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The Trent Park Museum Trust has announced the death of Fritz Lustig, the last of the "secret listeners", who collected invaluable intelligence by listening in to bugged conversations between German prisoners of war during World War 2.

This once top secret intelligence gathering was carried out at three large country houses that had been requisitioned, one being Trent Park.  Fritz Lustig, a refugee from Nazi Germany, did not himself work at Trent Park, but as one of only two surviving secret listeners played an important role in the successful campaign to persuade the new owners of Trent Park to set aside part of the mansion to be used as a museum.

In the first of the video clips below, Fritz tells part of his story at a campaigning event held by the Trent Park Museum Trust in June 2016, his energy and demeanour belying the fact that he was then aged 97.  The second is an interview by David Jason taken from a TV programme broadcast earlier this week.

As a final tribute to Fritz Lustig, an excerpt from an interview that he gave to the Guardian in 2013.  Bearing in mind that his speech at the Trent Park event was given as the country was absorbing the shocking news of the murder of Jo Cox MP, his warning from three years earlier is something that we shouldn't dismiss lightly - newspaper headlines about "enemies of the people" and "saboteurs" are only too reminiscent of totalitarian tactics in the 1930s.

I no longer believe that totalitarian tendencies are a uniquely German problem, as people did at the time: genocides have happened since, and all over the world. The events of 30th January 1933 to me still serve as a warning of how quickly a conservative government can lose control of the situation when it starts to engage with political party further to their right – and there's a lesson in that for British politicians too. Eighty years are a long time, but the events of that day are still relevant now: if we forget what happened, it may happen again.

The programme from which this clip is taken, the last episode of David Jason's Secret Service, will be repeated on More4 at 5.55pm on Saturday 23rd December.