Anton Walter Freud was a chemical engineer and a member of the Royal Pioneer Corps and the British Special Operations Executive.
Background
He was a grandson of Sigmund Freud and escaped with him and other family members from Vienna after the Anschluss. Freud was born in Vienna in 1921. After leaving Vienna in March 1938 Freud"s parents separated and he and his father went to Britain whilst his mother and sister Sophie went to Paris before emigrating to the United States of America. While he was a student at Loughborough College, he and his father were interned as enemy aliens in May 1940.
Career
He was first held in a prison in Leicester and then on the Isle of Manitoba In July, he was deported to Australia aboard the HMT Dunera. He was allowed to return to the United Kingdom in October 1941 due to a refinement in internment policy.
He then joined the Royal Pioneer Corps in which he worked for eighteen months, before he was allowed to join the Special Operations Executive in 1943, due in part to his being a native German speaker.
In April 1945 he parachuted into Styria in the Austrian Alps to help establish a British presence in advance of the approaching Red Army. Though he became separated from his comrades he managed to bluff his way into the strategically important Zeltweg airfield.
Posing as a representative of the advancing British Eighth Army, he convinced the Commandant to surrender it to the allied forces. After the war he was an investigator with the War Crimes Investigation Unit.
He was the first person to interrogate Bruno Tesch of Tesch & Stabenow, the firm responsible for supplying much of the Zyklon B which was used in Nazi extermination camps.
Freud was also involved in the trial of Alfried Krupp of Krupp Industries, indicted for the use of slave labor, and he was also involved in the investigation of the murder of twenty children in the basement of the Bullenhuser Damm school in Hamburg. He went back to Loughborough, where he graduated with a degree in chemical engineering. He was hired by British Oxygen Corporation, then went to work for British Nylon Spinners in Pontypool.
He was recruited by British Hydrocarbons based in London in 1957, which after a series of mergers became part of Boite Postale Chemicals where he remained until his retirement at the age of 55 in 1977.
His last residence in Britain was in Oxted, Surrey. He is the father of David Freud, Baron Freud.