- 2 months ago
How Canadians broke the German officer corps in their prisoner-of-war camps without ever raising their voices is one of the strangest stories of the Second World War. It begins in Quebec, where a German general could speak beneath swastika flags while a Canadian sentry simply kept walking, and ends with the collapse of a prison hierarchy that once looked untouchable.
This historical war story follows German POW camps in Canada, from the Bowmanville mess hall fight and the failed shackling crisis to the labor program that gave prisoners a wage, work on farms, and a way around Nazi control. It also traces censorship, camp intelligence, internal courts, and the quiet pressure of Canadian law, labor, and patience. The result is a military history narrative about power, discipline, and how a country can win without shouting.
Created for listeners who enjoy WW2 stories, Canadian military history, prisoner-of-war camp history, and calm historical narration. It also fits search intent for documentary-style history, war stories, and long-form historical listening about Canada in the Second World War, German prisoners, and the hidden battles behind the wire.
This historical war story follows German POW camps in Canada, from the Bowmanville mess hall fight and the failed shackling crisis to the labor program that gave prisoners a wage, work on farms, and a way around Nazi control. It also traces censorship, camp intelligence, internal courts, and the quiet pressure of Canadian law, labor, and patience. The result is a military history narrative about power, discipline, and how a country can win without shouting.
Created for listeners who enjoy WW2 stories, Canadian military history, prisoner-of-war camp history, and calm historical narration. It also fits search intent for documentary-style history, war stories, and long-form historical listening about Canada in the Second World War, German prisoners, and the hidden battles behind the wire.
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LearningTranscript
00:00April 20th, 1944. Camp 44 at Grand Lien, Quebec, 50 kilometers southeast of Montreal.
00:08Farmland in every direction. A double line of barbed wire. Four towers.
00:15Inside the recreation hut, two enormous flags bearing swastikas hang from the rafters.
00:21Beneath them, a German general is giving a speech. His name is Johann von Ravenstein,
00:27and the several hundred officers listening to him are all prisoners of war.
00:31It is Adolf Hitler's birthday, and they are celebrating it with full ceremony.
00:36This is not occupied Europe, this is Quebec. Outside the wire, a Canadian sentry walks his beat.
00:43He is Veterans Guard of Canada, which means he is somewhere between 40 and 65 years old,
00:49which means the ribbons on his tunic came from the last war, from Ypres, or Vimy, or the Somme.
00:54He can hear the singing from 30 yards away. He has a rifle. He has keys to that gate.
01:00He could walk into that hut, tear those flags down, and end the entire performance in about 90 seconds.
01:07He doesn't. He keeps walking.
01:10As he passes the window, he counts.
01:12How many men are inside? Which uniforms? Who is standing at the front?
01:17At the end of his shift, he walks to the intelligence officer's hut and reports every detail.
01:23And the intelligence officer writes it down.
01:25One of the prisoners in that room, a young officer named Franz Karl Stanzel,
01:30wrote afterwards that the Canadians turned a blind eye, as if the whole thing were none of their concern.
01:36He was wrong.
01:37It was very much their concern.
01:39He simply couldn't imagine what a country does with a thing it chooses not to interrupt.
01:44Now hold on to that image, because I'm going to bring you back to it at the very end of
01:48this story.
01:49And when I do, it will mean something completely different than it does right now.
01:53Two years after that speech, April of 1946,
01:58Johann von Ravenstein walks through the gate of another Canadian camp.
02:02Same man, same rank, and he cannot get a single German officer in that compound to follow him anywhere.
02:11Nobody struck him. Nobody shouted at him. Nobody put him in a cell.
02:17The men who did that to him wore Canadian uniforms.
02:21If their story matters to you, a subscribe helps it reach more people.
02:26Here is the problem Canada was handed, and I want you to understand how strange it was,
02:31because nothing in the history of the war looks quite like it.
02:36By October of 1944, Canada was holding 34,193 German prisoners on behalf of the British.
02:45A country of 11 million people, holding the equivalent of three army divisions of enemy soldiers on its own soil.
02:54And under the Geneva Convention of 1929, those prisoners had the right to elect their own internal leadership.
03:01Canada was legally obliged to let the German army govern itself behind the wire.
03:07Think about what that means in practice.
03:10It means the chain of command survived capture.
03:13A corporal who took orders from a sergeant in North Africa took orders from the same sergeant in Alberta.
03:20The rank structure of the Wehrmacht simply relocated across the Atlantic and kept running.
03:24And in camp after camp, the men who seized that structure were the hardest men in it.
03:30They built intelligence sections to watch other prisoners.
03:33They built propaganda sections that ran lectures on National Socialism and organized the celebrations.
03:40They built escape committees.
03:42And in several camps, they built something they themselves called the Gestapo.
03:46Internal enforcement squads whose job was to identify Germans who were wavering and to make examples of them.
03:53A Canadian intelligence officer, Captain J.A. Milne, put it in a report in four flat words.
03:59The Gestapo element is extremely active.
04:02Here is what that felt like from the inside.
04:05A prisoner at the Medicine Hat camp in Alberta kept a diary, and Canadian intelligence obtained it in 1944.
04:14Were we not a German island in enemy land, he wrote?
04:18It is clear that one could not have an opinion of his own.
04:22Listen to that phrasing.
04:24One could not have an opinion of his own.
04:27Inside Canada, in a camp guarded by Canadian soldiers.
04:31They controlled the mail.
04:32Camp enforcement squads intercepted letters, held them back, censored the news that came in so that men wouldn't learn what
04:40was actually happening in Russia or Normandy.
04:43One Canadian intelligence director noted something chilling about how effective that was.
04:49That withholding a man's letters from home worked better than beating him as a method of keeping him a loyal
04:55Nazi.
04:55A beating creates a martyr.
04:58Silence from your wife creates a man who will do anything to get his mail.
05:02So that was the situation.
05:05An intact enemy officer corps, operating a functioning police state inside Canadian barbed wire, protected by international law that Canada
05:13had signed and intended to honour.
05:16And Canada broke it.
05:17Completely.
05:19By the end of 1946, there was nothing left of it.
05:23Now, the obvious answer is that Canada broke it with kindness.
05:26Good food, hockey rinks, decent barracks, and a general softening of hard men.
05:31Remember that answer because we are going to test it, and it is going to fail.
05:36It is going to fail in a mess hall in Ontario on Thanksgiving weekend of 1942, when Canada tried exactly
05:43one time to do this the direct way, and a Canadian guard ended up on the floor with a fractured
05:48skull, put there by a jar of jam.
05:5012.30 in the afternoon, October 10, 1942.
05:55Camp 30 at Bowmanville, Ontario, 75 kilometres east of Toronto.
06:00A former boys' training school with nine guard towers bolted onto it and 600 German officers living inside.
06:08Lieutenant Colonel James Mason Taylor, the Canadian commandant, walks across the compound to find the German camp spokesman.
06:17He is carrying an order from Ottawa that he did not write and, by most accounts, did not want.
06:24The order comes out of Dieppe.
06:26When German troops captured Canadians on that beach in August, they found operational instructions about binding prisoners' hands.
06:34Hitler ordered allied prisoners chained in reprisal.
06:39London ordered German prisoners chained in counter-reprisal.
06:43And so, the whole ugly business landed on the desk of a Canadian colonel in rural Ontario, which is where
06:50these things always land.
06:52He was to produce 100 officers to be put in shackles.
06:57Taylor doesn't send guards in with irons, he asks.
07:01He goes to General Major Georg Friemel, the elected spokesman for the prisoners, and requests that 100 men volunteer.
07:10Friemel says no.
07:12Not one.
07:13So Taylor tries the others.
07:15He goes to General Lieutenant Hans von Ravenstein, the senior army officer.
07:20He goes to Obersleutnant Hans Heffele, the senior Luftwaffe officer.
07:24He goes to Corvetten-Capitain Otto Kretschmer, the most successful U-boat commander of the entire war, who ran the
07:32naval side of the compound.
07:33Three more times.
07:35No.
07:36Now watch what has just happened, because it matters far more than the fight that follows.
07:41Four German officers have just refused a direct request from the Canadian commandant, in daylight, in front of 600 of
07:48their own men.
07:49And nothing happened to them.
07:51Their authority did not come from Berlin that afternoon.
07:54It came from being the men who stood between the ordinary prisoner and the enemy, and said no on his
07:59behalf.
08:00At the next roll call, nobody comes out.
08:03Taylor orders his guards to take 100 officers by force.
08:07And here is where Canada does something that tells you exactly what kind of country was running these camps.
08:13The guards go in under orders to use non-lethal force.
08:17Empty rifles.
08:18Baseball bats.
08:19Nothing that fires.
08:21The Germans are waiting for them in the mess hall.
08:23400 officers, barricaded, armed with hockey sticks, iron bars, broken furniture, bricks, bottles, and the contents of the kitchen.
08:32What follows is three days of hand-to-hand brawling in a dining room in Ontario.
08:37Guards were showered with glasses, cooking utensils, table legs, anything with weight to it.
08:42One veteran's guard soldier goes down with a fractured skull.
08:45He was hit by a jar of jam.
08:47I want you to hold that detail, because it's the whole story in miniature.
08:52A man who survived the Western Front in the last war, standing in a school cafeteria in Ontario at 50
08:58-something years old,
08:59dropped by a jar of preserves thrown by a German officer.
09:03Reinforcements arrive from a commando training course at Kingston.
09:06About a hundred Canadian trainees.
09:09And they too go in with bats, because the order stands.
09:13Two sides, evenly matched, no firearms.
09:17It takes until October 12th, Canadian Thanksgiving, before somebody makes the decision that ends it.
09:23High-pressure fire hoses fed into the buildings and turned on.
09:26The prisoners come out soaked, and they come out in step, marching properly, like men who have won something.
09:33More than 80 Germans and around 20 Canadians were injured.
09:37Nobody died.
09:38And Colonel Taylor got his hundred men in shackles.
09:41He had also just handed the German officer corps the best three days it would ever have in Canada.
09:46Because now, Freemull and Ravenstein in Kretschmer weren't just senior officers.
09:52They were the men who refused, who fought, who came out marching.
09:56Every prisoner in that camp had watched it.
09:59Whatever grip those officers had on the compound before Thanksgiving, it was stronger afterwards.
10:05And then, Canada did something that nobody expected,
10:08and that no other combatant nation in this war would have bothered with.
10:12On the 26th of October, Time magazine in New York published a short piece on the affair,
10:17reporting that the guards had fired machine gun bursts and used tear gas on the prisoners.
10:22The Canadian government sent an official protest to the government of the United States.
10:27Ottawa wanted the record corrected.
10:29It mattered to them.
10:31Legally, because of what Germany might do to Canadian prisoners in reprisal.
10:35And beyond that, because it simply wasn't what had happened.
10:38A country in the fourth year of a world war spent diplomatic capital arguing with a magazine
10:43over whether Canadian soldiers had opened fire on prisoners.
10:47Meanwhile, the shackling policy itself was collapsing.
10:50Canadian public opinion ran hard against it.
10:53Ottawa and London stopped the practice in mid-December.
10:57Berlin, needing to save face, refused to stop until the Allies apologized.
11:02Until the Red Cross quietly pointed out that they could simply stop and not announce it.
11:09Which is what happened.
11:11So here is where Canada stood at the end of 1942.
11:15Good food had not touched these men.
11:18Force had not touched them.
11:20Force had fed them.
11:22The direct approach had been tried once,
11:25cost a fractured skull and a hundred injuries,
11:27and left the German officer corps in Canada stronger than before.
11:32And that is the last time in this entire story
11:35that a Canadian raises a hand to a German officer.
11:39What broke them was signed in Ottawa in May of 1943
11:43by a civil servant most Canadians have never heard of.
11:47It wasn't a punishment.
11:49It wasn't a policy about Nazism at all.
11:52It was worth 50 cents a day.
11:54Summer, 1943.
11:57Camp 133 at Lethbridge, Alberta.
12:01The largest prisoner of war camp in Canada,
12:04built for 12,500 men.
12:08A notice goes up on the compound board.
12:11The Canadian Department of Labor is asking for volunteers to work on local farms.
12:16Wages will be paid.
12:18Men will leave the enclosure in the morning and return in the evening.
12:23Somewhere in that crowd,
12:25a German soldier in his 20s reads it,
12:28steps out of the group,
12:29and gives his name to a Canadian sergeant with a clipboard.
12:33Understand what that man just did.
12:36He didn't escape.
12:37He didn't renounce anything.
12:40He walked 20 feet across a compound
12:42in front of several thousand of his own comrades
12:45and put his name on a Canadian list.
12:48And every officer
12:50and every senior NCO in that camp
12:53watched him do it.
12:55Hundreds of them did it.
12:56The Canadians could not process the volunteers fast enough.
13:00This is the thing that broke the German officer corps in Canada.
13:05And it did not come from the army
13:07or the police
13:08or intelligence.
13:10It came from a labor shortage.
13:12Canada had sent its young men overseas,
13:16and the farms and the bush camps
13:18were short of hands.
13:19In May of 1943,
13:22after a long argument in Ottawa,
13:24the Minister of Labor,
13:26Humphrey Mitchell,
13:27authorized the employment of German prisoners.
13:30The terms.
13:31The employer paid the government
13:33$2.50 per day per man.
13:36The prisoner himself received 50 cents a day
13:40for his own use.
13:42Canteen money,
13:43tobacco,
13:44soap,
13:44small things.
13:46Over the course of the war,
13:47that arrangement earned the Canadian government
13:49something on the order of $3 million.
13:53Now, 50 cents a day sounds like nothing.
13:56Let me tell you what it actually was.
13:58It was the first thing any of these men had owned
14:01since the day they were captured
14:03that did not pass through a German officer's hands.
14:07Think about the system we walked through earlier.
14:09The camp hierarchy controlled the mail,
14:11the news,
14:12the internal courts,
14:14the lectures,
14:15the celebrations,
14:16the punishments.
14:17If you were a German private in medicine hat,
14:20everything that mattered in your life,
14:21your letters from home,
14:23your standing,
14:24your safety,
14:24flowed down through men wearing the same uniform you were wearing.
14:28That is what authority is.
14:30Not shouting.
14:31Control of the things people need.
14:33And Canada had just opened a second channel
14:35that bypassed all of it.
14:37Here is the detail that turned that channel into a crowbar,
14:40and it comes straight out of the Geneva Convention
14:43the German officers were relying on for everything else.
14:46Under that convention,
14:47officers cannot be compelled to work.
14:50So the officers stayed behind the wire.
14:52Their soldiers went out the gate.
14:55Every morning,
14:56thousands of German enlisted men climbed into trucks
14:59and went out into Alberta and Manitoba and Ontario.
15:04And every evening,
15:06they came back with money in their pockets,
15:08and a day the officers had no part in.
15:11By 1945,
15:13more than 11,000 prisoners were working across Canada,
15:172,200 of them in the sugar beet fields around Lethbridge alone.
15:22Set that against the 34,000 Germans in the country,
15:26and by the last year of the war,
15:28roughly one prisoner in three was on a Canadian payroll.
15:32440 went north into Riding Mountain National Park in Manitoba
15:37in October of 1943 to cut fuel wood.
15:41Because Canada was short of firewood that winter.
15:44In the bush camps of northwestern Ontario,
15:47the quota was three quarters of a cord
15:50to a full cord per man per day.
15:52Go outside and look at a stack of wood
15:55four feet high,
15:56four feet wide,
15:57and eight feet long,
15:59and imagine producing that before dark.
16:02And out there,
16:03the relationship changed
16:04in ways nobody in Ottawa planned.
16:07Farmers began housing prisoners off camp
16:09for days at a stretch.
16:11Corporal Leo Hecker,
16:12working a bush camp in Ontario,
16:14was a keen hunter,
16:15and the veterans guard men,
16:17themselves old soldiers,
16:19used to lend him their rifles
16:20so he could go out after game.
16:22His words,
16:23We were trusted like that.
16:25I want to be careful here,
16:27because this is exactly the point
16:28where this story could turn into a fairy tale,
16:31and it isn't one.
16:32Canada was not being sentimental.
16:35Canada needed the labor
16:36and made money on the deal.
16:38Guards were armed,
16:39men were counted,
16:40and there were still around 600 escape attempts
16:43across the country over the course of the war.
16:46But look at what a man on a Manitoba farm
16:48in the autumn of 1943
16:50now had that he did not have in 1942.
16:53He had a wage.
16:54He had a Canadian who spoke to him by name.
16:58He had proof in his own hands
17:00and his own eyes
17:01of what this country looked like.
17:03And it did not look like a nation losing a war.
17:06And he had a future he could picture
17:08that did not require Germany to win anything.
17:11Every single one of those things
17:13was taken directly out of the officers' hands,
17:16not confiscated,
17:17not argued over,
17:19simply made irrelevant
17:20by a document about sugar beets.
17:23The officer corps understood
17:24what was happening faster than the Canadians did.
17:27And in July of 1943,
17:30seven of them stepped off a train
17:31at a camp on the Alberta prairie
17:33carrying an order
17:34from the highest-ranking German prisoner in Canada.
17:37It was one sentence long,
17:39and it was about what should happen
17:41to a man who stepped out of the line.
17:42The afternoon of July 22, 1943,
17:47Camp 132, Medicine Hat, Alberta.
17:51A Canadian sentry in a guard tower
17:54looks down into a compound
17:55holding thousands of German prisoners
17:58and sees a crowd forming around one of the huts.
18:01He has a rifle.
18:03Below him, the veterans' guard
18:05are outnumbered by something like 10 to 1.
18:08He does not fire into that crowd.
18:11I want you to sit with that decision for a moment,
18:14because it was not cowardice,
18:16and it was not indifference.
18:18There were, at that moment,
18:21thousands of Canadians
18:22in German prison camps in Europe.
18:25Every action taken inside a Canadian wire
18:27came back through Berlin onto them.
18:30A guard who opened fire
18:32on unarmed prisoners in Alberta
18:34was writing a policy
18:36for a camp in Silesia
18:38where somebody's son from Winnipeg was sitting.
18:41So he watches and he counts
18:43and he sends a runner.
18:45Inside that crowd,
18:46a German soldier named August Plashek
18:49is dragged out of a hut.
18:51He is a Catholic,
18:52and before this war,
18:54he had served in the French Foreign Legion,
18:57which in the eyes of the men holding him
18:59made him something less than German.
19:02He is beaten to the ground
19:04and struck with a rock.
19:06By the time they carry him
19:07into the recreation hall,
19:09he is already dead.
19:10They hang his body up anyway,
19:13because the display was the entire point.
19:16Now, why him,
19:18and why that week?
19:19Because earlier that same month,
19:22seven German officers
19:23had arrived at Medicine Hat
19:25carrying an instruction
19:26from General Artur Schmidt,
19:28the highest-ranking German prisoner of war in Canada.
19:33The instruction was that suspected traitors
19:35were to be identified and dealt with.
19:38A prisoner in that camp wrote afterwards
19:40that from then on,
19:42everything in the camp was carried through
19:44as if ordered by the general.
19:47Read the timing again.
19:48Ottawa authorizes prisoners
19:50to go out and earn wages in May.
19:53In July,
19:55the German officer corps in Canada
19:56issues an order about traitors,
19:58and a man is killed
19:59in front of the entire camp.
20:01That is not a coincidence.
20:03That is a counter move.
20:05And look at the shape of it.
20:07Canada opens a gate.
20:08The officers close a fist.
20:11Canada says nothing about politics at all.
20:13The officers have to kill a man
20:15to keep hold of their own camp.
20:17Remember which side was forced to escalate here,
20:20because it decides everything that follows.
20:22And I want to be honest with you
20:24about what happened next,
20:25because this story does not run smoothly from here,
20:28and any version that says it did
20:29is lying to you.
20:31It worked.
20:32The same prisoner wrote that after that,
20:34beatings were daily,
20:35that the enforcement squads
20:36walked the camp at night doing their work,
20:39that a man could no longer say a word.
20:41Some prisoners had begun organizing
20:43to overthrow that clique.
20:45That was precisely what the killing was meant to stop,
20:47and it stopped it.
20:48A wall of silence came down over Camp 132,
20:53and it held.
20:54The Canadians convened a military court of inquiry.
20:58Its finding is one of the bleakest sentences
21:01in this whole file.
21:03The guilty were not identified,
21:05but a good many prisoners of war,
21:08strongly Nazi,
21:09who either assisted in,
21:11connived at,
21:12or approved of the hanging,
21:13had been uncovered.
21:15Translated,
21:16we know roughly who did this.
21:19We know a large part of this camp
21:21went along with it,
21:22and we cannot prove it
21:24against any individual man.
21:26So here is Canada's decision point,
21:29and it is the hinge of this entire story.
21:32Every instinct of a wartime state says,
21:36collective punishment.
21:37Cut the rations,
21:39lock the compound down,
21:40put a hundred suspects in cells,
21:43and see who talks.
21:45Germany would have done it,
21:46most armies in that war would have done it,
21:49and no one would have written a memo about it afterwards.
21:52Canada did not do that.
21:55Instead,
21:56Canada did the slowest possible thing.
21:58It opened a file.
22:00The Royal Canadian Mounted Police,
22:03the civil police force of the country,
22:05not the army,
22:07began an investigation into a murder
22:09committed by an enemy soldier
22:11against an enemy soldier
22:13inside a military camp in wartime,
22:17and they investigated it
22:19exactly the way they would investigate a killing
22:21in a small Alberta town.
22:24Statements,
22:25names,
22:26evidence that would survive a courtroom.
22:29That investigation took three years.
22:33Hold that number,
22:34because it is going to come back
22:36with enormous force before we're finished.
22:39Three years,
22:41for a case that a military tribunal
22:43could have closed in a week.
22:45And here is the price of that patience,
22:48stated plainly,
22:49because you deserve it,
22:51stated plainly.
22:52It did not save the next man.
22:55The wall of silence at Medicine Hat
22:58held so well
22:59that the RCMP got almost nothing.
23:03Prisoners who knew what happened
23:04knew equally well
23:06what happened to men who talked,
23:08and they had been shown it
23:09in the recreation hall.
23:11Canadian intelligence understood
23:13that the camp had effectively been retaken.
23:16For 14 months,
23:17the officer corps had the run of that compound.
23:1914 months later,
23:21a man in that same camp
23:23made the mistake of doing his job
23:25in front of the wrong people.
23:27He was a teacher.
23:28His work was to take Canadian newspapers,
23:31translate them into German,
23:32and read the war news aloud
23:34to the men in his classroom,
23:36which meant he was the one
23:37telling several hundred prisoners
23:39what was actually happening at the front.
23:41One day in September of 1944,
23:44he added a thought of his own.
23:45September 10th, 1944,
23:48Medicine Hat.
23:50Dr. Carl Lehmann finishes reading
23:53the war news to his class.
23:55He has the Canadian papers in front of him,
23:57and he translates them
23:59the way he has translated them for months.
24:02Then he says the thing out loud,
24:04that Germany might lose this war.
24:08He is not a resistance figure.
24:10He is a schoolteacher
24:11doing arithmetic in public.
24:14That evening, he is beaten,
24:16taken into a building
24:17the Canadians logged as DZ,
24:20and hanged from a gas pipe on the wall.
24:23The cord around his neck breaks,
24:25and he falls.
24:27The men holding him pick him up
24:29and hang him a second time.
24:31Then they leave,
24:32and go and establish alibis.
24:35Stop there.
24:37That detail is the most important thing
24:39in this part of the story,
24:41and it is easy to walk straight past it.
24:44These were men who,
24:4613 months earlier,
24:47had killed August Plaszczek in the open,
24:51in daylight,
24:52in front of a crowd of thousands,
24:54and hung his body up as a message.
24:57Nobody arranged an alibi for that.
25:00They didn't need one.
25:0214 months of Canadian patience later,
25:04the same organization kills a man at night,
25:06behind a closed door,
25:08and immediately starts constructing a story for the police.
25:11They were still willing to murder,
25:13but they had begun to be afraid of the paperwork.
25:15There is a reason the second killing happened at all,
25:18and it did not come from Alberta.
25:20On the 20th of July, 1944,
25:22a bomb went off under Hitler's map table in East Prussia,
25:25and in the weeks afterwards,
25:27the Reich demanded a purge of traitors everywhere it could reach.
25:30Everywhere included a prairie town in southern Alberta,
25:336,000 kilometers from Berlin.
25:35Dr. Lehmann was killed because a plot had failed on the other side of the world,
25:39and men in a Canadian camp still considered themselves under German orders.
25:43And that is exactly the belief Canada had already begun quietly taking apart,
25:48a full year before Lehmann died.
25:50I need to take you back to September of 1943,
25:54and to a lighthouse in New Brunswick.
25:57The German officers at Bowmanville believed their communications were secure.
26:02They were wrong, and they had been wrong for a long time.
26:06Every letter in and out of every camp in Canada was screened.
26:11Prisoners wrote in code, and in invisible ink,
26:15milk, orange juice, potato, urine,
26:19and Canadian censors were pulling those messages out and reading them.
26:24Which is how Ottawa came to know, in detail,
26:27about a plan authorized by Grand Admiral Carl Donitz himself.
26:32It was called Operation Kiebitz.
26:35Four naval officers were to escape from Camp 30.
26:39Otto Kretschmer, Horst Elf, Hans Ai,
26:43and Hans Joachim Knebel Dobritz,
26:46who had been Donitz's own adjutant.
26:49They would cross 870 miles of eastern Canada
26:53to Chalure Bay in New Brunswick,
26:55where U-536 would surface each night for two weeks to take them off.
27:01The instructions came through the mail,
27:03through the International Red Cross, in code.
27:07Maps came through too.
27:09Canada read all of it,
27:11and said nothing.
27:13Understand the discipline that took.
27:16Canadian intelligence knew there was a tunnel.
27:19The RCMP put a microphone in,
27:22and listened to men digging under a camp in Ontario.
27:26And left them digging.
27:28Not one guard walked into that compound
27:30to announce that the game was up.
27:33Because Ottawa had worked out something better.
27:35If the escape ran on schedule,
27:38the Royal Canadian Navy could be sitting on top of that rendezvous
27:42when the submarines surfaced.
27:44A U-boat taken intact was the prize
27:47every Allied Navy in the war wanted.
27:49In the event, the tunnel collapsed.
27:52And in the confusion, one man improvised.
27:56Corvetten Capitan Wolfgang Haida
27:58didn't go under the wire at all.
28:00He rigged himself a seat on the overhead power line
28:03and went over it.
28:05He then crossed 1,400 kilometers
28:08of a country he had never seen,
28:10and reached the coast of Chalure Bay
28:13on the 26th of September.
28:16Waiting for him was Operation Pointe Maisonnette.
28:20Ten warships sealing the bay,
28:23radar posts installed on either side of the lighthouse
28:26by Royal Canadian Engineers,
28:28and a naval officer named Desmond Peers.
28:33Haida was picked up by the RCMP
28:35and brought to the lighthouse.
28:37Now, here is the scene I want you to see clearly,
28:41because it is this whole story compressed into one room.
28:46A Knight's Cross U-boat commander,
28:48six days into a 1,400 kilometer run,
28:52standing in a New Brunswick lighthouse
28:54in front of a Canadian lieutenant commander.
28:57He denies everything.
29:00Peers doesn't raise his voice.
29:02He doesn't raise a hand.
29:04He asks questions,
29:05and he keeps asking them,
29:07until Haida's story comes apart in front of him
29:10and the man admits who he is.
29:13Out in the bay that night,
29:15U-536 surfaced,
29:17sensed patrol vessels moving in the dark,
29:19dived, and ran.
29:21She never made the pickup.
29:23Eight weeks later,
29:24she was sunk in the Atlantic.
29:26The four officers stayed exactly where they were.
29:29Kretschmer,
29:30the highest-scoring submarine commander of the war,
29:33would not see Germany again until 1947,
29:36and not one Canadian ever told him
29:38how the plan had been beaten.
29:40And here is what none of them knew,
29:41sitting in Camp 30 that autumn.
29:43The men reading their mail
29:45had already learned something
29:46far more valuable than a rendezvous point.
29:48They had learned the names.
29:51By the summer of 1944,
29:53Ottawa could tell you
29:54which prisoner in which camp believed what,
29:56and had started sorting 34,000 men
29:59into three colors.
30:00October 3rd, 1944.
30:03Camp 44, Grandlin, Quebec.
30:06The same compound where,
30:08five months earlier,
30:09a German general stood under two swastika flags
30:12while a Canadian sentry
30:14walked past the window and counted heads.
30:17A Canadian intelligence officer
30:19opens a letter handed to him
30:20by a German civilian internee,
30:23a Roman Catholic priest named Georg Felber.
30:26The letter describes a plan to murder him.
30:29Not him personally,
30:30him and every other Canadian working at that camp,
30:33plus a list of German prisoners
30:35judged insufficiently loyal,
30:37plus as many civilians in the province of Quebec
30:40as could be reached before the shooting stopped.
30:43Felber names the ringleaders.
30:45He attaches roughly 100 supporters.
30:48Now let me show you how Canada had walked into this,
30:51because part of it was Canada's own doing.
30:54In August of 1944,
30:56a body called the Psychological Warfare Committee
30:59began doing something no one had tried on this scale.
31:02It started classifying prisoners by conviction,
31:05black for the committed Nazis,
31:07white for the anti-Nazis,
31:09gray for the great majority in between,
31:11who had been conscripted into a war they never chose
31:14and were now cutting timber in Ontario.
31:17This was only possible
31:18because of everything we've just walked through.
31:20Two years of censored mail, informants,
31:22interrogation reports and camp intelligence files
31:25had produced something extraordinary.
31:28Ottawa could look at 34,000 enemy soldiers
31:30and tell you, man by man,
31:33roughly where each one stood.
31:34And then Canada made a decision that looks obvious
31:37and turned out to be dangerous.
31:39It separated them.
31:40Take the hardest men out of the general population
31:43and the general population breathes.
31:45But you have also just built a camp
31:47containing nothing except the hardest men,
31:49with no moderating voice anywhere inside the wire.
31:53Canada had, without intending it,
31:55manufactured a laboratory
31:56for the most extreme ideas in the country.
31:59Camp 44 was that laboratory.
32:02And after the Normandy landings in June,
32:05the senior Nazi officers in it
32:07worked out what the war's end meant for them.
32:09and made a plan.
32:11They called it the Harikari Club,
32:14after the Japanese ritual suicide.
32:16The plan was this.
32:18When Germany capitulated,
32:19they would kill the anti-Nazi prisoners in the camp.
32:23They would kill as many Canadian staff as they could.
32:26They would storm the guard towers,
32:28break out,
32:29and move on the industrial areas
32:31and airports around Montreal,
32:33a city of shipyards,
32:35munitions plants,
32:36and war factories well within reach.
32:38They would destroy what they could
32:40and kill whom they could
32:41until they were shot down.
32:43Capture was not part of the plan.
32:46Colonel W. W. Murray,
32:48Canada's director of military intelligence,
32:50wrote that their only thought
32:52was to go to their deaths
32:53in a final blaze of glory,
32:55taking as many of the enemy
32:57and as much of his property with them as possible.
32:59And here is why nobody in Ottawa
33:02treated this as fantasy.
33:04Two months earlier,
33:05on the 5th of August,
33:06at Cowra in Australia,
33:08more than 900 Japanese prisoners
33:10had set their compound alight
33:12and charged the wire.
33:13They overran armed towers
33:15and two machine gun crews.
33:17Nearly 400 got out into the countryside.
33:19By the time it was over,
33:21four Australian guards were dead
33:22and more than 200 prisoners were dead,
33:25some by their own hand.
33:26That was the model.
33:27That was what a mass breakout
33:29by men who had decided to die
33:31actually looked like,
33:32and it had happened nine weeks ago
33:34on the other side of the world.
33:36Nine days after Felber's letter,
33:38a second prisoner,
33:39an anti-Nazi named Alois Frank,
33:41taken into Montreal for medical treatment,
33:44described the same plan to Canadian officers.
33:46He named targets,
33:48including munitions dumps
33:49at nearby airfields.
33:50His list of men
33:51was very nearly identical to Felber's.
33:54Two sources, no contact between them,
33:56the same hundred names.
33:58In December,
33:59the British asked Canada
34:01to take 50,000 more German prisoners
34:03off their hands.
34:05Canada refused.
34:07Prime Minister Mackenzie King
34:09wrote in his diary
34:10that Cabinet had decided against it
34:12because the prisoners they already had
34:14were a real menace,
34:16that protection was not adequate,
34:18and that there was reason to believe
34:19suicide squads were forming,
34:21which might cause great trouble later on.
34:24Then, on the 30th of December,
34:26a routine inspection at Grand Lien
34:28turned up an anonymous letter
34:30from inside the compound.
34:32Another prisoner,
34:33writing in secret,
34:34warning that violence was coming,
34:36and urging that the Nazi officers be moved.
34:39So Canada now had three independent warnings,
34:42a hundred names,
34:43and a precedent in Australia
34:45with two hundred bodies in it.
34:46Everything in the file said act.
34:49And still,
34:50the argument in Ottawa
34:51was not about how hard to hit them.
34:54Eric Ackland,
34:55of the Directorate of Military Intelligence,
34:58put the concern in one line.
35:00The danger of allowing that click
35:02of Nazi officers
35:04to remain at Grand Lien
35:06was becoming more apparent by the day.
35:09But others pointed out
35:10the obvious counter-risk.
35:12Move them,
35:13and you carry the idea
35:14of a mass suicide breakout
35:16to whatever camp you move them to.
35:19They needed a place remote enough
35:21that a breakout led nowhere,
35:23and they needed to do it
35:24without a fight,
35:25without a shot,
35:26and without warning.
35:28What they came up with
35:29happened in the middle of the night
35:31on the 6th of February, 1945,
35:34and it took a few hours.
35:36It is, to my mind,
35:38the single most Canadian operation
35:40of the entire war,
35:42and almost nobody in this country
35:44has ever heard of it.
35:45The middle of the night,
35:46the 6th of February, 1945,
35:50Grand Lien, Quebec.
35:52A Canadian officer
35:53walks into a barracks hut
35:55with a list in his hand
35:56and starts reading names.
35:58That's it.
35:59That's the operation.
36:01Behind him are extra guards,
36:03brought in quietly
36:04over the preceding weeks.
36:06Around the camp
36:07are reinforced towers,
36:10additional machine gun posts,
36:12tear gas,
36:13an armored vehicle,
36:14and veterans guard platoons
36:16standing by.
36:17None of it is used.
36:19The men on the list,
36:21more than a hundred of them,
36:22the core of the Harikari Club
36:24and its supporters,
36:26are woken,
36:27dressed,
36:27and taken out of the compound
36:29in the dark.
36:30They are not told
36:31where they are going.
36:32While they are being moved,
36:34Canadian staff
36:35search the camp properly
36:37for the first time.
36:38They find the radio receiver
36:40the prisoners had built
36:41and hidden.
36:42The machine that had been
36:43feeding them Berlin's version
36:45of the war.
36:46They find the escape
36:47and evasion equipment.
36:49All of it goes.
36:50By morning,
36:52Camp 44 holds
36:53several hundred German officers
36:54who wake up to discover
36:56that the men who ran their world
36:58are simply gone.
36:59That nobody was hurt
37:01and that no one
37:02is going to explain
37:03anything to them.
37:04The transfer was recorded
37:05as uneventful.
37:08Now hold that word
37:09against what we looked at
37:10in the last part.
37:12Cowra,
37:13four guards dead,
37:14more than 200 prisoners dead,
37:16nine days to round up
37:18the survivors.
37:19Same problem,
37:20same year,
37:21opposite hemisphere.
37:23Canada solved it
37:24with a list of names,
37:25a search warrant of sorts,
37:26and a few hours of darkness.
37:29The destination
37:30was Camp 130
37:31at Sieb, Alberta
37:33in the foothills
37:34of the Rockies
37:3480 kilometers west of Calgary.
37:37Chainlink fence,
37:38electrified,
37:39nine towers,
37:40and around it
37:41a few hundred kilometers
37:42of mountain
37:43in every direction.
37:44From there,
37:45a mass breakout
37:46leads to a glacier.
37:48And here is the sentence
37:49in the record
37:50that tells you
37:51the war inside the wire
37:52was over.
37:53At Sieb,
37:54some of the younger officers
37:56wanted to carry
37:57the Harikari plans forward.
37:59The plans fizzled
38:01for lack of support.
38:02Read that again.
38:04The same men.
38:05The same ideology.
38:07The same intention
38:08to die spectacularly.
38:10And they could not
38:11find enough followers
38:12to do it.
38:13Because the followers
38:14weren't there.
38:15The followers
38:16were the gray majority.
38:18And by February of 1945,
38:21the gray majority
38:22were 300 kilometers away
38:24in a bush camp
38:25with an axe
38:26or on a farm
38:27near Lethbridge
38:28or holding 50 cents a day
38:30and a letter from home
38:31that a Canadian censor
38:33had cleared
38:33and no German enforcement squad
38:36had touched.
38:37You cannot run
38:38a terror organization
38:39without a population
38:41to terrorize.
38:42Canada had spent
38:43two years
38:44quietly moving
38:45that population
38:46out of reach.
38:47Now watch what
38:48fills the vacuum.
38:49Because this is the part
38:51that finished
38:51the officer corps
38:52for good
38:53and it did not
38:54come from Ottawa.
38:55It came from the prisoners.
38:58At Camp 40
38:59at Farnham, Quebec,
39:00500 German officers
39:02captured after D-Day,
39:04the elected spokesman
39:05was Colonel Hans J,
39:07an anti-Nazi
39:08who was willing to work
39:09with the Canadian Commandant.
39:11For months,
39:12that had been dangerous work.
39:14A group of committed Nazis
39:15in that camp
39:16had spied on him
39:17and his people,
39:18cataloged their contacts,
39:20and at one point
39:21attempted to kill
39:22an openly anti-Nazi prisoner
39:24who was passing information
39:25to the guards.
39:27Canadian scouts
39:28inside the compound
39:29stopped it.
39:30Then,
39:31in February and March
39:32of 1945,
39:34the black prisoners
39:35were transferred out.
39:36And the men
39:37who had spent
39:38two years whispering
39:39discovered they could speak
39:40in a normal voice.
39:42By the middle of that year,
39:43Camp 40
39:44had a representative assembly,
39:46three elected officials,
39:47Colonel J among them,
39:49running the internal affairs
39:50of the camp.
39:51German officers
39:52in a Canadian prison camp
39:54holding an election.
39:56Alongside it
39:57came classes,
39:5830-odd teachers
39:59running some 45 courses,
40:02and among them,
40:03run with the camp interpreter
40:04and the intelligence officers,
40:06courses on English,
40:08world politics,
40:09and democratic government.
40:12Lecturers came out
40:13from McGill
40:13and from Toronto.
40:15They were always
40:16well attended.
40:17In the summer of 1945,
40:20the prisoners
40:20planted the fields
40:21around the camp.
40:23Tobacco,
40:24tomatoes,
40:25potatoes,
40:26cabbage,
40:27corn,
40:27celery.
40:28The surplus
40:29was canned locally
40:31or sold in Montreal.
40:32That crop
40:33earned about $15,000
40:35and two-thirds of it
40:37went back
40:37to the prisoners'
40:38own fund.
40:39By the spring of 1946,
40:42130 German officers
40:44at Farnham
40:45were working
40:46on local farms.
40:47Officers
40:48who under the Geneva Convention
40:50could not be compelled
40:51to do a day's labor.
40:53Each one
40:54signed a parole form
40:55promising not to escape.
40:57Then,
40:58he walked out the gate.
40:59And in July of 1945,
41:02Lieutenant Colonel
41:03A.W.
41:04DeWolf sat down
41:06to write an intelligence report
41:07on the political condition
41:09of that camp
41:10and recorded something
41:11the prisoners
41:12kept telling him.
41:14What they returned to,
41:16again and again,
41:17was the treatment
41:18by the Canadian authorities.
41:20The patience,
41:22the coolness of judgment,
41:23the fact that,
41:25after Germany
41:26had been defeated,
41:26the Canadians
41:28simply carried on
41:29in the same way
41:30as before.
41:32And DeWolf wrote
41:33that they frankly admitted
41:34they could not
41:35quite understand it.
41:37They could not understand
41:39why nobody gloated.
41:41But there was one piece
41:42of Canadian business
41:43still outstanding
41:44on the Alberta prairie.
41:46A file the RCMP
41:48had been building
41:49for three years
41:50on the killing
41:51of a school teacher.
41:52And it was about
41:53to walk into a courtroom
41:55that would have been
41:56familiar to any farmer
41:57in Medicine Hat.
41:59The 6th of April, 1946,
42:0211 months after
42:03the war in Europe ended.
42:06Four men are arrested
42:08in Alberta
42:08for the murder
42:09of Dr. Carl Lehmann,
42:11Bruno Perzanofsky,
42:14Heinrich Bush,
42:15Vili Mueller,
42:16and Walter Wolff.
42:18The RCMP officer
42:20who broke that case,
42:21an undercover investigator
42:23named George Krauss,
42:25described afterwards
42:26what had changed.
42:28The Nazi element
42:29had lost their control
42:30over the other prisoners.
42:32The old rule of fear
42:34was gone.
42:35And so, he said,
42:36the men they approached
42:37did not refuse
42:38to answer when questioned.
42:40That is the whole story
42:42in one line
42:43from a policeman's notebook.
42:44For three years,
42:46the file went nowhere.
42:47Not because Canadians
42:48were slow,
42:49but because frightened men
42:51do not talk.
42:52When the fear went,
42:54the evidence simply arrived.
42:56Now watch what Canada
42:58does with it,
42:59because this is the last move
43:00in the game.
43:01These were enemy soldiers.
43:04There was a war on
43:05when the crime happened.
43:06Every convenience pointed
43:08toward a military tribunal.
43:10Instead,
43:11they were tried
43:12in Medicine Hat,
43:13in the ordinary criminal courts
43:15of the province of Alberta,
43:17under the same law
43:18that governed a killing
43:19in any Canadian town.
43:20And the province of Alberta
43:22appointed them
43:23a defense lawyer.
43:24His name was G. E. Rice,
43:27and he was paid
43:28by the Minister of Justice
43:29to defend four German
43:31prisoners of war
43:32charged with murdering
43:34a fellow German.
43:35Rice fought hard.
43:37His central objection
43:38was almost beautiful
43:39in its irony.
43:40He argued that
43:41under the Geneva Convention,
43:43these men were entitled
43:45to a German military court-martial,
43:47judged by the codes
43:49of the German armed forces.
43:51Men who had run
43:52a drumhead court
43:53in a recreation hall,
43:55who had condemned
43:56August Plaschek
43:57without a hearing,
43:58and hanged Carl Lehmann
44:00twice in one evening,
44:01now had a Canadian lawyer
44:03standing up
44:04in a Canadian courtroom
44:05demanding process
44:07on their behalf.
44:08The objection was denied.
44:10And the courts
44:11did what courts do.
44:12In the Plaschek case,
44:14Johannes Wittinger
44:15was acquitted.
44:16Adolf Kratz
44:18had his death sentence
44:19commuted to life.
44:21Werner Schwalb,
44:22a panzer gunner
44:23with an iron cross
44:25from 1940,
44:26was convicted
44:27and hanged
44:28at Lethbridge
44:29on the 26th of June,
44:311946.
44:32His recorded last words were,
44:35My Fuhrer,
44:36I follow thee.
44:38And in the early hours
44:39of the 18th of December,
44:411946,
44:43Perzinovsky,
44:44Bush,
44:45Mueller,
44:45and Wolfe
44:46were hanged
44:47at Lethbridge Provincial Jail.
44:49It remains
44:50the last mass execution
44:52in Canadian history.
44:54Canada killed those men.
44:56It killed them slowly,
44:57lawfully,
44:58after three years,
45:00with counsel for the defense
45:01and a right of appeal.
45:03Which is precisely the point.
45:05The German officer corps
45:07in Canada
45:07was not beaten
45:08by a bigger fist.
45:09It was beaten
45:10by a procedure
45:11it could not corrupt,
45:13could not intimidate,
45:14and could not outweight.
45:16Now let me take you back
45:17to where we started.
45:18April, 1946.
45:21Camp 40 at Farnham, Quebec.
45:24352 German officers arrive
45:26from the closing camp
45:27at Grand Ligne,
45:29and among them
45:29are two men
45:30we have been following
45:31since the first minute
45:32of this story.
45:33General Georg Friemoll
45:35and General Johann von Rauenstein.
45:38Friemoll,
45:39who in October of 1942
45:41refused to give Colonel Taylor
45:42a single man for the shackles.
45:45Rauenstein,
45:46who in April of 1944
45:47stood under two swastika flags
45:49on Hitler's birthday
45:50and made a speech
45:52while a Canadian sentry outside
45:54counted heads through the window
45:55and said nothing.
45:57The Canadian staff at Farnham
45:59were worried.
46:00These were regular officers,
46:02captured early,
46:03hard,
46:03and considered
46:04the least likely men
46:05in the country
46:06to be re-educated.
46:07There was real concern
46:08they would undo everything.
46:10There was not one
46:11reported incident.
46:13Not because they were
46:14watched more closely.
46:15Because the camp
46:16they walked into
46:17was run by an elected assembly
46:19of their own countrymen.
46:20And those countrymen
46:21were not interested.
46:23The generals had rank.
46:25They no longer had anything
46:27anyone needed.
46:29That is the answer
46:30to the question
46:31we started with.
46:32Canada never had to raise
46:34its voice
46:35at the German officer corps
46:36because Canada
46:38never argued with it at all.
46:40It simply removed,
46:42one piece at a time,
46:44every single thing
46:45that officer corps
46:47had to offer.
46:48The news,
46:49the mail,
46:50the money,
46:51the protection,
46:52the future.
46:53And handed those things
46:55directly to the men.
46:57Authority that gives you nothing
46:59isn't authority.
47:01It's just a uniform.
47:03In May,
47:04they went to the trains,
47:06and then to Britain,
47:07and eventually home.
47:09Roughly 6,000 German prisoners
47:12applied to stay in Canada.
47:14Britain required all of them
47:16to be returned.
47:17Many came back later,
47:19on their own,
47:20and became Canadians.
47:23137 Germans died
47:25on Canadian soil
47:26during those years,
47:27of illness,
47:28and accident,
47:29and age.
47:30In 1971,
47:33Canada moved all of them
47:34to a German war cemetery
47:36at Kitchener, Ontario,
47:38and invited their families
47:40to the ceremony
47:41so that people
47:42who had waited 26 years
47:44could finally stand
47:46at a grave.
47:47Nobody made a speech
47:49about victory.
47:50It wasn't that kind of country.
47:53Thank you for staying
47:54with this one to the end.
47:55It's a quieter story
47:57than most,
47:58and I'm grateful
47:59you gave it the time.
48:00If you think it deserves
48:01to be remembered,
48:03a like genuinely helps
48:05it find more people.
48:06And if you'd like to hear more,
48:08we're here every week.
48:10If anyone in your family served,
48:12or stood guard
48:13at one of these camps,
48:15I'd be honored to hear
48:16about it in the comments.
48:17And if you'd like to hear