Paul Briscoe was born in Streatham, south-west London, on 12 July 1930. His father was a clerk who died in 1932 and his mother was a freelance journalist with fascist sympathies and little affection for her son whose care she primarily left to a nanny. In 1935, she took her son on a tour of Germany with her German boyfriend; they spent many months living in hotels and guesthouses around the country whilst Norah Briscoe wrote about the experience for British publications. When his mother returned home to continue her career and later drifted away from her fiancée, Briscoe was left with his parents in Miltenberg, Bavaria . He moved in with them permanently when he was six, so that he could attend school. Later in life, he would write that the ideology of the Nazi Party and antisemitism was taught in his lessons and how at the age of eight years old he was taken by his teachers to a local synagogue and sent in to loot it during Kristallnacht.