During WWII, German coal mines and steel mills in the Saar Basin were manned to a large extent by slave-laborers, mostly French, Russian, and Polish POWs, as well as civilians from those three countries. As early as 1944 many of these laborers had escaped their job sites and roamed the forests between Saarbruecken Germany and St. Avold France, often forming bands or groups for mutual assistance. The accompanying letter from 6/27/1944 was a German police report which dealt with their difficulty in capturing one group of these escapees. Of great interest to this group is the second paragraph which is loosely translated as: The leader of this band can be without a doubt an American, armed with two pistols, first seen on 5/31/1944 in the Farschweiler woods. He has since been often seen in this area, but has evaded many attempts at capture. Does anyone on this group have any knowledge of an American, Brit, or Canadian, probably a pilot, who roamed the woods around Saarbruecken with a group of escaped laborers in mid-1944? (I have reason to believe that my uncle Ralph Vincent Shaffer, pilot of a B-24 which crashed in this area on 26 August that year, also had contact with these escapees. His chute was seen to open just before his plane crashed in the French village of Schoeneck, but he was never found).
Posted on: Wed, 02 Jul 2014 23:02:03 +0000
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