225611 L/Bmdr. James William Gardiner British Army 28 Field Regiment Royal Artillery from:Birmingham (d.20th Aug 1944) I have only just found my great uncle James Gardiner and discovered his war grave site. Upon starting this research I was saddened to find out that my great uncle died in stalag 344 {stalag v111b}. It has since transpired that some time in 1942 he was reported missing and later turned up on casualty lists as a pow in PG 53. I am still investigating and awaiting war office records to fully explain how or why James ended up in such circumstances. I do not know any details of his service capture or cause of death at present. If any one has any knowledge of the event that occurred on 20th August 1944 or of how 28th Field regiment came to be captured, I would be eternally grateful.
I have recently traced the brief details of imprisonment in both PG53 in Italy and Stalag VIIIb of L/bdr James William Gardiner. James was killed by a US air raid on 20th August 1944. I am hoping that someone somewhere knew and remembered my great uncle and maybe there is a picture of him, I have no idea of what he looked like.
Editor's Note: In May 2009 a list of British POW's names was found in a bottle partly buried in the ground near Monowitz camp by Dominik Synowiec. It is thought that the POWs on the list were probably working in the IG Farben rubber factory part of the camp. An historian at the Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum believes that the list is authentic and he is positive that one of the names on that list -`Gardiner' - is James William Gardiner, who was killed in a US bombing raid on the camp. The following article appeared in a german newspaper in 2009:
"A list of 17 names believed to refer to World War II British prisoners of war held by Nazi Germany near its infamous Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp has surfaced in Poland, an Auschwitz museum historian said Tuesday. The list of names on the left-hand margin of the card reads as follows, three of them illegible: "Osborne, Lawrence, Gardiner, Lamb, Symes, Saunders, Dunne, Dunn, Hutton, Holmes, ..., ..., Clark, Manson, ..., Auty, Steinger." "I was looking for something else entirely," Synowiec told AFP Tuesday. He says he discovered the list of names by chance under debris inside a WWII-era bunker located on the site of the Nazi German Monowitz prisoner of war (POW) camp holding primarily British citizens. The POW camp in question was located next to the Monowitz slave labour camp, known as Auschwitz III, a branch of the main Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp holding labourers working at the nearby Nazi-run IG Farben rubber factory. Historian Setkiewicz was able to determine the fate of a man bearing the name Gardiner, believed to be James William Gardiner of Britain's Royal Artillery, who died in a US bombing raid and is buried in Krakow's Rakowicki cemetery. A separate list of seven Auschwitz prisoners surfaced last week after workers found it packed inside a bottle fixed in the mortar of a wall of a building in the southern Polish town of Oswiecim. Now part of a local high school, the building had served as a warehouse for the camp's Nazi guards during World War II. Three of the men on the bottle list are alive, including Frenchman Albert Veissid, now a sprightly 84-year-old contacted by AFP at his home in Allauch in southeastern France and two Poles. One of the men named on the list has passed away while the fate of the remaining three remains unclear. Nazi Germany systematically killed more than one million people, mostly European Jews, at the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp located in the then Nazi-occupied southern Polish town of Oswiecim between 1940 and 1945. The site was part of German dictator Adolf Hitler's plan of genocide against European Jews, six million of whom perished at the hands of the Nazis during World War II." - AFP (news@thelocal.de)
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