German POWs in Australia

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Max
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Re: German POWs in Australia

#16

Post by Max » 19 Jul 2012, 11:04

Greetings from the Wide Brown.

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Max
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Re: German POWs in Australia

#17

Post by Max » 19 Jul 2012, 14:08

Books about the war-time camps available from the Tatura Museum

http://www.taturamuseum.org.au/museum_shop.html

•As I See It - by Kurt Beilharz - $27.00



•Beyond All Hate - by Major James T Sullivan - $52.00



•Blankets on the Wire - Steven Bullard (with Japanese translation) - $12.00



•Camp Overview - pamphlet - $5.50



•Cesare Vagarini - Interned & Out - $11.00



•German Language Heritage Trail - $25.00



•German War Cemetery in Tatura - pamphlet - $5.50



•Haywire - Hay Historical Society - $40.00



•In the Interests of National Security - Internment - $25.00



•Leonhard Adam - From the Spree to the Yarra - $11.00



•Marched In - compiled by Lurline & Arthur Knee - $35.00



•My Berlin Suitcase - by Bern Brent - $22.00



•Operations & Tactics - the Kormoran - pamphlet - $10.00



•Quobba Station - pamphlet with pictures - $20.00



•Rikai means Understanding - Cowra Japanese War Cemetery - $8.00



•Schoolboys Memoirs - pamphlet - $5.50



•Sing Me That Lovely Song Again - by Helga Griffin - $29.95



•Stalag Australia - by Barbara Winter - $33.00



•Tatura Secret Radio - by Haaken Nilsen - $18.50



•The Holy Land Called - by Paul Sauer - $44.00



•The Story of the Beilharz Family - by Paul Sauer - $33.00



•Transport of the Temple Society to Australia (both English and German language editions) - $20.00



•Unwanted Aliens - Yuriko Nagata - $30.00



•Walls of Wire - by Joyce Hammond - $27.50
Greetings from the Wide Brown.


Dachhase
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Re: German POWs in Australia

#18

Post by Dachhase » 19 Jul 2012, 15:26

@ Max especially.
Re the German war graves at Tatura: I can see no reason in the world why Erich Puschnus. who hanged himself in Tatura on 1 June 1945, has been accorded the military rank of Oberleutnant. In the first place, the officers were not transferred from Dhurringile to Tatura until 25 July 1945. At the beginning of June, there were no officers in Tatura. Secondly, I tracked his history fairly thoroughly, in case he had seen service before the war and was an Officer of the Reserve, but I could find no evidence of this. He came from the Memelland, and his associations were with East Prussia and Lithuania, and his life story, as given in various records, shows no time span for him to have served long enough to attain commissioned rank.
A personal aside: I had occasion to interview Bill Elmecker some thirty years ago. At that time, he had a reputation for being very prickly about interviews. So I went along accompanied by a former German naval officer, who instructed him to grant me an interview. (Of course, he had no formal authority to do this.) Things went well. The Austrian charm kicked in, and he kissed me on the cheek when we left. With time, he mellowed about the interviews.

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Max
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Re: German POWs in Australia

#19

Post by Max » 20 Jul 2012, 04:02

Dachhase wrote:@ Max especially.
In the first place, the officers were not transferred from Dhurringile to Tatura until 25 July 1945. At the beginning of June, there were no officers in Tatura. .
Dachhase
I'm not sure what you are getting at with these dates.

Also remember that there were no camps actually in Tatura.
According to the Tatura Museum site
The camps housing POW’s were:
Dhurringile Mansion: for German Officers and their batmen including Captain Detmers of HSK Kormoran
Camp 13 near Murchison: or 4,000 POW’s mainly Italian and German but also some Japanese after the Cowra breakout
Camp 6 near Graytown: a wood cutting camp in the bush for Italian, German and Finnish POW’s which included the crew of the Kormoran.
The camps housing Internees were:
Camps 1 and 2 near Tatura for single males, mostly German and Italian
Camp 3 near Rushworth for mostly German family groups
Camp 4 near Rushworth for Japanese family groups
Each housed approximately 1000 internees.
Camp 1 had a first class hospital.
Dhurringile is about 9Km due south of Tatura.
Internee Camps 1 and 2 were about 10Km to the south west; the POW camps more than 20 Km to the south.

http://www.onmydoorstep.com.au/heritage ... hurringile

As an aside:
As a kid in the 1950's I was shown a bolt sticking out of cellar wall at Dhurringile with a wire noose attached and was told [by other kids] that a German officer had hanged himself from it.
The main dining hall walls were covered with drawings and paintings done by POWs
Greetings from the Wide Brown.

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Max
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Re: German POWs in Australia

#20

Post by Max » 20 Jul 2012, 04:17

Dachhase wrote:@ Max especially.
Re the German war graves at Tatura: I can see no reason in the world why Erich Puschnus. who hanged himself in Tatura on 1 June 1945, has been accorded the military rank of Oberleutnant.
Well, the mystery deepens.
According to the national archive he was not a Prisoner of War , but an Internee; "captured" in Woolongong NSW and sent to Tatura. After a time in [camp 1?] hospital he was returned to to camp 1. Note that camp 1 was for internees not POWs.
He died 1/7/45 [by hanging] and was buried in Tatura cemetary 2/7/45.
http://recordsearch.naa.gov.au/scripts/ ... ?B=8613629
Your doubts about his rank seem quite reasonable.
When and where did he acquire it?
Max
Last edited by Max on 20 Jul 2012, 04:53, edited 1 time in total.
Greetings from the Wide Brown.

nobodyofnote
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Re: German POWs in Australia

#21

Post by nobodyofnote » 20 Jul 2012, 04:37

Max wrote:
Dachhase wrote:@ Max especially.
Re the German war graves at Tatura: I can see no reason in the world why Erich Puschnus. who hanged himself in Tatura on 1 June 1945, has been accorded the military rank of Oberleutnant.
Well, the mystery deepens.
According to the national archive he was not a Prisoner of War , but an Internee; "captured" in Woolongong NSW and sent to Tatura. After a time in [camp 1?] hospital he was returned to to camp 1. Note that camp 1 was for internees not POWs.
He died 1/7/45 [by hanging] and was buried in Tatura cemetary 2/7/45.
http://recordsearch.naa.gov.au/scripts/ ... ?B=8613629
Your doubts about his rank seem quite plausable.
Max
Is it possible he was on a covert mission? What was he doing in Wollongong?

Dachhase
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Re: German POWs in Australia

#22

Post by Dachhase » 20 Jul 2012, 06:41

@ Max: I quoted the dates to back up my contention that Puschnus was not an officer, in fact not a military man at all. He hanged himself in "Tatura" in June; all the officers - except perhaps one or two medical personnel - were still in Dhurringile. These Tatura camps still held civilians only. Therefore Puschnus was a civilian - unless somebody can show evidence that he held a reserve commission pre-war, and my research virtually rules out this possibility. As far as I can see, the fact that his grave shows an Iron Cross, which was used on military graves, and gives him a military rank is pure fantasy, arising from a clerical error somewhere.
The bolt in the cellar at Dhurringile may have been the point from which a man hanged himself, but he was not an officer. He was one of the orderlies. That was Obergefreiter Robert Schepler. This was the only death at Dhurringilfe from any cause.
As can be worked out from my previous post, only two officers died, both in Tatura, both after the end of the war. Werner Junghanns from uraemia, and Max Erber from suicide by hanging. Erber, however, was not with the Wehrmacht; he was not an officer of the Kriegsmarine. He was with the Handelsmarine, Fourth Officer of Adolph Woermann. He had survived the sinking of Arandora Star and arrived in Australia aboard the infamous Dunera.
In mid 1942, merchant navy men were reclassified for administrative purposes as service personnel, to get them out of the purely civilian camps. After the war, they reverted to civilian status, which meant that those who wished to do so were allowed to stay in Australia, unless there was particularly incriminating evidence against them.
I have seen copies of the record cards of all those who died, the Military Intelligence investigations into most of them, and the medical reports, as far as they are available, and civil coronary inquests into some of them.

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Max
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Re: German POWs in Australia

#23

Post by Max » 20 Jul 2012, 13:42

OK - I get it now - thanks for that.
I've tried to track him down through Volksbund Deutsche Kriegsgräberfürsorge but with no luck so far.
Maybe you will have better luck - or have you tried already?
Keep us posted.
Cheers
Max
Greetings from the Wide Brown.

Dachhase
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Re: German POWs in Australia

#24

Post by Dachhase » 20 Jul 2012, 15:14

Yes, Max. I tried the Volksbund Gräbersuche lists. He was not there, which is another indication that he was not a military man. Strangely enough, these lists also give the names of some civil internees, even infants, who died in internment camps. But again: I could not find Puschnus. This makes me wonder whether he might have been re-classified as Lithuanian, and later on, at the end of the war, as Russian. Or that he feared that he might be.

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Re: German POWs in Australia

#25

Post by Mannheim » 21 Jul 2012, 05:44

I'm with nobodyofnote on this; I can't get my head around covert operations emanting from Wollongong. Dapto possibly but Wollongong-never.
Kein Irrtum ist so groß, der nicht seinen Zuhörer hat.

Dachhase
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Re: German POWs in Australia

#26

Post by Dachhase » 21 Jul 2012, 14:18

Before speculation runs wild on the unfortunate Puschnus:
NAA (National Archives of Australia), Melbourne repository, digitised on internet, but accessible only through the Archives website, for which I have already given the link: compiled from Series MP1103/1: Item PWN1281, and Series MP1103/2: Item PWN1281: Erich Hans Puschnus, born "Memel, Germany", 9 January 1909. Profession: engineer. (No information concerning the type of engineer; possibly only a mechanic.)
Arrived in Australia in March 1930 aboard Oder. (My experience suggests to me that he was a seaman deserter, but proof is lacking) He did not take out Australian citizenship, although he could have done so from 1935. He was apparently arrested on 5 June 1940 and transferred to internment at Orange, NSW, on 6 June. There were a lot of new internments at this time, which had little to do with a person's activities, but with the changed war situation after the fall of France.
His place of residence at that time was 39 Campbell Street, Wollongong. On his record form and card it is noted that he was unmarried and he did not give the name of any next of kin. (Either he was a loner or he was hiding from somebody or something.) On the list of his property, a diagonal line was drawn across a blank space. No bank account, no tools of trade, not even any cash listed. If the form is correct, he owned no more than clothing and toiletries that could have been packed into one or two suitcases, and he had no friends who would have taken care of any property that he had.
On the first page of the green forms (AA. Form A.111, in MP1103/2) which internees were given to fill out, he stated: Military Service: Nil, and signed the page. (Of course, some men lied; I have evidence of that, but most complied.)
Although it was compulsory for German citizens to register with the Consulate-General from about 1938, he probably did not do so, but this is not certain, as the records are incomplete. (Series C443, Items commencing with G1. A Sydney file now transferred to Canberra) This would indicate that he did not belong to the NSDAP or DAF, as records for members are fairly complete. However, on one form internees were asked whether they wanted their governments to be notified that they were interned, and he indicated that he did want this notification to be made.
There are two other files concerning him; they have been made available for public access, but they are not on internet.
In Canberra: Series A367: Item C68720: Puschnus Eric [sic]. Date range 1940-1945. This number indicates a file from the New South Wales branch of the Commonwealth Security Service. Evidently, he attracted no notice before 1940.
The other, sadly, is Series A1380: Item EP2060: Funds of Deceased (local) Internees. Date 1945. (EP = Enemy Property)
And no, he was not a spy. That was not the way the German espionage systems worked in Australia.

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Re: German POWs in Australia

#27

Post by nobodyofnote » 21 Jul 2012, 14:26

Dachhase, thanks for clearing that up.

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Max
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Re: German POWs in Australia

#28

Post by Max » 21 Jul 2012, 16:03

Thanks also from me Dachhase
BTW I've just noticed that I posted Puschnus' death and burial as July 1945 ; I should have been June 1945
http://forum.axishistory.com/viewtopic. ... 1#p1717451
Max
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Dachhase
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Re: German POWs in Australia

#29

Post by Dachhase » 21 Jul 2012, 16:16

No worries. If anyone wants specific information on Germans in Australia, ca 1910-1950, I shall be happy to oblige if I can. Mainly in the field of internees, POW, membership and activities of political organisations, commercial activity, refugees and espionage.
(I'm not much good on cultural and social activities, but this forum does not deal with these topics.)

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Max
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Re: German POWs in Australia

#30

Post by Max » 01 Aug 2012, 15:20

I put in a request to the Commonwealth War Graves Commission for information about Puschnus ; reply as follows
Thank you for your e mail of 28th July. Please accept my apologies for not including a link to our German equivalent in my earlier e mail.
http://www.volksbund.de/volksbund/volksbund-en.html

With regard to your query and as explained earlier however, we simply maintain the grave and have little in paperwork. The information contained on the only hand written card which we hold is as follows:

Name: Puschnus

German Air Force [my emphasis]

Rank : Oberlt

Initials: E H

Cemetery: Tatura German Mil. Cty

Plot: Row B Grave No 16 Country: Australia 501

Commune: Victoria Authority: RA4 12.10.73

Report no - Cross RA 45960

Age - File No -



I am sorry not to be of more help but hope this is of some assistance.

Yours sincerely

Julie Somay (Mrs)

Enquiries Administrator

Commonwealth War Graves Commission
2 Marlow Road, Maidenhead, Berkshire, SL6 7DX, United Kingdom
Tel: +44 (0) 1628 507200 | Facsimile: +44 (0) 1628 771208 | Website: http://www.cwgc.org
So now he was an airman? - what next?

I have also put in a request with the Volksbund even though both Dachhase and I could find no mention in a seach of the site - nothing to report yet.
You would expect Volksbund to have some record of him, as the Commonwealth War Graves Commission is acting on its behalf.


Max
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