Why German POWs Couldn’t Explain Why They Didn’t Want to Leave Canada

Imagine you are the most feared  submarine commander in the world. You have sent more enemy ships to the bottom of the ocean than any other captain alive. The British call you the wolf of the Atlantic. And then one cold March night,  your own boat is sinking under you and you are pulled out of the freezing  water by the very men you were trying to kill.

 You expect a cell. You expect  an interrogation room that never ends. Instead, a few months later, you are standing in the middle of Canada on a flat green prairie that runs further  than your eye can see. And a guard is handing you a plate of food bigger than anything you have eaten in years. This  actually happened.

And it did not just happen to one man. Tens of thousands of German soldiers spent the Second World War as prisoners on Canadian soil. Some of them were the absolute elite. And here is the strange part,  the part almost nobody tells you. [snorts] Decades later, many of those men came back not as enemies, as friends.

 They crossed the ocean again on purpose to  shake the hands of the people who had once locked them up. Today, we are going to figure out why. To understand how this  happened, you have to start with one man. His name was Otto Cretchmer.  And in the first years of the war, he was a problem the Royal Navy simply could not solve.

 Cretchmer commanded a Yubot called U99.  He was not loud. He didn’t boast on the radio like some commanders did. His own crew gave him a nickname that told you everything you needed to know about him. Silent Otto. He had one  rule that he lived by. One torpedo, one ship. He would slip his submarine right into the middle of an Allied  convoy at night on the surface where nobody thought to look for him and pick the freigherss off one by one in the dark.

By the spring of 1941,  he had sunk more shipping than any other Ubate commander in the entire war.  More than a quarter of a million tons of it. Stop and think about what that number really means. Whole cargos of food, fuel,  tanks, and men gone to the bottom because of one  quiet officer and one small boat.

 For Britain, fighting for its life and depending on supplies  carried across that ocean, Cretchmer was a living nightmare with a name and a face.  And then the nightmare ended. On the night  of the 17th of March, 1941, southeast of Iceland, Cretchmer pushed his luck  one convoy too far. A British destroyer called HMS Walker, working together with a second ship called Vayoch U99 on the surface and drove it under with depth charges.

The boat was finished. Water  was pouring in. And here, Cretchmer did the thing a true fanatic would never do. He chose his men over his medals.  He ordered the submarines scuttled and he sent one last message to  the British asking them to save his crew. Then  he stood on the deck of his dying boat in the dark and he waited.

The British pulled roughly 40 of his men  out of that black water. Cretchmer climbed up a scrambling net into captivity, still wearing his binoculars and his white commander’s cap. Now, here is the first thing you have to get straight because it shapes this whole story. The men  who beat Otto Cretchmer were not Canadians.

They were British sailors of the Royal  Navy. And the same is true for nearly every prisoner in this story. The Africa Corps soldiers who  would later fill the prairie camps were captured in the desert by British and Commonwealth armies. So when these Germans finally met their Canadians, it was never on a battlefield.

 They had never traded a single shot with them. The Canadians  were something else entirely. They were the keepers, the hosts, the  strangers on the far side of the wire who would feed them, count them, and live  beside them for four long years. Cretchmer was  first locked up in England in a grim old country house called Griale Hall.

But Britain was a small, crowded island within reach  of German bombers and in theory, German rescue. So in October of 1942,  the British did what they did with their most dangerous catch. They put Otto  Cretchmore on a ship and sent him across the Atlantic to a quiet little town in Ontario called Bowmanville  and to a camp known by a single number, Camp 30.

 To see why Canada, of all places, you have to step back from Cretchmer for a minute and look at the sheer size of the thing. Because the numbers are genuinely hard to believe. By the end of 1942, there were already more than 16,000 German prisoners of war held  in Canada. By the end of the whole war, that number had climbed to around 34,000  men, spread across more than two dozen camps.

>>  >> An entire enemy army picked up on battlefields thousands of miles away, shipped across a submarineinfested  ocean, and quietly set down in the safest country  on Earth. The logic behind it was cold and simple. Britain was full, and Britain was within reach.

 Every prisoner held in England was a prisoner who might be freed by an invasion and a mouth that  had to be fed off an island that was rationing every single loaf of bread. Canada was the  exact opposite. It was enormous. It was safe. The nearest free German soldier was an entire ocean away. You could drop a man in the middle of Alberta and the land itself became the wall.

 Where would he even run to? So Canada sorted its prisoners into two kinds of place. The first kind was for the dangerous minds. The senior officers, the yubot aces, the men who would never ever  stop scheming, went to smaller, tighter camps in the east.  That was Bowmanville, camp 30, where Cretchmer landed. From the outside,  it looked almost gentle.

 A cluster of brick buildings that had once been a boy’s school set among the trees of Ontario. Inside it held some of the most decorated  and most determined naval officers Germany had. The second kind of place was built for the  masses. And the masses were the Africa Corps. When the Axis lost  North Africa, the Allies suddenly had a flood of German soldiers on their hands and  nowhere to put them.

 The journey those men took reads like something out of a novel. They were captured in the desert, marched  into camps near Cairo, loaded onto ships, sailed all the way to New York, and then handed over to the Canadians, who put them on the trains of the Canadian Pacific Railway,  and ran them north and west deep into the prairie.

 They passed through a tent camp called Ozada and ended up in two purpose-built towns of  barbed wire out in Alberta, Lethbridge camp 133, Medicine Hat  camp 132. And these were not little stockades.  Lethbridge and Medicine Hat were the largest prisoner of war camps  in all of North America. Each one held roughly 12,000 men. That  is not a camp.

 That is a city. A German city  dropped onto the Canadian plains with its own streets, its own theater troops, its own orchestras, its own newspapers, even its own soccer leagues. All of it behind the wire. All of it staring out  at a horizon of wheat that ran on forever. And this is the framework you have to keep in your head for the rest of the story.

 These men had crossed  an ocean to fight an enemy they pictured as monsters. They had been told exactly what the other side  was like. Then they arrived and the enemy turned out to be a thin line of Canadian farm boys in uniform. A country with more food than it knew what to do with. And a silence so big it frightened them more  than any battle ever had.

Everything that came next, the riots, the tunnels, the killings, and the friendships  grew straight out of that one strange collision. Now, do not make the mistake of thinking these men simply gave up. A prisoner of  war, especially an officer, does not believe the war is over just because he is behind wire.

 His job, the way he saw it, was to go on fighting by any means he still had. And at Camp 30, that fight got  personal fast. It started over chains. In the autumn of 1942, after the bloody  DEP raid, a bitter dispute broke out between Germany and the Allies about prisoners  being tied up during operations. Both sides started shackling each other’s captured men out of pure revenge.

So when the order came down to put handcuffs on the German officers at Bowmanville, the officers refused flatly. They barricaded  themselves inside the camp buildings. Armed with hockey sticks, bottles, broken table legs,  anything they could swing, and they dared the Canadians to come in and take them.

What followed got  remembered half seriously as the Battle of Bowmanville. For 3 days, Canadian guards fought a running fist and club brawl through the halls of a former boy  school against some of the proudest officers in the German military. Men  were bruised and bloodied on both sides.

 In the end, the Canadians won. The shackles went on for a while and then a strange thing settled over the place,  a grudging respect. The Germans had shown they would not be pushed around. The Canadians had shown they would not back down. They were learning the shape of one another. But the real fight at Bowmanville happened underground.

Among the officers in that camp were four yubot commanders, including Cretchmer  himself. And the German Navy back home decided these men were far too valuable  to leave rotting in Canada. So in 1943, they cooked up one  of the most ambitious escape plans of the entire war. It was called Operation Keep It.

The idea was almost insane in its scale. The four commanders would dig a tunnel out under the wire, slip away from Bowmanville, and then travel roughly 1,400 kilometers  across Canada on foot and by stealth alone in enemy country all the way to the coast of  New Brunswick. There on one chosen night, a German Ubot U536 would be waiting just offshore to pluck them out of the surf and carry them home across the Atlantic.

Inside the camp, the prisoners dug. They hid the tunnel. They scattered the sand. They passed coded messages  back to Germany. hidden inside their letter’s home, setting the  date and the exact meeting point off a place called Point Deanet.  It was brilliant. It was disciplined and it was already dead  because the Canadians had been reading the mail the whole time.

 The RCMP and Canadian  military intelligence had been quietly screening the prisoners coded  letters for months. They knew a submarine was coming before some of the prisoners did. The tunnel was discovered  after a cave-in gave it away and the escape collapsed. But the Canadians did not stop there.

  They let the trap close on the New Brunswick coast. U536 crept in night after night for about 2 weeks, surfacing in the cold dark, listening for a signal from men who were never coming. Canadian warships were already waiting out there in the black water. They drove the submarine off and very nearly sank it.

 The commander  of U536 barely escaped with his boat and his life. Sit  with that picture for a second. a German submarine surfacing in total silence off the coast of Canada,  waiting to rescue four prisoners who at that very moment were sitting in a camp hundreds of miles inland  with their tunnel filled in and their grand plan in pieces.

 While Canadian  intelligence officers read their letters and smiled, the enemy these men had crossed an ocean to outsmart had quietly outsmarted them. And still, not one of them had fired a shot  in anger at the other’s face. So far, this might sound almost like a game. Clever Germans, clever Canadians, hockey sticks and  tunnels and submarines in the dark.

But I owe you the harder truth because the camps carried a darkness inside them that had nothing to do with the Canadians at all. The Germans behind the wire did not stop being the  army they had been. In the big prairie camps, especially the hardcore Nazis  among the prisoners set up their own secret courts,  they watched their fellow soldiers for any sign of weakness, any whisper  of doubt about Hitler, any man who seemed to be getting  too friendly with the Canadians or too

honest about how the war  was really going. And when they decided a man was a traitor, they killed him. There  were prisoners at Medicine Hat who were dragged out and lynched by their own comrades. Murdered inside a Canadian camp, surrounded by Canadian guards for the simple crime of no longer believing.

A few of the men responsible were later put on trial and hanged here in Canada for those killings. Let that settle for a moment. Some of these prisoners were safer from the Allied army outside the wire than they were from the fanatics on their own side of it. The  war the Germans had brought with them.

 The cruelty, the fear, the informers, all of  it had crossed the ocean inside their heads, and it went on quietly killing in the middle of peaceful  Alberta. And yet at the very same time, in the very same camps, something gentler was growing. And this is the  part that will stay with you. Canada needed hands.

 The young Canadian  men were away at the war, and the farms and forests were desperately  short of labor. So they opened the gates. They sent these German prisoners  out to work, out onto the wheat farms, into the sugarbeat fields, into the bush to cut timber.  And out there, away from the fanatics and away from the wire, the strangest thing of all happened.

The enemies met as people. A German soldier who had been told that Canadians were brutes found himself sitting at a farmer’s kitchen table eating supper. A Canadian  family who had been told that Germans were monsters found a polite homesick  young man who worked hard, played with their children, and missed his mother.

They could barely speak a word of each other’s language, but they shared the work and they shared the meals and that turned out to be enough. The food alone stunned the prisoners. After years of war rations, the prairie looked like a  land of impossible plenty. meat, butter, and bread with no end to it.

 Many of these men would say later, with no irony at all, that they had  been treated better as prisoners in Canada than they had ever been treated as soldiers in their own army. Historians even have a phrase for them that sounds like a joke, but absolutely is not. the happiest prisoners  and some of them when the war finally ended and they were offered the chance to go home genuinely did not want to leave.

You have to hold both of these things in your hands at once  or you do not understand the camps at all. Inside the same fences  in the same years, men were being murdered for doubting Hitler. And men were quietly falling  in love with the country that was supposed to be their enemy. That  was the real prison, not the barbed wire.

The barbed wire was almost  nothing. The real prison was inside  the men. And over those four long years out on the Canadian prairie  with the wheat moving in the wind and the kitchen table set for supper, you could watch some of them slowly, painfully begin to walk out of it.

 Then the war ended and the question became simple and enormous. What do you do with 34,000  men who have spent years living right  next to you? The official answer was that they had to go home. Germany lay in  ruins and needed every pair of hands to rebuild it. So through 1946 and 1947, the camps were emptied and the prisoners were shipped back  across the same ocean they had crossed as captives.

But a quiet thing had happened in those years that no government order could ever undo. A great many of these men no longer thought of Canada as enemy ground. They thought of it as the  place where they had been fed, where they had worked good land, where a family had treated them like a son. And so almost as soon as they were allowed to, they started coming back, they applied to immigrate.

 They saved their money, packed up their lives in a broken Germany, and sailed  back to the very prairie towns that had once held them behind wire. This time to stay for  good. Former prisoners became Canadian  farmers, Canadian neighbors, Canadian citizens. Some of them sought out the  very guards who had counted them every single night and the very families they had worked beside.

 And they shook those hands again. Not as prisoner  and keeper this time, but as old friends who had simply lost touch for a while.  And the man at the center of our whole story, Otto Cretchmer, the wolf of the Atlantic,  the prisoner of Camp 30, went home and put a uniform back on. But this time, it was a different uniform  entirely.

West Germany, the enemy of yesterday, became an ally of Canada inside NATO. And Crymer rose to become a rear admiral in that new West German Navy, serving on the same side as the country that had once  locked him up. The man who had tried to tunnel his way out of Canada to keep fighting it  ended his career as its formal ally.

He retired in 1970,  an old sailor at the end of a long story, and he lived  until 1998. The Wolf of the Atlantic  died not as anyone’s monster, but as a quiet footnote in a long piece. So, what is the lesson sitting underneath all of this? I think it comes  down to this. These men crossed an ocean absolutely certain of who their enemy was.

 They had been told, they had been trained. They carried a picture in their heads of the brute on the other side. And then they actually met him. And the picture fell apart in their hands because the enemy turned out to be a farmer, a guard, a family,  a whole country with too much food and too few young men left at home.

 The thing that finally beat the hatred  was not a speech and it was not a treaty. It was time and work and a kitchen table. It was the ordinary,  daily, unglamorous business of living next to a person until you can no longer pretend that he is a monster.  And that is the part that should haunt you just a little.

 Because the wire that came down easiest was never the wire around the camps. It was the wire inside the men. And the only lever strong enough to pry it open was 4  years of suppers, harvests, and human faces. It makes you wonder how much of any enemy has ever really, and how much of him is just a stranger you have not yet been forced to sit down and share a meal with.

 If you have ever heard a story like this in your own family, a grandfather who was captured, a relative who came home from some faraway camp with strange kind words about the people who had held him, I genuinely want you to tell it  in the comments down below. These stories are slipping away from us as the last of that generation goes,  and this channel exists to hold on to them.

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 Thank you for sitting with me through  this one. Take care of each other out there and I will see you in the next story.