Denis Hills

Denis Cecil Hills (8 November 1913 – 26 April 2004) was a British author, teacher, traveller and adventurer. He came to international prominence in 1975 while he was living in Uganda and was sentenced to death for espionage and sedition following comments about President Idi Amin in a book which Hills wrote. After Amin rebuffed appeals for clemency by Queen Elizabeth, Hills was released and allowed to return to the UK following the intervention of the British government. Biography Hills was born in the Birmingham suburb of Moseley. He attended King Edward's School, Birmingham before going on to Oxford University in 1932 where he read Philosophy, Politics and Economics at Lincoln College. In 1935, he left Oxford to travel through Germany, funding himself by writing for the Birmingham Post. Returning to England, Hills worked briefly at Shell-Mex & BP before moving to Poland in 1937 as English editor of a cultural magazine. Hills' book Return to Poland showed his fascination with pre-war Poland, and in 1939 he moved to Warsaw to teach English. At the outbreak of war, he moved to Romania where Hills worked with the British Council. He was for a time seconded to General Kopanski's Polish Carpathian Lancers Brigade, and then to the King's Own Royal Regiment. Polish-speaking, he joined the 5th Kresowa Division in Iraq and Palestine before being sent to Italy in 1944. In 1944, Hills served as an officer of the British Eighth Army in Italy. He fought with the Polish Carpathian Lancers Brigade and the King's Own Royal Regiment in the Second World War. After the Battle of Monte Cassino, he was involved with the implementation of the Yalta Repatriation agreements. He found that thousands of Ukrainians and Russians were being sent to gulags or condemned to death. This was known as Operation Keelhaul. Hills could not accept this as they had fought alongside the Allies against the Nazis and he did everything in his power to thwart the return of all but a bare minimum. Norman Davies in his book Europe: A History and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in The Gulag Archipelago recognised Hills's part in this.