Hitler may never have invaded Britain, yet between 1939 and 1945, Essex was occupied by thousands of German and Italian soldiers.

Soldiers in what became known as “Hitler’s last army”, they were the prisoners-of-war, who lived in camps scattered round the county, often working on local farms or or in factories.

They were the enemy, yet they became part of the scenery, and in many cases they were friends to the communities where they were imprisoned. Few of them were strutting Nazis.

A new book, Hitler’s Last Army, provides a comprehensive survey of the POW camps in Essex and elsewhere. Author Robin Quinn has talked to dozens of former prisoners of war.

Overall, their testimonies build up into a surprisingly heartwarming tale.

The British tend to view prisoner camps in terms of endless escape attempts.

The Great Escape and Colditz have perpetually captured our imaginations.

The Germans who talked to the author have a quite different perspective. For the most part, they regarded being a prisoner of war as a stroke of luck.

Being on an island, they had little hope of a sustained escape, but in any case, escape was the last thing on their mind. Most were ordinary blokes who had little love of the Nazi powermen, and were just glad to be safely out of the war. Some of them look back to their time in camp as the best years of their lives.

For British citizens, fraternisation with the enemy was strictly prohibited. Even talking was illegal, unless in connection with work. Yet they found ways of practising silent kindness.

One prisoner, who worked alongside a group of local women in a factory, remembers: “The women weren’t supposed to fraternise, so they couldn’t give you a cigarette.

“But they’d light one for me and put it in a place where we could see it and pick it up, all ready lit, because we were not allowed to have matches.

Sometimes one of them would put a sandwich down, push it towards you, and walk away.”

Sympathies for the prisoners were heightened after a number of incidents in which good deeds were widely reported in the press.

In Kent, a lorry carrying 30 hop-pickers went over the edge of a bridge into a river.

A party of Germans working nearby plunged straight into the river.

Some smashed the back of the lorry to rescue those trapped inside. Others dived to the bottom of the river to haul out those who had gone under. Thanks to their action, there were no fatalities.

Most prisoners worked hard, gave no trouble, and usually endeared themselves to local communities. Yet they were no pushovers. On the rare occasions when they were mistreated, they knew how to get their own back. One prisoner, Peter Roth, at High Garrett working camp, near Braintree, was working on a farm on a hot summer’s day. The prisoners asked the farmer for a glass of water, but were rebuffed with the words: “Bloody Nazis.”

Peter Roth recalls: “We were planting lettuces.

After that, we cut the roots off three out of four lettuces before planting them. After a few hours, the farmer inspected them, went ‘tut, tut,” jumped into his car and went racing off the get some chemicals to put on the wilting vegetables.”

There was a tragic side to the prisoner experience. In the final years of the war, German cities were bombed relentlessly. Tens of thousands of civilians perished, most notoriously in Dresden and Hamburg.

All too often, they were the wives and children of German prisoners.

High Garrett POW camp stood within sight of the airbase at Wethersfield, in north Essex. By day the USAF, and by night the RAF, took off on a conveyorbelt basis to bomb Germany.

Eberhard Wendler, a Pow at High Garrett, recalls the agony induced by this sight.

“Every day we saw hundreds of these planes going off to our homeland to smash everything to pieces. A lot of prisoners received letters to say their parents had been killed, children killed, wife killed, house and everything smashed to pieces. And we saw those planes flying off every single day.”

Despite this, at the end of the war, many prisoners had become so naturalised that they decided to stay on in Britain. Quite a few married Essex girls, and became lifelong residents.

Others went back to Germany, but left a legacy.

One of them was Eberhard Fischer. A submariner, Erhard was imprisoned at Langdon Hills, where he swapped a submarine for a lorry. Much of his time was spent moving men and materials between camps.

He kept this job despite one unfortunate incident when, in an incident of pure farce, he backed into the toilet block, scattering those inside in panic.

In 1947, all prison restrictions were lifted.

Eberhard found a job working for a local greengrocer. He has remained firm friends with the family ever since.

Eberhard’s last role as a truck driver was to transport camp inmates to Laindon station, for repatriation.

The last man of all to go was Eberhard himself. In June 1947 he delivered his truck back to base, then boarded the train for Harwich and home.

Not, however, before he had left a unique record of camp life.

A budding artist, Eberhard, created a visual record of camp routines in the shape of a series of cartoons. They bring back to life an almost forgotten part of Essex history.

They also help to dispel an utterly unfair myth – that Germans have no sense of humour.

ý Hitler’s Last Army: German POWs in Britain by Robin Quinn, is published by The History Press at £17.99