The Canadian Trick That Guarded 34,000 German POWs With Old Soldiers

The Canadian Trick That Guarded 34,000 German POWs With Old Soldiers: German prisoners of war in Canada and the Veterans Guard of Canada, First World War veterans who guarded German POWs in Canada. German prisoners of war in Canada filled prisoner of war camps Canada built from Lake Superior to the prairies: Camp X Angler, Camp 132 Medicine Hat and Camp 133 Lethbridge. Luftwaffe prisoners and Afrika Korps prisoners, WW2 prisoners of war shipped from Britain, were guarded by old soldiers of the Veterans Guard of Canada that Norman Rogers raised in 1940. The Angler POW escape of April 1941 was the Great Escape Canada had: twenty-eight Luftwaffe prisoners out of Camp X Angler, a POW camp escape on Lake Superior that ended on a freight train to Camp 132 Medicine Hat. Franz von Werra, the one German prisoner who got away from Canada, is part of the same story of German POWs in Canada. Canada in World War 2 needed its young soldiers overseas, so First World War veterans of the Veterans Guard of Canada guarded German POWs, Afrika Korps prisoners and Luftwaffe prisoners in prisoner of war camps across Canada. This is Canadian military history and the Canadian home front WW2 seen from the guard towers of Camp 133 Lethbridge and Camp 132 Medicine Hat. In April 1941 a guard alone in his tower at Angler, on the north shore of Lake Superior, heard a scrape past the wire. By morning twenty-eight Luftwaffe prisoners were gone through a flooded tunnel, with needle compasses, fat candles and three hundred pounds of meat in jars. The hunt that followed ran through the bush, a bait shack on the lake shore and a westbound freight train that carried two of them two thousand kilometres to Medicine Hat. Behind the escape stands the decision of Defence Minister Norman Rogers in May 1940: a force of veterans of Vimy, Passchendaele and the Somme, armed with rifles, often the old Ross. When Britain asked Canada to take its prisoners, and then the Afrika Korps arrived from Egypt in 1942, those old soldiers ended up guarding the largest POW camps in North America at Lethbridge and Medicine Hat. The film follows German prisoners of war in Canada from Angler and Ozada to the murders inside Camp 132 and the last mass hanging in Canadian history, and to the prisoners who later came back to live in the country that had held them. Was your grandfather in the Veterans Guard, or held in a Canadian camp? Leave his name below. Chapters: 0:00 The tower at Angler 4:01 Norman Rogers' old soldiers 7:14 The one who got away 9:05 Found by smoke 11:36 Two thousand kilometres on a freight 13:27 The Afrika Korps arrives 16:17 Murder inside Camp 132 18:02 "They treated us well" 20:05 The ones who came back Sources: 1. Legion Magazine, "To war once more" (Veterans Guard of Canada) 2. The Canadian Encyclopedia, "Prisoner of War Camps in Canada" 3. POWs in Canada, "Breakout from Angler: Canada's Great Escape" 4. POWs in Canada, "27 Company, Veterans Guard of Canada" 5. Library and Archives Canada, Liebeck statement, 29 April 1941