Looking for any help regarding the following person. Sorry have know other information regarding name or unit that he served in. Camp: STALAG XV111 D No: 5735 Trusting that some person just may have a copy of the POW record books, personaly last saw them at the reading room(that is a room!) in the IWM, but im no longer able to get down to london. Ps: Would like to say a thank you to Adam in regards to getting me through the start up & doing a thread, one gets to an age when one has problems spelling one's own name let alone knowing where one lives when one go's out. Regards
I am afraid it would take many hours looking through every page of the Reference Books. There is no short cut at all. It could also be that the tag belonged to P.O.W. of another Nationality other than the Commonwealth. I have seen the three for sale on Ebay,but as I say Nationality is not indicated. Brian
IIRC, I believe the PoW numbers were reissued when inmates moved to other camps etc, so even were one to track down a name, it could possibly have also been allocated to others. Barring a lucky strike, I think the odds are stacked against you on this. Wiki (!!) has this:- Stalag XVIII-D (also known as Stalag 306) was a German Prisoner of War camp at Maribor (German: Marburg an der Drau) in what is now Slovenia. It opened in the spring or early summer of 1941, operating until the end of the war. By July 1941 Stalag XVIII-D contained nearly 4,500 British and Commonwealth prisoners captured in Greece and Crete. Conditions initially were very poor, with more than 1,000 men accommodated in tents while huts were being constructed. There was an outbreak of typhus in early 1942. However the situation improved as the war went on. Escapes assisted by Yugoslav Partisans became increasingly common, with most escapers being led south to the Partisan base and airfield at Semič in Bela Krajina. In August 1944, the largest mass rescue of POWs of the war in Europe took place when 132 Allied prisoners from Stalag XVIII-D were freed by Partisans in the raid at St Lorenzen. Between August and November 1942 there was a second camp at Maribor, Stalag XVIII- B/Z. There is therefore the slight possibility that the ID tag went "missing" with its owner during this escape, or for some reason was retained on release in 1945
Thank you for your help. looks like i'll have to save up my pocket money to go to london & camp overnight with my tent in the grounds of the IWM.
Thank you. Did come across a lot of the info regarding what you sent found it all very intresting, just a shame that they did not put the names on the I.D.TAGS.
Posibley may have something that could be very intresting regarding one of the largest POW break IN'S / OUT well over 300 confirmed got away.Regards
The number stopped with a P.O.W. whenever he moved from one Camp to another. It was issued at the Camp he first went to when processed. As I have said in my earlier post; there is nothing to tell the Nationality of the Prisoner so he could be French, Belgian, Dutch, Jugoslav, Norweigen, American,Russian, or Greek. So these would not show in any records of Commonwealth P.O.W. which were a minority of the Total Nos. in German Captivity.
