POW Camp 2226 - where my father was from February 1945 to September 3rd 1945

My father, Axel von Schulmann, was a prisoner in British POW Camp 2226 which was located in Zedelgem near Brugge and Ostend in Belgium.  Given my father's Baltic background, it is of interest to note that the neighbouring camp 2227 in Zedelgem was for Latvians.

 My father arrived there sometime early in 1945 after having captured late in the Ardennes Offensive.   He was in the camp until September 3rd 1945.  He was had the number A 476444 but I have no idea if this was his number from the German military or one assigned to him in the camp.  He arrived in the camp around his 23rd birthday with no knowledge what had happened to his family.   At about the same time his father August von Schulmann was shot and dumped in a mass grave just east of the pre-war German/Polish border.

Camp 2226 seems to have held close to 20,000 German POWs of which 1/4 were officers and a number very senior naval officers.

A letter of reference for my father

Camp 2226 was guarded by the 19th Fuselier Battalion, which was created in February 1945 from Dutch speaking Belgians.  My father spoke about two of guards in the unit that happened to Jewish - Weiss and Gruen if I remember correctly.  One was pleasant and the other was not.

Discharge papers for Axel von Schulmann - due to water damage the details are
very hard to make out

Conditions of the camp became worse after the end of the war, the amount and quality of rations dropped.  My father did well with food because he played cards well.   Since food was really all they had to bet with my father ended up with more than his fair share of rations.   My father also benefited from working on the administration staff of the camp starting on May 1st 1945.  He worked for a Captain but I can not make out the name on the paper, best I can get is S.R. Berge(?).

My father's knowledge of English allowed him to get the work in the documents office of POW Camp 2226..  In general his knowledge of English benefited him several times between 1945 and 1952, when he arrived in Quebec City he had his first job in Canada before he even left the ship.

Why did my father know English?   It comes from his high school in Estonia.   At age 16 he was fluent in German and English and spoke decent Estonian.   Even though his education was in a German school, it was not the same as what was learned in Germany.   He graduated in 1938 from the Pernauer Deutsche Realgymnasium.   Remember, this was a school without any ideological leanings and no mass purging of teachers.

My father was released relatively early because he was a of a low rank and had a place to go to.   The family had an central address to contact each other at.   I suspect the fact he worked well with the Camp staff helped gain him an early release.  Others remained in British camps for several years.

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update on October 5th - pictures of Camp 2227 can be found at this link, thank you to Meredith Schofield

Scars of the Second Generation

I think I finally have found a counselor I can work with and I think I am finally ready to face the issues that I need to deal with.

I come from a family where the generation of my parents and and of my grandparents suffered so many things in just over 30 years.   The world my family knew in 1914 was utterly and completely gone in 1946 with many members dead.   What they had to endure is beyond what I can fathom and they seemed to have survived it well, but it is becoming clear that is only a surface thing and does not represent what they had to do with their emotions.   My intelligent and interesting parents were not very emotionally open with anyone much.   To admit my parents were not great is a huge barrier for me to consider.

The counselor I am seeing, Susanna Hunter, is a few years older than me and a German.   She has the same sort of scars of the second generation in her life.

My goal is going to be to write about what it has been like to be the son of German immigrants that survived World War Two.  I was raised in a country that was the 'enemy' in the war.   I was raised in a society that said over and over again that the Germans were the enemy and the only people I knew that had been in the war were Germans, and they were all decent people.

These posts will be rambling and the intent is only for me to work some stuff out on paper.   More later.