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POW in Germany

Heroes Remember

POW in Germany

Transcript
We were there for about a good week, close to a week and Ted was helping as much as he could and whatnot. And then one day they came in and they wanted all the officers and I’m pretty, about 100% sure of this, but anyway there was this man across from me and he went and he got his tunic out, it was underneath his pillow and he put it on, and he was a Colonel and it was Merritt. Cec Merritt... and he had been helping guys with bed pans and everything else in there and what not, but anyway, he, off he went. He got all the officers and they took them off to an Auflag, what they called an Auflag and then they started looking for those that weren’t wounded and my friend Ted got scooped up. In the meantime, all the rest of the men, that were taken prisoner, they were just outside of Dieppe and anyway they, I don’t know what they were, if they were in a barn or what, but anyway, they had them all together and Ted went with them, he ended up back there with them, and he went off into Eastern Germany. On the train trip through, this is what my friends told me anyway, they mentioned to Broadbent that he smelled a bit and finally he got a bit feverish and whatnot, and he had been wounded in the shoulder and he never said anything to anybody. And of course the thing was festering and he ended up in a hospital in Eastern Germany in what they call Stalag 8B Lamsdorf it was known then. Then in the mean time they come along and they loaded us all on the hospital train and it was a great propaganda move. They had chalked on the side, Dieppe POW’s and we went, it took three days to get into Germany anyway. We ended up at a surgical hospital at a place called Obermasfeld. and it was in the, out in the country and anyway, it was manned by all British medical staff, who had been taken prisoner in 1940 at Dunkirk.
Description

As a Prisoner of War in the Rouen hospital, Mr. Gorman continues the story of his treatment there and his subsequent move to a POW camp located in Eastern Germany.

Donald Gorman

Mr. Gorman was born June 23, 1921. His father was a stationary engineer at one of Windsor’s high schools and was a veteran of both the Boer War and the First World War. Mr. Gorman left school after achieving junior matriculation. He held jobs in a bakery, a fish market and as an apprentice mechanic at Remington-Rand typewriter factory in Windsor. After enlisting on September 16, 1939, he took his basic training in Windsor before being moved to Camp Borden for advanced training in June, 1940. Mr. Gorman went overseas with the Royal Hamilton Light Infantry Regiment and was involved in the Dieppe Raid.

Meta Data
Medium:
Video
Owner:
Veterans Affairs Canada
Duration:
03:08
Person Interviewed:
Donald Gorman
War, Conflict or Mission:
Second World War
Location/Theatre:
France
Battle/Campaign:
Dieppe
Branch:
Army
Units/Ship:
Essex Scottish Regiment
Rank:
Lance-Corporal
Occupation:
Signalman

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