Walter Freud

Who was Walter Freud?

Anton Walter Freud was a chemical engineer and a member of the Royal Pioneer Corps and the British Special Operations Executive. He was a grandson of Sigmund Freud, who escaped along with his family from Vienna, Austria after the Anschluss.

Freud was born in Vienna in 1921. He was the first child of Sigmund Freud’s eldest son Jean-Martin, a lawyer, and his wife Ernestine Drucker. He was named after Anton von Freund, a colleague of his grandfather.

After leaving Vienna 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 USA. While he was a student at Loughborough College, he and his father were interned as enemy aliens in May 1940. He was first held in a prison in Leicester and then on the Isle of Man. In July, he was deported to Australia aboard the HMT Dunera.

He was allowed to return to the United Kingdom in October 1941. 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 establish a British presence in advance of the approaching Red Army. He took possession of the airfield in Zeltweg singlehandedly.