Kestell-Cornish, Reverend Geoffrey

Geoffrey Kestell-Cornish

Family/Last name:
Kestell-Cornish
Forename(s) and initial(s):
Geoffrey
Nationality:
British
Camp
Stalag VIIIB Lamsdorf / Stalag 344
Working Party
E538 Sosnowitz
Data sources
View a commemorative certificate for this prisoner

The wartime diary of Reverend Kestell-Cornish, edited and published by James Coulter under the name Guests of Hitler’s Reich: The Wartime Diary of Devonian Army Chaplain Geoffrey Kestell-Cornish with Contributions from Fellow Prisoners of War:

When, at the outbreak of WWII in response to an appeal from his bishop, Devonian churchman Geoffrey Kestell-Cornish volunteered to become an army chaplain, he was not to know that virtually his entire career as such would be spent as a prisoner of war behind the barbed wire of the notorious prison camp Stalag VIIIB at Lamsdorf in Poland. In 1944 he was transferred to a POW working camp at Sosnowitch. In January 1945, with the Red Army making rapid advances into Poland, the inmates of E5-38 at Sosnowitch were forced to evacuate. Liberation this was not but the start of an epic journey of some 400 miles on foot from Poland throughout Czechoslovakia into Southern Germany. Written in pencil in a tattered school exercise book, Padre Geoffrey Kestell-Cornish’s day by day account of the long march is a poignant tale of dogged courage and endurance in the face of grinding adversity when the human spirit was often tested to its limits and beyond.

Guests of Hitler’s Reich is published and distributed by James Coulter in paperback format: 210x148mm with 97 pages, 12 b/w photos, 3 line figures and a map at £8.25 from booksellers or by post within the UK at £9 from the publisher. To order, contact James Coulter at [email protected]

Kestell-Cornish is mentioned in The Clarion, number 5 page 13.

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