John Amery travelled to Berlin in October 1942, and proposed to the Germans the formation of a British volunteer force to help fight the Bolsheviks.

He made a series of pro-German propaganda radio broadcasts, appealing to his fellow countrymen to join the war on communism.

The first recruits to the Corps came from a group of prisoners of war (POWs) at a 'holiday camp' set up by the Germans in Genshagen, a suburb of Berlin, in August 1943.

[9] On 11 October 1944, the Corps was moved to the Waffen-SS Pioneer school in Dresden, to start military training for service on the Eastern Front.

In one Dutch camp, cigarettes, fruit, and other items were lavished on the POWs while they listened to Nazi propaganda officers who described the good that the Germans were doing in Europe, then asked the men to join in fighting the real enemy, the Soviets.

These were: A number of sources mention the involvement of Brigadier Leonard Parrington, a British Army officer captured by the Germans in Greece in 1941.

Leading members of the Corps included Thomas Haller Cooper (although he was actually an Unterscharführer in the Waffen-SS proper[19]), Roy Courlander, Edwin Barnard Martin, Frank McLardy, Alfred Minchin and John Wilson – these men "later became known among the renegades as the 'Big Six', although this was a notional elite whose membership shifted periodically as members fell into, and out of, favour.

[21] He commented that he had changed his mind about joining and refused to sign the enlistment papers, spending the rest of the war in a punishment camp.

Richard W. Landwehr Jr. states "The Britons were sent to a company in the detachment that was situated in the small village of Schoenburg near the west bank of the Oder River".

"[26] On 29 April, Steiner decided "to break contact with the Russians and order his forces to head west into Anglo-American captivity.