British war prisoners like you’ve never seen before
AN ALBUM of photographs reveals the elaborate lengths a group of British soldiers went to while trapped in a Second World War POW camp to put on costume dramas.
So serious were members of the amdram group of Stalag 383 in Bavaria, they turned a barn into a sloping auditorium, known as the Ofladium.
The men bartered their Red Cross parcels with their German guards for materials and props and then spent weeks creating sets that wouldn’t have looked out of place in a West End theatre. The sets, costumes, performances and concert programmes were of almost professional standards, with a lot of effort and skill clearly going into creating them.
Productions that were lapped up by packed audiences, comprising both the Pows and their German captors, included Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest, H.M.S Pinafore by Gilbert & Sullivan and Dick Whittington.
Servicemen wearing women’s cloth- ing made out of hundreds of handkerchiefs stitched together played the female roles. The professional-looking theatre programmes were printed with the help of the Germans and often signed by the cast for the audience. The archive has been sold for £600 by Tennants Auctioneers of Leyburn, North Yorks.
A spokesman for Tennants said: “This archive sheds light on the extraordinary range of events the prisoners were allowed to organise.”