BRITAIN AT WAR
DOWN IN GERMANY
been dropping agents were told that they were guilty of technical espionage and could be shot unless they talked.
Microphones were fitted in the fifty rooms of the “cooler” block by the Telefunken Company, but results yielded little of use as the prisoners quickly realised that it would be unusual if the rooms were not bugged. Indeed, the Germans soon accepted that the security education provided to Allied aircrews in the United Kingdom made their microphone arrangements virtually worthless.
After the war, examination of the information accrued by the interrogators at Dulag Luft revealed that much of what was collected came unwittingly through the detritus and innocuous bits of paper found on personnel and in aircraft wreckage. Notebooks, manuals, logbooks, diaries and letters all yielded valuable information. The conclusion was drawn that personnel on active service were insufficiently aware of just what was useful to the enemy. For example, new airmen fresh from training were anxious about forgetting what they had learned, so often took their notes with them.
Also of interest to the German interrogators were items confirming a PoW’s unit, target details, new equipment, losses and replacements, training methods, and aircrew morale. Auswertestelle West kept card indexes of RAF Bomber Command and US Eighth Air Force units and bases, although their information on RAF Fighter and Coastal Commands was sketchier. The unit that undertook the famous Dams raid on 16/17 May 1943, 617 Squadron, was soon established from the serial number on one of the crashed aircraft.
RAF identity cards, ‘1250s’, were particularly useful as they recorded a history of the various units to which bearers had been posted.
Photographs on escape passes issued to American personnel could be used to determine the particular Group a prisoner came from. For example, certain Groups used the same tie and jacket for all their photographs, pictures from others had a darker hue, whilst aircrew from others had hurriedly put on the same coat – all easily identifiable to an astute Luftwaffe
ABOVE:
Hundreds of single-seat fighters also lost their battles, such as this 501 (County of Gloucester) Squadron Spitfire VB, AA837. Damaged during combat with a Messerschmitt Bf 109, its pilot, Pilot Officer E.H.L. Shore, made an emergency landing on the foreshore of the Channel coast, unfortunately on the wrong side in Normandy, on 4 November 1941. Shore, having no doubt passed through Auswertestelle West, ended up in Stalag Luft III. (Via author)
BELOW LEFT: Austwertestelle West was surrounded by barbed wire fencing, watch towers and searchlights, a far cry from today’s housing estate entrance which betrays no evidence of its former past. (Courtesy of Annette Moog)
BELOW:
As the air war over Europe intensified, the numbers of Allied prisoners of war passing through Oberursel exceeded the camp’s capacity to cope. As a result, a satellite camp was established at nearby Wetzlar and predominantly used to process USAAF PoWs. Wetzlar was liberated by troops of the American Seventh Armored Division at the end of March 1945. This photograph shows one of the detainees released. The original caption states that this is Sergeant Edward Hill from Manchester. A soldier who had been captured at Dunkirk in 1940, Hill was believed to be one of the camp’s permanent PoW “staff”. (Courtesy US National Archives)
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