Phil Lamason: Documentary of Dannevirke man who talked firing squad out of shooting him re-released

Flying Officer Phil Lamason (wearing flying cap) with his Wellington bomber crew at RAF No. 218 Squadron in late 1941. Photo / Phil Lamason Heritage Trust.

He was probably known as a reluctant hero and his story is not that well known, but those who knew him are keen to ensure that he will never be forgotten.

Phil Lamason, who moved to Dannevirke a few years after returning from World War II, had an incredible tale of bravery while incarcerated in one of the most horrifying of German camps.

Yet he never spoke about it until near the end of his life.

That was when film-maker Mike Dorsey, a grandson of one of the men who survived that time, was filming a documentary and interviewing survivors of that experience.

The documentary, The Lost Airmen of Buchenwald, was released in 2011, a year before Lamason's death.

It has been re-released, with new information and a new interview with one of the surviving airmen who hadn't been part of the original interviews.

Dorsey said the documentary was re-released in the United States in June and is now signed to an international distributor looking for buyers in other countries, including New Zealand.

So, what is it that makes Lamason's story so compelling?

Phil Lamason Heritage Trust chairman Mike Harold, who grew up in the neighbourhood, said the story was a remarkable one.

In 1944, Lamason's plane was shot down and after being sheltered by the French Resistance, he was captured and taken to Buchenwald, a concentration camp near the city of Weimar in east-central Germany.

Flight Sergeant Phil Lamason beside a Stirling bomber at RAF No. 218 Squadron in 1942. Photo / Phil Lamason Heritage Trust

"They were wrongly incarcerated," Harold said.

"They were specified as terror flyers because of the bombing that was happening in Germany.

"The Allied men who had been taken captive when their planes were shot down were classified as police prisoners and therefore terror flyers and basically saboteurs.

"They were classed differently from what their prisoner-of-war status should have entitled them."

The 168 Allied airmen banded together, led by Lamason, who Harold said co-ordinated a non-violent disobedient approach to what was required of them.

Through a sympathiser inside the camp, they were able to get a message out to the local Luftwaffe who then ensured the men were transferred to bona fide POW stalags, where they remained until their release.

What was even more remarkable about the story is that Lamason at one point was within moments of being shot by a firing squad, yet he managed to talk an officer into disobeying those orders.

Harold believed he had an innate ability to understand people.

"It was late in the war. The situation in Buchenwald was that the supply of food and the management of things was beginning to break down."

He said Lamason tapped into a growing mood among SS officers intent on avoiding being held accountable for war crimes, telling them that choosing not to shoot him would work in their favour.

"It was a skill not a lot of people have – the ability to very quickly sum up what people are about."

Lamason's leadership skills have been held up as an example, but Harold said it was innate rather than something he'd learnt.

His reluctance to tell his story meant that even his family didn't know the full scope of what he did in Buchenwald.

It didn't help that many of those who went through that experience were told never to speak of it amidst efforts to develop certain technologies.

Or that was the theory.

"There's some pretty good evidence supporting those theories."

Harold said that at the end of the war, both the Americans and the Soviets wanted some of the Nazi scientists who had been developing rockets to help develop both the space and the atomic bomb programmes.

Some of those scientists had connections to the Buchenwald camp, so any revelation of mistreatment of the airmen in the camp would have created major political problems between the scientists and those in charge of the programmes.

Lamason's biography and the story of his experience in Buchenwald was told in the book I Would Not Step Back, by Hilary Pedersen, released four years ago.

Harold said the trust was formed with a view to also help preserve and present other important stories from the district.

He also wanted to see Lamason's story used in school curriculums, particularly in the local area, not only for what it could teach children about leadership, but as an object lesson in many ways.

He said Lamason was often concerned with how a country like Germany that was educated and supposedly Christian, could go on to allow such atrocities; and that people should be watchful of those in power to avoid such a thing happening again.

But his final message was something he felt even more strongly about.

"You never give in to bullies. You've got to stand up to them. Never step back!

"That was his message."