Quote:
Originally Posted by Feuer Frei!
No charges were ever brought against Detmers, despite some suspicion about possible ‘foul play’ against the Sydney, a controversy that still rages to this day, and the Australian Government finally released him and his crew on January 21 1947, nearly 21 months after the end of the war.
Some people, again, not all of them Germans, think this prolonged internment was a form of revenge.
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I looked into this a bit more and have not found one reference to any person who thinks the treatment of Detmers and his crew by the Australians was a "form of revenge".
They were treated in accordance with the Geneva convention, were housed, fed, clothed, kept in a POW camp with other prisoners. One seaman died of lung cancer and Detmers was hospitalised for three months after a stroke. All were repatriated in 1947 more or less at the same time as every other Axis prisoner held by the western alllies.
A real example of a "form of revenge" is the way the Germans treated their prisoners. During Barbarossa in 1941, 3,300,000 Soviet soldiers were captured by the German Army. By march 1942, 2,800,000 had died in German POW camps.