“I wish my captivity could begin all over again!!”
German POWs in Britain
Post War 1945-1948
“They were no trouble”
“Nan used to make them lunch”
How did Britain’s rural communities go from fighting non-commissioned Germans soldiers in 1945 to inviting them over for Christmas and offering them their spare rooms in just a couple of years?
The answer lies in the structure of the POWs camps themselves. Camps in the UK were known by numbers rather than names and they typically held a few hundred to over a thousand men with there being no less than 400,000 German POWs in the country post war. A figure around roughly 1% of the UK population.
This camp structure changed in late 1944 when farmers were getting increasingly frustrated that POWs were only available for work between the hours of 9:30 to 4:30 due to strict camp schedules.
To rectify this, a large number of smaller, satellite camps were opened, holding just a few dozen Germans in each one. Many of these camps are not listed in official records or are listed as a sub camp of a larger one. It meant that almost every rural town in the UK had some form of POW camp nearby. This didn’t mean the larger, more structured camps closed, it just meant the prisoners suited to farm work and manual labour were moved elsewhere.
Germans on farm work details prior to then had worked hard, despite a few incidences of sabotage, but they were under close guard during most of the war years and had no chance to interact with locals. They had been previously hired out to large farms in high numbers yet the new camp structure allowed smaller family run farms to use POWs as labour if they wished to.
Under these new camps, since the war was coming to an end, the rules were more relaxed than in the larger camps and Germans were allowed to make their own way to their work place themselves, often early in the morning. The freedom given to POWs to get to these farms is beyond what may be believable today.
Many walked in small groups for a couple of miles each day with some having been given army bicycles yet more bizarrely some were allowed the freedom to drive trucks to their place of work, completely unsupervised. Not all of these drivers held a licence and were given an army permit which allowed them to do, standard practice in the military back then.
The British public weren’t informed of this either and it was inevitable that problems did occur. One morning a British motorist was nearly run off the road by an oncoming truck carrying only German POWs of which the driver hadn’t apparently been aware that the British drive on the left hand side!! The motorist complained but the allowance remained in place.
With only 1-4 Germans on each farm, this allowed farmers and POWs to talk face to face for the first time although fraternisation between civilians and Germans was actually still forbidden, even in the post war era.
Where some Germans had been denied even water from farmers in the past, it was harder to avoid interacting with those who you now worked alongside each day with many small farms being family affairs and all members mucking in. Post hostilities, relationships with these non-commissioned POWs improved dramatically.
The smaller, rural camps were often fairly primitive with few facilities or comforts. Many locals donated reading materials and old clothes to POWs or held collections such the one below advertised on the program of a play put on in my local village in late 1944.
Farmers paid the camps directly for the labour with the POWs receiving payment in the form of coupons or plastic money which they could use in the camp or sometimes in local shops if allowed. The camps took a considerable chunk of this money as upkeep with the Germans receiving just 1.5 pence an hour. An amount which is still only equivalent to 50p an hour in today’s money.
Since the farmers were not allowed to offer further payment as incentive to work harder, many rewarded the POWs in the form of lunch (on top of the camp rations) although not everyone would have been comfortable doing this of course or they didn’t want to make it obvious that they were showing sentiment. It was common to hear, “This was my wife’s idea, not mine!!”.
Some POWs remember going from being offered sandwiches in the fields or eating on upturned crates in a barn to being invited to sit with the family at their dinner table in just a few weeks since it was common in those days to eat a cooked meal at lunch time. All the while fraternisation still remained illegal but since there were no guards present, who would know?
At the camp local to me, this was no different. The man who lived in the former village manor house had been a POW in Germany in the First World War and remembered what it was like to be a prisoner in a foreign country. He took on a 19 year old by the name of Jann and treated him like the son he never had while his daughters looked on him as their older brother.
That is not to say that the laws about fraternisation weren’t enforced. A British nurse had been exchanging letters with a German man who she had nursed when he was sent to a hospital close to his camp. The camp censors intercepted a marriage proposal in the final weeks of the war where the POW had asked her by letter. She had not written in reply but made it clear she wasn’t going to refuse. She was fined £15 which is a sum of almost £600 today.
Minor fraternisation, if caught in the act, was still an chargeable offence and a woman was fined £1 (£50 today) for throwing a small piece of cake over the fence of a camp. The police had to follow the law but many policemen admitted privately that matters of the heart were not the same as aiding an enemy’s country.
Elsewhere, Germans who had been hired out to other forms of work found that their colleagues had ways of bending the rules. A worker in a factory would often light a cigarette and leave it on the desk in front of him to be picked up by the POW who worked alongside him, therefore avoiding being seen close together.
In early 1946, farm owners had the opportunity to allow POWs to stay with them if they were able to accommodate them since many farms had lodgings for workers.
The benefit of this was that the POWs would start work and finish at the time of the farmers choosing. This didn’t always mean the Germans lived in luxury and many farms were still fairly primitive, having to fetch water from an outdoor well and most houses had no inside toilets. While the idea may have seemed open to abuse with people wishing to enact revenge by forcing POWs to work unrealistic hours or tasks, this rarely happened and the prisoners were able to complain about their employers if they were being mistreated. If this was the case they were then moved elsewhere.
A further benefit to the scheme was the opportunity to remove well behaved POWs from the hardline C graded Nazis who were sometimes life threatening to those who didn’t see things from their point of view or even those who simply showed optimism about a democratic future of Germany. The hardline men were often removed to camps in the North of Scotland or remote areas where it would be harder to escape or cause trouble.
A POW’s given grading could change depending on behaviour in the camp as it was first based on questions asked about political beliefs rather than actions or conduct in the war. Most smaller camp commandants were only interested in a prisoners willingness to work hard and to show at least some interest in changing beliefs. There was often little time for political re-education in these camps as the POWs were out working most of the time.
Those with good grades (A and B) had access to the small farm work details and this applied to former SS men too. When interviewed in later life a few of these men felt like the time working on the farms had been of great benefit to them in changing their world views.
German officers were not required to work, similar to allied officers in German ran POW camps, although lower ranking officers often volunteered in order to pass the time.
Another reason for the public to lend itself to sympathy was the status of the POWs themselves. Britain had signed an agreement with the US stating it would take half of the German POWs captured, however with Britain being bombed in the war this was an obligation they could only fulfil after the war had ended.
The Germans had wrongly assumed that they would be held only in the custody of the country of the troops they had surrendered to, so when the US released its German POWs in early 1946, the prisoners were deliberately lied to to get them to cooperate by telling them they were going home to Germany when in fact they were only being transferred to camps in Britain. Most were unknowingly facing an additional two years in captivity.
Each month, thousands of Germans arrived unexpectedly in Liverpool instead of Hamburg and for a short while moral in the camps plummeted since the POWs had even written to their families about them coming home. This lie became known as the Repatriation Deceit.
Not all Germans had served equal time in the war, some had been captured early on and therefore would be in captivity for almost 8 years by the end of 1947. On the other hand many young Germans had only served in the final weeks or months of the war so again their captivity stretched far beyond their wartime service.
Since the decision to remove the POW status from the captured men meant the allies were no longer bound by the rule that POWs should released at the end of hostilities, questions were raised in British Parliament whether, if the Germans were no longer POWs, that they were being held without trial and they were being paid a pittance a day, were they in fact slaves? It was a fair question given Britain’s role in ending the slave trade with some MPs pointing out that, this fact, plus the deceit over repatriation was maybe not the best introduction to democracy.
The churches also helped bridge the gap between POWs and civilians. While camps in earlier years offered their own church services, in the late and post war era some churches allowed prisoners to join them in services alongside the public. Fraternisation rules still applied but the Germans were permitted to sing hymns.
Surprisingly, for the benefit of the POWs, churches often chose to sing the hymn Glorious Things of Thee are Spoken of which the tune is the same as Deutschland, Deutschland. This meant many British subjects were hearing the tune of the German national anthem played every Sunday. Some British residents remember Christmas 1946 and German POWs singing Silent Night in front of the congregation in the song’s original language.
That same winter many of the POWs staying on farms ate Christmas dinner with the families they worked for. To show their appreciation the Germans made toys for the children out of wood and scrap metal. This was repeated in 1947 with many British newspapers reporting on the sheer devastation of Germany and its economy two years after the war which led to an increase in sympathy.
After Christmas of 1947 the remaining POWs who had not yet been repatriated were allowed even more freedom and could travel up to 5 miles alone on their non-working day. Some used this opportunity to visit local landmarks and learn about the area which they were based. Many talked to residents of the local town for the first time. Not everyone approved of this and some restaurants and cinemas put up signs saying “no Germans allowed” yet some went with the families who they were staying with wearing borrowed clothes over their uniforms.
This had been a big contrast to the POWs arrival in the country during the early war years where many (not all) were faced with understandable, sometimes violent hatred. Now in 1947 when Germans were denied travel on a bus there were many passengers who would stand up for them. This good reputation hadn’t come about overnight, it only came after years of being visible repairing roads, clearing bomb damage, shovelling snow and doing the jobs no one else desired.
For the first years of the war the majority of camps in the UK held Italian prisoners, captured in North Africa. After the Italian surrender, these prisoners were not released for some time yet but they could not be held alongside the Germans either. These POWs would be moved out of their camps in 1944 and into hostels of small groups to make way for the masses of Germans now arriving.
The Italians were reportedly slightly more easy going overall but they worked slower than the Germans and from a practical viewpoint, many farmers specifically requested German POWs where available. Some newspapers actually printed that Germans worked 3.5 x more efficiently than Italians.
By late 1946 most conscripted British soldiers had returned home from postings overseas and this led to complications with some employers where they had gotten use to cheap German labour. POWs on farms were paid by the hour yet many British casual farm workers were on a piece work scheme.
A common complaint was that German POWs received higher rations than British citizens but it wasn’t true. They had received army rations in the war which were higher than civilian rations but this decreased after the war. The calories provided had to reflect men who were working 50 hours a week manual labour.
When there were eventual talks of repatriation, many employers did not want the POWs to leave, some to serve their own benefit of having cheap labour but others had simply built up good relationships.
In the final few months of the camps being open, rules regarding fraternisation were being protested by both civilians and prisoners alike. A couple made headlines when a woman from the ATS secretly married a German POW at the town hall with the man using his middle name which was more English sounding. The woman was fined £4 (£200 today) but the act was done and it wasn’t technically illegal to marry a German, it had just been forbidden to fraternise full stop. The event became a source of entertainment in camps as the news spread around the country.
At this point several POWs already had children with British women and it was decided in parliament they would be allowed to marry but had to remain in their camps until repatriation and it didn’t automatically guarantee the chance to stay in the UK if that was their wish. In the months following July 1947 almost 800 marriages took place to Germans still in POW camps.
Britain’s reason for keeping the German POWs post war was that there had been no official peace treaty with Germany as there was no German run government in the years after the war but at the Moscow Conference in early 1947 it was decided that the German POWs were to be all sent home by the end of December 1948 at the very latest.
In the final months, there were a lot of escapes for various reasons. Many found the process of repatriation too slow and tried to find ways to return sooner while some had heard the news their homes in East Prussia no longer existed and feared an uncertain future. A few were genuinely heartbroken to have been leaving Britain and the way of life which they may never had had before or in a long time. A POW in his mid 20’s wrote a final entry in his diary “Oh unhappy me! I have no future in Germany. I wish my captivity could begin all over again.” When the train he was travelling on arrived at the docks for the ship to leave for Germany, he was found to have hanged himself in the toilet.
While most were looking forward to returning home, 25000 Germans POWs applied to stay in Britain. They did so by obtaining references from their employer and camp commandant so they could convert their status to a Civilian Worker. In 1947 a number of European Volunteers Workers had been invited to Britain but delays in arrival and the thought of having to train people with little knowledge of English and teach them the necessary skills made little sense if a farmer already employed a trained POW who may be willing to stay in Britain. Farmers were also facing a harvest with a shortage of workers due to repatriation on mass so it was a benefit to them to help “their” Germans to stay on.
The book Hitler’s Last Army as well as the documentary The Germans We Kept highlight the gratitude expressed by the POWs at their treatment while in British captivity.
As for Jann, the POW in my village, he was offered a cottage in the grounds of the estate where he could live for free under a tied contract (ownership remained with the farm) as long as he worked on their land. He would live and work there for the rest of his life and died only a few years ago with his “sisters” still talking about him today with fondness. A couple of former POWs came back to visit him and a reunion was held in the local pub.
So why did these small communities choose acts of kindness far beyond what these prisoners may have deserved? It wasn’t that hadn’t been bombed, many rural locations has been ideal spots for power stations, listening posts and airfields. The people were simply just sick of hating their fellow man full stop, even if there had been a good reason to. Many had lost family members in both wars and they did not want another reason to go to war with Germany again even if that came with great personal sacrifice. They had hoped by being kind they would show the Germans that they, the British, were not the enemy they had been taught to hate.
Sources - Hitler’s Last Army by Robin Quinn. A book on the detailed history of Germans in British captivity in the Second World War. It contains many individual stories of capture and captivity.
The Germans We Trusted - Another book featuring Germans POWs and their experiences in Britain. This one has lots of photographs.
The Germans We Kept - A Timewatch documentary from 2000, mainly featuring British memories of German POWs. This is available on YouTube.
My knowledge of my own village POW camp.
My village POW camp in Cornwall consisted of just 3 huts plus a guard house. There was not even a watchtower, just a main gate with a sentry. As you can see from the bottom photo the camp (on the right) wasn’t on the outskirts of the village but just a field away from residents’ homes. The chimney structure is the water tower. These photos were taken in 1990.
The cartoon at the top is from the Sunday Express and has been used from the Island Camp Farm archives.
