By 1944, the Germans were being overwhelmed by POW,s especially airmen. While the losses on the raid Dad was shot down were very unusual ( over 95 heavy bombers lost that night) 15 or so were not uncommon on a raid. Then, of course, there was the daylight contribution by US forces.
Dad was sent to Stalag 6, at Hydrekrug. There were several compunds there; one was for Army POW, a lot were captured during the ill fated Dieppe raid. The Germans really distrusted the airmen, and considered them more troublesome that army types, so they were segregated, and under more frequent and closer scrutiny. In addition, the British and US forces were in different compounds.
Such were in influx that barracks to house them were still being constructed. Dad and about 150 other POWs were housed in a large circus tent affair for about 6 weeks.
A favourite pastime of the prisoners was to do anything they could to harass, embarrass, annoy the Germans. A favourite was to make the role calls a nightmare. They has 2 role calls a day, and frequent snap ones called as well. In the book The Last Escape, they were described as a 'shambles' and deliberately so- late getting to parade, raucous behaviour etc. If the weather was good, they would deliberately foul up the count- some POW,s , once counted, would slip into another rank about to be counted, to be counted again. The Officer in charge knew he had XXX number of prisoners to account for-any less and an alarm would be raised for escaped POW,s.
In this case, now he was faced with XXX PLUS a few! Officer bawls out NCO,s who bawl out guards, with helpful suggestions from the POW,s of course. Role call started all over ( and over! ), and sometimes was hours before the POW,s grew tired of this and let the count be correct.