AS the country commemorates the 68th anniversary of D-Day today , Examiner reporter BARRY GIBSON speaks to a Huddersfield man who is part of the dwindling number of soldiers who served in a top-secret unit in occupied Europe in the run-up to the Normandy landings

DAVID Joseph lost nearly 100 relatives at Auschwitz and has no doubt why he was chosen for top-secret operations in occupied Europe.

“I was selected because I’m Jewish and I had an unnatural hatred of the Germans,” said the Lockwood man.

“There’s no better soldier than one with a reason to fight.

“What I did wasn’t bravery, it was sheer hatred because the Germans were murdering my people. I had blood in my eye.”

Mr Joseph joined the Special Operations Executive (SOE), a top-secret unit carrying out sabotage, espionage and hit-and-run attacks across Nazi-occupied Europe.

During seven tours he served in France, Germany and Poland – where he tried unsuccessfully to get arms into the Warsaw Ghetto just weeks before it was liquidated by the SS.

Mr Joseph was asked to join the SOE in 1942.

“I volunteered for the Army when I was under age and I joined the Second Battalion of the Royal Fusiliers, the City of London Battalion,” he said.

“While I was stationed in Canterbury I was asked if I was willing to volunteer for the SOE.”

Mr Joseph added that his Jewish background gave him both a reason to join and a crucial head-start in training.

“I speak Yiddish which is 80% Germanic so it didn’t take them long to teach me enough German to get across what I needed to say,” he said.

“Men and women from every occupied country were involved in the SOE.

“There were certain people in Britain – Northern Irish, Scottish, Welsh – who couldn’t take part because of their accents. Even if they spoke German, their accents would give them away.”

Mr Joseph’s first tour was in northern France. Even 70 years on, he held back some details because of the Official Secrets Act.

“I first went to Europe in June 1943,’’ he said. “I can’t say exactly where – all I can say was that it was in the region of Lille.

“We operated in groups of three in civvies, disrupting communications by blowing up railway lines and telephone exchanges.

“Our job was to cause as much difficulty for the Germans as possible. We did espionage, sabotage and arms dumps. On the odd occasion we would even assassinate a German.”

Mr Joseph was unimpressed by the French Resistance fighters he worked with.

“When London spoke, they listened because we supplied them with arms and ammunition,” he said.

“There was a lot of resentment between each different group of Resistance people.

“It was childish. They wouldn’t co-operate of their own free will.”

Mr Joseph also worked within Germany during his tours.

“I was disguised as an SS officer finding out what they had where,” said the 85-year-old.

“There was an anti-Nazi organisation in Germany called the White Rose who helped us a lot.”

Mr Joseph tried to get arms into the Warsaw Ghetto just weeks before the uprising in April 1943.

However, he said the Polish Resistance backed out of the operation when they found out that he wanted to give guns to the starving Jewish inhabitants.

“The Polish Underground refused to help us,’’ he said.

“The conditions in the ghetto were indescribable. There were people lying everywhere, dying of starvation. People weren’t taking any notice of them because it was an everyday occurrence.

“If any Pole was caught throwing a loaf of bread over the wire they would be shot.”

Mr Joseph, who grew up in London, lost nearly 100 relatives during the war.

“I had a big family in the Polish town of Zakopane in the Tatra Mountains,” he said.

“They all went to Auschwitz, near enough 100 of them – aunts, uncles, grandparents, nieces, nephews. None of them came back.”

Mr Joseph continued his work with the SOE, avoiding death which came to so many of his comrades.

“Sometimes we went in by parachute, sometimes over the Pyrenees, other times we went ashore on rubber boats,’’ he said. “Sometimes we were flown in.

“A normal tour of duty was three months because that was our life expectancy. A radio operator’s was six weeks.

“We would come back for new training before going back. I did seven tours.

“We had to sleep with one eye open. If you didn’t wake up quick enough, you didn’t wake up at all.

“We weren’t protected under the Geneva Convention because we weren’t in uniform. If we were caught, we would be shot.

“We lost 82%. I’m one of the lucky 18%.”

Having spent years helping prepare the ground for the Normandy landings, Mr Joseph spent D-Day itself in a hospital bed.

“I was badly hurt in a firefight just outside Lille,” he said.

“They told me that on June 5, 1944, I was in a military hospital in Southampton. To this day no-one has told me how I got there.

“I stayed there until July 1949 with a spinal injury. It wasn’t until 1951 that I was able to walk with crutches.”

Mr Joseph, who reached the rank of major, said: “The SOE had a great impact considering its size. We caused more problems for the Germans than a whole regiment.”

After the war Mr Joseph ran his own cabinet-making factory in London.

He married Ida Livingstone in the early 1970s and the couple moved to her native Manchester. She died aged 76 in 2005.

Mr Joseph moved to Lockwood 18 months ago.

“I decided to come and live in the country,” he said.

Mr Joseph was awarded the Military Medal, Military Cross and the American Legion of Merit. He also received a CBE for his work with war pensioners in Manchester.