Photograph of Capt Niemeyer, Commandant of Holzminden POW camp, around 1918

This image shows the notorious commander of Holzminden Prisoner of War Camp Karl Niemeyer.

Holzminden Prisoner of War camp was designed as an escape proof camp for officers and operated from September 1917 to December 1918. Niemeyer returned from America before the First World War and was a proficient English speaker. He would make his authority known issuing orders to place men in solitary confinement at a whim or in a hole in the ground. A prisoner of the camp James Bennett who would go on to work with MI9 lecturing on escape techniques would describe him as a ‘bombastic devil’.