Jock Lewes: SAS Founder in Nazi Germany

Jock Lewes. Oxford scholar. Gentleman rower. Future war hero.

And, on a winter’s evening in Berlin, 1938, he was a guest at a Nazi ball attended by Adolf Hitler and Joseph Goebbels.

To the people who would one day fight and die beside him in the deserts of North Africa, the thought would have been unthinkable. Lewes — the disciplined visionary who helped create the Special Air Service (SAS) — mingling with the architects of tyranny? Yet in the years before the war, this brilliant and deeply idealistic young man had fallen under the spell of a dangerous illusion. He admired what he saw as the “order” of the new Germany, the pride, the purpose, the promise of renewal. He even fell in love with a glamorous Nazi Party member, Senta Adriano, and for a time spoke passionately in defence of the regime.

So how did this same man go on to become one of the founding fathers of the rogue heroes, the Special Air Service, that would wage a secret war against the Nazis and swing the tide of the War.

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