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WW2 Tales, Diary of A German POW, an extraordinary YouTube Channel

transmaster

transmaster

AK Subscriber
Subscriber
WW2 Tales, Diary of A German POW, is a fascinating YouTube channel that is narrations of World War 2 German POWs. It chronicles their travels through the POW "system". I know some of this from the German POWs that returned to Wyoming and Nebraska to marry the daughters of the German farmers they worked for during the war. I also knew of the contrast in treatment they received in the USA, the English and the sometimes brutal treatment they received from the French. It is interesting their shock when they finally got to States. They realized when they were traveling on trains into interior the US that Germany didn't stand a chance.

 
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I'll check this out. I live south Scottsdale and close by is Papago Park. Near there during WWII was German POW camp that actually had an escape using a tunnel. It's a fascinating story and if you're interested in this type of history I recommend you look it up.
 
Thanks @transmaster for the link, sounds super interesting. Maybe someone from West Texas can explain the correlation between Ft. Bliss and Germany? There's a straight up German elementary school 200 yds inside the main gate, I was there for THAAD training and no one could answer my questions.
 
Hajidub said:
Thanks @transmaster for the link, sounds super interesting. Maybe someone from West Texas can explain the correlation between Ft. Bliss and Germany? There's a straight up German elementary school 200 yds inside the main gate, I was there for THAAD training and no one could answer my questions.
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The German Air Force Air Defense Center was located Ft Bliss. The GAFAD, was established in 1956, and was the home of the German Air Defense School. In Germany they do not have the open country needed to properly train with modern AA systems. It was deactivated and moved back to Germany in May of 2022 because of the Ukrainian war. The German school was for the children of the German personal stationed there.
 
transmaster said:
The German Air Force Air Defense Center was located Ft Bliss. The GAFAD, was established in 1956, and was the home of the German Air Defense School. In Germany they do not have the open country needed to properly train with modern AA systems. It was deactivated and moved back to Germany in May of 2022 because of the Ukrainian war. The German school was for the children of the German personal stationed there.
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Thanks for the explanation!
 
The story in the Panhandle of Nebraska with German POWs is so interesting. in the area from around Kimball Nebraska up North through Scottsbluff there were a lot of first generation German farmers. The POWs assigned to these farms as farmhands entered into a household of Germans able to converse in German. These POWs quickly became members of the family. They returned after the war and married the daughters of these families. The Geneva Convention required that POWs had be returned to their home country. If this had not been the case a large portion of the Germans POWs in the States would not have gone home at all. The Russians demonstrating their barbarity did not repatriate their German POWs, and in the closing days of the War they imprisoned American soldiers most of them disappeared into Russia never to be seen again. Returning Russian POWs were imprisoned, executed, or worked to death in Siberian gulags.
 
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transmaster said:
in the closing days of the War they imprisoned American soldiers most of them disappeared into Russia never to be seen again
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Not once in my years have I read about such. I'm not disputing, I'm just flabbergasted to read this. What reason would the Russians have for doing this to their Allies?
 
onwardjames said:
Not once in my years have I read about such. I'm not disputing, I'm just flabbergasted to read this. What reason would the Russians have for doing this to their Allies?
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From what I've read about Stalin- any alliance he made, personal or political or military, was temporary, subject to summary termination if it no longer was of perceived benefit to him.

At the end of the war- Stalin saw that the Allies were likely going to be no longer useful to him- and in fact, were probably going to be an impediment to his expansion wishes- so they became fair game for his gulag system, most likely, in cases like this. That's how he thought. And people like Putin, learned that from Stalin and people who also thought like Stalin did...

Regards,
Gordon.
 
onwardjames said:
Not once in my years have I read about such. I'm not disputing, I'm just flabbergasted to read this. What reason would the Russians have for doing this to their Allies?
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I have talked to several people that were in this situation at the end of the war. They said the Soviet soldiers were so stupid they could not tell the difference between an American and a German soldier. If a Allied officer or a better educated Russian officer didn't intervene you were hauled off with all of the other surrendered German soldiers. Once in the gulag system there was no getting out. Stalin didn't care. This also happened during the Korean war. There were known living American POWs in North Korea. There were Russian interrogators, those they thought might have important information disappeared. Fellow POWs were sure they were taken into the Soviet Union. This was also supposed to have happened to POWs in North Vietnam but no solid evidence has been found for that. After Russia opened researchers with Russian help scoured the Russian Archives. They did not find anything conclusive. The Russian Archivists said that most of the records, what there was of them, were destroyed to hide what was done.
 
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The Chaplain at the Cheyenne VA back in the early 1990 was one such person. He was imprisoned by Soviet troops days after the end of the war. He could not convince them that he was an American. Chaplain George said they were a bunch of drunk barbarians. He finally escaped when they were passed out drunk and he managed to get to a US Army Patrol. He said he saw Americans loaded into cattle cars headed into Russia along with Germans. He told me they recognized a British accent so they were reasonably safe. I have always had the impression that this was all swept under the rug in the US.
 
onwardjames said:
Thank you @GordonW and @transmaster. Somehow, I have never read about this awful wartime tragedy.
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There are excellent accounts written on the German side now. I have one somewhere in my audible library (still looking for it) that is the story of a German ME-262 pilot, and squadron commander. His account of the last month of the war and the weeks following it are fasinationing. They knew they had been defeated but they carried on. One very sad story in this book is a desperate young and poorly trained pilot wanted to fly a ME-262 on a combat patrol just days before the end of the war so he could say he flew in combat. The Me-262 was a real handful for an experienced pilot to fly. They let him go and because of his inexperienced he ended up crashing and was killed, the war ended on the next day. With the surrender he used a BMW halftrack ( Kleines Kettenkraftrad HK 10) to travel cross country to the American lines to surrender. His account of the journey could be made into a movie masterpiece. He encountered American troops fighting hold out German Waffen SS units who were determined to fight to the last man. His descriptions of the destroyed landscape and towns he passed through are jaw dropping. The main goal of the average German soldier was to surrender to the Americans. They knew they would be treated well. The British were OK, but they didn't have much to take care of them, The French had even less and they wanted revenge. The Russians just killed most of them.

I must find this book I want to re-listen to it. I have over a 1000 books in my Audible library things get lost in there.
 
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I've read Adolf Galland's musings. He was an ME-262 pilot. I've also got Eric Brown's comments on post war flying the Komet 163, the 262, and countless others.

The stones on that Englishman! I think I lost my book by Eric Brown in a yard sale (thanks, honey...) but that ol' RAF badass was something.
 
transmaster said:
I have talked to several people that were in this situation at the end of the war. They said the Soviet soldiers were so stupid they could not tell the difference between an American and a German soldier. If a Allied officer or a better educated Russian officer didn't intervene you were hauled off with all of the other surrendered German soldiers. Once in the gulag system there was no getting out. Stalin didn't care. This also happened during the Korean war. There were known living American POWs in North Korea. There were Russian interrogators, those they thought might have important information disappeared. Fellow POWs were sure they were taken into the Soviet Union. This was also supposed to have happened to POWs in North Vietnam but no solid evidence has been found for that. After Russia opened researchers with Russian help scoured the Russian Archives. They did not find anything conclusive. The Russian Archivists said that most of the records, what there was of them, were destroyed to hide what was done.
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One of the things highly trained militaries do/did is enemy recogniziion...it starts with big things like aircraft, sea craft, land vehicles...and then goes to uniforms, small arms and key personnel...you'd get the key personnel earlier if you're in HQ/Intelligence
 
I remember the luftwaffen @ Ft Bliss in the mid-1960s during my training there.
There's a German POW cemetery @ Ft McClellan not far from me.
 
transmaster said:
There are excellent accounts written on the German side now. I have one somewhere in my audible library (still looking for it) that is the story of a German ME-262 pilot, and squadron commander. His account of the last month of the war and the weeks following it are fasinationing. They knew they had been defeated but they carried on. One very sad story in this book is a desperate young and poorly trained pilot wanted to fly a ME-262 on a combat patrol just days before the end of the war so he could say he flew in combat. The Me-262 was a real handful for an experienced pilot to fly. They let him go and because of his inexperienced he ended up crashing and was killed, the war ended on the next day. With the surrender he used a BMW halftrack ( Kleines Kettenkraftrad HK 10) to travel cross country to the American lines to surrender. His account of the journey could be made into a movie masterpiece. He encountered American troops fighting hold out German Waffen SS units who were determined to fight to the last man. His descriptions of the destroyed landscape and towns he passed through are jaw dropping. The main goal of the average German soldier was to surrender to the Americans. They knew they would be treated well. The British were OK, but they didn't have much to take care of them, The French had even less and they wanted revenge. The Russians just killed most of them.

I must find this book I want to re-listen to it. I have over a 1000 books in my Audible library things get lost in there.
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So many accounts of rushing to the American sector before they closed off the areas. It's like the end of game football play where the ball just crosses the line on outstretched hand before the whistle blows and you score.
 
Pio1980 said:
I remember the luftwaffen @ Ft Bliss in the mid-1960s during my training there.
There's a German POW cemetery @ Ft McClellan not far from me.
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At F.E. Warren, now Air Force Base, In Cheyenne. They had a small Italian POW camp. There is a small but carefully tended cemetery of Italian POWs who died while being held in the camp. Like the Germans, in Nebraska, Cheyenne had a small but tight Italian community that welcomed these Italian soldiers into their families.
 
DeadRock said:
One of the things highly trained militaries do/did is enemy recogniziion...it starts with big things like aircraft, sea craft, land vehicles...and then goes to uniforms, small arms and key personnel...you'd get the key personnel earlier if you're in HQ/Intelligence
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The Russian Army swarmed like a zombie horde into Germany. Even during the darkest days of the German invasion Stalin and his political spies were arresting and sending soldiers off to Siberia. They were poorly trained, if they were trained at all. A book to read about this is The Gulag Archipelago, by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.
 
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A stupendous movie that will give you frostbite is 'One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich' (1970) based on the Solzhenitsyn book by the same name. Ivan Denisovich's crime was to be captured by the Germans, and escaping back to Soviet lines during WW2. Returning Russian POWs were all considered to be Spies. The opening of this movie alone will leave you slack jawed and shivering it is so cold and bleak.

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