German POW reunites with sister after 80 years

The experience of living and working with the Germans helped many in Britain to put the war behind them, said Terry Charman, senior historian at the Imperial War Museum. But not much attention has been paid to what happened to the POWs, he added.

"The entire POW experience for the British tended to revolve around Colditz and 'The Great Escape,'" said Charman. "I think many young people in this country would be surprised to learn there were German POWs living here at all."

Some 400,000 German POWs were held in Britain in the peak phase in 1946, when they accounted for around a quarter of the agricultural workforce, said Weber-Newth, an expert on postwar German migration at London Metropolitan University.

"They contributed greatly to the British economy," she said. "And in a way they were early pioneers of the European Union."

"TRUMAN'S SS"

Richard Michalek, 85, said the hospitality of farmers in the Scottish Highlands helped to convince him to stay -- but not before he had had to travel across half the globe as a POW.

Captured by U.S. forces in Normandy aged 19, Michalek was transported to England, then across the Atlantic where he worked in cotton fields in Oklahoma decked out in black clothes.

"They called us the Truman SS," he said, referring to U.S. President Harry Truman and the black-clad elite Nazi troops.

In time, his detail moved westwards and were shipped back to Britain via the Panama Canal, the former woodcutter said. Billeted in the Highlands, he and other POWs came face to face with an officer wearing a kilt -- and burst out laughing.

"I'd never seen a man with a skirt on," said Michalek.

The POWS were then made to stand in the cold for hours.

In the end, about 15,000 Germans stayed, said Weber-Newth. Some, like Roestel, never looked back -- to the point that he had forgotten so much German when his sister Edith found him that he had to talk to her in English through a son-in-law.

"After you got married you had to start speaking Scottish to survive: you forgot most of the bloody German. I never went back," said Roestel, who tended cattle in the hills around Thornhill before retiring in 1990, just as Germany reunified.

Others like Georg Kotzyba, an 84-year-old great-grandfather from Dumfries, have retained close links to Germany despite spending nearly all of his adult life in Scotland.

"I was a soldier for six months and that was me finished. But I usually go back every year," said Kotzyba, who said he was lucky despite spending time in 18 POW camps. "When I see what happened to the POWs in Russia, there's no comparison," he said.

A sense of national identity has remained strong among POWs, with many, like Kotzyba and Michalek, keeping a German passport.

"I support Scotland when they're playing another team," said Kotzyba with a laugh. "Except for when it's Germany."

(Editing by Steve Addison)