Alfred Vivian Minchin (27th of January 1917

Alfred Vivian Minchin (27th of January 1917 –



 February 1998) was a British merchant seaman captured on the 28th of March 1942 when the SS Empire Ranger, a cargo ship that was part of a Murmansk convoy, was sunk off Norway by German bombers. The Murmansk convoy was an Arctic convoy that delivered war supplies to the Soviet Union. As a prisoner he joined the Waffen-SS’s British Free Corps, holding the rank of Sturmmann, meaning Storm man in English, and reportedly suggested the unit’s name. On the 8th of  March 1945, VE Day, he was in the SS hospital at Lichterfelde-West in Berlin being treated for scabies. After liberation he faced trial at the Old Bailey in London, and on the 5th of February 1946 he was convicted of conspiring to assist the enemy, receiving seven years’ penal servitude. Trial records still remain at the National Archives in Kew, London. He died in Somerset at the age of 81 in 1998. 

Photo:
Alfred Minchin (second right) with SS-Mann Kenneth Berry (second left) and German officers in April 1944

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