Now 85, Geoffrey Perry fought in the wake of the D-Day landings and was among those who witnessed the horrors of Belsen concentration camp after it was liberated. He was born Horst Pinschewer and grew up in Berlin, before coming to Britain as a Jewish schoolboy evacuee.

Perry was part of a special unit, called Tforce, whose brief in the closing stages of the war was to take Radio Hamburg. They did this in May 1945 and he read the first Allied boradcast from the same microphone which two days erlier Britain’s most wanted traitor and Fascist, William Joyce (Lord Haw Haw) had used in his last message to the German people.

It was Mr Perry who captured William Joyce – otherwise known as Lord Haw Haw. In May 1945, he and a British officer encountered an odd-looking figure in a forest near the German border with Denmark.

“I shot him in the bum,” Mr Perry recalled gleefully. “It was one shot. I’d asked him if he was by any chance Lord Haw Haw. His hand went to his pocket as if to pull out a gun – so I fired.”