Every German Prisoner in Britain Got a Letter: A, B or C. It Decided When He Went Home.

Every German prisoner of war in British hands was interviewed and given a letter — A, B or C — and a colour to go with it. White, grey, black. #ww2 #germanpows #prisonersofwar The interview took, on average, fifteen minutes. The guidance listed twenty-eight questions the officer might ask, and said explicitly that the list was for guidance only, so no two interviews were the same. The officer also weighed the man's military record, his age, his religion, his class and what work he had done since 1933. The letter decided what a man's captivity would be. A black man could not go out on a working party — no fields, no villages, no English, no sixpence a day. The letter also decided the queue home: from 1946 the whites went first as a reward, and the C-plus men waited until 1948. Of the men screened: 19,448 came out white. 85,380 came out grey. 50,205 came out black. About 53,000 were never screened at all, out of something like 400,000 screenings in total. Most men were grey. The largest single verdict the British state reached about the German army in its hands was that it could not tell. The system had a flaw its own historians name plainly: prisoners worked out what the interview wanted, and came to understand what they needed to say to be classified as white. The grade measured what a man had learned to say. Screening was abolished in July 1947. Every letter on every card stopped meaning anything at once, and nothing replaced it. Ivy Kerrison is invented, and so is her farm and so is Kurt Reineke. She is not a documented woman with the gaps filled in — she is the person the period makes ordinary: a farmer of thirty-eight on a hundred and ten acres in Norfolk, with a working party three mornings a week. Everything around her is exact and is listed below. SOURCES SPOKEN ON AIR — "ABCs of Nazism: The Political Screening and Classification of German Prisoners of War", English Historical Review 141:608 (2026), doi:10.1093/ehr/ceaf151 — the grades and colours, the fifteen-minute interview, the twenty-eight questions, the counts of white, grey and black, the regrading of 1946 and the abolition in July 1947, and the finding that prisoners learned what to say. — HC Deb 20 February 1945 — Sir James Grigg, Secretary of State for War, on the segregation of Nazis from other German prisoners. — Wolfgang Rosterg, Compound B, Camp 21 Cultybraggan, near Comrie, on the night of 22-23 December 1944; five men hanged at Pentonville on 6 October 1945, the last mass execution in British history. WHAT I COULD NOT SETTLE There is no photograph of a screening interview. None was taken. There is also almost nothing on the British civilians who wrote to committees about individual prisoners — a letter from a member of the public is not a record anybody keeps — so the shape of the machine is provable and the number of people who put a hand into it is not. PHOTOGRAPHS Most of the photographs in this film are real: Ministry of Information and War Office official collections, public domain. Where the archive had nothing, the frame is AI reconstruction and is not archival photography. CHAPTERS 0:00 A lorry that did not come, November 1946 1:23 A year of a man's behaviour, at six feet 3:14 German POWs on British farms in 1946 5:26 Fifteen minutes, and a letter: A, B or C 5:49 Who was on the other side of the table 8:51 What the prisoners learned to say 9:49 White 19,448. Grey 85,380. Black 50,205. 11:01 Why the sorting existed: Cultybraggan, 1944 13:31 Re-education, and what the grade was for 14:47 What a black letter took from a man 17:06 Regraded to C, and off the working party 18:01 Six weeks, three offices, one bus fare 20:08 What the village did 21:14 The letter changes in January 1947 24:17 July 1947: screening is abolished 27:22 Going home in 1948 29:09 What is invented and what is not #worldwar2 #ww2history #britishhistory #postwarbritain #ukhistory