Spy story

Britain’s 'toughest secret agents’ during the Second World War who went behind enemy lines to seek revenge

After 15 months of hell, Alfred and Henry Newton were lucky to still be alive – but only just.

It was 11 April 1945 when American tanks arrived outside the Nazi concentration camp at Buchenwald in central Germany. A reconnaissance troop soon entered the camp, and among the prisoners they found were the two brothers.

They looked more like skeletons than “Britain’s toughest secret agents”, as a newspaper would label them in the 1950s. The British officers could barely walk, but suppressed emotion was also choking them, for they had been liberated.

I first came across their story in 2008 when I bought Alfred’s medals. He had served during the Second World War with the Special Operations Executive, the secret organisation set up in 1940 to insert spies and saboteurs behind enemy lines in Nazi-occupied Europe.

As a passionate historian of that war, I wanted to know more, not least why Alfred and his older brother – both former cabaret artists – had joined the SOE in the first place.