Alfred Hummel (1898 – 1954), the last German Prisoner of War

It is tempting to think that when a war is declared to be over, the combatant sides would be eager to exchange their prisoners as quickly as possible. After all, why would the winning side want to saddle itself with extra mouths to feed? But that doesn’t seem to always be the case. After the First World War, France retained its German combatant prisoners of war until the spring of 1920 and moved other rank prisoners to the northern battlefields and put them to work, partly to put pressure on the German authorities to accept the terms of the Treaty of Versailles.

It was only in 1930 that the French authorities were able to assure the Germans categorically that every prisoner they had had been released. Anyone who hadn’t made it back to the Fatherland could be presumed to be dead. Imagine the stir, then, when in May 1932 a soldier by the name of Oscar Daubmann made his way back to Germany, claiming to have spent the last sixteen years in a French PoW camp.

Daubmann’s tale was one of misfortune and fantastic derring-do. Captured in October 1916 at the Battle of the Somme, he was sent to a camp, where he killed a guard during an unsuccessful attempt to escape. The French Authorities came down hard on him, sentencing him to twenty years’ hard labour and shipping him off to Algeria. After being kept in solitary confinement, tortured and starved, the unfortunate Daubmann was transferred to a prison tailor’s shop where he worked until he was able to effect his escape. Still, he had to walk some 3,000 miles along the African coastline before being picked up by an Italian ship which took him to Naples. He then made his way back to Germany.

Daubmann was treated as a national hero, partly because his remarkable return gave a scintilla of hope to those families whose relatives were missing that they might still be in camps somewhere in the French empire and partly because it fed nascent anti-French sentiments. The remarkable return of Daubmann seemed to suggest that the French had been lying. In particular, the Nazis used him as a poster-boy, a living epitome of German strength and virtue, and he regaled thousands at their rallies with stories of his ill-treatment at the hands of the French. A book detailing his life story was rushed into print and sold 180,000 copies and Daubmann was made an honorary citizen of 18 towns and cities.         

However, not everyone was convinced by his story. Supporters of a rapprochement with France began to make enquiries of the French authorities about Daubmann and drew a blank. The French notified Berlin that they could find no record of an Oscar Daubmann, a claim that was poo-pooed by the Nazis as a typical example of French duplicity. Supposed former comrades, though, failed to recognise him. In September 1932 he was unmasked as a fraud.

There are two versions of how this came about, one prosaic and the other more dramatic. It may well have been that the weight of evidence that the French authorities were able to produce convinced the naysayers amongst the powers that be. The other version is that when Daubmann was about to begin his usual account of his amazing experiences in a Bavarian town, a man stood up and shouted, “You are not Daubmann. You are my son, Alfred Hummel, Get down from that platform, you faker!”. Daubmann fainted and confessed all.     

The truth soon came out. Daubmann was really Alfred Hummel, a tailor from Offenbach, who had spent ten years in jail on a burglary charge. He had never served in the army and upon his release, had bought a second-hand army uniform in a shop. Inside he found some papers relating to Daubmann, who had been killed in the war, and decided to assume his identity.  

Quite why is not known but the Nazis came down on him like a ton of bricks. He was sentenced, in July 1933, to two and a half years in prison on charges of serious forgery and fraud and, upon his release, was held in preventive detention at Schwabisch Hall until his release by American forces in 1945. He worked as a tailor until his death in 1954.

If you enjoyed this, why not try Fifty Scams and Hoaxes by Martin Fone?

https://www.troubador.co.uk/bookshop/business/fifty-scams-and-hoaxes/