Hitler's Last Army

Using original research, previously unseen photographs, and interviews with former POWs and their wives, this is the story of the half-million German prisoners-of-war held captive in Britain during and after World War II Adolf Hitler would have given anything to see such headlines in 1940 as these: 500,000 Enemy Troops on British Soil! 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 labor. 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 terrorized non-Nazis, guards sometimes maltreated their prisoners, and British girls who married ex-POWs faced bitter recriminations: Falling pregnant outside marriage was bad enough--but with a German POW!