- 2 months ago
A Canadian farmer driving a German prisoner back to camp in 1946 sounds like the end of a war story, but it is really the beginning of a stranger one. Thousands of German POWs passed through Canada during the Second World War, and more than 6,000 filed formal applications asking to stay after the war ended.
This historical documentary traces how men who arrived as enemies ended up living on farms, in granaries, and in camps with no fence at all. It follows the Bowmanville shackling crisis, the rise of farm labor programs in Alberta and Ontario, and the harsh internal politics inside the camps, where Nazi hardliners, secret police, and even murders shaped daily life. The result is a powerful piece of Canadian military history, WW2 history, and prison camp history.
The story also explains why comfort was only part of the answer. For many prisoners, Canada offered work, routine, and a future that war-ravaged Germany could not. For others, it offered the first place they had felt safe, respected, or even familiar. This is a wartime history narrative about POW camps, German prisoners of war in Canada, postwar immigration, and the strange human cost of captivity.
Created for listeners searching for Canadian war stories, WW2 documentary narration, military history, and historical storytelling about German POWs in Canada. It also fits searches for prison camp history, Alberta war history, Bowmanville, and long-form history narration for background listening or focused viewing.
This historical documentary traces how men who arrived as enemies ended up living on farms, in granaries, and in camps with no fence at all. It follows the Bowmanville shackling crisis, the rise of farm labor programs in Alberta and Ontario, and the harsh internal politics inside the camps, where Nazi hardliners, secret police, and even murders shaped daily life. The result is a powerful piece of Canadian military history, WW2 history, and prison camp history.
The story also explains why comfort was only part of the answer. For many prisoners, Canada offered work, routine, and a future that war-ravaged Germany could not. For others, it offered the first place they had felt safe, respected, or even familiar. This is a wartime history narrative about POW camps, German prisoners of war in Canada, postwar immigration, and the strange human cost of captivity.
Created for listeners searching for Canadian war stories, WW2 documentary narration, military history, and historical storytelling about German POWs in Canada. It also fits searches for prison camp history, Alberta war history, Bowmanville, and long-form history narration for background listening or focused viewing.
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LearningTranscript
00:00On a cold morning in November of 1946, a farmer named Joe Kayser started his truck on a road
00:07outside Lethbridge, Alberta, and drove a German soldier back to prison. The soldier's name was
00:13Rudolph Reese. He had been a prisoner of war in Canada for years, and for the last stretch of it,
00:19he had not lived behind wire at all. He had his own small house on the Kayser farm. He took
00:25his
00:25meals with Joe and Mary and their children. Their daughter Bessie, remembering it half a century
00:31later, said he had been like one of the family. Nobody made Joe Kayser drive him in. A guard could
00:38have come out for him. Kayser took him himself, and years afterward, when a reporter from the
00:43Lethbridge Herald asked about that morning, the old farmer said nothing about the war. He said it
00:49was a sad parting. Sit with that sentence for a moment.
00:52A Canadian farmer in a province that had sent its sons to Sicily and Normandy and the flooded fields
00:59of the Shelt, describing the removal of an enemy soldier from his land as a loss. And the man in
01:06the passenger seat had asked to stay, not asked to escape. More than 600 prisoners tried that in
01:12Canada, and escape was a soldier's duty. Reese did something quieter and much stranger. He put his name
01:19on a formal application asking the government of Canada for permission to remain in the country he
01:24had been sent to fight. He was not alone. More than 6,000 German prisoners of war did the same
01:30thing.
01:31Remember that number. Everything in this story runs through it. 6,000 men out of roughly 35,000 held in
01:38Canada. Close to 1 in 5. Panzer gunners from the Afrika Korps, Luftwaffe pilots, submarine crews,
01:46career sergeants of Hitler's army, filing paperwork to stay. The easy answer comes fast, and you have
01:53probably already reached for it. They were treated well. The food was good. The guards were kind.
01:58Germany was rubble. All of that is true. By the end of this story, you will see that it explains
02:06almost nothing. If these stories matter to you, a subscribe genuinely helps them reach more of the
02:13people who still remember these men. To understand what happened in that truck, you have to go back
02:18to how a German army ended up on the Canadian prairie in the first place. It was not Canada's idea.
02:25In June
02:26of 1940, with the British army pulled off the beaches at Dunkirk, an invasion expected within
02:31weeks, Churchill's government asked Ottawa to take 7,000 enemy aliens and prisoners off British soil.
02:39Britain could not guard men it might soon be fighting in its own streets. Canada said yes.
02:45A thousand Luftwaffe prisoners followed in January of 1941. Then, North Africa broke open, and after the
02:53desert campaigns, the number stopped being a trickle. 10,000 German prisoners were shipped from Cairo to New
03:00York, put on Canadian Pacific trains, and unloaded at a tent camp called Ozada on the open Alberta prairie.
03:08By the end of the war, 35,046 German soldiers, sailors, airmen, and internees had passed through 26
03:17locations in this country. Here is what that meant on the ground, and I want you to picture it
03:23properly. The two largest camps were both in southern Alberta, Camp 132 at Medicine Hat and
03:30Camp 133 at Lethbridge, each built to hold 12,500 men. Medicine Hat, the town, had a population of about
03:3913,500 at the time, which means the German army inside the wire and the Canadian civilians outside it
03:47were, very nearly, the same size. A prairie town looking across a fence at its own reflection in
03:54field gray. Now come inside one of those trains with a 20-year-old naval ensign. Wilhelm Rahn had been
04:01fished out of the Mediterranean in January of 1943, the only man of 48 to survive the sinking of his
04:09submarine. He had been shipped across the Atlantic expecting a frozen wilderness. Standing at the
04:16rail as the coast came up, he and the others saw something that made no sense to them at all.
04:22A
04:23shoreline blazing with light. They had lived under blackout for years. One of the prisoners said out
04:30loud what all of them were thinking. These people must feel very safe leaving the Christmas lights
04:35burning. Then Halifax and the train. Rahn expected wooden benches. He found upholstered compartments
04:44and a hot supper waiting, a stew with more meat in it than he had seen in months. He wrote
04:50later that
04:50they understood immediately they had arrived in a country where the phrase food shortage meant
04:56nothing. And walking the aisle of that train were the men who would guard him for the next three
05:02years. The Veterans Guard of Canada. Not young soldiers. Middle-aged and older men, most of them
05:10veterans of the trenches of the First World War, who had already done their killing at Vimy and
05:15Passchendaele and the Somme. They were friendly. They also made one thing very clear to the new arrivals.
05:21Outside these windows, there was nothing but bush and a great deal of winter. And if anyone got clever,
05:28they would put a bullet through his hide. That is where 6,000 applications begin. Not with kindness.
05:35With a decision. Because four years before Joe Kayser's truck, in a camp on the shore of Lake Ontario,
05:42German prisoners and Canadian guards fought each other for three straight days. With hockey sticks,
05:47kitchen knives, anything that came off a wall. Those were the same men, same army, same uniforms,
05:54same war. Something happened between that camp and that truck. And it did not begin in Ottawa.
06:00The camp on the shore of Lake Ontario was called Camp 30 at Bowmanville. And on the 10th of October
06:071942,
06:08the Canadian officer in charge of it had to walk into a compound of German officers and ask for a
06:15hundred
06:15volunteers to be put in chains. He knew how that would go. He had no choice about asking. The order
06:23had come down a long chain that started in Berlin. After the raid on Dieppe that August,
06:30German troops had gone through the pockets of dead and captured Canadians and found operational orders
06:35about restraining prisoners. Hitler ordered Canadian prisoners in Germany shackled in reprisal.
06:42London ordered reprisal in return, and the reprisal was to be carried out here, on German prisoners held
06:49on Canadian soil. So a Canadian officer, following orders he had no part in writing, asked a hundred
06:56German officers to submit to handcuffs. They refused, and then they fought. It lasted three days.
07:05The prisoners tore the camp apart for weapons. Drinking glasses, sports gear, table legs, anything
07:12that could be swung. Guards went in with clubs and came out bleeding. Men barricaded themselves in the
07:18huts. In the end, the Canadians won it, building by building, and the shackles went on. That is the low
07:26point of this story, and I want you to hold it in your mind as the baseline, because it is
07:31the true
07:31starting condition. Not friendship, a three-day brawl over chains. Now watch what Canada did next.
07:39The reaction across this country was not what Berlin expected. Canadian newspapers turned against
07:45the shackling. Canadian families with sons in German camps understood immediately that this game had two
07:51ends and their boys were tied to the other one. And there was a second argument, quieter and harder to
07:57say out loud in wartime, that a country which does this has given something away it cannot get back.
08:04By the middle of December 1942, Britain and Canada had stopped. Germany kept Canadian prisoners in chains
08:12for months longer and demanded an apology. It never came, and eventually the Germans simply stopped too,
08:20and said nothing about it. Canada had made a decision. From that point forward, the Geneva Convention would be
08:27followed here to the letter. Not because the enemy deserved it, and not because Ottawa was sentimental.
08:34Understand this clearly, because the whole story turns on it. This was not softness.
08:40Two months after Bowmanville, in December of 1942, Britain asked Canada to take 50,000 more German
08:47prisoners off its hands. Cabinet said no. Prime Minister Mackenzie King wrote in his diary that they had
08:54decided against it because the prisoners already here were a real menace. A real menace. That is how the
09:02Prime Minister of Canada described the men who would later ask to stay. So what did following the convention
09:08to the letter actually look like from the inside? Not from a policy document, from a bunk. Go back to
09:16Wilhelm Rahn, the young submarine survivor in Camp 33 near Petawawa, Ontario. Real mattresses. A library
09:23he later said would have done credit to a German city of the same size. Courses taught by the prisoners
09:29themselves, some for university credit. Uniforms and rank insignia permitted, exactly as the convention
09:36required. Winter clothing that actually worked. And the newspaper. The Canadians delivered a daily paper to
09:43each barrack, largely uncensored. In Rahn's hut, he was the man whose English was best, so every
09:49afternoon he stood up and read the news aloud to 30 German soldiers. Soviet advances in the east,
09:56Allied gains in the Mediterranean. His comrades shouted back the same two words every day.
10:01Propaganda and lies. Rahn kept reading, and because he was a submariner, he knew what the allies were
10:08actually doing to the U-boat fleet, and he could no longer make the numbers on the page disagree with
10:13the
10:13numbers in his memory. Sit with what Canada was doing there. It handed the enemy the facts, and let
10:19the enemy argue with them. There were consequences the convention never contemplated. One day, a work
10:26party of prisoners nailed a hat shut over the head of a Canadian guard who had crawled under a hut
10:32to check
10:33for tunnels. The guards swore at them and did nothing else. Rahn wrote afterward that it was
10:39inconceivable, his word, that such a thing could have happened in German or Russian hands.
10:46And then there is the scene I find hardest to forget. In April of 1945, Rahn cut through both fences,
10:55waded into a lake, and ran. He was out for forty hours in the bush before a railway crew saw
11:01through
11:01his stolen lumberjack clothes. When he was finally brought back, filthy, he was marched in front of the
11:08camp commandant, a Canadian whose own son at that moment was a prisoner of the Germans. That man had
11:16every reason on earth to take something out of the Germans standing in front of him. He smiled and said,
11:22well done. Then he said he had to punish him anyway for stealing and damaging Canadian property.
11:30Twenty-eight days in the cells. Well done. To an escaped enemy, by a father whose son was in enemy
11:37hands. Keep that commandant in your mind, because he is the closest thing we have to an answer at this
11:44stage of the story. And notice what is still missing. Mattresses do not make a man apply for immigration,
11:52neither do libraries, or soccer, or a newspaper he does not believe. Nobody in history has petitioned to remain
11:59in a barracks. In May of 1943, Canada did something no other detaining power in this war would do at
12:06this scale.
12:07Ottawa argued about it for months, and the arguments were about beets and firewood, not about the human soul.
12:14They opened the gate. In May of 1943, Canada's Minister of Labor authorized the employment of
12:22German prisoners of war, and the first test of it was small enough to fit in a truck.
12:27A call for volunteers went out inside Camp 133 at Lethbridge. The Department of Labor wanted to
12:35know whether German soldiers would work the sugar beet fields, and whether the farmers of southern Alberta
12:41would tolerate them. Hundreds of prisoners put their hands up. The pay was fifty cents a day.
12:48What they were actually volunteering for was air. You go down the row bent double, thinning by hand,
12:54and in the fall, you top them with a knife until your wrists stop belonging to you.
13:00Farmers who had lost their sons and hired men to the army had been watching those fields go to weed.
13:06Now, they had labor. The arrangement was simple, and it is worth knowing the numbers, because they tell
13:12you what this actually was. The farmer paid the government two dollars and fifty cents per man
13:18per day. Out of that, he could deduct what he spent on room and board. The prisoner got his fifty
13:25cents.
13:27Which meant the cheapest way for a farmer to run the arithmetic was to feed the German at his own
13:33table and put him up on his own land. Ottawa had built an economic incentive. What it accidentally built
13:42was a table with a German sitting at it. The program worked, and it grew, and this is where the
13:49scale
13:49becomes something worth stopping on. By 1945, more than 11,000 German prisoners of war were at work in this
13:58country. Around Lethbridge alone, 2,200 men were in the beet fields. Nine temporary hostiles of tents went
14:08up in a ring around the city, and here are their names, still on the map today. Barnwell, Iron Springs,
14:17McGrath, Sterling, Park Lake, Coaldale, Whiteside, Welling, Turin.
14:25In Manitoba in the autumn of 1946, there were over 1,100 prisoners working out of 25 hostiles.
14:33In southwestern Ontario, hostiles at Glencoe, Centralia, and Fingal. Now hold the number 11,000
14:41against something. 11,000 men out of 35,000. Roughly one in three German prisoners in Canada spent his war
14:50not behind wire, but in a field, a bush camp, or a barn. And the further you follow it, the
14:56stranger
14:57it gets. Because at first, these men went out under armed guard. Then, Trust started doing something to
15:03the arrangement that no policy had authorized. Here is a veterans guard corporal at Camp 133,
15:10supervising fieldwork in southern Alberta. His son, Doran Degenstein, told the story decades later.
15:17This was a man of the first world war, guarding men of the second. And when the truck needed to
15:22be
15:23moved up the row, he would leave his loaded rifle lying on the seat and ask a German prisoner to
15:28drive it forward. Think about what has to be true for a man to do that. Not affection. Judgment.
15:35That old soldier had made a calculation about the specific human being in front of him,
15:40and he had bet a rifle on it. In the bush camps of Northern Ontario, it went further still. A
15:47German
15:48corporal named Leo Hoker was a keen hunter before the war. He said afterward that the veterans guards
15:55used to lend him their rifles so he could go off into the woods. Because, in his words, they trusted
16:01us
16:02like that. A prisoner of war, in enemy territory, walking into the forest with the guard's rifle.
16:09And coming back. Some men stopped returning to camp at all. Farmers began keeping them for days at a
16:16stretch. A young prisoner named Alfred Weiss worked a farm at Picture Butte, north of Lethbridge. And when
16:23he described those years later, he described them from the inside of a building. He said he had been
16:29living in the granary. Not a barracks. A granary on a family's land with the smell of grain in it.
16:36And then there is the camp with no fence at all. In October of 1943, 440 German prisoners were taken
16:45off the train from Medicine Hat and driven into the back country of Riding Mountain National Park in
16:51Manitoba to cut fuel wood on the shore of Whitewater Lake. Nearly one in two Canadian households burned
16:59wood for heat that winter, and the country was short. The camp cost about a third of a million dollars.
17:05Six bunkhouses with their own showers, a hospital, a power plant, and no compound, no barbed wire,
17:13no guard towers. The boundary of that prisoner of war camp was marked by axe blazes cut into a ring
17:20of
17:20trees. Canadian officials had reasoned it out. Unfenced men would work harder, and beyond those blazed trees,
17:27there was nothing but mile after mile of bush in every direction. So 440 soldiers of Hitler's army
17:35spent the winter inside a line of paint marks. That is the answer most people stop at, and it is
17:42real.
17:43These men were not prisoners of a country. They were workers in a community. They ate with families,
17:49drove trucks, borrowed rifles, slept in granaries. When Canada finally asked them to leave, they were
17:59being removed from a life, not released from a cage. But that answer has a hole in it big enough
18:06to drive
18:07a truck through. And the hole is this. That same summer, the summer Canada opened the gate, inside Camp 132
18:17at
18:17Medicine Hat, a group of German prisoners convened a court in a recreation hall and sentenced one of
18:24their own comrades to death. They were still running the barracks. And they had noticed exactly what Canada
18:32was doing to their men. Late in the afternoon of the 22nd of July 1943, a veterans guard private named
18:40Reginald Back was on duty at Camp 132 in Medicine Hat when he saw something he had no procedure for.
18:49Out in the compound, a man was waving a white cloth over his head, not surrendering, signaling,
18:57asking the Canadians for help. Two prisoners were being hunted inside that camp by their own comrades.
19:05One of them got close enough to the wire to reach the guards,
19:08and the Canadians pulled him out and saved his life. The other man was caught in the open by a
19:14mob.
19:15His name was August Plashek. He was a Catholic, and before the war he had served in the French
19:22Foreign Legion, and inside Camp 132, those two facts made him something worse than a bad soldier.
19:29A guard in a watchtower saw him being dragged by the heels toward a recreation hall. He was beaten,
19:36and then he was hanged from a rafter in the building where the prisoners held their concerts.
19:42Now put that against a date five months later. In December of 1943, the Girls Glee Club from the
19:50Medicine Hat High School came into that camp and gave the German prisoners a Christmas concert.
19:56That is the story most people never hear. Because inside the wire, alongside the soccer tournaments,
20:03and the university courses, and the beat crews going out at dawn, there was a second government.
20:10Understand what Canada had actually taken custody of. The Geneva Convention required that prisoners
20:16be administered through their own military hierarchy, their own camp leadership, their own discipline,
20:23their own internal order. In the largest Canadian camps, that leadership was Nazi. Committed, organized,
20:31and armed with the only weapon it needed, which was the knowledge that every man in there had a family
20:37inside the Reich. At Medicine Hat and Lethbridge, they built their own secret police, and the men called
20:44them exactly what they were, the Camp Gestapo. Interrogations behind screens in the huts.
20:51Stenographers taking down testimony. Verdicts. And here is what they were actually policing.
20:59Not escapes. They forbade escapes from the work parties because they did not want Canada to shut the
21:05farm gate. They were policing doubt. The second killing tells you how precisely.
21:12In the summer of 1944, the bomb went off under Hitler's map table in East Prussia,
21:18and the Fuhrer's answer was a public demand for the hunting down of traitors, anywhere and everywhere.
21:25Anywhere included a camp on the Alberta prairie, 4,000 miles from Berlin.
21:31Carl Lehmann was a non-commissioned officer who had let it be known that he no longer believed.
21:36On the 10th of September 1944, he was lured into a lecture room, a classroom, in a building the
21:43prisoners used for study, and murdered there. Stop and take the measure of that. In the room where German
21:50prisoners were being taught by other German prisoners, a German was killed for thinking.
21:57So set aside for a moment everything you have heard about the happiest prisoners in the world.
22:03The war did not stop at the Canadian coastline. It came ashore, moved into the barracks, and went on
22:10being fought between two kinds of Germans. And one side of it had rope. Which changes the question in
22:17front of us. It is no longer why comfortable men wanted to stay. It is this. What did it cost,
22:24inside those camps, to become the kind of man who would later put his name on an application to live
22:31in Canada? Here is that cost, in one small act. In January of 1945, two prisoners in an eastern camp
22:40said out loud that Germany was going to lose the war. Their Canadian guards did not punish them.
22:46They moved the two men out of the compound entirely. Not to break them, but to keep them breathing.
22:53Because by then, everyone in the camp system knew what had happened to two defeatists in Alberta.
23:00The Canadians were not blind. And they were slow. And they knew both things.
23:06The investigations went nowhere at first, because the code of silence held. Then Canada made two
23:13decisions. The first was a warning issued to the entire prisoner population. Any man who learned of a
23:21plot to murder and failed to report it would be tried as a murderer himself. Not the ringleaders.
23:28Everyone. The second was surgical. In September of 1944, Ottawa reopened a shutdown camp on the north
23:37shore of Lake Superior, Camp 100 at Nays, Ontario, for one purpose. The hardcore Nazis of Medicine Hat and
23:46Lethbridge, the men Canadian intelligence had begun marking down as blacks, were pulled out of the big
23:53camps and put on trains east. Among the men shipped to Nays were four who had murdered Carl Lehmann days
24:00before. Canada had reached into the enemy's own hierarchy and decapitated it. It did not work
24:07perfectly. Nothing did. But it worked. And there was never another political killing in a Canadian camp.
24:15An RCMP officer named George Kraus, who went in undercover to work the Lehmann case, described what
24:22he found once the grip was broken. The Nazi element had lost control, he said, and the rule of fear
24:28was
24:29gone. The prisoners they questioned did not refuse to talk. They had been waiting for someone to make
24:34it safe to talk. Keep Nays in your mind, because Canada had just proved something it did not fully
24:41understand yet, that the men in these camps were not one thing, and that the difference between them
24:47could be identified, separated, and acted upon. In eight months, Germany would surrender, and the
24:54Canadians would take that discovery and build something out of it that had nothing to do with
24:59the Geneva Convention and everything to do with hunger. On the morning of the 8th of May, 1945,
25:06a Canadian guard threw open the door of an isolation cell at Camp 33 in Ontario and shouted at the
25:12German
25:13inside it, Son, the bloody war is over. You'll be going home soon. He meant it kindly. He was wrong
25:20by about
25:21two years, and the reason he was wrong is the reason we are here. Wilhelm Rahn was still serving his
25:2728 days
25:28for cutting the fence. From the cell window, he watched the prisoners fall in on the parade square,
25:34while the Canadian commandant read out the announcement of the German surrender.
25:38Their own senior German did not dismiss them. Instead, 800 men sang. They sang the German national anthem.
25:45And then they stopped. Since 1933, every official singing of that anthem had been followed by a second,
25:53mandatory song, the anthem of the Nazi party, the one about the swastika and the ranks marching.
25:59On the 8th of May, 1945, in a clearing in the Canadian bush, 800 German soldiers left it out.
26:07They simply finished the first song, went silent, and walked back to their barracks.
26:13Hold that image, because Canada was about to test how deep it went.
26:17Within weeks, Rahn was one of 50 men pulled out of Camp 33 as troublemakers. Hardliners,
26:25agitators, escapers, and put on a train west. They came off it near Lethbridge, Alberta at Camp 133,
26:33and Rahn wrote that his first impression of the place was that time had stopped inside it.
26:3912 and a half thousand men, many of them captured in 1941 and 42, when the German army still looked
26:47unbeatable. The German camp leader came out to greet the new arrivals in full uniform and gave them the
26:53Nazi salute. The war had been over for a month, so the Canadians stopped being polite. The man who ran
27:01what came next was an officer of the Royal Canadian Air Force, and he began with a film projector.
27:08The prisoners were marched in and shown the footage the Allies had taken inside the concentration camps
27:15as they liberated them. Belsen, Buchenwald, the ditches, the survivors.
27:21Rahn described the reaction in the room without flattering anybody. On many faces,
27:29honest horror. And also, shouting. Lies. Propaganda. Then the Canadian officer stood up in front of them
27:38and made a promise that no Geneva Convention drafted in 1929 had ever imagined. He told them he would make
27:47decent human beings out of them, whether they cooperated or not. He told them that none of them
27:53were going home until their behavior changed. He told them they had been coddled here and that they
28:00were now going to learn what the Germans had done to other people. Their rations would be cut. Nobody would
28:07die. He was specific about that. But every man in that hall was going to find out what hunger felt
28:15like.
28:16They laughed at him. The laughter stopped inside a few weeks. And what Rahn recorded next is the most
28:23uncomfortable sentence in this entire story. Hunger began to churn in their guts, and the solidarity of
28:32the prisoners cracked very quickly. Men who had worn their rank and their medals for three years took
28:39them off. Austrians who had been Germans since 1938 suddenly rediscovered Austria and pinned on Austrian
28:48cockades. And the dogs that the Canadians had let the prisoners keep in the compound began to disappear,
28:55because their owners ate them. I am not going to dress that up. This was not kindness. This was a
29:03democracy applying pressure to the inside of a man's head, and using his stomach to do it. Now here is
29:11the machine they built on top of it, and it deserves a name because almost nobody outside the archives knows
29:17it. Canadian authorities began classifying every prisoner under a system they called Furuta. Each man was
29:26sorted. Black for the committed Nazi, gray for the undecided, white for the anti-Nazi. With finer grades
29:35inside that. Militarist, indeterminate, democrat, and at the top of the scale, in the language of the day,
29:43the super democrat. 35,000 human beings, each one carrying a letter that decided what happened to
29:51him next. And this is the part that matters. Camp privileges now followed the classification. Only
29:59the men graded as democrats were allowed outside the wire to work for the local farmers. Where, as everyone
30:07in the camp understood perfectly well, a man got fed considerably better than he did in the mess hall.
30:14Look at what Canada had just done. It had taken the farm gate, the table, the granary, the 50 cents
30:22a
30:22day, and turned it into the reward for changing your mind. Ron never claimed a conversion, and I respect
30:29him for it. He wrote that at Lethbridge he did not end up sorted with the Nazis, he ended up
30:35with the
30:35militarists, and, in his words, he was in the right company there. But look what was happening around
30:41him. At the officers camp at Wainwright, Alberta, the Canadians ran their assessment in February of
30:471946, and found roughly half the camp gray, the rest split between white and black. And in that same
30:54camp, in that same winter, about one man in four told them he hoped to remain in Canada. One in
31:01four.
31:01In a camp of officers of the German army, in the first winter of peace. Ottawa now had thousands
31:07of men who wanted to stay, and a written system that told it which of them were safe to keep.
31:12So it did the bureaucratic thing. It handed out forms. What the men filling in those forms knew,
31:18and what almost nobody watching this knows, is that the word on the paperwork was repatriation.
31:23And in 1946, repatriation did not mean Germany. In July of 1946, the Department of Labor shut the
31:31last of the bush camps, and a German prisoner named Alphonse Worts came out of the timber country of
31:37British Columbia for the final time. He had spent the better part of two years at a logging operation
31:43near Clearwater, halfway between Kamloops and Jasper, working for the Swanson Lumber Company. 39 prisoners
31:50had stepped off the train there in December of 1944. Now the war was 14 months finished,
31:56and the camp was closing. So Worts was sent back to Camp 133 at Lethbridge, where the wire and the
32:02mess hall were waiting. He did not stay there. That summer, Canada asked for volunteers to go out on
32:08the farms one more time, and Worts put his hand up again. Then he sat down and applied to remain
32:13in
32:13Canada permanently. He was one of more than 6,000 men who did that. And I want to be precise
32:19about
32:20what those applications were, because it is easy to hear the word and picture something casual.
32:25These were not conversations. They were formal, written requests, filed by prisoners of war to the
32:32government of the country holding them, asking to be allowed to stay in it as immigrants. Men wrote
32:38them at kitchen tables on Alberta farms. In one camp of German officers, one in four. Now, why?
32:46We are not guessing at this. 60 years later, an Edmonton filmmaker named Eva Kolmers, whose own
32:52father had spent three years behind the wire at Lethbridge, went looking for the survivors and
32:57interviewed a dozen of them. She asked them the question in this video's title directly.
33:02What they told her, over and over, was not about the food. They talked about arithmetic.
33:08Germany was rubble, and they had no way of knowing whether there would be work in it.
33:13Would there be jobs? Could a man study? Would there be a house?
33:18Those were the three questions, and none of them had answers in 1946.
33:23And then, Kolmers found the pattern underneath the arithmetic.
33:26It was strongest, she said, in the men who had nobody and nothing left. No parents, no family,
33:33no house standing. For those men, the most familiar place of belonging in the world was Canada.
33:39Read that again slowly. Not the best place, the most familiar. For a 24-year-old whose street in
33:46Hamburg or Essen was gone, and whose mother was a name on a list, the last three years of ordinary
33:52human
33:52life, a bed, a job, a table, people who used his first name, had all happened in Alberta.
33:59There is one more thing they told her. Kolmers said the men described a relationship with the
34:04Veterans Guard of Canada that was fatherly and respectful.
34:08Fatherly. Those guards were veterans of the trenches of the First World War,
34:13men who had gone over the top against the German army at Vimy and the Somme,
34:17and who 30 years later found themselves in charge of that army's sons, and became, to some of them,
34:23the closest thing to a father they had left. But even all of that is not yet the full answer,
34:29and here is the piece that almost every telling of this story leaves out.
34:33When Canada told these men they were being repatriated in 1946, it was not sending them to
34:39Germany. It was sending them to Britain. Britain had been the original detaining power. Canada had only
34:46ever been holding these men on London's behalf, and under the Geneva Convention, Britain wanted them
34:51back. Not out of sentiment, but because a wrecked British economy needed labor, and tens of thousands
34:57of able-bodied men were standing behind Canadian wire. By 1946, Britain held over 400,000 German prisoners
35:06of war, many of them shipped in from Canada and the United States, and it was in no hurry to
35:12release
35:12any of them. So look at what the word repatriation actually meant on the form that Alphonse Wurtz
35:19signed. It did not mean going home. It meant crossing the Atlantic to another camp, in a country he had
35:25never worked in, for an unspecified further period of labor, after which, eventually, maybe, Germany.
35:33Wilhelm Rahn got the full experience, a year of imposed labor in Britain after leaving Canada.
35:39He finally reached Germany in 1947, at the age of 23, four and a half years after a British submarine
35:46pulled him out of the Mediterranean. Across the channel, it was worse. German prisoners in French
35:52hands were being used to clear minefields, and by September of 1945, French authorities themselves
35:58estimated 2,000 prisoners a month were being maimed or killed doing it. That is the Europe on the other
36:05side of the ocean. Now add the last, coldest fact. For a very large number of these men, the hometown
36:13on their paperwork no longer existed as a German place at all. The eastern provinces of the Reich were
36:21gone, and millions of Germans were being expelled westward with what they could carry. A prisoner from
36:27Silesia or East Prussia was not being repatriated to anywhere. He was being sent to a country that
36:34had lost the ground his family stood on. So we can finally state the answer straight, and it has nothing
36:41to do with kindness. 6,000 men were not choosing comfort over home. They were choosing the one place
36:48on earth where they had a job, a bed, and a name, over more captivity in a foreign country, followed
36:56by a
36:56homeland that in many cases had ceased to exist. And Canada, remarkably, wanted to keep them. The
37:04government fought for it. It lost. And the Canadians who fought hardest on the other side were wearing
37:10legion pins. Through the autumn of 1946, the government of Canada quietly tried to keep several thousand
37:16German soldiers. Cabinet's reasoning was agricultural, not sentimental. These men had brought in the beets,
37:24cut the fuel wood, and worked the farms of three provinces for three seasons, and the farmers wanted
37:29them back next spring. So Ottawa began doing what governments do when they want something they cannot
37:35ask for outright. It slowed down. London noticed, and London was not amused. Britain wanted its prisoners,
37:44and it had the Geneva Convention on its side, which is when Norman Robertson, Canada's senior diplomat,
37:51put a proposition on the table. Canada would honor its commitment and hand over every last German,
37:57if Britain would release an equal number of demobilized Polish soldiers to work Canadian land instead.
38:03Read what that document is really saying. Canada was not attached to Germans. Canada was attached to
38:10local labor, and it was prepared to trade one set of foreign men for another. But out in the country,
38:16something less transactional was going on, and it split this nation in a way almost nobody remembers now.
38:22Newspapers ran editorials. Radio commentators took positions. Letters poured in to the editors of local papers,
38:29and the argument in them was consistent. Not all of these men should be sent back. The phrase that kept
38:34appearing
38:34was that certain prisoners had proven themselves on the farms, in the factories, in the bush, and that men
38:41who had proven themselves would make desirable citizens. Ordinary Canadians, in 1946, writing to
38:47their local newspapers to ask that specific German soldiers be allowed to stay. And now the other side,
38:53and I want to give it every ounce of respect it deserves. At its Dominion Convention in 1946,
38:59the Canadian Legion debated the question and passed a resolution opposing any German prisoner of war
39:07being permitted to remain in Canada. Any. Sit in that hall for a second. Those delegates were the men
39:15who had come home. In the room were fathers who had buried sons in Italy, and men who had walked
39:22off
39:22Juneau Beach, and men whose friends were in the ground at Dieppe. They had spent four years hearing that the
39:29German army was a thing to be destroyed, and they had destroyed it, at a cost this country still counts.
39:36Now they were being asked to welcome its survivors as neighbors. They said no. And they were not wrong
39:43to feel it. That is the honest shape of this story. It was not a country of soft hearts. It
39:50was a country
39:51arguing with itself, out loud, about what to do with men it had beaten. In December of 1946,
39:59the argument ended. The government bowed to public pressure and ordered every remaining prisoner of
40:05war transferred to the United Kingdom. The camps went dark one after another through that year.
40:13Petawawa emptied in March. Nays in late March. Medicine Hat in May. Wainwright in May.
40:21Kananaskis in June. And the last men at Camp 133 in Lethbridge boarded trains for Halifax in December.
40:30And here is the coincidence in the calendar that tells you everything about what Canada had been holding.
40:36On the 18th of December 1946, in the provincial jail at Lethbridge, four German prisoners were hanged for
40:45the murder of Carl Lehman. Bruno Perzanowski, Heinrich Bush, Wilhelm Mueller, Walter Wolff. It remains the last
40:56mass execution in Canadian history. Werner Schwalb had already gone to the same gallows in June for the
41:04killing of August Plaschek. His last words were reported as, My Fuhrer, I follow thee. So in one month,
41:13in one small Alberta city, both Germanys left Canada. One by the front gate, on a train, carrying
41:22applications to come back, the other through a trap door, still saluting. Now come back to a farm road in
41:30November, a month before the trains. Joe Kaser had driven Rudolph Reese in for the last time.
41:37That is where we started, and we can now see what was actually in that truck cab. Not a farmer
41:44being
41:44sentimental about cheap labor. A man who had spent four seasons watching another man work his land,
41:51eat at his table, and become someone his daughter would still describe, 50 years later,
41:56as family. And who understood, driving him back to the wire, that Ottawa and London were about to undo
42:04it. And then, the ships. Wilhelm Rahn walked up the gangway of the Mauritania at Halifax in 1946,
42:13bound for what was left of Germany. He had arrived in this country as a self-described arrogant young
42:19Nazi, who cheered when a ship carrying British nurses went down. He was leaving as a man who had
42:26read the newspapers out loud, seen the footage from the camps, and been unable to argue with either.
42:32What he felt on that gangway was not relief at going home. In his own words, it was trepidation
42:38and shame. Understand what that word is doing here, because it is the real answer to the question in
42:44the title. Shame is not something you feel about a country. It is something you feel about yourself.
42:50Canada had not simply made these men comfortable. Canada had made a certain number of them unable to
42:56go back to being who they had been. And a man in that condition has nowhere to be repatriated to.
43:01Rahn wrote that most of his companions felt the same, and he thought that was why so few of the
43:06Germans who had lived as prisoners in Canada ever wrote or spoke publicly about it afterward.
43:126,000 applications went into a Canadian file, and the ships sailed. That should be the end of it.
43:18Except that a young merchant seaman named Harry Pohl reached Hamburg, found his new wife, and said
43:24five words to her. I'm going back to Canada. That is what Harry Pohl said to his wife in Hamburg.
43:31He had been captured at 19, a merchant seaman, and he had spent his war on a farm near Brooks,
43:38Alberta.
43:39She agreed to go. In 1951, they crossed the Atlantic, and he went back to work on the same farm
43:46he had
43:47worked as a prisoner. Before he died, he said he knew of at least 36 other men who had done
43:54the same
43:54thing and come back to southern Alberta. They came back one at a time, and every single one of them
44:01needed a Canadian to make it possible. Alfred Weiss, who had lived in the granary at Picture Butte,
44:08returned and bought that farm. Paul Mengelberg had been a wireless operator on a submarine depth-charged
44:15off Ireland in 1940, and he cut bush at Longlack, Ontario. Back in Germany, he applied to work as a
44:24river policeman on the Rhine and was turned down. Because, as he put it, I was a Nazi. His own
44:31country
44:32would not have him. So the farmer he had worked for at Glencoe, Ontario, sponsored him in 1951.
44:38He worked for International Harvester in Toronto, went back up to Longlack in 1955, and spent his
44:45working life there as a heavy-duty mechanic. In his 90s, he was still occasionally lecturing at the
44:50university in Thunder Bay about what had happened in Germany and what had happened to him here.
44:56Horst Braun, another U-boat man, was sent back and said, simply, that he was terribly homesick for
45:02Canada. A man he had worked beside in the northern Ontario bush sponsored his return. Horst Liebeck,
45:10the Luftwaffe fighter pilot who had escaped from the camp at Heron Bay and been recaptured, became a
45:15Canadian citizen on the 21st of February, 1958, and built houses in Brantford, Ontario. Siegfried
45:22Bruce, a U-boat officer, went into business in North Bay with a former Luftwaffe officer named Tony
45:28Kleimacher, and the two of them ran a large real estate firm. Bruce said that when he came back as
45:34a
45:34landed immigrant, he knew this was his country. Siegfried Osterwalt had been an artillery lieutenant,
45:41captured at El Alamein, held at Wainwright. He went home to Germany first and found it miserable,
45:48everyone on the black market, everyone for himself. He and his wife Eva came to Canada in 1953,
45:55giving up jobs to do it. He became a land surveyor in Edmonton, and they raised their family there.
46:01Fifty years on, he said, deep in my heart I am more Canadian than German.
46:07Heinz Altendorf was shot down over North Africa and held at Gravenhurst, Ontario. He went home,
46:14married a woman named Ruth, and told her stories about Canada until she and their daughters agreed
46:19to leave. In five years, eleven members of that family followed them across. Ruth, still living in
46:26British Columbia decades later, said that her husband's greatest piece of luck in life was
46:31being sent to Canada as a prisoner of war. And Rudolf Reese, the man in Joe Kaser's truck,
46:37the man whose place Mary Kaser set at her own table, the one this story started with,
46:42he wanted to come back. He never found a way.
46:47That is how these stories usually end. Not with a reunion. With a farm road in November,
46:53and a door closing, and a man who spent the rest of his life on the wrong side of an
46:58ocean from the
46:59place where he had been treated like a son. Wilhelm Rahn did come back, but not as an immigrant.
47:06After his year of forced labor in Britain and his return to Germany in 1947, he joined the police,
47:13then the Army of the New West German Democracy, and rose to Colonel. In 1967, he was sent to Kingston,
47:21Ontario, to Fort Frontenac, for a promotion course at the Canadian Army Command and Staff College,
47:27as a NATO ally, 22 years after cutting his way through a Canadian fence. By then, Petawawa and
47:35Lethbridge had been bulldozed flat. Almost all of it is gone now. Camp 133 is an industrial park with a
47:43small stone marker at one corner. At Kananaskis, a single guard tower survives. At Whitewater Lake in
47:51Riding Mountain, where 440 men were kept inside a ring of axe marks. There are foundations in the grass
47:58and a backcountry campsite. 137 German prisoners died in Canada. In 1971, at the request of the
48:07German War Graves Commission, every one of them was moved to a German War Graves section at Kitchener,
48:12Ontario. Their families were invited. Canadians conducted the ceremony with full honor.
48:18So here is the answer to the question we started with, as plainly as it can be put.
48:246,000 men did not ask to stay because Canada was comfortable. They asked because Canada had handed
48:30them a newspaper they could not argue with, a table they were welcome at, and work that made them worth
48:36something, and had done all of it while their own leadership was hanging men in recreation halls a
48:41hundred yards away. Canada beat the German army twice. Once with guns, in Normandy and Italy and the
48:49Scheldt, and once with a job, a table, and the truth. Thank you for staying with this one to the
48:56end.
48:56The prisoners are gone now, and so are the farmers and the old soldiers of the Veterans Guard who did
49:01something extraordinary without ever calling it that. If you think this story deserves to be remembered,
49:07a like genuinely helps it find more people. And if anyone in your family served, or worked alongside
49:12these men, I would be honored to hear about it.