His Neighbour Went East and Never Came Back. A German POW Came Home From an English Farm.

#ww2 #germanpows #prisonersofwar In May 1945 Emil Hartung walked west, towards the Americans, and was sent to a farm in Norfolk. His neighbour Walter walked east, and never came back. Emil, Walter, Gertrud, Anna, Albert Crane and Kurt Dallmann are invented. The world around them is exact, and the sources are below. 0:00 The road west, May 1945 1:40 Who are they giving us to? 3:36 German POWs in England 4:59 The farmer who would not speak 5:53 A mug of tea on the gatepost 7:04 News of the street 8:02 Christmas 1946 and the grey socks 10:02 The only man who came home 12:09 Eastern Front: the men who never came back 13:21 Soviet camps and the last train, 1955 16:11 The socks across the road 16:49 Back to Norfolk, 1963 18:27 The face at the beginning WHICH WAY HE WALKED. In the last days of the war German soldiers tried to surrender to the Americans or the British rather than the Red Army. A man captured in Bavaria could be handed to the British and shipped to England as farm labour. A man captured in East Prussia went to a Soviet camp. GERMAN POWs IN ENGLAND. Prisoners were sent to farms across the country, Norfolk among them. Farmers could ask to keep their men, and in the end about 24,000 stayed in Britain. From Christmas 1946 a prisoner could, for the first time, be invited into an English home. Tea was rationed at two ounces a week. THE MEN WHO WENT EAST. Of the German soldiers taken by the Soviet Union, somewhere between one in seven and one in three never came home; nobody has ever agreed on the number. Adenauer went to Moscow in September 1955, and the last prisoners, about 10,000 men, came through the transit camp at Friedland from October 1955. THE FACE AT THE START. The opening film is real: a National Archives reel shot near Rosenheim in Bavaria on 5 May 1945, a US government work in the public domain (catalog.archives.gov/id/18171). 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. Bundesarchiv images under CC BY-SA 3.0 DE, including Bild 146-1987-053-38 (Friedland, 1955), and 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. #worldwar2 #wwii #easternfront #sovietunion