Yesterday I joined Mike Read on his BBC Radio Berkshire show to chat about Hitler’s Last Army.
We talked about prisoner of war camps in Berkshire, and I mentioned that German POWs were at one time housed in the former winter quarters of Bertram Mills’ Circus near the race course at Ascot. Accommodation for some prisoners was found in what had once been the elephant house!
Mike also asked about escapes: we’ve all seen movies such as The Great Escape which depicts the mass breakout of Allied POWs from a camp in Germany. On the whole, there were relatively few escape attempts by German prisoners. Luftwaffe pilot Franz von Werra – subject of another film, The One That Got Away – jumped from a moving train in Canada, made his way back to Germany, was decorated by Adolf Hitler himself, and flew again in combat. (It was a short-lived return to action, as his plane crashed into the sea soon afterwards, and his remains were never found). But as Hitler’s Last Army reveals, von Werra was not the only German to escape, or even the first …