I would ask my dad as he would know but he doesn't like to talk about his father (now dead) so I thought I'd ask you instead.
The story I've been told on the few times I've asked is that: He fought in Stalingrad and was captured by the Soviet army. He was given to Britain by Russia as a POW and worked in a camp near London for a year or two before being released when the war ended and building a life here (the UK).
What I want to know is:
Why didn't Russia just execute Germans they captured, particularly in a battle like Stalingrad?
Why was he sent to England? Was there an agreement between the allies about who would house POWs?
What were POW camps in England like? I was told he did bricklaying for several years when he was a prisoner. Was this the normal role for a captured POW?
Did most German POWs continue to live in the UK after their release or did they return home?
It wasn't until a few days ago when I actually considered the story that I realised there were potentially some issues with it.
I'd like to add a follow up question on top of why Russia would send POWs to the UK. I just learnt recently that most POWs in allied prisons were in the US or the UK.
Why were allied prisoners held in the UK? The US makes sense, it's far away from the fighting and there were huge amounts of land to build prisons on. However, it seems to me that the UK was in a pretty bad position during the war. Being an island very close to the war, they had a lot of trouble getting supplies (especially food) to people living in the UK. Wouldn't it have made more sense to move as many prisoners as they could to the US (even Canada) instead of keeping them in a country that was having trouble importing supplies? Or was the cost to move prisoners to the US an even bigger hurdle?