Captain Robert Philip Baker-Byrne: personal papers

This collection of personal papers documents, in part, the life of Robert Philip Baker-Byrne, formerly Rudolf Philipp Becker, a German Jewish emigrant to Great Britain who, having served in the Pioneer Corps, ended his war time activities working for the British Secret Service, and after the war as a war crimes investigator. Robert Philip Baker-Byrne was born in Berlin in 1910. His father was the owner of the company, Modellhaus Becker, Berlin. In 1936 he and his parents, under increasing pressure from life under the Nazis, came to Great Britain as refugees. Some time later he married and had a daughter. From 1939 until 1944 he was a member of the Pioneer Corps. In 1944 he began working for the British Secret Service and made two lone parachute drops into enemy territory. Whilst on the last mission into the Lübeck area he was apparently captured (see 897/4). Having survived the war, he worked as an investigator in the investigation section of War Crimes Group, North West Europe (see 897/5). After he left the military he went to Australia (presumably with his family). After a few years he returned to Great Britain where he worked as a sales manager in the 1950s. Nothing further is known about his life nor that of his family.<br><br>The most significant papers in the collection are those relating to the defence of a Wehrmacht General during the post war de-nazification process (879/4) and those relating to the sentencing of former Gestapo officers found guilty of summarily executing escaped allied prisoners of war in a case known as 'the Kiel Hassee case' (879/5). The case was made famous by the film 'The Great Escape' and the book of the same name by Paul Brickhill. Open