#stalag iii

[major-mads]

Dulag Luft

Places of Interest in Masters of the Air

Masterlist

When captured by the Germans, Allied airmen would be sent to Dulag Luft, the interrogation and transit POW camp for the Luftwaffe that was just northeast of the city of Frankfurt. This is the camp where Cleven and Egan were held in solitary confinement for weeks before being transported right outside Sagan to Stalag Luft III.

Dulag Luft interrogators were some of the best in the business, and Miller describes them in Masters of the Air as "deeply skilled specialists who preferred methods more subtle than a rubber hose (Miller, 2007, pg. 386)." Many of these interrogators had spent time in America and were fluent in English. The conversation "would begin by offering him chocolate and cigarettes and then draw him into some light banter about American baseball or movies.... [the conversation] became so congenial that many airmen were unaware that the interrogation had begun (Miller, 2007, pg. 386)."

The interrogators had thick folders on each man and their bomb group. They gathered their information from intercepted communications, Stars and Stripes newspaper articles, and anything else they could get their hands on. It unnerved some of the men that the Germans knew such specific details of themselves, their families, and their bombardment groups. The conditions were terrible, and many of the officers were subjected to solitary confinement for weeks at a time.

Miller writes about this in his book:

“Downed Allied airmen felt safer in the hands of the German military than they did with the local citizenry they had bombed. Luftwaffe police and interrogators were in official charge of captured airmen, and their tactics for extracting information were rough but rarely barbaric. After being captured, Lou Loevsky was shipped with other downed American airmen to Dulag Luft, the Luftwaffe interrogation center for Allied airmen at Oberursel, a suburb of Frankfurt am Main. At one point in his interrogation a smiling Luftwaffe major asked Roger Burwell why the men in his 381st Bomb Group at Ridgewell had not yet fixed the broken clock in their officers club. Airmen who refused to provide military or personal information were usually threatened verbally. Some were told that their families would not be informed they were alive and "safe" until they began to cooperate; men captured without identification tags were warned that they could be turned over to the Gestapo to be executed as spies. One stubbornly tight-lipped officer - married and with children - was told that if he persisted in his obstinacy, a report would go out the next day from the German radio station in Calais that the night before he was shot down he had been at the Grosvenor House in London, in room 413, with an attractive blond woman. Knowing that the information was exactly correct, the major is reported to have fainted on the spot. Prisoners were also softened up by the appalling conditions at Dulag Luft: the tomblike isolation, the starvation rations, and the mice that ran free in the dank cells, and crawled in prisoners' pockets searching for food. Sometimes the promise of a shower, a shave, and a hot meal was sufficient to loosen a man's tongue. The guards also fiendishly manipulated the temperatures in the cells, shutting off the electric wall heaters in the winter and turning them up to intolerable levels, to 130 degrees, in warmer weather. Hundreds of airmen arrived at Dulag Luft wounded and were denied medical treatment, a flagrant violation of the Geneva Conventions regarding prisoners of war. "My interrogator said he could see that I was injured and needed treatment and that my being stubborn would only delay my being sent to a hospital," Roger Burwell re-called. On the other hand, high-ranking Allied fliers believed to possess specialized military information were taken on hunting trips or invited to raucous drinking parties with German officers.

Most of the information was gathered from Allied sources by Dulag Luft's efficient staff, who scrutinized American magazines and newspapers brought in from neutral Portu-gal, including Stars and Stripes, a rich source of hometown information about airmen. Additional information, including logbooks, briefing notes, and airmen's personal diaries, was gathered from clothing and other personal belongings found in the charred wreckage of bombers. These documents often contained highly secret data about flight patterns, the effectiveness of German defenses, and targets marked for future bombing. An officer in the American Air Force's Counter Intelligence Corps noted at the time that 'it was not uncommon for large German manufacturers to ask the Luftwaffe if their factories were on the list, and if so, when they could expect to be bombed." German linguists also monitored Allied airmen's wireless communications. According to Hanns Scharff, the interrogators at Dulag Luft had at their disposal a copious file in which "nearly every single word spoken in the air from plane to plane or from base to plane or vice-versa was carefully noted." As Air Force counter-intelligence experts noted in their own secret files, "nothing in the way of documents, written or printed, was too insignificant to merit close scrutiny" by the intelligence staff at Dulag Luft. A case in point is the airmen's ration cards. Every American flier in the European Theater received exactly the same kind of card, and there was nothing on the card to indicate where he was stationed. But investigators at Dulag Luft were able to identify an airman's bomb group by the way his card was canceled. At Thorpe Abbotts, for example, the clerks on duty in the PX marked the cards with a heavy black pencil. The PX counter was made of rough board. All the cards canceled there carried the impression of its distinctive pattern in the black pencil markings. The Air Force's Counter Intelligence Corps estimated that 80 percent of the information obtained by Dulag Luft was supplied by captured documents and monitored radio traffic, with the remainder coming from POW interrogations. After the war, when he was hired as an interpreter by the American military, Hanns Scharff estimated that all but twenty of the more than 500 airmen he questioned disclosed operational and tactical information that proved useful to the Luftwaffe. Few of these airmen, he emphasized, did it knowingly, or through intimidation or a conscious desire to improve the conditions of their confinement. "I suppose he got something out of me," said one flier, "but to this day I haven't the least idea what it could have been." After being released from Dulag Luft, Loevsky and several dozen other airmen were taken by tram to Frankfurt, where they were herded onto cattle cars and sent deep into German-occupied territory to Stalag Luft III (Air Camp number three), near the town of Sagan, a hundred miles southeast of Berlin, one of the half-dozen main POW camps operated by the Luftwaffe hence the term "Luft," or air-for Allied airmen (Miller, 2007, pg. 387-89)."

Dulag Luft was the first stop in a sequence of camps and transportation depots that downed airmen had to go through. Hopefully, we'll get to see more of the camp in the show! We're less than a month away, guys! The wait is almost over!!

tag list: @ronald-speirs @footprintsinthesxnd @georgieluz @sweetxvanixlla @coco-bean-1218 @gloryofwinter

message or comment if you want to be added to the tag list! <3

[mastersoftheair]

"Sunrise on Stalag Luft 3. Someone said it was the biggest use of fake snow in UK film production history. I don’t know about that, but it was a lot of fake snow!!!" -(via John Orloff)

[lestweforget5]

For those of us doing research for MOTA fics in the Stalag-arc, this appears to have some very interesting information as well as pictures.

(Do I have to have the name of an actual American POW doctor within Stalag Luft III? No. Do I really want one so I don't have to invent another OC? Yes. Did I find some info about one of the actual American doctors in the camp? Yes, a wee bit.)

[johnslittlespoon]

hey y'all. wtf are we meant to do with this info :)

was aware of other forms of recreation being a thing from other articles, but i've never heard about the fire pool situation! interesting (opens google doc)

[thatsrightice]

“Bucky Cleven, the impervious, the invincible, was gone. If he couldn't make it, who could? His good friend, Bucky Egan, didn't talk much that night.”

“The loss of Bucky Cleven over Bremen and Bucky Egan over Münster seemed to have cut the heart right out of the the 100th. Without them the 100th was a shadow.”

"What I can't really handle is that when Cleven and Egan were still around, the men were happier. With them gone, the heart of the 100th has stopped beating."

“It wasn't only that my friends were gone. The spirit was gone. The laughter. Ham, Brady, Warsaw, Crankshaft, Solomon, Murph-always good for a laugh-were gone. Under Dart Alkire and Chick Harding as Group Commanders, anything went with the 100th and it did. When Bucky Cleven and Bucky Egan were setting the tone of the 100th, there was dash. There was derring-do. Flying the war was an adventure.”

— Harry Crosby in his memoir, A Wing and a Prayer

[clevervonskelli]

Meanwhile, in a prison camp for air force personnel:

"I need these parts for a radio, think you can get them?", a beautiful nerd asks.

Morally flexible bff with just the right shady connections: Say no more, babygirl!

*cue WWII MacGyver montage*

[hesbuckcompton-baby]

i love how we MoTA writers collectively looked at a literal prisoner of war camp and said ah yes. romance shall occur.

[kylaym]

Hammy Murphy and Kitten 👉👈

[avonne-writes]

I did my research and the Stalag 3 was a library so they had access to all the books and that is why people started teaching each other many of the prisoners got their law and language and engineer degree at the Stalag. They had the exams to pass their bachelor given to them by the Red Cross. Buck classes were actually really popular and a lot of the prisoners have said that it helped them feel more normal at the camp. They also had a newspaper called Kriegie Times and the Circuit lol. They also played football and volleyball games and had tournament. I’m just imagining stories published about Bucky in the newspaper and how the next Buck classes seat are already sold out.

Thank you so much for sharing, very useful information! I knew about the library, the sports and the newspapers, but the classes part somehow escaped me until one of you guys told me. I think it’s amazing how they tried their best to improve life at the camp.

[promptsiwontwritebutiwannaread]

So I have an ideas for fics but my ADHD has no patience or attention span for actually writing any of it.

So I’ll blog them here, anyone can use them if they want, it will probably go on until the hyper focus is gone so have fun!!

It will mostly be Bucky whump and feels (any remotely ADHD coded character is normally the one I hyper focus on).

Feel free to geek out write drabbles or fics or whatever. Mostly doing this to get it out of my head!

I don’t mind which ships are used, but if it’s not Clegan, Buck and Bucky are very much platonic soulmates in my head.

❤️❤️

[fuckyeahjeremyclarkson]

Behind the scenes at the Prison Camps Museum, Żagań (these photos from the museum's Facebook page)

[mastersoftheair]

pictures taken by brian mazza (chloe melas' husband) from MotA's 2021 set.

[lestweforget5]

🌹

Johnny turned at the sound of the door opening. His face made it clear that he felt out of his depth, and his relieved, “John!” confirmed that. Only then did Millie look up slowly. Her beautiful, deep-set eyes, which had so often danced with fondness or good humor or been narrowed in careful, intense focus, were shadowed and dull. And there was a fevered, glassy sheen in her eyes, as well. Their eyes met. The resulting barest glimmer of a smile that she somehow managed to muster up was a troubling half-hearted imitation of her usually bright smile. John’s face spasmed at the sight before he got his reactions back under control.

[tomoleary]

Hank Porter "Stalag Luft III" WWII Insignia Preliminary Design Original Artwork (Walt Disney, 1940s)

Source

A few more by Hank Porter:

[california-112]

Today is the 79th anniversary of the mass escape from Stalag Luft III!

[clevervonskelli]

I'm trying to focus on what I liked about Episode 7 and my brain is just looping a few things.

-Was that Colonel Alkire at the camp heading up compound staff? I missed if he was named, but if so, I'm quite pleased to see him.

-Frank Murphy getting a letter from his mom ❤️

-The way the show approached the Great Escape. They managed to keep the focus entirely on the tragedy and incredulousness of the situation, and on how it could directly impact the American prisoners in the other compounds. It felt very balanced and very Great Escape in the context of MotA, not Great Escape eclipsing the show.

- MUSTANGS!!!!! MotA is a bomber-centric show and B-17s are incredible in how they can be beat to hell and keep flying, but fighter planes will always be my first love when it comes to WWII.

-Von Lindeiner's removal from his position as commodant being mentioned. He's someone I find very interesting, plus it's nice to have that hint of how there was a whole world of politics going on when it came to the running of the camps and the tension between the Luftwaffe and the Gestapo.

- I loved all the fountain pen shots we got to see this ep when folks were writing.