German POWs in England Thought They’d Been Sent to HEAVEN

In November 1945, a German prisoner of war sat behind barbed wire in Lancashire and waited to find out what the British were going to do to him. He had survived the Eastern Front. He had survived the collapse of Nazi Germany. The propaganda had been specific — the British would make German prisoners pay. What happened instead would change his life, and the lives of hundreds of thousands of men like him, forever. Britain held over 400,000 German prisoners after the war. What it chose to do with them — and why a decision to hand out footballs on muddy prison pitches helped build the peace that followed — is one of the least told stories of the Second World War. And at the centre of it stands one man: a Luftwaffe paratrooper who went from prisoner behind wire to FA Cup winner at Wembley, playing the last thirty minutes of the final on a broken neck. Topics: German POWs in England WW2, Bernhard Trautmann Manchester City, POW camps Britain 1945, British treatment of German prisoners, Bert Trautmann broken neck FA Cup, Camp 180 Lancashire, German prisoners football England, POW repatriation postwar Britain, British German reconciliation WW2, FA Cup Final 1956 Sources: Rowlands, Alan — Trautmann: The Biography (1990) Faulk, Henry — Group Captives: The Re-education of German Prisoners of War in Britain 1945–1948 (1977) Pistol, Judith — Prisoners of Britain: German and Italian POWs, 1939–1952 (2012) Imperial War Museum Archive — iwm.org.uk The National Archives UK — nationalarchives.gov.uk BBC History — bbc.co.uk/history Disclaimer: All images, graphics and video footage used in this production are either created, licensed, or legally transformed under fair use. All materials have been transformed during production to meet the criteria of fair use under Section 107 of the Copyright Act 1976. #BritishHistory #WW2 #MilitaryHistory #POW #BertTrautmann