the Holocaust. A wall of silence encompassed them for decades. In that period, Harry continued to reflect on his experiences under Hitler and his wartime service in the British Army. It affected him deeply.
Over the decades, Harry Rossney composed an extraordinary collection of poems which form the basis of a new book “Grey Dawns” written by Harry Rossney and edited by Helen Fry with a forward by the Imperial War Museum was published November 2008. Harry used his creative talent to record for posterity his own experiences of a horrific period of European history, responses and experiences which future generations of historians will be unable to reconstruct from official documentation. With the passing of his generation, the urgency to record such eye-witness accounts becomes ever more pressing. Harry’s book is a tribute to his self-strength, and dedication to preserving the memory for the sake of humanity.
