My Grandad, Donald Thomsett was POW in Stalag 3a for the last 4 or 5 months of the war. He was the rear gunner in a Halifax bomber flying out of RAF Snaith/Pollington. He'd been an RAF gunner for all the war on varying aircraft - Wellingtons and Halifax's mostly. He'd flown God knows how many missions from 1940 onwards!
He remembers being shot down over Hanover on a night raid. That night he was rear gunner in the plane and told me that two German night fighters approached the plane from the rear, one high and one below. He managed to shoot at the higher aircraft and said he either shot it down, or it broke away because my grandad thought he was getting pretty good hits on it. By the time he got his guns to the floor he saw the face of the other German pilot illuminated by his instrument panel below him. Bit corny maybe, but he swore on it. After that, the German plane flew under the Halifax (which was doing an evasive manouvre). There was an explosion and the plane started heading for the ground. The comms had gone and so had the hydraulics, so grandad had to manually wind the turret round so he could bale out.
He landed on the roof of a house and sprained his ankle while falling into the garden below. The local residents came out and beat him with pieces of wood, then the SS arrived and took him through the streets. They took off his flying boots and coat and made him walk through the snow bare foot. While walking he saw the bodies of other airmen hung from lamp posts, he said they looked as if they had been hung by the locals after landing.
They took him to the Dulag and interrogated him and strung him up and ran a knife down his back - he still had the deep long scars right up to his death. He had frostbite on his feet so they made the room alternitively hot and cold to make it worse. They also put another English prisoner in the room with him. Grandad wasn't telling them anything in interrogation, but he spoke with the room mate. It turned out that the room mate was a German plant and he told them everything he had been told by my grandad, where he was from, his girlfriend's name.
Eventually, via being cattle trucked in Berlin station while the Allies were bombing Berlin - something he said the Nazis thought was very funny. If the Allies bombed their own men trapped in cattle trucks in the station - he was taken first to Sargen, then to Camp 3a.
He was there when the Russians advanced on the camp. He said the german guards were a bit like "dad's army" and he bore no ill will towards them, even though they had little food. He remembers the Russian prisoners being treated like animals in a seperate compound. Eventually he escaped from the camp by going over the wire with a Canadian and an American. They found an old beat up car, got it going, then drove it across Germany westwards. A German family helped them out and housed/fed them for a few days in a little village. One day the Russians came to the village and my grandad hid in the cellar of the house. He remembered seeing "people looking like really dirty Chinese people" coming into the cellar and eating raw sugar with their bare hands like they were starving. The Russian soldiers took the family's 11 year old girl into the woods and she was never seen again. They didn't discover my grandad or his two friends.
Eventually they made it to just outside Berlin and literally walked into the city. He was treated well by the Americans and given food and fags and some money. He arrived back in the UK about three weeks later and couldn't even speak for weeks. The war stayed with him for the rest of his life. But it wasn't the end.
Nearly 50 years later a local historian had found out who had shot down my grandad that night (he had been the only one of his crew in the Halifax to survive) and arranged for the two of them to write to each other. It turned out that the German pilot - Herman Greiner - was a WW2 ace. He remembered that night and was able to tell my grandad how his plane was shot down (some kind of upward pointing gun that the night fighter had just had installed), and my grandad didn't blame himself as much for the death of his 6 friends that night. Herman gave his Iron Cross with Oakleaf, medal to my grandad as a token of his sorrow and apology. They met in Germany and shook hands after 50 years. Grandad died of cancer a couple of years later, he hardly ever talked about it all, despite me writing this, and only opened up at all towards the end. That war destroyed him. But he was brave as anyone I've ever met.
