World War II Database

As servicemen of the Western Allies became captured in Germany, they were treated better than their Eastern European counterparts, but the experience was by no means comfortable. The enlisted men lived a life of hard labor, only returning to their quarters at night to a bowl of watery soup with a few pieces of potatoes and a chunk of bread (with the former often rotten and the latter moldy). The officers did not receive better treatment even with the exemption from physical labor; an imprisoned officer was said to live an unbearably monotonous life at the camps, constantly trying his psyche.

Shire Library's Prisoner of War in Germany by Peter Doyle introduces the readers to the WW2-era German POW camps and their inhabitants. The "Kriegies", nicknames of the POWs, were innovative by necessity, fashioning cookers from empty tin cans and carving utensils out of wood. While Germans sent photographs of them playing football as if they were on holiday, the truth was that the prisoners fought to stay alive. Some of them relentlessly planned for daring escapes, resulting in timeless stories such as the "Great Escape" and the sad tales of plans gone terribly wrong. Meanwhile, other POWs directed their ambitions toward their survival instead, hoarding food, listening to news of Allied advances with their contraband radios, and awaiting the day of their liberation. From camp theatrical productions to forging fake documents, from the Red Cross aid packages to the post cards that the Germans let prisoners send home, Prisoner of War in Germany provides a general overview of the lives of POWs. To keep the overview from becoming impersonal, Doyle introduces the stories of three POWs, Private Leslie Doyle of the British Army, Private Aben Caplen of the United States Army, and Flying Officer Duncan Black of the Royal Air Force, contrasting their experiences as prisoners of war and personifying the otherwise faceless descriptions.

Color photographs accompany the text throughout the entire book, which are helpful for readers to see the Klim cans, prisoner-printed newsletters, and other artifacts, thus providing greater insight to the understanding of camp life. Photographs and text of letters and post cards sent home from POW camps also achieve similar effect.

The size of the book, at only about 60 pages, reflects the lack of in-depth detail on this topic. However, it should not take away from the fact that Prisoner of War in Germany is a great primer for those not familiar with the experience of the WW2-era prisoners of war in Germany, and it makes this reader speculate whether there would be a similar title about the experience of British, Commonwealth, and American POWs in Japanese camps.