BAOR - Post War Germany - British sector

After returning from Burma, having been away for 3.5 years, my father was posted to Hameln / Hannover as an EDO - Executive Demolition Officer.

Being a Sapper with, by now, extensive wartime experience of demolition, UXB's and explosives in general, his job was to demolish the substantial Nazi infrastructure and ensure it could never be put to use again.

As he put it "we made a lot of big bangs". He also took many interesting photographs and kept the scale plans of the structures to be demolished, which detailed how much explosive was to be placed and at which locations. Some were filled 2/3 with water to make use of the larger shock wave this would create.

In the 1970s I discovered a roll of b/w film in a bureau, developed it - wondering what might appear - and it proved to be photographs of these buildings. An interesting conversation followed.

In the 80's a scheme was announced to compensate those who fought in the war for their deafness, and he was certainly one such. I obtained the forms, explained the process and left him to fill them in and submit.

On a visit home some months later I asked if he heard anything back, only to be told that the forms were in the drawer where I had left them. When asked why he had not claimed, he replied simply "I was just doing my job".

I knew, and he knew - we all knew that there might be a scheme, but he did not really approve of it and was not going to play ball !

The photos and documents below are mostly those which came to light only last year (2024) as we finally got to make a start on "sorting the loft". An exciting find for us as we had never seen them before.

Also of interest and a puzzle is that I can find no information at all, anywhere about the role of EDO's. The RE museum had not heard of them and searching the internet draws a complete blank. Even ChatGPT find nothing, suggesting there is nothing on the WWW.

I have his posting order which clearly states EDO, but have not been able to relate this to either BAOR or the Control Commission Germany, despite searching a number of books on the subject.

The search goes on - it is likely that there were a number of EDO's, given the size of the task.