Thread: German gunner’s prison camp story

Coincidence led to German gunner’s prison camp story (From The Northern Echo)

A HISTORIAN piecing together the story of a wartime Army camp has received details of how one German army corporal ended up there as a prisoner.

Eileen O’Hara, who is leading the history project, was thrilled to hear about Joseph Dagner’s time in Stainton Camp, near Barnard Castle.

The news came from retired police officer Bill Hardman, who served in Barnard Castle for four years from 1966, but moved away and served in the Hertfordshire force from 1973.

While there, he became friends with Dagner’s stepson and, after learning of the history project on the internet, passed on the story.

“The way Joseph Dagner came here as a prisoner of war was quite remarkable,” said Mrs O’Hara.

“We would never have heard about him if Bill Hardman had not moved away from Teesdale and got to know the stepson.”

Captured prisoners were held in an annexe to Stainton Camp known as Blackbeck Camp, so it is being included in the history of all the regiments and civilian workers based there during and immediately after the Second World War.

Corporal Dagner was a marine gunner near Calais, working on huge guns which fired shells over the Channel into southern England.

He was captured there by Canadian troops in September 1944 and put on a ship bound for Canada.

But the vessel was torpedoed by a German U-boat off the coast of Northern Ireland.

He and other survivors were picked up and landed there, before being sent to England.

After spells in other camps, he arrived at Stainton.

Cpl Dagner opted to stay in this country after the war.

He married a widow with a three-year-old son, Peter Harwig.

The boy eventually became Bill Hardman’s friend and told him the full story.

Dagner died in about 1970.

Mr Hardman, who was a superintendent before he retired from the police in 1995, and now lives in Stevenage, said: “When I was a bobby in Barnard Castle in the Sixties, Stainton Camp was full of soldiers and I often had to go there.

“It is a coincidence that, years later, I got to know so much about one of the prisoners of war who was held there.”

The project, run by the Stainton Grove Community Association, is funded by the Heritage Lottery Fund, and supported by Groundwork West Durham and Darlington.

Indeed interesting