What happened to German POWs?

I once asked Peter G to do some research on the SS Division that my unit guarded in Austria.

http://www.ww2talk.com/forum/veteran-accounts/21973-dotting-%22i%22s.html#post482693 see comment #26

According to Peter "they just melted away" !

Ron

 

From TNA description of WO 307 series:
"In the early 1960s, the individual records of enemy PoWs that had previously been held by the British Prisoners of War Information Bureau were all returned to the appropriate national authorities under the provisions of the Geneva Convention, in order that those countries could deal with administrative questions raised by their citizens.

Aha! Now we have a direct paper trail which leads to Germany,
the home of bureaucracy and meticulously detailed record keeping!

Should be a simple task to find out what became of the files, with
the right questions asked of the right people in the right language!

best

 

Aha! Now we have a direct paper trail which leads to Germany,
the home of bureaucracy and meticulously detailed record keeping!

Should be a simple task to find out what became of the files, with
the right questions asked of the right people in the right language!
best

When you would have visited the BA/MA archives in Freiburg, you wouldn't have said that! :p

The German records are a disaster. First of all, before the military archives were organised they had lost much of their most precious files. It was an open archive, where one could take away originals easily. That was the same in the Netherlands, by the way. Microchips could have saved the day, but many records had not been photographed. Large chunks of records have gone.

As we speak of POW records, it probably refers to Red Cross archives. The German Red Cross does have an extended archive, but not well organised at all.

The WASt, the German personnel-archive, is disastrous. Besides the fact that millions of their former soldiers have not or only partially been registered, the waiting time for ordinary folks to get a single request handled is around three to four months nowadays. If you are lucky it is a few weeks less, usually a couple more! It costs you some bucks too.

I have spent much time in and around German archives. If you hit the jack-pot, its great and rather cheap. You usually won't though. This is one aspect that doesn't agree with their reputation.

 

It is possibly rare that such oddities occur as that of my father's experience. He was captured in May at the beginning of the war and repatriated from Regensburg, Germany in 1945. When he returned to the UK he saved up , bought himself a van and started to build up a small moving/transport business. One of the first contracts was to transport POWs to and from Seven Mile Lane POW camp, on the B2016, near Comp Wood, Leybourne, Kent, Map Reference: 51.266104,0.351219. I know some were specifically German as one of them made a small carved figure and gave it to my mother. Thank you for the great information by the way

 

My father, a Captain in The Royal Hampshire Regiment, and recently home from, Africa, was in charge of a German prisoner of war camp, in Carlsle Scotland. When war was over, the prisoner's put on a concert. My son has the program. We also where quite used to seeing, Italian prisoner's of war, on our local farm, in Lancashire.

 

Didn't Churchill ask the French to turn over all their Luftwaffe POWs while they still could during his last trip to France? Many later fought in the Battle of Britain.

Dave

 

An interesting article on the handling of German prisoners in Normandy;

https://www.normandythenandnow.com/from-nonant-le-pin-to-german-pow-life-in-normandy/

 

Alan Patrick Malpass, British attitudes towards German prisoners of war and their treatment: 1939-48, PhD Thesis, Sheffield Hallam University, 2016.
Johann Custodis, Employing the enemy: the contribution of German and Italian Prisoners of War to British agriculture during and after the Second World War, in The Agricultural History Review, Volume 60, Part II. 2012.
see also various papers and articles by R. J. Moore-Colyer and Bob Moore,

Initially there was no intention to hold numbers of POWs in Britain but rather to ship them off to Canada. Up to 1942 there were only relatively small numbers held in Britain. The majority of Italian POWs were held in North and East Africa where they had been captured. However this put a lot of pressure on the British and Commonwealth forces in those theatres and the POWs could not be held in conditions consistent with the 1929 Geneva convention. Consequently they were distributed to camps in India, Kenya, South Africa and Britain and often used for labour. It was initially considered that security issues would preclude using Germans in this manner and no attempt was made to do so until 1944 when in January just under 1000 were shipped to Britain from N W Africa for an experimental scheme. This proved successful but numbers in Britain remained low until October 1944 after which large numbers were shipped from France.