No, we've not been invaded. This story appeared in the Aberdeen Press and Journal on 14 September 1933:
English Schoolboy Assaulted
Nazi Attack Because He Did Not Salute
An English schoolboy, J. R. K. Preedv, Market Harborough, last night, in London', told remarkable story of an experience had in Germany on August 31 when Nazis brutally assaulted him because he did not salute Hitler's standard.
1 was walking with some German friends along the Stresemannstrasse in Berlin, and met a column of Hitler's Jugend (young men), he said.
On each side of them on the pavement were about eight or ten Nazis about eighteen years of age. They were put there for the purpose of seeing that everybody saluted, and I was told afterwards by my German friends that they would have attacked anybody who did not salute.
Exempted by Order
I did not salute the standard as the others did, being English, and therefore exempted from it by an order of Hitler's.
Suddenly I was attacked from behind by the Nazis on the pavement. 'Some held me while others kicked me. No great damage was done, but my glasses were completely smashed. It happened so suddenly that my friends saw little. I am claiming compensation for my glasses.
The people he was staying with told him it was lucky he made no resistance, or he would have been severely beaten up. '
A search of other reports of this incident reveals that the lad's first name was John and that he was a pupil at Wellington - presumably the public school Wellington College. And after the war there was a medical researcher called J.R.K. Preedy with a number of publications to his name.
The reports also reveal that John Preedy was the stepson of the owner of Nevil Holt preparatory school, Frederick Phillips.
A post of mine, which still attracts worrying accounts of abuse from former pupils of the school, quotes a now-vanished Times Educational Supplement story about Phillips:
A headteacher who faked his name, age and qualifications to run a boarding school in Leicestershire for 40 years has been exposed as a fraud by his son.
Frederick Phillips cheated parents, pupils and his bank manager into believing he was a qualified French teacher and aristocrat with military honours in order to buy and run Nevill Holt preparatory school in Market Harborough. He died in 1982 ...
Swansea-born Frederick Phillips changed his accent and pretended he was a graduate from the Sorbonne to get a job teaching French at Nevill Holt.
He had, in fact, only attended summer school at Besancon university, France.
In 1927 he adopted the double-barrelled name Serille-Phillips and claimed he was the son of a gentleman (his father was a wheelwright) to secure a bank loan of £12,000 to buy the Grade I listed 13th century school building.
He said he was 30, to substantiate a lie that he was a former squadron leader, secret service agent and medal-winner in the First World War. In fact, he had only just completed his military training at Uxbridge.
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