Following on from my post From the Deep, I looked a bit more at the National Archives and found they had more records of my Grandad’s wartime service- a set of cards that were official German records of the time that were taken into British hands at the end of the war, and they give more information on that time.

Sadly, these weren’t available electronically, so I had to request a scan: you pay a fee where someone goes and checks the records are actually present and relevant, then if they are, you pay a fee for scanning.

The files duly arrived as JPEG pictures with an odd colour profile from the specialised scannner that was used, which confused some viewer software, but Imagemagik sorted that easily, and the scans are great quality.

Here’s the front card:

This doesn’t tell us much we didn’t already know, apart from the only time I saw a photo of him with a beard. The date of capture is a little at odds with what we had before: 9th Jan 1940 against the. 6th. It does, however, confirm Oflag IX-A.

The next scan has him “on work detail” (auf arbietskommando nach wildflecken) in February 1940. The full trnaslation by google says “on work detail to wild spots”, which I guess means the surrounding countryside, and his early letters home mention the hard physical work clearing ground with a pick at about this time.

The records confirm he did, indeed, pass through Stalag IX C in April 1940, then Stalag X-B by February 1941- earlier than I’d been able to ascertain from his other records.

The period I mentioned in 1942 at Marlag und Milag Nord must have been quite short: April/May 1942:

as the move to Stalag IV-A seems to have been in July 1942: he’d contracted Typhus, as well as the TB that I thought I’d recalled from conversations with my grandmother. As I’d previously said, this camp had an attached field hospital. He was still there on 2 October 1943:

Which is the latest record the Germans had: by November 1943, he was back in the UK.

One thing of tangential interest is the German Clerks’ interpretation of Sutton Coldfield, his town of birth. We had Luton, Southland Caulfield, Southland Caulfield, Sutton Coalville as various forms.