England's too warm Born in N Germany, where the only heating you got was flogging the Hiwis.

Since I verge towards the "unpleasing" end of "pleasingly plump", I carry my insulation.

Flash

Are Hiwis small farm animals?

A bit self insulating myself.

 

Jim

British government might not find anyone to defend itself come the next war. I read a story on another page where soldiers returning from Afganistan through Heathrow were told they couldn't wear uniforms in terminal, by someone from airport authority.

 

Though I will admit US troops are prohibited from accepting decorations from foreign government without congressional approval which is pretty much always given.

Hiwis were Hilfswilligen.

The Germans said they were proper Russian POWs; the Soviets said they were traitors.

In my boyhood they were deeply feared. many were released and allegedly murdered many Germans. I can remember seeing them being transported in busses with windows blocked with barbed wire coils.

I'm wrong to crack jokes about them They were deeply unhappy people.

Ref # 14. In theory the Queen is head of the Armed Services and they owe allegiance to her not the government. 

The monarch has a surprising  number of theoretical powers, but very few if any have been put to the test in the last 150 years or more.

And won, he stayed on for another 24 years.

The Russian POWs from WW2 from what I read went back and Stalin sent them directly to Siberia where something like 1 in 100 of them survived. By contrast something like 4 out of 10 of the Germans taken by the Russians survived.

This is a dodgy statistic but I'm sure 4/10 is way too high,

 

However, while I have never seen specific breakdown in numbers, I suspect that most of the survivors are POWs that were released quickly. Men who went to Siberian work camps had a very high mortality rate. For example, out of about 200,000 POWs taken at Stalingrad in early 1943, only 5,000 lived to see Germany again - a mortality rate of over 97%. POWs taken late in the war, 1945, fared somewhat better.

The Russians used to tell jokes about the POW situation, referring to the Germans as 'Stalin's little ponies'. This is a reference to the brutally hard labor - ponies......and the reference to 'little' tells us that all the larger men were dead, probably from starvation. On the skimpy rations provided only very small men could survive more than a year or so. Very funny.

The shocking thing weas the behaviour of the British at Linz, handing back the white Cossacks.

 

There's a very harrowing book called "Cage of Iron" whose printing was uppressed in the UK which went into the blatant kidnaps by the Soviets of British and US POWs in Korea and Vietnam.

 

 Anyone who had an engineering or intelligence or other skilled background was liable. The book shows pictures of Americans and British settled down in Siberia. It also describes how Soviet "Observers " boarded ships in Norway and removed POWs and British naval personnel, never to be seen again.

 

The excuse the Labour Party gave was with thousands of Allied POWs in Russian overrun camps, we had no choice.  

The small county I grew up in had a WW2 pow camp in it. Filled with guys from the Africa Korps. My 8th grade English teacher told me a story about when she was about 7 she and a much older sister went to the camp and picked up a prisoner who had been a plumber in germany before the war he fixed what was broken and they paid him and returned him to the camp.  Most of the non skilled enlisted men worked in the rice fields. My uncles father was a horse guard on detail with them. He once dropped his shotgun and before he could dismount to pick it up a prisoner handed it to him butt first and told him he should take better care of his weapon. They were paid wages and when they went back to germany they had some scratch in their pockets. Only had one escape a truly dedicated nazi type ran and was killed by a state trooper about 10 miles from where he escaped. One guy even got permission to stay and after working in the oil field for about 10 years went to work for the city, fixing roads.

Remember the Film, "the One that got away?" Franz von Verra. Risking life and limb to run from Canada to the neutral USA From where he was repatriated via Mexico.

 

He disappeared on a routine patrol.

 

How many British personnel did he kill after repatriation?

 

Just so that you would know where Smith Falls Ontario and Ogdensburg NY is.

The green line up the St Lawerence R. is the border.

Franz von Werra (1914-1941) was a German WWII fighter ace who escaped from a British POW camp in Canada.

Franz von Werra was born on July 13, 1914, to impoverished Swiss parents in Leuk, a town in the Berner Oberland, one the Cantons of Switzerland. Later he and his sister were given to the care of an aristocratic German family.

Before World War II, von Werra joined the Luftwaffe. In the beginning of the war he served in the French campaign. He distinguished himself by boisterous behavior, a pet lion he kept at the aerodrome, and boasts of imaginary kills. He also used the title Baron, although he was not really entitled to it.

On September 5 1940, during the Battle of Britain, von Werra's Me109 was shot down over Kent, possibly by friendly fire. He successfully crash-landed on a field, was captured and eventually sent to London District Prisoner of War Cage. He was interrogated for two weeks and four days and eventually taken to a POW Camp No.1, at Grizedale Hall in the Lake District, Cumbria.

Next October 7 von Werra tried to escape for the first time during a daytime walk outside the camp. He had arranged the cooperation of other prisoners in the group. At a usual stop, and while a fruit cart provided diversion and other German prisoners covered for him, von Werra slipped over a brick wall to a meadow.

When von Werra's escape was discovered, the army alerted the local farmers and the Home Guard. On October 10 two Home Guard troopers captured him from a hoggarth but he escaped again. On October 12 a search party captured him when he was trying to hide underwater. Von Werra was sentenced to 21 days of solitary confinement for trying to escape but on November 3 was transferred to Camp 10 in Swanwick, Derbyshire.

In Camp 13, also known as the Hayes camp, von Werra joined a group of would-be-escapees calling themselves Swanwick Tiefbau A. G. (Swanwick Excavations, Inc.), who were planning to dig an escape tunnel. They worked in the tunnel for a month until it was completed December 17 1940. Camp forgers equipped them with money and forged identity papers. On December 20 von Werra and four others slipped out of the tunnel under the cover of antiaircraft fire and singing of the camp choir. Others were recaptured only a few days later.

Von Werra decided to go alone. He had taken along his flying suit and decided to masquerade as Captain Van Lott, Dutch RAF pilot. He claimed to a friendly locomotive driver that he was a downed bomber pilot trying to reach his unit, and asked him to take him to the nearest RAF base.

In Codnor Park Station, a local clerk treated him with suspicion but eventually agreed to arrange his transportation to the RAF at Hucknall. Police also questioned him but von Werra convinced them he was harmless. At Hucknall, squadron leader Boniface asked for his credentials and he claimed to be based on Dyce in Edinburgh. When Boniface was confirming this, von Werra excused himself and ran to the nearest hangar, trying to tell a mechanic that he was cleared for a test flight when Boniface arrived to arrest him at gunpoint. He was sent back to Hayes and put under armed guard.

In January 1941 von Werra was sent to Canada alongside most other German prisoners of war. His group was to be taken to a camp on the north shore of Lake Superior, Ontario so von Werra begun to plan escape to the United States, which was still neutral at the time. On January 21 he jumped out of the prison train through a window, again with the help of other prisoners, when the train had left Montreal and ended up near Smith Falls, 30 miles from the St Lawrence River. Seven other prisoners tried to escape from the same train as well but they were recaptured. Von Werra's absence was noticed the next afternoon.

Von Verra made his way over the border to Ogdensburg and turned himself over to the police. Immigration authorities charged him with entering the country illegally, so von Werra contacted the local German consul. Thus, he came into attention of the press and told them a very embellished version of his story. When US and Canadian authorities were negotiating his extradition, the German vice-consul helped him over the border to Mexico. Von Werra proceeded to Rio de Janeiro where he traveled to Barcelona, to Rome and eventually to Germany in April 18 1940.

Von Werra became a hero. Hitler granted him the Iron Cross, and he married. He also commented to condition of the German prison camps, comparing them to British ones that may have led to better conditions to British POWs. Von Werra returned to the Luftwaffe and was initially deployed to the Russian front but later flew fighter patrols over the North Sea.

On October 25 1941, von Werra's plane disappeared in a routine patrol from Holland north of Vlissingen, probably due to engine failure.