THREE Wiltshire men’s names have been discovered on a secret hit-list Hitler kept during the Second World War, after a Melksham genealogy company found what they are now calling his ‘Black Book’.

Tim Hayhoe, managing director of Forces War Records, uncovered the book while researching through MI6 files for another project. Having quickly glanced over it, he realised what the ‘list’ actually was.

“It was just something I looked into myself because I found it really interesting,” he said.

“A lot of the German words are no longer used and the majority of it was abbreviated and there were a lot of mistakes. This led us to believe that it was worked on for some time by a lot of clerks, as there were so many different styles.

“The list was really interesting and I think it raised as many questions as it did answers.”

Now Mr Hayhoe has published a digital version of Sonderfahndungsliste GB (the title translates as ‘(es)special(ly)/most wanted list –GB’) to mark the 75th anniversary of the Battle of Britain: if Britain had lost the war at that point in 1940, many of the people named would have probably been imprisoned or sent to concentration camps.

Sadly, Mr Hayhoe has been unable to trace the three Wiltshiremen who would have been at risk: they were listed as Thomas Chaloner, Captain; Jan Roney-Kougel, allegedly a British Officer and Albert Wohlfahrt, conscript/draft dodger.

Out of the 2,820 names, there were many who were easily recognisable, including Prime Minister Winston Churchill. Curiously, the Royal Family are not included.

One further person that Mr Hayhoe uncovered on the hit-list was a little known hero who he believes was the inspiration for James Bond – Conrad Fulke Thomond O’Brien-ffrench.

Mr Hayhoe also believes to have discovered ‘Britain’s Schindler’, Major Francis E. Foley, the head of the Berlin Station of MI6, where his position enabled him to save tens of thousands of people from the Holocaust by issuing visas to allow Jews to escape ‘legally’ to Britain and Palestine.

With the assistance from military history graduate Sean Bennington, Mr Hayhoe spent a year completing the meticulous project to translate and digitalise the entire book. There are now thought to be only two copies worldwide, one at The Imperial War Museum and the other somewhere in Germany.

Mr Hayhoe found that other countries such as Poland had similar books written about them.

and believes Hitler would have made an intensive study of Britain’s defences in planning his invasion.

To mark Battle of Britain Day on Tuesday Forces War Records can be seen online for the very first time.

To see the book, visit www.forces-war-records.co.uk