Prisoners of the Reich: Germany's Captives, 1939-45

Pen & Sword Books Ltd. Very Good/Very Good. 1988. Hard Cover. 8vo 0850526817 Dust jacket complete. Original cloth boards with bright gilt titling on spine. Previous owner's details on ffep. 226 pages clean and tight. Many of those who found themselves in German prisoner-of-war camps during the Second World War later wrote accounts of their experiences. Of these, however, the vast majority were by prisoners whose experiences included one, if not several, attempts at escape. So it is not altogether surprising if many people have the mistaken idea that all POWs spent their time ragging their captors and planning ingenious and heroic ways to escape. Add to this ever-growing library the many films and TV series which have been made during the last forty years, and you get an even more romantic and distorted picture. As one Sapper Kirk ruefully says in this book, 'Sadly they did not tell our story'. 'They' cannot altogether be blamed, for the reality of POW life was compounded of boredom, monotony, hunger and cold, with more boredom and some brutality thrown in for good measure - not quite the stuff of which best-sellers or box-office hits are made. In Prisoners of the Reich Dr Rolf shows what life was really like for the ordinary British POW in Germany, basing his study on interviews and correspondence with hundreds of those who endured anything up to five years in captivity and who have watched with increasing bewilderment as their experiences have been trivialized by the media for mass entertainment. He follows their story from captivity to liberation and tells in their own words the various emotions which accompanied each stage of their ordeal. The result is not a catalogue of heroics, but rather an attempt to set straight the record of life during those wasted years for the vast majority who knew that they had neither the resources nor the will to try and escape. .