24,000 German Prisoners Never Went Home. Britain Never Asked Them Why.

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• HI

  @HisMajestysGuests · 2 weeks ago · pinned

  🎞 New film is up. Subscribe so you don&apos;t miss the next one.<br>Twenty-four thousand of them signed a farm contract instead of getting on the boat. This one is about the four hundred thousand who did get on it, and what Britain paid them for two years of work.<br>▶ <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_g8b1SraCzo">https://youtu.be/_g8b1SraCzo</a>

• HI

  @HisMajestysGuests · 2 weeks ago

  First, before anything else: Erich Nolde is invented.<br><br>So are Ronald Pike and his sister Winifred, and so is the farm. I wrote them. They are not documented people with the gaps filled in — they are the people the record makes ordinary: a German prisoner of twenty-six on a two-hundred-acre Devon farm whose owner applied for prisoner labour in 1946 because he could not get anybody else. Chulmleigh is real. The film says all this out loud. Everything around them is below and is sourced.<br><br>The thing everyone gets wrong. This is told as a love story — the German who stayed for an English girl. The men themselves said otherwise. One of them, interviewed decades later: &quot;I didn&apos;t marry my wife until some four years later, it wasn&apos;t that.&quot; And the great majority who did marry British women went back to Germany anyway, with their wives following them. Marriage is over-represented in the record for a dull reason: a wedding made the local paper and a farm contract did not.<br><br>The documented reason is colder. Home was in the Soviet zone and there was nothing to go back to. Through 1947 the British papers that reached the camps carried the uranium mines and the cattle trucks going east, and the part the men could check was true.<br><br>And what they chose was not freedom. Permission to stay was tied to agricultural employment: if a farmer would have you, you could stay; if not, you went back. The wages were the lowest legal wages in the country and factory work was closed to them. The historian who went through the Home Office and Ministry of Labour files describes the status in four words — akin to indentured labour.<br><br>The numbers, as they actually stand.<br><br>Peak 402,200 German prisoners in Britain, September 1946. Repatriation ran at 15,000 a month from October 1946 — a rate set by shipping capacity, not by policy — raised to 20,000 in December 1947, and completed on 12 July 1948.<br><br>24,000 volunteered to remain, counted to December 1948. 15,700 held civilian status a year later. A second count says 25,252 elected to stay and about 12,000 stayed beyond their contracts. 796 marriages were made while the men were still prisoners — that is a floor, not a total, and nobody has ever counted the ones made after release.<br><br>32,000 is the figure you will find everywhere. I could not find a source for it. It is not used in this film.<br><br>And after 1949, nobody counted again. No follow-up, no naturalisation figures, nobody tracked them. That is the honest end of the record, and it is why the film ends where it does.<br><br>Sources. Alan Malpass, British Attitudes Towards German Prisoners of War and their Treatment 1939-48 (PhD, Sheffield Hallam, 2016) — the 25,252 and 12,000, the repatriation rate, the completion date, and &quot;akin to indentured labour&quot;. Michele Ingham (PhD, Goldsmiths, 2019) — the interviews, the legal route to civilian status, the marriage law, and the Werner Vetter case. Julius Isaac, British Post-War Migration (NIESR / Cambridge University Press, 1954), pp. 183-84, 191 — the 24,000 and 15,700. Henry Faulk, Group Captives (1977), p. 169 — the 796 marriages. Hansard: HC Deb 25 March 1948, 27 October 1947, 13 July 1948; Lords 12 February 1947.<br><br>Photographs are Ministry of Information and War Office official collections, public domain. 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.<br><br>Two things I would like from you.<br><br>In your family, was there someone who arrived from somewhere else and stayed, and never really explained why? Not a hero and not a scandal — a man who turned up for a season and was still there thirty years later. Tell me about him. Three of the last four films on this channel started life as somebody&apos;s comment.<br><br>And tell me where you are watching from. It is never the mix I expect.