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Near the end of World War 2, as the Reich was collapsing and the German army was in retreat, the Nazi authorities stopped supplying their prisoner of war camps. https://nationalpost.com/news/liberation-1945/the-untold-story-of-how-canadian-pows-helped-liberate-the-women-of-ravensbruck-concentration-camp
Prisoners who were already in desperate straights began to starve. In the concentration camps, all order, such as it was, was collapsing.
In that environment, the Red Cross came up with a plan. They convinced the Germans to allow prisoners of war to drive relief trucks through the bombed-out country to re-supply the starving camps.
The Red Cross scoured the camps for available drivers. Most of the British couldn't drive and the Germans didn't trust the Americans. So it ended up being "a Canadian affair," Canadian dispatch rider Robert Kerr said years later.
“Canadians," he said, "you can be damn sure every one of them can drive a vehicle.”
For months, the Canadians — POW like Walter Moss, Samuel Neilly, Fred McMullen and Kerr — drove all over Germany, sometimes going 48 hours or more without sleeping, ducking allied bombing runs, hijackers and fleeing German troops.
It's no exaggeration to say they kept hundreds, maybe thousands of POWs alive to see the end of the war.
I never would have known anything about the Canadian relief drivers had it not been for a stray mention in a 1945 New Yorker story about Ravensbruck, an all-women's POW camp in northern Germany.
In the last dying days of the war, the Canadians rescued 300 women from the camp — all of them starving, many beaten and barely alive — and drove them across Germany and into Switzerland and freedom.
“The Canadians were like the first figures in a good dream,” one of the women told The New Yorker weeks after the rescue. They recognized them by the red maple leaves on their arms.
“I thought it was a dream,” one of the rescued women said years later. “Really, I did not believe it. It was surreal. We went forward and we saw the soldiers … and they cried when they saw us. When I saw them crying, I began to think it was real.”
