- 19 minutes ago
For more than a year, German guards chained Canadian prisoners every morning—then in spring 1945, those same guards needed the men they had humiliated to stay alive. At the center of this military history story is Corporal Robert Prouse, a Canadian military policeman captured at Dieppe, who quietly kept watching while the war around him collapsed.
The transcript follows the Dieppe prisoners from Stalag 9C and Stalag 8B to the roads of Germany, where white cloth signs, Allied fighter planes, and retreating guards turned the balance of power upside down. It also shows how one stolen document from Dieppe led to months of ropes, chains, barter, and survival inside German prisoner-of-war camps.
This is a WWII documentary-style narration about Dieppe, Canadian war stories, prison camp life, and the uneasy relationship between captor and captive. It includes Jack Bolton, Douglas Macalder, and the hidden notebook that later became a record of who did what, and who remembered it.
Created for listeners searching for WW2 stories, military history, Canadian history, prisoner of war stories, narrated war documentaries, and historical storytelling. It also fits search intent for calm long-form history narration, documentary-style storytime, and background listening for fans of World War 2 and Canadian army history.
The transcript follows the Dieppe prisoners from Stalag 9C and Stalag 8B to the roads of Germany, where white cloth signs, Allied fighter planes, and retreating guards turned the balance of power upside down. It also shows how one stolen document from Dieppe led to months of ropes, chains, barter, and survival inside German prisoner-of-war camps.
This is a WWII documentary-style narration about Dieppe, Canadian war stories, prison camp life, and the uneasy relationship between captor and captive. It includes Jack Bolton, Douglas Macalder, and the hidden notebook that later became a record of who did what, and who remembered it.
Created for listeners searching for WW2 stories, military history, Canadian history, prisoner of war stories, narrated war documentaries, and historical storytelling. It also fits search intent for calm long-form history narration, documentary-style storytime, and background listening for fans of World War 2 and Canadian army history.
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LearningTranscript
00:00On the 29th of March, 1945, the Germans unlocked the gates of Stalag 9C at Bad Sulze and marched
00:09their prisoners out onto the open road. A few days later, somewhere in central Germany,
00:16Corporal Robert Prowse of the Canadian Provost Corps was lying face down in a ditch while
00:22Allied fighters came down the length of the column with their cannon firing. The man pressed
00:28into the dirt beside him was his guard. The guard had a rifle. On that road, at that moment,
00:36the rifle was worth nothing at all. You do not shoot down an aircraft coming out of the sun
00:42with a bolt-action Mauser. And the guard knew it better than anyone. What lay on the road below
00:48those pilots was a long, slow, gray line of men walking west. Prisoners of war and German civilian
00:57refugees mixed together, pushed around the edge of a town that was being bombed. From 3,000 feet,
01:04a column like that looks like exactly one thing. It looks like troops. Then an officer in that column
01:12did something that had nothing to do with rifles. He got hold of strips of white cloth and laid them
01:18out on open ground where the pilots could see them from above. It was a recognition signal,
01:23and it said one sentence and one sentence only. Prisoners of war here, in danger.
01:31Nothing else on that road could say it. Not a shout, not a waved coat, and certainly not a German
01:37uniform. A German uniform said the opposite. The only thing on earth that could pull those aircraft off
01:44was the fact that Allied prisoners were lying in the ditch. Hold on to what that means,
01:50because the whole of this story comes out of it. For two and a half years, the wire had protected
01:56the guard from the prisoner. On that road, in about 90 seconds, it reversed. The German's life
02:03now depended on his prisoners being seen, recognized, and counted as prisoners.
02:08For the first time since the summer of 1942, the safest place in Germany was lying next
02:15to a Canadian. The Canadian in that ditch was born in Verdun, Quebec, in 1911. Robert Prowse,
02:23service number D-9-8-5-0-5. In civilian life, he had been a private investigator. In uniform,
02:34he was a military policeman, provost. Remember that trade, because it comes back at the end
02:41of this story in a way you will not expect. His profession was control. Directing traffic,
02:49moving men, keeping order, deciding who went where and who did not move at all. And he had spent nearly
02:56three years as a man whose own profession had been taken off him and turned around and used
03:03on him. So here is the question this video is going to answer, and I want it stated plainly
03:09before we go one step further. In the spring of 1945, German soldiers all over the Reich began
03:17coming to Allied prisoners, men they had starved, chained, and shot at, and asking those prisoners
03:25to take them in, speak for them, stand between them and what was coming. With Canadians, it
03:31happened in a particular way, for a particular reason. And that reason goes back to a single
03:37sheet of paper picked up off a French beach in 1942. If what the Canadians did here matters
03:45to you, a subscribe helps these stories reach more people. Now, I am going to be careful with
03:52the word begged, because it gets thrown around. I am not going to tell you that German guards
03:58fell on their knees. I am going to show you three documented moments. A guard who took his
04:05weapon off and walked away from his post to find the enemy. An officer who paid his own
04:11prisoners in bread and livestock. And a Canadian policeman who ended the war escorting his former
04:18guards into a compound. And then you can decide what word fits. But none of it makes sense until
04:26you understand what these particular Canadians were to the Germans holding them. They were
04:32not ordinary prisoners. They were the men from Dieppe. Go back to the 19th of August, 1942.
04:41The raid on Dieppe is the single worst day in the history of the Canadian army. And I am not
04:47going
04:47to soften it. Roughly 5,000 Canadians went in. 900-odd never came back. Close to 2,000 were taken
04:57prisoner in about 9 hours. More Canadians captured in one morning than in the entire campaign in
05:04Northwest Europe afterwards.
05:06Prowse went in with No. 2 Provost Company, 41 men, under Captain Edward Stevenson. Think about
05:14what their orders were. They were to land with the assault wave, get onto the beach, direct
05:20the fighting troops off it, help the engineers, set a cordon, and then control the re-embarkation
05:27when everybody came back. Traffic control. Under fire. On shingle. Their job assumed there
05:36would be a re-embarkation. He described the moment the ramp went down in one line. Suddenly, all hell
05:44broke loose. The air filled with a hum of bullets sounding like a swarm of angry bees. A mortar
05:51bomb took him down. The steel helmet is the reason he is in this story at all. The fragment
05:57went into the helmet instead of his head.
05:59Of the 41 provosts who went in that morning, 22 came back to England. 18 were taken prisoner.
06:06Lieutenant Peter Seddon Oliver was killed, the first man of the Canadian provost corps to die in battle.
06:14And while Canadian wounded were still lying on the shingle waiting to find out what would happen to them,
06:19German soldiers were walking the beach picking things up. Weapons, wireless sets, maps, and paper.
06:27Operational orders out of the pockets and pouches of dead and captured men because Dieppe went wrong
06:33so fast that almost nothing was destroyed the way it was supposed to be. One of those documents was an
06:39instruction about what Canadian soldiers were to do with German prisoners during the raid. It was a small,
06:45practical, unglamorous paragraph. It was also, by the strict letter of the thing, indefensible. And the Germans
06:53knew within days exactly what they had in their hands. That single paragraph is why Robert Prowse's
07:00war was different from every other Allied prisoner's war. It is why, for over a year, Canadians in German
07:08camps woke up every morning and put their hands out to be chained. And it is the reason that in
07:141945,
07:15when the guards finally needed somebody to speak for them, the men whose word mattered most in all of
07:22Germany were the Canadians they had chained. The Germans read that paper on the 22nd of August.
07:29They gave London eight days to answer it. London refused. The document the Germans picked up at Dieppe
07:36was an appendix to the operation order. It told Canadian soldiers what to do with German prisoners
07:42during the raid. Roland Gravel, a gunner who went in that morning and who was himself taken prisoner
07:48before the day was out, described it in plain words years later. We had orders to bind our prisoners.
07:55Not bind their feet or hands, but just bind their two thumbs with a cord, and then put their hands
08:01behind their backs. That was it. Two thumbs and a cord. The reasoning behind it was purely practical.
08:09A raid is not an invasion. You come in, you take men, you have hours, and a prisoner with free
08:16hands
08:16can tear up the papers in his own pockets before you get a look at them. So Canadian raiders were
08:22told to tie thumbs. It was a small, cold, sensible instruction, written by men who expected to be back
08:29in England by tea time. Now hold the irony of it, because it is total. The one army that lost
08:35its
08:35documents wholesale on that beach was the Canadian one. Nothing got burned, nothing got dumped in the
08:41surf, because Dieppe collapsed too fast for any of that. German soldiers walked the shingle for two
08:48days collecting orders out of the pockets of the dead, and among them they found the paragraph about
08:53tying prisoners' thumbs, which the Canadians in the event had barely had the chance to use on any
08:59body. On the 22nd of August, three days after the raid, Berlin announced what it had found and
09:05demanded an answer. London was given until the beginning of September to apologize and to guarantee
09:11it would never happen again. London refused. Not because the paragraph was worth defending,
09:17but because the moment a government apologizes for a captured document under threat, every document it
09:23ever writes becomes a hostage. So Britain said no, and then went further. It ordered German prisoners
09:30shackled in return. And every one of those decisions was made by men in offices in London and Berlin,
09:38who were never going to feel the consequences. The consequences were going to be felt by roughly
09:442,000 Canadians already behind wire in Germany, who had not written the order, had not read the order,
09:51and in most cases had never heard of it. Robert Prowse was not in a camp yet. He was in
09:58a hospital in
09:59Rouen with a hole in his helmet and a body full of small metal. What happened to him in that
10:05hospital
10:05tells you something about the man that matters later. The Germans were short of everything,
10:11including anesthetic. Canadian wounded were being operated on while awake. And Prowse, walking wounded,
10:18a military policeman with a working pair of hands, was put to work holding other men down on the table
10:25while the surgeons cut. He was a prisoner for less than a week, and he was already being used as
10:31an
10:31instrument of the German medical system. He did it because the alternative was that nobody held them at
10:37all. Then the boxcars. Then Germany. Prowse ended up at Stalag 9C at Bad Zuldze in Thuringia,
10:47a camp between Erfurt and Leipzig that eventually held Poles, French, Belgians, Yugoslavs, Italians,
10:54British, Americans, and Canadians, and which fed a whole web of work camps around it, including one
11:01at Mühlhausen. He would be inside that system for three years. Most of the other Dieppe men went east
11:08to Stalag 8B at Lamsdorf in what is now Poland, and were put into one compound together, so the Germans
11:15always knew exactly where the Dieppe prisoners were. One of them was Jack Poulton. 1942. Royal
11:23Regiment of Canada. Prisoner number 26212. A farm family boy out of Northern Ontario. Remember him.
11:33He is going to spend more days in chains than almost any Canadian of the war, and he is going
11:38to try to
11:39escape four separate times anyway. Here is where the reprisal starts. On the 2nd of October 1942,
11:4729 commandos taken at Dieppe were handcuffed, and the detail that tells you everything about the
11:52state of Germany that autumn is what they were tied with. Red cross string. The Germans did not have
11:59enough handcuffs to go around, so they used the cord off the parcels that kept the prisoners alive.
12:05Eight in the morning to noon. One in the afternoon to nine at night. On the 8th of October it
12:10went camp
12:11wide. At Lamsdorf, the Dieppe compound was called out in small groups and bound with rope.
12:17Bert Moody, of the Queen's own Cameron Highlanders of Canada, put one flat line in his diary.
12:24Canadian prisoners were tied up with rope as a reprisal.
12:27At Bad Sulze, the same order, the same morning. Dieppe men's hands tied with cord, 12 hours a day,
12:35taken off only at night. Rope is worse than steel, and I want you to understand why,
12:41because this is the part that does not come across in a sentence. Rope was cheaper, so rope was used,
12:47and some of it had been treated with creosote, a wood preservative. It burns. Men's wrists ulcerated.
12:56Trooper Forbes Morton carried the marks. And a man with his hands crossed and bound in front of him
13:04cannot eat properly, cannot use a latrine properly, cannot wash, cannot scratch,
13:10cannot lie down the way a human being lies down. 12 hours, then a night, then 12 hours.
13:22By December, the Germans had caught up on supply and moved to chains, a steel cuff on each wrist,
13:30and between them a length of chain measured out at 44 and a half centimeters, about 17 inches,
13:39just long enough to be possible, short enough to be constant.
13:44Prowse stood in a line every morning and put his hands out. So did Poulton. So did roughly a thousand
13:51other Canadians. And this is the moment the whole relationship between these particular Canadians
13:59and these particular Germans was set. So slow down here. Chaining a man is not done by a government.
14:07It is done by a specific soldier, standing in front of a specific prisoner, at a specific hour,
14:15every single day, for month after month after month. Which means that for over a year, a Canadian
14:24private and a German guard looked directly into each other's faces at close range, daily, in the most
14:32humiliating transaction two men can have. Both of them remembered the other's face. Only one of them
14:40thought that would ever matter. The Canadians did not get the chains taken off. They did something
14:48smarter. Within weeks, they had cracked the German system open, and the tool they used came out of a
14:55red cross parcel. And it was made of tin. Somewhere in the Dieppe compound at Lomsdorf, in the winter of
15:031942,
15:04a Canadian sat with the lid of a sardine tin and worked it back and forth until it snapped, and
15:09then
15:10filed the broken edge down against concrete until it would slide into a handcuff lock and turn. That is how
15:16the Canadians answered the chains. Trooper Fred Tanner described the drill exactly. When you saw a German
15:23coming, you'd just slip your hands in your pockets and it would look like you were still chained.
15:28Off in the hut. On when the door opened. Off again. Men played cards with free hands,
15:34ate with free hands, slept with free hands, and stood in the doorway listening. Now look at what that
15:40little trick actually required, because this is the part that matters, and almost nobody notices it.
15:45To run that system, you have to see the German coming, which means somebody is always watching
15:50the wire. Which means you learn, within weeks, that the Germans do not exist. There is no such
15:56thing as a guard. There is a man called Willy, who counts heads twice and never looks at hands.
16:03There is a Feldwebel, who came back from Russia with one lung,
16:07and does not care what you do as long as the numbers add up. There is a young one, party
16:14badge,
16:14who will search a hut for an hour because he enjoys it. There is an old one, 45 years old,
16:22a schoolmaster in 1938, who walks past an unchained Canadian and keeps walking. For over a year,
16:31every single morning, a Canadian private stood face to face with a named German soldier,
16:37while that German put steel on his wrists. And every single evening, the same two men did it in
16:44reverse. You cannot do that for 400 days and remain strangers. Sergeant Tommy Cunningham watched it
16:53happen from the inside and put his finger on the drift. The guards got complacent. They stopped looking
17:00hard. Some of them stopped looking at all. The Canadians, meanwhile, were building something.
17:06Not a plan, not an organization, an inventory. Which man was decent? Which man was dangerous?
17:15Which man had been at the front and which had never left Thuringia? Which man took cigarettes? Which man
17:24had hit somebody? Which man had turned his back at exactly the right moment? Remember that inventory?
17:33It is going to be the most valuable thing any prisoner in Germany owns, and not one of these men
17:39knew it
17:40yet. Jack Poulton wore the cuffs for 410 days without a break, and he used every one of them to
17:48look for a
17:49way out. He jumped from a moving transport train. He dug on a tunnel that the Germans found after the
17:55first snowfall gave it away. Snow melts differently over fresh-turned earth, and that is how tunnels
18:02died all over Germany that winter. He swapped identity disks with another prisoner to get himself onto a
18:09farm work party, because a man on a farm is outside the wire, and a man outside the wire can
18:16walk. He
18:17went into the forest on a work detail and sabotaged what he was given to work with. Four escape attempts.
18:24Every one of them failed. Hold on to Poulton anyway. He is going to try a fifth time in the
18:31worst
18:32possible conditions, and what happens to him then is part of the answer. At Bad Sulze, Robert Prowse
18:40fought the same war in his own idiom, and his was funnier and colder. In his own words,
18:48life at Stalag 9c was a never-ending battle of wits between the prisoners and the Jerries. Tunnels were
18:55constantly being dug and discovered. At one point, the Germans put Prowse and another
19:01Canadian onto a soft job, painting wooden toys for German factory workers to give their children at
19:08Christmas. Warm room. Indoor work. Any sensible prisoner takes it and keeps his mouth shut.
19:17Instead, the two of them painted half the little dancing dolls as skeletons. The other half they
19:23painted as small Hitlers. And the toy battleships? They carefully lettered onto the holes the names of real
19:31German warships that the Allies had already sunk. Imagine a German factory hand in 1943, unwrapping
19:38that for his son. They were thrown off the job. And then there is the cigarette. At roll call,
19:46in the cold, counted like livestock, Prowse laughed at something and tried to hide a lit cigarette in his
19:53hand. Seven days solitary. A cold cell, a bare wooden bunk, blankets issued only at night and taken away in
20:03the morning. When he stayed defiant, they cut his rations off entirely. He did not starve, and the
20:10reason is the whole camp in one sentence. Other prisoners slipped him food when he was led out to the
20:17latrine. Which means men cued, palmed bread, timed it, and handed it over. In a building, in a routine,
20:26that was run and watched by German soldiers. Somebody on the German side was not looking. Every day. For a
20:35week.
20:36Meanwhile, in the world of governments, the chain business ground on. Canada shackled German prisoners
20:43in Canadian camps in reprisal for the reprisal. Britain and Canada stopped in the middle of December 1942,
20:51quietly. The Germans kept going for almost a year after that, long after the original argument was
20:57dead, because by then it was not about thumbs and cord at all. It was about who blinked. It ended
21:04on the
21:052nd of December, 1943. The Red Cross put together an arrangement that let Berlin stop without admitting
21:12anything, and the chains simply stopped coming out. No announcement, no apology, no statement
21:19that it had been wrong. One morning the Canadians lined up and put their hands out, and nobody chained
21:25them. And that was the end of it. I want you to sit with that for a second, because it
21:31matters more than
21:32the chains did. Nothing was settled. Nothing was closed. The German government had spent 14 months
21:40publicly, officially, on the record, doing something to Canadian prisoners that it would not defend and
21:46would not admit. Every guard in every one of those camps knew it. They had done the chaining with their
21:53own hands, one wrist at a time, in front of witnesses who knew their names. And the witnesses were still
21:58alive, still in the camp, still counting. Fifteen months later, in the spring of 1945, a German officer
22:07in that same camp system walked out to his Canadian prisoners and handed over a loaf of bread for each
22:12man to last three days, and four sheep. Nobody ordered him to do that. Nobody was watching. The Reich had
22:20no
22:20bread and no meat to spare, and he gave both away to men he had been starving for years. He
22:27was not being
22:27kind. He was paying for something. And I'm going to show you exactly what he thought he was buying.
22:34Picture a hut at Bad Sulse in the summer of 1944. A Canadian sits on a bunk and opens a
22:42Red Cross parcel,
22:43and the first thing out of it is a tin of real coffee. Not acorn, not chicory, coffee. And a
22:52German guard,
22:53a man in his forties with a wife and children in a town that had been bombed twice, stands in
23:00the
23:00doorway of that hut and smells it. That guard could have taken it. He was armed and the Canadian was
23:06not.
23:08But he did not take it. Because taking it ended the arrangement. And by 1944, every man in that doorway
23:16understood that there was an arrangement. He came in, he put something on the bunk, a newspaper,
23:23a razor blade, a bit of information about where the front was, and he waited to be paid in coffee,
23:30or chocolate, or soap, or cigarettes. Here is the thing almost nobody says about the German camps in
23:38the last two years of the war. Inside the wire, the prisoners were the rich men.
23:44Germany, by 1944, had no coffee, no chocolate, no decent soap, and not nearly enough cigarettes.
23:52The Red Cross parcel, when it got through, contained all four. So the poorest, thinnest, most powerless
23:59man in the Reich, a chained Canadian private, was sitting on hard currency that a German soldier could
24:05not buy at any price. And a currency only works if there are two parties who both want to keep
24:11using it.
24:12That is the real beginning of what happened in 1945. Not fear, need.
24:18It started years earlier, and it started as commerce. One of the men living inside that economy
24:24at Bad Sulza was Private Douglas McAlder, of the Queen's own Cameron Highlanders of Canada,
24:30out of Winnipeg. Service number H19603.
24:36He had married Ruby Warner in December of 1939, and there was a small daughter at home he had
24:42barely met. McAlder had gone in at Green Beach, at Poorville on the morning of the raid, and his
24:48diary records the moment it became clear that nobody was coming back for them.
24:54I guess the boats won't be coming in again, and we are waiting for Jerry to close in.
24:59He would be a prisoner for 975 days. And here is the human detail I want you to hold,
25:07because it is the measure of what these men actually did with three years.
25:12He wrote his wife 102 letters. She wrote him 150. He knew both numbers because he counted them.
25:23That is a man doing arithmetic on the only thing he still owns.
25:28McAlder kept a diary too. So did a lot of them. And so did Robert Prowse. Now I need you
25:35to pay
25:36attention, because this is the single most important fact in this entire story, and it arrives quietly.
25:44Prowse kept a secret log. Not an occasional note, a running record kept hidden across three years of
25:52captivity, out of which he later wrote his book. Dates. Places. What was done, and who did it.
26:00Think about who was keeping it. Not a poet, not a chaplain, not an officer writing for posterity.
26:06A professional investigator. A military policeman. A man trained, in civilian life and in uniform,
26:13to do exactly one thing. Observe people accurately, and write it down in a form that stands up later.
26:20The German army had put a detective in a cage, and left him there for three years with nothing to
26:25do
26:25but watch them. Around Bad Sulze there was a whole web of work camps. Mülhausen was one. And men moved
26:33out to
26:33them and back, which meant they saw more of Germany than the Germans intended. They saw which factories
26:39were still running. They saw what the civilians were eating. They saw guards come back from leave
26:44with nothing left to go home to. And through 1944, the sky over Thuringia stopped being empty.
26:51Bad Sulze sits between Erfurt and Leipzig, which in 1944 is another way of saying it sits under the
26:58main road to the target. Day after day, the bomber streams went over. Some of the guards standing in the
27:03towers
27:04had families under them. Then, at the end of December 1944, something arrived at Stalag 9C that had not
27:11arrived in a long time. New prisoners. Americans, in numbers, taken in the Ardennes. Men who had been free
27:20four weeks earlier. For the guards, that was the last good news of the war, and it lasted about three
27:26weeks. Because the men who came in from the Ardennes brought something with them that no German radio
27:31broadcast could counter. The actual state of the Allied armies, told by men who had been standing
27:38in front of them. After that, the questions started. Not demands, not searches. Questions.
27:45A guard falls into step with a prisoner he has known for two years and asks him, without quite asking,
27:51how far away the Americans really are. Whether the Americans shoot prisoners? What happens to a man
27:57in uniform when they come? Whether it is true what they say about the Russians? The German army did not
28:03tell its own soldiers those things, their prisoners did. And every one of those conversations was happening
28:09with men who had been chained on Berlin's direct order, in public, for 14 months, and then let out
28:15of the chains with no announcement, no apology, and nothing on paper that said it had ever ended.
28:21A German guard in 1945 could not know how the world would settle accounts, but he could count,
28:27and the arithmetic was not hard. Of all the prisoners in Germany, the ones the world would definitely ask
28:32about were the Canadians from Dieppe. Everybody knew their story. Their treatment had been in the
28:37newspapers of four countries. When the reckoning came, those were the men the reckoning would start
28:42with. And somewhere in Robert Prowse's kit, wrapped and hidden and carried through three years of searches,
28:48transfers, work camps, and one week of solitary confinement, there was a notebook with names in it.
28:55It had been a diary. In April of 1945, it was about to become the most dangerous object in Thuringia,
29:03and the men whose names were in it were the men holding the keys. On the 29th of March,
29:09those men unlocked the gates and gave the order to march. Understand what that order actually did.
29:16It took the guards out from behind their wire, off their towers, away from their records and their
29:22rations and their chain of command, and put them on an open road in a collapsing country,
29:27walking beside the only witnesses in Germany who could tell the Americans, by name, who had done what.
29:33On the 22nd of January, 1945, the gates of Stalag 8B at Lamsdorf were opened, and the Dieppe men were
29:43walked out into a Salesian winter. They went in batches of two and three hundred, heading west,
29:49away from the Russian guns. No transport, no winter clothing worth the name. Boots that had been repaired
29:57with wire for three years. Across the whole of Germany that winter, something like 80,000 allied
30:05prisoners were put on the roads in the same way, and as many as three and a half thousand of
30:10them
30:11did not finish the walk. Jack Poulton was in one of those columns. Now, he had been a prisoner for
30:18two
30:18and a half years by then. He had worn handcuffs for four hundred and ten consecutive days. He had
30:26jumped off a train, dug a tunnel, traded his identity for a farm party, and gone into the woods to
30:33wreck
30:33what he was handed. All of it had failed, and all of it had been punished. And on this march,
30:40starving,
30:40frostbitten, in temperatures that were killing men out of the column every night, he tried to escape
30:46again. That is the fifth time. Think about what that tells you about the conditions in the column.
30:52A man does not run from safety. Poulton was caught again and put back in, but here is what I
30:58want you
30:59to notice about that road, and it is the thing that changes everything that follows. The guards were on it
31:05too. Same snow, same wind, same absence of food. And they were not the guards of 1942 anymore.
31:14The fit ones had been combed out of the camps and sent to the front long before. Normandy,
31:20Italy, the East. What was left walking beside the Canadians in January 1945 were men in their 50s.
31:28Men with one lung. Men invalided out of Russia. Men who had been shopkeepers 18 months earlier.
31:35They had rifles and greatcoats. They did not have trucks or rations or maps or the faintest idea
31:42where they were supposed to deliver anybody. The prisoners were walking to freedom. The guards
31:48were walking into a country that no longer existed. But I am not going to pretend this was some shared
31:55brotherhood of suffering, because it was not, and the record is very clear on that. On these marches,
32:02men who could not keep up were left in ditches. Some were shot. Flying officer Frank Rowan of Ottawa,
32:1024 years old, a Lancaster navigator who had been shot down by a night fighter over Germany in March of
32:171945
32:18on his 35th operation, so he had been free and flying a matter of weeks earlier, was put onto those
32:26roads
32:26almost immediately. He recorded what they were fed, a thin broth of water and boiled onions,
32:34and he saw wounded prisoners executed. So hold both of these things at once, because the truth
32:41is both. Some German guards on those roads spent the spring of 1945 trying to keep their prisoners
32:48alive, because they had worked out what their prisoners were worth to them. And some of them
32:53were murdering stragglers in April. The Canadians walking those columns knew exactly which was which.
33:01They had been studying these men for three years. That is precisely the point. The inventory in their
33:08heads was not sentimental. It was accurate. It had names in the decent column and names in the other one.
33:16Then there was the sky, which brings us back to Robert Prowse, face down in a ditch, with his guard
33:22in the dirt beside him. Stalag 9C had been emptied on the 29th of March, and Prowse was on the
33:29road in
33:29the first days of April, in a column that had prisoners and German civilian refugees walking mixed
33:35together around a town that was being bombed. And the Allied fighter pilots who came down on that
33:41column were not doing anything wrong. They were doing exactly their job. A dense column of men on
33:48foot on a German road in April 1945 was a legitimate military target roughly 9 times out of 10. The
33:58strips of white cloth went down on the open ground. Recognition signal. Prisoners of war here. And they
34:06worked. The aircraft went away. Now stop and look carefully at who was saved by that piece of cloth,
34:13because this is the hinge of the whole story. The prisoners were saved. And so was every German on
34:22that road. The guards, the refugees, the old men with rifles who had spent three years counting these
34:29Canadians twice a day. Not one of them could have signaled anything. A German soldier waving at a
34:36typhoon is a German soldier waving at a typhoon. There was no signal in the world that a man in
34:43a
34:43Wehrmacht greatcoat could make in April 1945 that would stop an Allied fighter. Because everything he
34:52could do meant shoot me. The prisoners had the only voice on that road that the Allies would listen to.
35:00Six years of war had taught every German soldier that the uniform was protection. It marked you as a
35:05soldier. It put you under orders. It put you inside an army. In the first week of April 1945 in
35:13central
35:13Germany, that uniform became the single most dangerous object a man could be wearing. Hunted from the air by
35:20the Americans and the British. Hunted from the east by the Red Army. And hunted at ground level by
35:26something the German guards feared in a way that is hard to convey now. Because the roads of Germany
35:32that April were also full of freed foreign workers. Millions of them. Poles, Ukrainians, Russians, Frenchmen,
35:41who had been worked, starved, and beaten for years, who were now loose, armed with whatever they had
35:47picked up, and who were settling accounts village by village. They were not taking prisoners. They were
35:53not interested in paperwork. The safest thing a German in uniform could possibly do in that landscape
35:59was to be standing in the middle of a column of Western prisoners of war, visibly, obviously,
36:06provably attached to men whom the Americans wanted alive. That is the arrangement. That is the whole trade.
36:14And by the middle of April, the guards had worked it out. On the 17th of April, 1945, on a
36:20work camp near
36:21the town of Hetzstedt, one of them acted on it. Douglas McCaulder, who by then had been a prisoner
36:27for 974 days, wrote it down in his diary as it happened. A member of the guard staff took his
36:34weapon
36:35off, left his post, and walked down into the village alone. He was not deserting. He was not running.
36:42He was doing something considerably stranger than either. And what he was doing is the exact answer
36:47to the question this video started with. The 17th of April, 1945. A work camp outside Hetzstedt in the
36:56Harz foothills. American armor is somewhere to the west and closing, and nobody inside the wire knows
37:03exactly how close. Douglas McCaulder had been a prisoner for 974 days. He wrote the moment down
37:11in his diary, in his own spelling, and it is worth hearing exactly as he said it on the page.
37:18The clerk from the guards has taken off his gun and gone down to the village to see if he
37:24can't get a
37:24hold of some Yanks. Read that again slowly. He took his weapon off. Deliberately. In wartime, at his post,
37:35in a country where the penalty for abandoning a weapon was a rope, and where SS units were hanging
37:41German soldiers from lampposts in April 1945 for far less. Then he walked out of the camp, alone and
37:51unarmed, towards an advancing enemy army, in order to find that army and bring it back. He was not
37:58surrendering himself. He could have simply walked west and put his hands up, and nobody in that camp
38:04would ever have seen him again. He went to fetch the Americans and bring them to the camp, to deliver
38:11his prisoners to them in one piece, in front of witnesses, with his own name attached to the handover.
38:17And around the same time, the German officer commanding those prisoners did something that
38:23in April 1945 was close to unthinkable. He issued them a loaf of bread each, enough for three days,
38:32and four sheep. Four live sheep. Meat, in Germany, in the last month of the war, when German civilians were
38:42queuing for potato peelings. He gave it to men he had been feeding on turnip water for years. Nobody ordered
38:50him to. There was nobody left to order him. And he was not doing it out of kindness, or not
38:57only out of
38:57kindness. He was doing it because within days he was going to be standing in front of an American
39:03officer, and the condition of the men behind him was the entire case for his own life.
39:09So here, finally, is the answer to the question this video started with.
39:14It has three layers, and they stack. The first layer is physical and immediate, and you have
39:20already seen it. On the roads of Germany that spring, a German uniform was a target from the air,
39:27a target from the east, and a target at ground level from millions of freed foreign workers,
39:32who were loose and settling accounts. The only object in that landscape that could neutralize all three
39:39was an Allied prisoner of war standing next to you. Prisoners could signal to aircraft. Prisoners could
39:46vouch for you to a rifle company. Prisoners were the one category of human being on that road that the
39:52Allies wanted found alive. The second layer is procedural, and it is the one people miss. The German
39:59army did not dissolve in April 1945. It surrendered, piece by piece, to specific units, and the first 30
40:09seconds of that transaction decided whether a man lived. An 18-year-old American rifleman coming through
40:16a gate does not know who you are. He knows he has spent four months in Germany, and he has
40:23seen things.
40:24What he does with the German in front of him depends almost entirely on what the prisoners in that
40:30compound say in the first minute. A guard could not argue his own case. Only his prisoners could.
40:39And then the third layer, and this is the Canadian one, and it is the reason this happened to these
40:45men
40:46with a force it did not have anywhere else. Of all the prisoners in Germany, the Canadians were the case
40:53that was already open. Berlin had chained them. On the record, by direct government order, in reprisal,
41:02for 14 months. It had been in the newspapers of four countries. It had gone through the Swiss and the
41:09Red
41:09Cross. It had been raised at the highest levels between governments at war. And it had ended in
41:17December 1943, with no apology, no announcement, and no statement that it had ever been wrong.
41:24Which meant that, in law and in fact, nothing had been settled.
41:31Every guard who had handled Canadians knew what that meant. When the war ended, somebody was going to
41:38ask questions about the Dieppe prisoners, and the questions would be specific. And they would start
41:44with, who put the chains on? The answer to that question was not in any German file. Berlin's
41:53records were burning. The answer was in the heads of a few thousand Canadian soldiers, who had stood in
41:59line every morning for over a year, looking directly into the faces of the men who did it. That is
42:07the
42:07thing the guards needed protection from. Not the Russians. Not the Americans. Their own past. And the
42:15only people who held the record of it were their prisoners. And one of those prisoners had written it
42:21down. Somewhere in Robert Prowse's kit, through three years, through transfers and searches and seven days
42:27in a cold cell, there was a hidden log. A working investigator's record kept by a military policeman
42:34of what happened and who did it. In April 1945, in the whole of Thuringia, there was probably not a
42:41more
42:41dangerous document in existence, and it was in the possession of a man who had been the least powerful
42:47human being in Germany six weeks earlier. On the 11th of April 1945, six days before the guard at
42:55Hetchtet took off his gun, the American Third Army reached Robert Prowse. Think about what that
43:01incident looked like on the ground. For 965 days, the routine had been the same. The Canadians stand in
43:09a line and are counted by armed Germans. On the 11th of April, in a matter of minutes, the Germans
43:15were
43:15the ones standing in a line, unarmed, waiting to be counted. And the men doing the counting had been
43:21their prisoners that morning. Every guard in that line knew the men looking at him, knew which ones
43:28he had been decent to, knew which ones he had not, knew that some of them had been in chains
43:35on his
43:35shift. And standing there among them was a 34-year-old Canadian from Verdun, Quebec, who had been a policeman
43:43before the war, and was a policeman again the moment the wire came down, with a notebook full of names,
43:50and the absolute, unquestioned right to use it. The Germans had spent three years teaching Robert
43:58Prowse in enormous detail exactly how one man can be made to suffer at the hands of another. Now they
44:06were going to find out what he had learned from it. On the 11th of April, 1945, Corporal Robert Prowse,
44:13D-9-8-5-0-5 Canadian Provost Corps, got his job back. Not metaphorically, literally. Within hours of the
44:25American Third Army arriving, Prowse was doing provost work again, and the first duty of his
44:31restored profession was escorting captured German guards into the prisoner compounds.
44:36Sit with that image for a moment, because it is the whole story compressed into one picture.
44:41A Canadian military policeman who had been chained on a German government's order and put in a cold
44:47cell for laughing at roll call, walking a column of German soldiers along a road. Not driving them,
44:54them. Not dragging them. Escorting them. Which is a specific word with a specific meaning in police
45:01work. It means you are responsible for delivering these people intact. And here is the part that most
45:08people never think through. In central Germany, in the middle of April, 1945, being escorted by Robert
45:14Prowse was the safest a German soldier could possibly be. Outside that column were the freed foreign workers,
45:21loose across the countryside, who had been worked and starved for years, and were not in a forgiving
45:27frame of mind. Outside that column were front-line troops who had just come through the camps at
45:33Ordruf and Nordhausen, and were in no mood to be careful. Outside that column was the Red Army,
45:40coming the other way, and no German on earth wanted to meet it. Inside the column, walking beside a
45:47Canadian with an armband and an official function, a German guard was a piece of paperwork. He would be
45:53counted, registered, put behind wire, and fed. The guards had worked out, correctly, that their
46:00prisoners were the safest thing in Germany to be standing next to. And when the moment came,
46:05the prisoners turned out to be exactly that. I am not going to tell you this happened everywhere,
46:10because it did not. In other camps, in that same month, accounts were settled. Guards who had beaten
46:17and shot men did not survive the first hour of liberation. And there are places where that is
46:22well documented. I am also not going to tell you that every German deserved what Prowse gave them.
46:29Some of the men in those columns had shot stragglers in ditches three weeks earlier. What I am telling you
46:36is what a specific Canadian did on a specific day, with three years of grievance in his pocket,
46:42and nobody in the world able to stop him. He took them in, alive, through a countryside that would have
46:49killed them. And then he went up on a roof. At Bad Sulze, allied fighters came down on the camp
46:56itself,
46:57the same mistake as on the road, made for the same reason. From the air, a camp full of men
47:03in ragged,
47:04mixed uniforms, looks like a camp full of soldiers. Prowse had seen how that was solved in the ditch,
47:10when an officer laid out strips of white cloth on open ground and the aircraft peeled away.
47:16So he did it himself. Up on the roof, in the open, with the fighters working,
47:23laying out the recognition panels where the pilots could see them. Look at who was underneath that
47:29roof while he was doing it. Prisoners, yes, but also Germans. Guards, staff, whoever was still
47:38in the wire when the aircraft came. The panels do not discriminate. When a Canadian lays out a
47:45recognition signal, everyone under it is covered, including the men who had been counting him twice
47:51a day since 1942. That is the answer to the question in the title, performed rather than spoken.
48:00The guards needed their Canadian prisoners to protect them, and the Canadians did, from the air,
48:07from the mob on the roads, and from the twenty seconds in front of an American rifleman that could
48:13go either way. Six days later, and a hundred kilometers north, Douglas McCaulder was living through the
48:20ugliest version of the same day. The morning of the 17th of April, he wrote,
48:27It is now twenty minutes to ten, and it is getting hot around here, with bullets flying around.
48:34That is a man in his 974th day of captivity, lying flat in a camp that has become a battlefield,
48:43with no weapon, no hole to get into, and no say in the outcome.
48:49The clerk from the guard staff had already taken off his gun and gone down to the village to find
48:55the
48:55Americans. The officer had already handed over the bread and the sheep. Now the two armies were
49:02shooting at each other over the top of them, and the prisoners could do nothing at all except wait to
49:08see who won. Then, later that same day, the entry changes completely. Here we are with the Yanks who have
49:17freed us. I have a rifle over my arm once again. I have a rifle over my arm once again.
49:25975 days.
49:27A man who was disarmed on a beach at Poorville in August 1942, who wrote 102 letters to a wife
49:37in
49:37Winnipeg and got 150 back, who counted them because counting was the only control he had left, and the
49:46first thing he writes down when it ends is that he is holding a weapon. He does not write about
49:52food.
49:53He does not write about revenge. He writes that he is a soldier again.
49:58Jack Poulton was freed on the 12th of April, the day after Prowse. After 410 days in handcuffs and
50:08five separate attempts to escape, all of which failed, Freedom finally arrived without his having
50:15to take it from anybody. And Frank Rowan, the Lancaster navigator from Ottawa, who had been shot down in
50:23March and marched all spring on boiled onion water, was handed over by his German captors to the American
50:30Third Army about a week after the war in Europe had already ended. His captors' plan, from the moment the
50:38front started to move, had been exactly that. Find Americans, hand the prisoners to them, and be standing
50:43there when it happened, rather than wait for the Russians. Rowan summed up his own war in one flat
50:49sentence that I think is the most honest line in this whole story. I just wanted to get home. That
50:55was my main aim. To stay alive. None of these men came out of it looking for blood. Not one.
51:02Robert
51:03Prowse walked out of Germany with his hidden log in his kit. Names, dates, what was done, and who did
51:09it.
51:09Three years of a professional investigator's observations carried out of a country that had
51:14spent the spring burning every record it could reach. He brought it home to Canada. And then he
51:20put it away and said nothing publicly about any of it for 37 years. Go back to the ditch.
51:27Early April, 1945. A road in central Germany. A Canadian lying face down in the dirt. Beside him,
51:36a German, with a rifle that cannot help either of them. And out on the open ground, strips of white
51:42cloth lay down in a pattern that says one thing to the sky. Prisoners of war here. That is the
51:49whole war
51:50in one image. And it took two and a half years of chains, tunnels, cold cells, and sardine tin keys
51:58to arrive at it. Robert Prowse came home to Canada in 1945 with the hidden log in his kit. And
52:06then he
52:06did something I find harder to explain than anything else in this story. He said nothing. Not for 37 years.
52:17The book finally came out in 1982. Ticket to Hell via Dieppe from a prisoner's wartime log. And when you
52:25read
52:26what he chose to put in it, you understand this silence. It is not an indictment. It is not a
52:32settling of accounts. It is an unusually honest, accurate picture of captives and captors, both
52:39side by side, given the same careful treatment. The guard who traded. The guard who looked away while
52:48other prisoners smuggled him bread. The ones who were cruel. Named as cruel. A professional
52:55investigator spent three years gathering evidence against the men holding him, brought it home,
53:01and used it to write the truth rather than to prosecute anybody. That is a decision. He made it
53:07deliberately. And he made it in the one month of his life when nobody on earth could have questioned
53:12him if he had chosen otherwise. Jack Poulton went home to Ontario, worked as a mechanic,
53:19and raised three children with his wife. Nine grandchildren followed. 410 days in handcuffs,
53:27five failed escapes, and the rest of a life spent with his hands in an engine. He told the story
53:33late,
53:34too, with his daughter, in a book called Destined to Survive. He died in 2005. And here is a detail
53:42that I
53:42did not expect to find and which I think says something. His life is written up today in
53:48careful detail by the Museum at Lambinovice, the Polish institution that stands on the ground where
53:54Stalag 8b was. On the exact soil where a young Canadian farm boy was put in chains for 410 days,
54:02there is now an archive that keeps his name and tells his story properly. Douglas McAlder came home to
54:09Winnipeg on the Queen Mary, to Ruby, and to a daughter who had been a baby when he left and
54:14was old enough to remember the day he came back. 975 days, 102 letters out, 150 in. He kept the
54:25diary,
54:25and it survived, which is the only reason you and I know what a German clerk did on the 17th
54:31of April,
54:321945, when he took off his gun and walked down the hill to find the Americans. Frank Rowan of Ottawa,
54:39got what he had asked for, which was the smallest thing any of them asked for. I just wanted to
54:45get home. That was my main aim. To stay alive. So, why did German guards need their Canadian prisoners
54:55in the spring of 1945? Because in the end, the only currency left in Germany was what somebody was
55:03willing to say about you. Everything else had burned. The files, the orders, the army, the government.
55:11And it happened that the men best qualified to say anything about German guards were a few thousand
55:18Canadians who had been studying them at close range, every morning, for three years. And whom Berlin
55:26itself had turned into the most famous prisoners in Europe by chaining them on the record and never
55:33admitting it. The guards worked that out. It is why one of them gave away four sheep he could not
55:40spare.
55:40It is why one of them put his weapon down and walked toward an enemy army to fetch it back
55:46to his own
55:47camp. And what the Canadians did with it is the part I would ask you to keep.
55:53This was a country of 11 million people that had sent an army of volunteers overseas. They did not
56:00write the paragraph about tying thumbs. They had no say in the diplomatic quarrel that came out of it,
56:07and no say in the 14 months of chains that followed. And nobody ever apologized to them for any of
56:15it.
56:16Then, in one week in April 1945, the whole arrangement turned over and every debt in it came due at
56:24once.
56:25A Canadian military policeman used that week to walk his own jailers to safety through a countryside that
56:31would have killed them, and then climbed onto a roof under fighter attack to lay out a signal that
56:38covered everybody underneath it, Germans included. Nobody ordered him to do either thing. There was
56:46no one left to order him. That is what the Canadians did with their turn. They kept the record, and
56:53they
56:53brought men in alive. Thank you for staying with this one to the end. It is a quieter story than
56:59most,
56:59and it means a great deal that you gave it the time. If you think what the Canadians did here
57:04deserves
57:04to be remembered, a like genuinely helps it reach more people, and a subscribe means you'll get the
57:09next one. And if your father, your grandfather, or your uncle served in the Second World War,
57:14I'd be honored to hear about him in the comments. Those names belong here as much as any of the
57:20ones
57:20I've read out today.