Britain Was Rationing Bread in 1947. It Still Paid for a German Prisoner's Glasses.

#ww2 #germanpows #prisonersofwar In March 1947, in the worst winter Britain had seen, a German prisoner of war walked out of an eye clinic in York wearing a pair of spectacles he had not paid for. Four English people put them on his face, and not one of them had to. Werner Lohse, Dennis Wray, Harold Greenwood, Edith Collins and Edward Ashby are invented. The world around them is exact, and the sources are below. 0:00 The column out of the Reichswald 0:32 Operation Veritable: the first shelling 1:49 Fit for labour, not for the army 5:28 German POWs at Eden Camp 7:06 A shot not fired 11:05 The eye clinic in York 13:57 What the Geneva Convention said 15:21 A clerk at the War Office 18:51 The woman at the lens bench 21:19 The winter of 1947 23:43 The glasses 27:15 Home to Krefeld 28:21 Two years before the law THE WINTER. January to March 1947 was the coldest winter in England since 1814. Coal froze in the pits, power was cut to industry, and bread — which had never been rationed during the war — was on ration from July 1946. That is the country that paid for the glasses. GERMAN POWs IN ENGLAND. About 400,000 German prisoners were held in Britain, most of them working on farms. In March 1947 they were still here, two years after the war ended, and the last did not go home until 1948. WHAT THE LAW SAID. The 1929 Geneva Convention obliged the detaining power to give prisoners the medical attention their condition required, at its own expense. It says nothing about spectacles. Somebody had to decide that seeing counted. FREE GLASSES IN BRITAIN. The National Health Service opened on 5 July 1948, and free eye tests and spectacles came with it. Werner Lohse got his sixteen months before any Briton could. THE FACE AT THE START. The opening film is real: a US National Archives reel of a German column on the road, a US government work in the public domain. The man at the back of that column is real and nobody wrote down his name. The face that comes out of him is generated. I made it, and the film says so. PHOTOGRAPHS. Imperial War Museums, US Signal Corps and Bundesarchiv images, plus public-domain archive film. Where the archive held nothing, the frame is an AI reconstruction and is not archival photography. I would rather tell you than let you find out. #ww2stories #ww2documentary #worldwar2 #militaryhistory #untoldww2stories