“You’re Still Nurses” — German Female POWs Shocked by How Canadians Treated Them

After Allied troops had swept into Northwest Germany, 27 German military nurses who had been assigned to a military hospital near Oldenburg were at the ready for the worst.In April 1945, as Allied forces were advancing on Northwest Germany, 27 German military nurses at a field hospital near Oldenburg were waiting for the worst. Many had hidden suicide pills in their pockets, prepared for terrible retribution, after weeks of constant propaganda during the war. Rather, Canadian soldiers immediately granted them the privileges of the Geneva Convention, referring to them as doctors, and provided for their safe passage across the Atlantic to Camp 132 in Medicine Hat, Alberta. The camp authorities and local physicians were looking for nurses to fill a large number of vacancies in civilian hospitals, as Canadian nurses were serving overseas and so offered the captured nurses a voluntary assignment to help at Medicine Hat General Hospital. They worked in close fellowship with Canadian physicians and patients, and many of whose relatives had been killed in the fighting in western Europe, and had the feeling of equality in the profession, of plentiful medicine, and of daily human kindness. That simple truth was a slow and steady demotion of years of totalitarian indoctrination, all over the course of eighteen months. This film explores all of this and the impressive legacy of humanism that proved stronger than wartime hatred, as well as the little story of the German medical personnel interned here, and their return to a devastated homeland afterwards. TIMESTAMPS 00:00 -Field Hospital at Oldenburg- April 1945 03:45 - Atlantic Crossing on HMS Letitia 06:45 - Camp 132 in Medicine Hat – arrival. 09:30 - Major Preston’s Offer: Volunteering at the Hospital The Breakdown of Propaganda is the original name of Christmas 1945.The original title of Christmas 1945 is 14:15. War in the Barracks is Loyalty vs Reality, 19:00. The author was the first person to be repatriated to a broken homeland in October 1946, at 23:45. 28:00 - Rebuilding Post-War Lives Across Two Continents 31:30 - 1976 and 1995: The Medicine Hat Reunions Historical sources and further reading are provided. Behind Canadian Barbed Wire: POWs in Canada during Two World Wars by David J. Carter (1998). Eagle Butte Press. Martin F. Auger (2005): Prisoners of the Home Front: German POWs and Enemy Aliens in Southern Ontario and Alberta. UBC Press. 3. Jonathan F. Vance (2002): Objects of Concern: Canadian Prisoners of War Through the Twentieth Century. UBC Press. 4. Canadian War Museum (CWM) - Internment Operations and Axis POWs in Canada: https://www.warmuseum.ca/learn/canadian-military-history-timeline/second-world-war/ Library and Archives Canada (LAC) - Records of the Directorate of Internment Operations (Camp 132 Medicine Hat), Record Group 24. ABOUT CANADIANS AT WAR Canadians at War is committed to establishing and maintaining a record and a legacy of the military history, humanitarian values and operational history of Canadian military personnel from past eras. If you appreciate the independent documentation of Canadian military history please support this work, subscribe to it. Ask the class to discuss how the treatment of enemy medical staff personnel was an example of the Canadian attitude to the conventions of the Second World War. Leave a comment below. #CanadianMilitary #WWII #POW #MedicineHat #MilitaryHistory #CanadianArmy #HistoryDocumentary #GenevaConvention