THE memoir written by the German officers and men held prisoner at Raikeswood Camp has proved to be a uniquely important resource in our understanding of the conditions they and thousands of other prisoners experienced during the First World War, writes historian Alan Roberts.

For all the detailed accounts of daily life the book edited by Fritz Sachsse and the enigmatic Lieutenant Cossmann reveals remarkably little about the identities of the prisoners themselves. Fritz Sachsse was a successful naval officer in the German Imperial Navy, but until very recently nothing more was known about his co-editor Cossmann besides his rank.

The names of just four German officers were included in the main text of their book Kriegsgefangen in Skipton. Naturally enough Sachsse featured as the Senior German Officer. Captured in 1914 in a joint British and Japanese attack on a German colony in China, Sachsse defied logic by attempting a daring overland escape across Asia in the hope of reaching Germany. When news of his attempt reached the ears of the British and Russian authorities, he commenced an equally audacious attempt to return to Germany via America which involved crossing both the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. He was only discovered as a stowaway on a Norwegian vessel when a Royal Navy boarding party searched his ship shortly after it had left Orkney when he was just a couple of days’ journey away from safety.

The German memoir was a collaborative effort featuring drawings, poems and articles written by over 50 of the officers held at Skipton. Each contribution was duly credited, but only by each officer’s surname. For example, an officer called Dunkelgod was one of the most prolific artists and several of his line drawings have already appeared on these pages.

The tragedy of the Spanish flu epidemic wreaked its deadly toll on Skipton Camp. The names of the 47 German officers and men who died are dutifully recorded in a roll of honour contained in the German book. This list revealed the town where each of the victims lived as well as his rank and unit. Two of the victims were airmen while four of the deceased were officers serving on board German submarines.

The names of 81 officers and men from Raikeswood Camp were recorded in the Admissions Book for Keighley War Hospital where they had been sent for treatment during the flu epidemic. Despite the high mortality rate the German officers were pleased with the standard of care they received.

It might be expected that British record keeping would extend to the other prisoners held at Skipton. Unfortunately these records were destroyed in a bombing raid on the War Office records repository in Arnside Street in south London. during the Second World War.

The Craven Herald contained the names of four German officers who were believed to have escaped from Raikeswood Camp in the summer of 1918. According to the following week’s Clitheroe Advertiser Second Lieutenants Hans Wallbaum and Hans Laskus entered The Black Bull at Chatburn claiming to be officers from the Royal Flying Corps who were inspecting the area. The landlord did not believe them and called the local policeman PC Hawkwood who arrested the two escapers. The German memoir published two years later maintained that they had pretended to be American airmen and that the landlady was in tears as they were led away.

Textbooks on searching for missing relatives held prisoner of war advise researchers to search the database held by the International Red Cross in Geneva. The author tried on many occasions over several years to search for Sachsse and Cossmann, but to no avail. While searching for the equally elusive Dunkelgod, he happened upon a card in an index and a link to some typed documents. The typed documents were in fact copies of the documents destroyed in the Blitz in 1940 which had been routinely passed through to the Red Cross. Here was information about Second Lieutenant Erich Dunkelgod: his full name, date of birth, place of birth, unit, place of capture, details of wounds, etc. On the same page was the mysterious Willi Cossmann, a schoolteacher from Spandau near Berlin who was also captured at Cambrai. There were very many pages, over 42, 000 in fact, but the author was able in the course of one winter to find full details of 99 per cent of the German prisoners held at Skipton.

Skipton has thus achieved another remarkable first. Not only is there a unique record in the German diary of life at Skipton, but there is also an equally unique record containing full details of the 910 prisoners who were held at Raikeswood.