An old photograph recently published in this newspaper has revealed a tale of an Ilkley serviceman experiencing the horrors of a German concentration camp.

Flying Officer Edgar Jackson was ordered to bale out of his Lancaster bomber on a mission over France in 1944.

Despite several weeks on the run – with the help of the French Resistance – he found himself handed over to the Gestapo, and kept in solitary confinement in prison, along with other captured servicemen.

As American forces advanced on Paris, the SS took them to a railway, packed the men into cattle trucks, and sent them to Buchenwald concentration camp, in Lower Silesia.

A photograph of Mr Jackson, with his wife and new baby, was featured with an article in the Ilkley Gazette in May 1945.

The picture, missing its details, recently appeared on our Across the Years page.

Researcher, Richard Thackrah, who has been busy studying back-copies of the Ilkley Gazette and Wharfedale & Aireborough Observer newspapers from the First and Second World Wars, recognised the undated picture, and was able to track down the original article.

Mr Jackson, a former Bradford City policeman, received his RAF training in Canada, passing out in 1943.

But it was the following year when he fell into enemy hands.

Conditions at Buchenwald were very bad, he said in the original article. The camp was built to hold 9,000 people, but there were 45,000 there.

“Our food was coffee made from husks, a litre of soup made out of grass and cabbage leaves and turnip, a fifth of a German loaf, and a little margarine,” he said. The Allied servicemen, however, were not forced to work as other prisoners were.

Mr Jackson told how prisoners were shot or hanged every day, and the chimneys of the crematorium were always smoking.

The camp also housed a block where horrendous experiments were carried out on prisoners.

“These men would be well fed for about a month until they were normal and then infected with disease. Many died,” said Mr Jackson.

After a fortnight in a smaller camp, the servicemen were taken to the big camp and placed in a block crammed with 800 prisoners, who slept on tiny shelf-like beds with no pillows.

“We must have looked like monkeys in cages,” said Mr Jackson.

Of that number, 500 were gypsy children whose parents had been gassed at death camp Auschwitz.

Some of the prisoners who had been there had a number tattooed on one arm – and they told fellow prisoners how six million Jews had been killed at Auschwitz.

The servicemen continued to refuse to give away information to men who regularly interrogated them.

In response, they were sent to the block normally reserved for men about to be executed the following day – although it turned out to be a bluff.

At the end of October, the servicemen were hastily transferred to Stalagluft 3 prisoner of war camp, near Sagan, and then to another camp closer to Berlin. He was there when the Russians broke through, and from there made his way to the American lines. He was sent to Rhiems and then home to Britain.