Otto Muthesius
Ottfried Muthesius was born on 21th April 1925 and was drafted into the army in Fulda, Germany in September 1943. In 1945, as an Officer Cadet Muthesius was taken prisoner by the US army near Wetzlar on 27 March 1945 and eventually brought to France. Ottfried Muthesius arrived in Voves, France as a prisoner of war (POW) on 11 th April 1945. It was there he experienced the end of the Second World War. On the 7 th June 1945 he began to keep a diary, which was mainly for his mother Erna Muthesius. The 20-year-old worried about his mother as she lived in Eisenach - a Soviet- occupied zone. Muthesius also wrote that he was considering volunteering for mine clearing.
Although very dangerous, the prospect of more rations and better treatment convinced him. At the POW camp he volunteered to help to clear the beaches of mines and died on such a mine clearing mission on 25 th September 1945 in Trouville-sur-Mer. Mine clearance In September 1945, Muthesius and his comrades were amongst the POW that volunteered to clear mines. There was an estimated 500,000 hectares of land in France were littered with mines, especially in the coastal regions. According to the Geneva Convention, "no prisoner of war may be employed on labour which is of an unhealthy or dangerous nature." However, in the early summer of 1945, the French foreign minister Georges Bidault obtained a respective agreement from the American and British governments. Due to the higher food rations, more than 40,000 POW volunteered for mine clearing duties. But it remained a very dangerous job, with ten percent of these prisoners lost their lives in the course of this work.