Held at: | Voss Collection |
Reference: | RS |
Source: | Original document |
Title: | Digital Archive – Voss Collection: INDEX |
Place name: | Golden Valley |
Date: | 1930 - 2010 |
Description:
The Voss collection consists of photographs, documents and biographical details relating to Dietrich Heinrich Karl Voss, a German national, and his experiences in and after the Second World War. It includes his call up to the German Army, his capture by American troops in Italy and his life as a prisoner of war, ending up in a POW camp at Dorstone in the Golden Valley in 1946. Along with hundreds of thousands of other German prisoners he was put to work on the land, and worked on several farms in and around the Golden Valley where he eventually settled rather than return to his home which was then in the Russian occupied zone of East Germany.
The collection of material has very kindly been made available by his son, Graham Voss, who has given his permission for us to add it to our website. It is a unique record of an aspect of wartime events in the Ewyas Lacy area which is little known and otherwise recorded poorly, if at all.
At a more general level, historians writing of the immediate post-war period acknowledge that German prisoners of war made a vital contribution to the British economy at a time when labour, particularly in agriculture, was in desperately short supply. This collection puts that struggle to keep Britain fed and to begin reconstruction in the immediate aftermath of war into a personal context.
Links to other related material and research on our website are included in the index below for convenience.
Ewyas Lacy Study Group
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INDEX TO THE VOSS COLLECTION:
Photographs of Dorstone Prisoner of War Camp
Dietrich Voss working at Newton Farm Westbrook
Dietrich Voss Army Discharge Papers
Dietrich Voss Identity and Registration documents
Records of Dorstone POW Camp - mail sent and received
Dorstone POWs working at Turnastone Court Farm
Background to Dorstone Prisoner of War Camp
Prisoner of War Camps: Report by English Heritage
Observations:
None
Ref: rs_gdv_0141