By HELEN WEATHERS

Last updated at 23:42 17 August 2007

They were spat at, punched and shunned by their families. Their crime? Falling in love with German prisoners of war. As they celebrate their diamond weddings, two British war brides tell their haunting stories

With each step they took, hand in hand along the bomb-ravaged streets of Southampton, the sight of June Tull and her boyfriend incited insults and fury.

"Aren't our boys good enough for you?" yelled one woman. Another ran up to June and punched her. Others spat in her face.

How could she, they asked, fraternise with the enemy when their own fathers, husbands and sons had been killed by the Germans?

For 18-year-old June's boyfriend was German prisoner of war Heinz Fellbrich, 25, a fact which was advertised wherever they went by the PoW's brown uniform with orange felt patches he had to wear at all times.

"There was a lot of hostility towards us," recalls June, now 79.

"I could understand it because people had lost loved ones in the war, but all that mattered to me was that I loved Heinz.

"However, it wasn't easy. We tried to go to quiet places when we were together so people wouldn't see us.

"My father Frank was all right about it, but my mother was against the relationship. She worried about what people would think."

Especially when four months into the courtship - which began at the end of January 1947 - June, who was by this time sleeping with the enemy having written a "Dear John" letter dumping her Royal Marine boyfriend, became pregnant.

"I was scared stiff," says June. "Falling pregnant outside marriage was bad enough - but with a German PoW!

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"I dread to think what would have happened if Heinz hadn't wanted to marry me."

Three months pregnant, June married Heinz on August 14, 1947, at the Civic Centre in Southampton - much to her mother Winifred's chagrin.

June wore a blue suit borrowed from a friend, and other German PoWs had made Heinz a brown suit without the orange patches.

June was the first British woman to marry a German PoW following Clement Attlee's postwar government's decision to lift the ban on fraternisation and marriage - an event so controversial it made newspaper headlines.

At the reception at the Labour Hall, there was a German Oompah band - made up of other PoWs - and guests ate a simple buffet prepared the night before by June and a girlfriend, after her mother refused to help.

When they emerged, they were greeted by the pop of flashbulbs from newspaper photographers.

At 10pm sharp, Heinz was back behind the barbed wire at the PoW camp - having been given permission to marry by the camp commandant - and June begged him not to slip out to meet her later, which would be punished by solitary confinement.

Their "wedding night" took place the following day at June's home, when Heinz was allowed to visit his new wife.

He was released from the PoW camp one week before their eldest son Peter was born.

This week, June and Heinz celebrated their diamond wedding anniversary with 70 family members and friends at the Methodist Hall in Eastleigh, Hampshire, and today will fly to Hamburg to celebrate again with Heinz's German family.

They have six children - four boys and two girls - 12 grandchildren and 15 great-grandchildren, and say they are as in love today as the first moment they caught sight of each other back in 1947.

Theirs is a remarkable love story, especially when set against the intense hostility and bitterness towards the British women who fell in love with German PoWs.

"After our wedding we received two sackloads of hate mail.

"I didn't read it all because I knew what people would say. But there was one lovely letter which said: "You can't choose who you fall in love with, just be happy," says June.

"I refused to let it bother me and I'm glad of that. We have been incredibly happy.

"I don't regret falling in love with Heinz, although for a long time we felt very isolated."

Heinz adds: "The British people were much harder on June than they were on me, but once they got to know me, the fact I was German became irrelevant.

"Of course I was sorry for the suffering of the people who'd lost loved ones or their homes, but the German people had suffered, too. It is the nature of war.

"Since falling in love with June, I have never once felt homesick for Germany.

"This is my home. I like the people, the country and being here. We have been very lucky."

It was in late 1939 that the first prisoners of war arrived in Britain and were held in two camps.

Their numbers remained small as the Government was reluctant to accept PoWs while the threat of Nazi invasion was imminent - but by the end of the war there were more than 600 camps.

Each camp was given a number and was either a disused building, such as a factory, or was made up of specially constructed corrugated iron buildings known as Nissen huts.

More than 400,000 German PoWs were still being held in Britain in 1946, the year after World War II ended, with Attlee's government refusing to repatriate the Germans until well after the war was over.

During 1946, up to one-fifth of all farm work in Britain was being done by unpaid German PoWs, and they were also employed on road works and building sites.

When the ban on fraternisation was lifted just before Christmas 1946, many British people chose to put the war behind them and welcomed PoWs into their homes.

By the end of 1947, around 250,000 German PoWs had been returned home.

The last were repatriated in 1949, but approximately 24,000 decided to stay in Britain - either because they'd met a British girl or because their home towns were now in Russian-held territory and they feared another spell of imprisonment in Soviet hands.

Some British women fared better than others, who were disowned by their families.

Perhaps it was because June had not lost her home or any relatives that she did not hold Heinz's nationality against him.

The daughter of bus driver Frank Tull and the eldest of five children, June was working in a bottling factory when she first met Heinz shortly after the ban on fraternisation was lifted.

The fact that she and her family had to spend almost every night in an air raid shelter during the Blitz had no bearing on her feelings when she spotted the tall, handsome German.

"A couple of my girlfriends were seeing German PoWs," says June, "and one day I cycled to the camp with them.

"While they were chatting over the fence to their boyfriends, I saw Heinz and said to my friend Amy: 'He's a bit of all right.'

"She told her boyfriend, who brought Heinz over. He was incredibly handsome and tall with wavy hair.

"He could hardly speak any English, but there was a spark between us."

Heinz adds: "She was a lovely looking girl. She still is."

Prisoners of war were allowed out of the camp during the day but had to be back by dusk.

However, Heinz and his friends would dig a ditch under the barbed wire and crawl out at night to meet their sweethearts.

"At first we kept it secret. I had a boyfriend who was stationed in Chatham, in Kent, with the Royal Marines," says June.

"We would go for walks and hold hands and we fell in love. When I plucked up the courage to tell my parents, my father said: 'Bring him home for lunch then,' so I did. My father made him feel very welcome, although my mother wasn't so happy."

Heinz, the eldest of nine children and the son of a farmer, had grown up in an East Prussian village near the Russian border and volunteered aged 20, believing Hitler had been "good for the German people".

A paratrooper with the Luftwaffe, he'd almost lost a leg in 1942 when a soldier next to him stood on a landmine and was killed.

He spent a year in hospital before returning to the front line.

He gave himself up to Allied troops in Alsace, France, in 1945 when efforts to flee via the River Rhine using oil drums failed.

He was shipped to Boston and imprisoned in Pennsylvania but was sent to Britain a year later, ending up in Southampton.

After he was released from the PoW camp, Heinz, June and their baby son lived with her parents for six months until they moved out to one of the prefabs on the common which had been vacated after the American troops went home.

They then moved into a cottage, on the farm where Heinz had found work and in 1960 to a council house in Eastleigh, where they live to this day.

Heinz found great success erecting Dutch barns at farms all over the country.

"After a while the anti-German sentiment died down a bit," June says.

Heinz adds: "I have been very happy here. I have nothing bad to say about the British."

Although proud of his roots, Heinz - like many German soldiers who initially thought emerging stories about the Holocaust were British propaganda - was later horrified by the atrocities perpetrated by the Nazis.

June met Heinz's family for the first time in 1957, as for years Heinz had no idea where they were after fleeing East Prussia and only found them in Hamburg through the international Red Cross. They welcomed his British bride.

It had been a hard road, but ultimately - once the war was over - the British generally were remarkably accepting and forgiving of the German PoWs who settled here.

Margaret Stratton, now aged 93, shocked her community when she married German PoW Peter Roth, five years her junior, on May 22, 1948 in Peterborough.

Hundreds of people lined the streets - more out of curiosity and disbelief than anything else.

"They couldn't believe she had married a German," recalls Peter, now aged 88.

"But I struck lucky when I fell in love with Margaret. People accepted me, not because I was German, but because I was Margaret Stratton's husband."

Margaret adds: "No one ever said anything to me, but I'm sure people talked about me behind my back.

"After the wedding, I went to the local paper and paid them to print our marriage picture as I wanted everyone to know I didn't care what they thought."

Margaret was the only child of a gardener and groom, who worked for the wealthiest farmer in the area.

When he died, the Strattons moved in with his widow, and Margaret's mother Annie became her housekeeper.

A talented sportswoman, swimmer, artist, toy maker, actress and dancer who'd raised money for the war effort by performing concerts, Margaret - whose father died when she was 16 - had decided not to marry as she had "such a wonderful life", even though many young men were besotted with her.

It was in 1945 that Peter Roth, an uneducated soldier from the village of Erbach, near Frankfurt, was sent to work near the farm where she lived after being captured in Normandy in 1944.

Margaret recalls: "When I first saw Peter, I said to my girlfriend: 'I know he's German, but he has the most lovely face.' There was just something about him."

Peter was equally struck and that evening he stripped his camp hut's garden of every flower - six snowdrops - and presented them to Margaret the next day.

In return, she gave him a cigarette and a piece of cake and so began a highly dangerous romance.

"The war was not yet over and fraternising between local women and German PoWs was forbidden.

"Heaven knows what would have happened to us if we'd been found out," says Peter.

"In many ways Margaret saved my life. I remember her saying: 'I don't want to know anything about your past or what you've done. All I know is that I love you and that you are mine now. That's all that matters.'

As Christmas 1945 approached, Margaret wanted Peter to spend Christmas Day at her home with her and her mother Annie, who'd already met him and instantly liked him.

Although the war was over, prisoners were not yet allowed to visit private homes.

Peter's camp was 13 miles away, so Margaret paid local taxi driver Douglas Fiddieng 13 shillings to bring him to the farmhouse where they lived on Christmas Day.

As it turned out, the local police had been tipped off, but Margaret was so well loved in the community they decided to turn a blind eye.

Margaret says: "The police used to ask Peter to translate letters for them and years after we married the police sergeant told us he knew all about Peter visiting our house. He should have arrested us."

"The sergeant told Peter: 'I could not harm Margaret. Her only sin was falling in love.' We were lucky.

"I don't regret marrying Peter. We've been very happy and next year celebrate our diamond anniversary."

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They have one daughter, Anita, 57, two grandchildren and a great granddaughter.

But not everyone was happy at the time. Peter says: "When I went back to Germany in 1949, an old schoolfriend came up to me after church and said: 'I shall never forgive you for marrying a British woman.

'At the very least you should have married one of the German women now left on the shelf.'

I simply replied: "Go back to 1939 - if I'd asked you to marry me you would have turned up your nose, so what has changed?"'

After the war, Peter worked on a farm for a while, then in the parcel depot on the railways.

Today, he is the full-time carer for his wife, who is very frail. They have a lifetime of happy memories.

"When our grandson was five he saw a war programme on the television and asked me: 'Granddad, who were the goodies in the war?'

"I told him I would write down my life story and then he could decide for himself when he was older," Peter says.

"The British like to think they are always 'the goodies'.

"There is no doubt that the Nazis and the SS committed many atrocities, but I didn't fight for Hitler, I fought for Germany, my homeland, which had been treated so badly after World War I.

"I like to think that I am one of the 'goodies', too."