A Man Worth Knowing: The Memoirs of Hans-Georg Neumann

J.L. Granatstein is a professor of history at York University, the
co-author of the Dictionary of Canadian Military History and Empire to
Umpire: Canada and the World to the 1990s, and the author of The Good
Fight.

This slim volume is the memoir of a German soldier who, taken prisoner
and sent to Canada during the war, later returned as an immigrant and
built a new life. Neumann was a professional soldier who enlisted in the
German army in 1933 and became a signals officer. He served in
Hitler’s headquarters (and admired the Fuehrer as one who gets things
done) and then with Rommel in the Afrikakorps until he was captured in
late 1941. Then it was POW camps in South Africa and in Ontario’s
Muskoka district, where he ran a pig farm that fed his officer comrades.
His is a good account of life in the camp, a relatively easy time of
walks in the woods (on his word of honor to return) in one of the
prettier parts of Canada.

Taken with Canada, after the war Neumann and his wife immigrated and
made a new life. After his retirement from his food importing business,
Neumann went to university, made an impression on his professors and the
younger students at Erindale College, and set out to write his story. He
has done that very well indeed, simply setting out one man’s view of
war and peace and adding to our understanding of what Canada looked like
to a POW and postwar immigrant.