After so and so much time in Russian POW camp, he got moved to some US prison (camp?). Only after that he was released.
They had to work a lot as prisoners, so I guess both sides wanted their share of work from war prisoners and so he first had to be in a Russian camp and then later in a US managed camp.
In documentaries you can also see, that some more qualified people got moved to "in the middle of nowhere" in Russia and Siberia as "experts" to help with building something up, where before German soldiers had destroyed. If you are willing, you can watch some kind of war documentary at least every second day in Germany. After you have seen your 20th documentary, you might get tired of it. However, many of the old people watch that stuff over and over. I guess it is because of the huge impact those events had on so many lives in their youth and to keep in mind how horrible things went. Perhaps also to try and get some kind of understanding of how a society could screw up so badly. And perhaps they want to know about all the evil things that happened, which they did not know about. The things that happened outside of the eyes of most people.
There is no lack of educational material at least. Just a day ago I saw an announcement on TV for another documentary for one of the almost infinite sides of that history: A documentary showing photographs and short clips taken by hobby photographers in 44 or 45 or so, showing a deceptive calm in some places in Germany, basically before things rolled all the way back, with only few indications of impending doom. You see, there is always something TV stations can send about it. Every little detail can be looked at and a documentary made about it.
When my grandfather had was called into the army, he was 15 years old. Send to the east, to fight a war. Many young people of that generation never finished school before entering the army. Basically children soldiers. They had to go back to school, as adults, when they returned from war and imprisonment. Re-education and further education. Imagine that contrast. I think it must have been hard for many of them, with post war trauma and all those memories.
He was either extremely fortunate, or unfortunate, depending on how you look at it. Came into a field hospital with a headshot wound, but somehow survived. The doctor told him, that he could drink and smoke as much as he wanted to, because he wouldn't make it much longer anyway. I think that must have been a German field hospital and then later he must have been captured, and of course, as part of the army, taken prisoner of war.
Well, he managed to stick around until a few years ago, reaching old age of over 90 years.
> They had to work a lot as prisoners, so I guess both sides wanted their share of work from war prisoners
As a practical matter, it may also be easier to guard and manage prisoners who are busy and tired from work, rather
than idle and restless. For a detailed view of the late-war
and early post-war years, I can suggest: _Savage Continent_, by Keith Lowe - https://www.npr.org/2013/07/24/204538728/after-wwii-europe-w...
When it's said that the concentration camps were "liberated", this mostly means that the guards on the fences were changed, and any intentional killings were stopped. But it took quite some time to actually empty the camps. From the Harrison report:
>We appear to be treating the Jews as the Nazis treated them except that we do not exterminate them. They are in concentration camps in large numbers under our military guard instead of S.S. troops. One is led to wonder whether the German people, seeing this, are not supposing that we are following or at least condoning Nazi policy.
This was in August 1945, three months after Germany surrendered. Moving millions of people around in postwar Europe wasn't easy, or quick.
Obviously, all sides destroyed railways or bridges when possible. What few left operational were running at capacity just moving food, troops, and critical replacement parts. If you're a Allied junior lieutenant, and you're put in charge of a camp of 50,000 people, do you just throw open the gates, and tell them to walk home? If there was food to buy, which there wasn't, (Everyone had conscripted all their farmers. Europe had food supply problems for years afterward) they didn't have any money to buy it. Nobody had ration cards. They were lucky to have identity papers at all.
And, of course, the Allies were correctly paranoid about security. The countryside was littered with weapons. Let a starving DP out of a camp, a few days later he might be sorely tempted to pick up a fallen rifle and ambush the next checkpoint he sees.
Or... you could just leave them in the camp, where they're all in one place, not clogging the roads, where you can more or less feed them, and where you can eventually get around to handing out Nansen passports, when you feel like it.
