In the summer of 1947, it would have taken Gwen Chandler just 15 minutes to cycle home from the textile factory in Bletchley where she worked as a machinist. Her route went east out of town, straight past the county cinema and up the hill into the Buckinghamshire village of Little Brickhill, where she lived at 9 Watling Street with her mum, Lottie, her aunt, uncle and grandparents.
It’s easy to imagine Gwen pausing in the heart of the village and glancing apprehensively to her right down the tree-lined drive to the large manor house there. Requisitioned during the second world war, it was home to 105 German prisoners. Held captive since Hitler’s defeat, these men – along with hundreds of thousands of their compatriots scattered across Britain in dozens of prison camps – were put to work in the fields, brick factories, construction sites and gasworks.
Gwen, who had just turned 21, harboured a dangerous secret. At some point during that summer, she had started a clandestine relationship with one of the PoWs at the manor house – a relationship that, if discovered, would have brought scandal on her family.
In the first months after the war, German prisoners were largely kept apart from the British public while they helped rebuild the nation. But, slowly, the regulations banning social interaction were relaxed and by Christmas 1946 the PoWs were allowed to go for “walk-outs” within a five-mile radius. This taste of freedom came with strict rules, including this written instruction from their captors: “You may converse with members of the public, but you may not establish or attempt to establish any relations with women of an amorous or sexual nature. This prohibition includes walking arm-in-arm or any other familiarity.”
Hostility towards these recent enemies was common. The sight of “free-spirited” PoWs soon sparked angry letters in local newspapers arguing that they had “made their beds” and that “we cannot forgive so soon”. One Englishwoman was fined £1 simply for giving a piece of cake to a German PoW, while others were threatened with imprisonment for being “too warm” with the men. But in the months that followed, restrictions on the PoWs were relaxed further: while trips to pubs were forbidden, they could go to the pictures, attend dances and, in the case of Little Brickhill, compete in the village chess tournament.
How Gwen first came into contact with a PoW at the manor house is a mystery. But by the autumn of 1947 she was pregnant. And in April 1948, alone, Gwen gave birth to a boy at a church-run “home for young unmarried mothers” in Aylesbury. Six weeks later, the shame and stigma that came with being an unmarried mother forced Gwen to hand her baby, via an informal adoption, to an intermediary family in the “big house over the road” where her mother worked as a cleaner. She never saw or heard of her baby again.
What happened to that baby remained a secret for more than seven decades – until, in the aftermath of my dad’s death in 2019, I made an innocuous inquiry that upturned the established “truth” of my family history and revealed a surprising connection to the forgotten story of German PoWs in Britain.
* * *
The societal pressure Gwen faced would have been intense. Local newspaper clippings reveal the disquiet caused by “interactions” between German PoWs and “local girls”. The Bletchley District Gazette, dated 2 August 1947, carried a letter from the Rev Ewart Wilson arguing that the men – predominantly young, low-ranked conscripts rounded up in the hundreds of thousands by the allies after the D-day landings – should be sent home: “It is for the good of all concerned and Europe as a whole that [the PoWs] should now be taking their place in the rebuilding of the industries of Germany upon which [their] economic recovery depends.”
Debate raged in newspaper letters pages and opinion columns. Some argued that, given the severe loss and damage caused by the war, it was only right that the captives’ labour was helping to rebuild Britain. Others believed that by keeping around a quarter of a million PoWs in camps, the British were in danger of repeating the cruel behaviour of the Nazis. The word “slavery” was even used.
Inevitably, the newspapers were also drawn to reports of love affairs. One case was even discussed in parliament. Werner Vetter had been sentenced to 12 months’ imprisonment in July 1947 after admitting to “improper relations” with a 21-year-old woman from Chingford called Olive Reynolds. At the time, they had a three-month-old baby. But by August a public outcry led to his release and they were married shortly afterwards.
Dr Alan Malpass, a lecturer in military history at Bishop Grosseteste University in Lincoln, has studied the reaction of the British public to German PoWs in the postwar period. He says the Vetter-Reynolds case “ignited public imagination and debate”. The newspapers reported that Vetter stood up in court and appealed: “I’m a man. Have I not the right to love?”
“Just because they were German, it didn’t mean they were not human,” Malpass says. “If you’re going to allow people to get to know each other and relax fraternisation rules, then this is just the natural course of human emotion.”
Yet even as public attitudes began to shift, the Home Office was keen to highlight the consequences for women in relationships with PoWs. At that time, any woman marrying a German immediately lost her British nationality, forcing her to relocate to the desperate hunger and chaos of postwar Germany. And intense hostility remained from some sections of the public. In 2007, when interviewed on the occasion of their 60th wedding anniversary, June and Heinz Fellbrich recalled how, after they married in Southampton in 1947, they were spat at in the street.
Malpass says it has been estimated that there were at least 750 marriages between German PoWs and British women from 1947 onwards. It is not known, he adds, how many babies resulted from these relationships.
* * *
The questions started with my dad’s death certificate. The more I looked at it, the more the inaccuracies and anomalies stood out. Michael John Hickman – or Mick, as everyone called him – had slipped away in September 2019 at Poitiers hospital, aged 71. Pneumonia had finally taken hold of his frail lungs and the doctor’s softly spoken euphemisms about “the next precious hours” hinted at what was to come.
The funeral followed quickly. We smiled and cried together as his beloved Sympathy for the Devil and Mr Blue Sky rang out at the crematorium. We reminisced about his love of the cryptic crossword – and how the ripe cheese, wine and Gitanes cigarettes had lured him to France 13 years earlier. In my own eulogy, I failed to fight back the tears when remembering how he’d bought me a pocket dictionary and Asterix book for my first day at school.
One of his favourite phrases was, “If you’re going to do something, do it properly” and I could hear him saying it when the Ville de Poitiers issued the death certificate to our family. Two things about it troubled me: it stated that he was born in Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire, and that his father was Ronald Hickman. The latter fact I knew to be false: but it was the mention of Aylesbury that really confused me. Our family had no known connection to that town or county.
I recalled a conversation I’d had with my dad two years earlier when visiting him in France. He told me that when he moved there from England in 2006, he was asked to present his “long” birth certificate (which lists a range of details including your parents’ names) in order to apply for a French health card. When he asked the General Register Office for this, he was instead sent his entry on the Adopted Children Register. The information on the document dumbfounded him. It showed that his mother, Phyllis, had secretly adopted him in 1967 when he was 19. None of it made any sense. Why would his own mother adopt him? And why would she do so via the high court in London without his knowledge or consent when he was in his late teens?
My dad settled on a theory. He knew Ronald Hickman, the man listed on the French death certificate, had walked out on Phyllis when my father was 12; he was never heard of again. After that, Phyllis sat my dad down and told him that his real father was a celebrated theatre impresario with whom she had been having a long-term extramarital relationship. When my dad found out about his adoption, he assumed Phyllis must have used it as a form of custody protection; a way to prevent Ronald ever returning to their lives.
To me, though, it stretched credulity. None of it added up. And with my dad’s passing, I resolved to solve the mystery. I had no idea it would take more than three years – and lead me to journey far beyond Aylesbury.
* * *
My first step was to contact the register office in Buckinghamshire. Staff there were stumped. There was no record of a birth in my father’s name in Aylesbury in the second quarter of 1948. (He was born in mid-April that year.) Four boys named “Michael John” had been born at that time, but none with the surname Hickman. The registrar did some digging and said that one of them, with the surname Chandler, had been born on the same day as my father. It had to be him, she said, as it also said the child had been adopted.
A week later, the birth certificate arrived in the post. The birth mother was listed as Gwendoline Chandler, a “machinist in a clothing factory” who lived in Little Brickhill, a village just south of Bletchley in Buckinghamshire. The name of the father was blank.
Using websites such as Ancestry and FindMyPast, I was quickly able to establish that Gwen was 21 and unmarried when my father was born. I sketched out a simple family tree. I could see that she had married in the 1950s and had two more children. Sadly, she had died in the early 70s, in her mid-40s. I hesitated. Should I contact her other children? How would they react to news of an older brother that they probably never knew about?
I decided to start with a more distant relative. I could see that Jill Kent was Gwen’s (much younger) first cousin and, now in her mid-70s, was still living in the area. “I’ve been waiting for this phone call all my life,” she told me, when I finally tracked her down. “I knew someone would come asking one day.”
Gwen’s tale was a familiar one: a young, unmarried woman got pregnant, and familial and social pressure meant the baby was put up for adoption within weeks of the birth. But who was the father, I asked? Jill’s voice became hesitant. “I will need to consult with my cousin Valerie first. I’m having tea with her tomorrow. I will call you back if we agree that we can tell you.”
Twenty-four hours later, I raced to the phone. Jill said she and Valerie had discussed the whole thing and were willing to approach Gwen’s other children, Kevin and Denise, who indeed knew nothing, to tell them about my dad. “The father, as we understand it, was a German prisoner of war who was being held at a camp in Little Brickhill after the war,” Jill told me. But they didn’t have a name for him.
A few months before my dad died, I had asked him to take a DNA test as part of some wider family tree research I’d been chipping away at. The results arrived the week before he died, but my attention was obviously elsewhere and I hadn’t studied them. What I saw when I opened them back up was so remarkable that I refreshed the webpage three times to be sure: my dad’s estimated ethnicity was 47% “Germanic Europe”. What’s more, many of his “distant cousin” matches suggested a strong connection to Lower Saxony and, specifically, the Elbe-Weser triangle, a flat area of marshland just west of Hamburg.
Meanwhile, Jill and Kevin had invited me to meet them. I enjoyed hearing about the lives of the Chandler family in Little Brickhill, but their knowledge of Gwen’s story in those immediate postwar years was limited. One detail seemed important, though: one of Gwen’s relatives, now deceased, had spoken of a letter sent by the mother of the German PoW to Gwen to say sorry about what had happened, but that she had been told Gwen was a “lovely girl”. It hinted that the relationship between Gwen and the PoW had been more than fleeting. But the letter was lost.
* * *
Almost 18 months passed without a whisper of a breakthrough. I spent many forlorn hours building dozens of family trees “down” from various commonly shared ancestors. I watched YouTube tutorials on genealogy and emailed experts asking for tips and assistance. I had no option, they said, other than to wait for new, stronger matches.
In late 2021, a 19-year-old childcare assistant in Hamburg was scrolling through TikTok when an advert for MyHeritage caught her eye. It was offering a Black Friday deal on its DNA tests. “$39! It’s our #lowestprice #DNA #deal ever!”
What Malina Michaelis did next was the gamechanger I’d been waiting for. Six weeks later the results of her DNA test – a simple spit-in-a-tube affair – were processed and emailed to her. At the same time, MyHeritage sent me an email: “Good news! We’ve discovered a new DNA match for your father.” I often received these email alerts, but I could tell straight away that this was potentially pivotal: there was a strong chance that one of Malina’s grandparents was a first cousin to my father. This was by far the closest connection I’d seen.
Malina connected me with her mother, Kerstin, who agreed to take a DNA test, which in turn confirmed the link with my dad.
Other evidence suggested the link was via Kerstin’s paternal grandmother, whose maiden name was Emma Grell. Emma had died in 1942, long before Kerstin was born.
Kerstin knew very little about the Grells, but by early 2023, working with a skilled local archivist called Anke Schriefer, we established that Emma was one of 10 siblings who had 25 children between them. One of those children was likely to be my grandfather, the German PoW at Little Brickhill.
In parallel to the DNA research, I had also continued searching through local newspaper clippings to learn more about the experience of the German PoWs at “Camp 268” in Little Brickhill. One story in particular caught my eye: in early April 1948, the same month my dad was born, a prisoner called Helmut Grell had been found guilty of “handling stolen goods” and sentenced to four months in prison. A theft of “cigarettes, sweets and groceries” from a village post office had been pinned on two other PoWs and Helmut Grell was later caught by a policeman with some of the goods. The men told the court they wanted to “send these things to their mothers in Germany”, but they were all found guilty.
Could Helmut Grell be related to Emma Grell, Kerstin’s grandmother? How common is that surname in Germany, I wondered? The Red Cross archives hold “capture cards” filled out by each German prisoner in their own hand at the time they entered British custody. Learning that the surname Grell is relatively uncommon, I took a punt: I ordered Helmut Grell’s card, as I had been told it would reveal his home address, birth date and next of kin, who were likely to be his parents. I also approached Germany’s Militärarchiv to see if it held either his PoW or service records.
In early April, I received his capture card. It was a goldmine of information. It showed his parents to be Joachim Grell and Anna Mathias from Bremervörde. It also revealed he was born in September 1923 and that, as a Fallschirmjäger paratrooper, he had been captured by the American army in December 1944 during the Battle of the Bulge (often described as “Hitler’s last stand”) in Belgium. He’d spent a year as a prisoner at Camp Butner in North Carolina before being transferred to England. (Hundreds of thousands of German and Italian prisoners were shipped to camps in the US before the war ended for fear they could escape and rejoin Hitler’s war effort if held captive in France or Britain.)
On the eve of what would have been my dad’s 75th birthday, Kerstin emailed me. Her excitement was clear: “Joachim Grell was one of Emma Grell’s brothers! And one of Joachim’s children was Helmut, born in 1923.” Further research by Anke Schriefer also revealed that Joachim and Anna lived at the same address written down by Helmut Grell on his PoW records. We had found the definitive link. We had found my grandfather.
A month later, an email arrived from the Bundesarchiv in Berlin. It contained the US army’s file for Helmut Grell. Remarkably, it included his mugshot and fingerprints, taken three months after his capture as he was being processed at Camp Butner in March 1945. In the picture he is still wearing his Luftwaffe uniform, the epaulettes on his shoulders just visible above the card listing his prisoner number – 31G832568.
I could see my own younger self in his 21-year-old face, as well as my dad’s. The likeness overwhelmed me: I felt the blood connection back through the generations to a young man I never knew existed.
* * *
Where exactly did Helmut and Gwen meet? How did they carry out their forbidden liaisons? Even though Gwen’s family did not know the details, I kept running possible scenarios through my head. I’d been told Dr Mary Ingham would be able to paint an accurate picture for me. In the 1980s and 1990s, she had interviewed many women about such relationships. They informed her PhD thesis at Goldsmiths, University of London, Improperly and Amorously Consorting: Post-1945 Relationships Between British Women and German Prisoners of War Held in the UK.
Ingham said it was important to understand just how hated the Germans were immediately after the war. One of her interviewees – named simply as “Kathleen W” – recalled her mother insisting to her during the war years, “If ever the Germans get here, they’ll never have you. I’ll shoot you first.” Another woman, called Barbara, spoke of her fears, especially once news reports of the Nazi concentration camps were first aired: “Germans were regarded as fiends incarnate … To those of my age … brain-washed nonstop for six years, they meant nothing but revulsion and terror.”
But once these women got to see the PoWs in the flesh, typically being worked hard in the local fields, attitudes softened. “Lorna H” told Ingham, “Not one of them was a seven-foot gorilla-type man wearing jackboots, as I had been led to believe all Germans were.”
Another woman described most of the PoWs she saw as “very young and very handsome”, admitting, “We girls went overboard for them.” They were often viewed as a “novelty”. “Pity” was also a common sentiment. But they were “exciting”, too, with one interviewee telling Ingham the PoWs offered “something different and the challenge of perhaps being caught”.
Ingham wrote in her thesis: “The prisoners also, refreshingly, exuded charm, old-fashioned chivalry and good manners, unlike the ‘dour misogyny’ of local boys. Land Army workers, accustomed to the casual chauvinism of local farmers and farm workers, were impressed by how ‘polite and courteous’ the Germans were … The lure of the forbidden simultaneously offered these young women an opportunity to rebel against the authority they now questioned.”
These women knew their illicit liaisons were likely to provoke anger. “Jillian R” told Ingham that any woman known to have “fratted” with PoWs would risk being called a “Nazi swine lover” and greeted with mocking “Heil Hitler” salutes. Most women “wouldn’t have dared hold hands” in public and many meetings took place in “the fields and the woodland”. Some PoWs would leave notes for their girlfriends in the bushes with nothing more than a crudely drawn map marking the next meeting point. There were also stories of women making use of their brothers’ civilian clothing to “smuggle” their PoW boyfriends into cinemas.
When parents were confronted with the prospect of their daughters dating a German PoW, many expressed revulsion, Ingham says. One told his stepdaughter, “We expected more of you than that – we didn’t think you could sink this low.”
It’s hard for me now – more than seven decades on – to imagine Gwen’s panic and fear when she realised she was pregnant by a German PoW. And then the news that Helmut had been imprisoned for handling stolen goods the same month my dad was born. The chances of ever seeing Helmut again must have seemed remote. There’s almost an inevitability that she was forced into handing her baby boy – my dad – over for adoption.
* * *
Kerstin had said to me, while we were researching her grandmother’s family tree, “No one wants a Nazi in their family.” She could sense how important it was to me to understand Helmut’s exact role during the war. All we could realistically do, we agreed, was closely study his military service and PoW records for clues.
What they revealed was that, aged 18 in 1942, he had been drafted into the Luftwaffe to serve in a Flakscheinwerfer-Abteilung – an anti-aircraft searchlight unit – with the responsibility of helping to defend Berlin. In 1944, he was then assigned, without any direct combat experience, to the Fallschirmjäger paratroopers and thrown into the Ardennes offensive. Given the extreme number of casualties on both sides during those bleak midwinter battles, it appears he was lucky to be captured alive. But I could find no evidence of him having any military connection with the Nazi party or being a member of the SS.
German PoWs went through a process of “de-Nazification”, particularly until 1946 when they were largely held in US camps. I found an account of how, at Camp Butner where Helmut was held, the PoWs were shown a “25-minute atrocity film” made up of newsreel footage taken during the liberation of Bergen-Belsen. After the film, hundreds of the prisoners took off their Wehrmacht uniforms and burned them in disgust.
Malpass says the British authorities began slowly to repatriate the PoWs from 1946 onwards – about 15,000 a month – but first they had to “grade” them. “They were all screened and interviewed by an ‘education officer’, then put into three categories,” he says. “You were either ‘white’, which meant you were an anti-Nazi, pro-democrat prisoner; or grey, which meant they were unsure; or black, which meant you were still an ardent Nazi. They didn’t want to risk sending this latter group back to Germany. They wanted to re-educate them.”
It isn’t clear from his records how Helmut was classified, but Malpass says the men were largely sent home in the order in which they were captured – “last in, last out” – which, along with his conviction for handling stolen goods, is the likely explanation for his relatively late repatriation.
I was desperate to learn more about Helmut’s life. What happened to him after he returned home to Bremervörde in July 1948? Did he know about my dad’s birth? I now knew my grandfather’s identity, but the questions wouldn’t stop, so I booked a family trip to Germany. I wanted to thank Kerstin, Malina, Anke and the wider Grell family; to walk around Bremervörde; to see, smell, breathe the places that Helmut would have known so well. I wanted to visit Helmut’s grave.
We strolled through Bremervörde – a quiet, provincial market town – stopping to see family landmarks such as the church where Helmut was baptised and his parents married. I wrote in the visitor book: “A special day for the Hickman family to be visiting Bremervörde for the first time … connecting with the Grell family.”
We then stepped together into the town’s manicured Neues Feld cemetery. And there we finally found him, buried with his wife, Vera, and her parents, bordered by begonias and clipped lavender. He had died in 2004 – the year after my first child, Esme, was born.
I had always thought I was as English as Elgar, milky tea and rained-off cricket. But, from questioning a few odd details on my father’s death certificate, I had ended up on an epic journey in which I’ve found out I’m quarter German. Mourning my dad has been hard but I can see now, on reflection, that this at times obsessive quest has been an important part of the process.
And as for my children? They have been intrigued, but have largely seen all this through the prism of their post-Brexit prospects. As we walked away from Helmut’s grave, one of them asked me, “Does this mean we can now apply for German passports?”
• Leo Hickman will be online on 18 July to discuss the techniques he used to find his grandfather. Tickets at bit.ly/FindingHelmut
