Hitler's Last Army

500,000 ENEMY TROOPS ON BRITISH SOIL! Adolf Hitler would have given anything to see such headlines in 1940. five years later, half a million German soldiers, sailors and airmen did find themselves in the UK - but as prisoners of the British government. Using recently declassified documents, this book reveals how Britain - in defiance of the Geneva Convention - went on to detain these men for a further three years, and used them for forced labour. As new interviews within these pages show, some Germans were surprised to discover a freedom unknown in their homeland: 'I felt like a guest ... not any more a PoW. I could hardly imagine that they had been my enemy.' But behind the barbed wire, Nazis terrorised non-Nazis ... guards sometimes maltreated their prisoners ... and British girls who married ex-PoWs faced bitter recriminations.

Auteur

ROBIN QUINN is an author and independent radio producer based in South-East England. His first book, Hitler's Last Army (THP), is the story of the 400,000 German prisoners of war detained in Britain during and after the Second World War. He contributes to family history and other magazines, and has written and produced over sixty programmes for BBC network radio, including the critically acclaimed Summer of 1940 and The Cuban Crisis (Radio 2).

Résumé
After the Second World War, 400,000 German servicemen were imprisoned on British soil, some remaining until 1948. These defeated men in their tattered uniforms were, in every sense, Hitler's Last Army. Britain used the prisoners as an essential labour force, especially in agriculture, and in the devastating winter of 1947 the Germans helped avert a national disaster by clearing snow and stemming floods, working shoulder to shoulder with Allied troops. Slowly, friendships were forged between former enemies. Some POWs fell in love with British women, though such relationships were often frowned upon: 'Falling pregnant outside marriage was bad enough but with a German POW !' Using exclusive interviews with former prisoners, as well as extensive archive material, this book looks at the Second World War from a fresh perspective that of Britain's German prisoners, from the shock of being captured to their final release long after the war had ended.