The dentist at Camp Alva in Oklahoma leans closer to the prisoner’s open mouth and touches one of the blackened teeth with a metal probe. August 1945. The war has been over for 3 months, but prisoners are still being processed and prepared for eventual repatriation. This prisoner is 19 years old, thin, but not skeletal.

 And according to his intake form, he has severe dental pain. The dentist expects the usual problems. Decay from poor nutrition, lack of hygiene, untreated cavities. But when the probe touches the surface of the first rotten tooth, something breaks loose. And what falls into the dentist’s hand is not tooth enamel. It is metal. We are at Camp Alva, Oklahoma on August 14th, 1945.

The camp sprawls across flat prairie land northwest of Oklahoma City and it holds over 5,000 German prisoners of war at peak capacity. The camp has been operational since 1943 and by now the processing routines are smooth and efficient. New arrivals are photographed, their personal information is recorded and they undergo basic medical screening before being assigned to work details.

 The latest group of 29 prisoners arrived 3 days ago from a staging facility in Virginia and they are completing their medical screenings today. The camp physician, Major Daniel Corwin, moves through the intake examinations with practice speed. These prisoners look better than many of the earlier arrivals. They are underweight but functional.

 No obvious signs of tuberculosis or dysentery. No open wounds requiring immediate treatment. Corwin checks vitals, listens to hearts and lungs, examines skin for rashes or infections. Most examinations take less than 4 minutes. When he reaches the 14th prisoner in line, a boy with dark hair and nervous eyes.

 The boy winces when Corwin checks his lymph nodes near the jaw. Corwin asks in German if his teeth hurt. The boy nods and opens his mouth without being asked. Even in the poor lighting of the intake tent, Corwin can see that several teeth are severely decayed. The boy’s name is listed as Hans Brener, age 19, captured near AAN in October 1944.

Corwin makes a note on the medical form. Dental examination required, moderate priority. Hans is sent to join the other cleared prisoners and Corwin continues down the line. Four days later, Hans receives a notice to report to the dental clinic. He walks across the camp compound on a hot August morning past rows of barracks and work crews heading out to the fields.

 The dental clinic is a small wooden building near the camp hospital and Hans enters to find a reception area with three chairs and a desk. The camp dentist, Captain Richard Voss, is a 34year-old graduate of Northwestern University Dental School who has been at Camp Alva for 18 months. Voss has treated hundreds of German prisoners for dental problems and the work has become routine.

 Extractions mostly with occasional fillings when materials are available. Voss calls hands into the examination room and gestures to the dental chair. Hans sits gripping the armrests. Voss adjusts the overhead light and tells Hans in basic German to open his mouth. Hans opens wide and Voss gets his first clear look at the damage.

 Seven teeth are visibly rotten, four on the lower jaw, three on the upper. The decay is severe with blackened surfaces and visible cracks. But what catches Voss’s attention is the texture. The teeth do not look like normal decay. They look deliberately damaged. We are still in the dental clinic at Camp Alva, 5 minutes into Hans Brener’s examination.

 Now we go to the moment that changes everything because Captain Voss sees something that makes him pause. Voss picks up an explorer, a thin metal instrument with a sharp point, and gently touches the surface of one of the rotten mers on the lower right side. The tooth is black and brittle, and when Voss applies light pressure, a piece of the outer surface breaks away. This is not unusual.

Severely decayed teeth often crumble during examination. But what is unusual is what Vos sees underneath the broken surface. There is a thin layer of something metallic embedded in the tooth structure. Voss sets down the explorer and picks up a pair of dental forceps. He uses the forceps to carefully remove more of the decayed material from the tooth, working slowly to avoid causing pain.

 Hands tenses but does not pull away. As Voss removes the outer layer, he exposes a small cavity that has been drilled into the tooth and inside that cavity is a tiny rolled piece of metal foil. Voss uses tweezers to extract the foil and he unrolls it on the metal tray beside the chair. It is paper thin metal, possibly aluminum or tin, and there is writing on it.

 Tiny cramped handwriting in German. Voss stares at it for a moment, then looks at Hans. Hans’s face is pale, and his eyes are wide with fear. Voss does not speak German fluently, but he can read enough to recognize that the writing is not random. It appears to be names and numbers. Voss sets the foil aside and examines the other rotten teeth.

 He uses the explorer to test each one. And in three more teeth, he finds similar cavities with rolled metal foil inside. Each piece contains writing. Voss extracts all four pieces and lays them on the tray. Then he tells Hans to close his mouth and he steps back. Hans is shaking now and Voss can see sweat on the boy’s forehead.

 Voss asks Hans in German what this is. Hans does not answer. Voss asks again more firmly. Hans looks at the floor and says in a whisper that he cannot tell him. Voss leaves the room and walks directly to Major Corwin’s office in the adjacent hospital building. He brings the four pieces of metal foil with him and he explains what he found.

 Corwin examines the foil under a magnifying glass and confirms that the writing is in German. The pieces contain lists of names, dates, and what appear to be location codes. Corwin asks if Hans explained what this is. Voss says Hans refused to speak. Corwin says they need to bring in the camp intelligence officer.

 Within 30 minutes, Lieutenant Colonel Frank Davenport, the senior intelligence officer at Camp Alva, is sitting in Corwin’s office examining the metal foil. Davenport reads German fluently, and as he studies the writing, his expression becomes increasingly serious. He tells Corwin and Voss that this is a prisoner roster, names, ranks, capture dates, and transport codes, and the information is less than a year old.

 We are now in an interrogation room at Camp Alva, 2 hours after the dental discovery. Now we shift to Lieutenant Colonel Davenport’s questioning of Hans Brener because the military needs to understand what this information means and where it came from. Hans sits across a table from Davenport with Corwin and Voss present as witnesses.

 A German-speaking translator, Sergeant Otto Klene, sits beside Davenport. The four pieces of metal foil are laid out on the table between them. Davenport begins with a simple question. He asks Hans who gave him this information. Hans stares at the table and says no one gave it to him. He wrote it himself. Davenport asks why.

 Hans is silent for a long moment and then he starts talking. He says he was captured by American forces near Aen in October 1944. He was part of a Vermach infantry unit that was defending the city during the Allied advance. After his capture, Hans was taken to a temporary holding area, then transferred to a larger prisoner of war camp near Lege in Belgium.

 The camp held approximately 8,000 German prisoners, and conditions were harsh, overcrowding, insufficient food, inadequate shelter. But Hans says the worst part was the chaos. Prisoners were constantly being moved, transferred to different camps, or sent to labor details. There was no central record system that the prisoners could access and men would disappear without explanation.

 Some were transferred, some died, some escaped. No one knew which. Hans says he started keeping a record in December 1944. He would watch during roll call and memorize the names of prisoners who were called out for transfer. He would note their ranks, their units, and the dates they left. At night, he would write the information down on small pieces of paper scavenged from Red Cross packages, but paper was easily discovered during inspections, and Hans had already lost two lists when guards searched his barracks.

 So, he came up with a different method. He realized that if he could hide the information inside his own body, it could not be confiscated. And the only place inside his body that had cavities large enough to hold rolled metal was his teeth. Hans explains that he deliberately damaged seven of his teeth by using a small metal wire to drill into the enamel.

 It took weeks working at night, a few minutes at a time, to create cavities deep enough to hide the rolled foil. The pain was excruciating and the damage caused infections that turned the teeth black and rotten. But hands kept going. He transcribed his lists onto metal foil taken from food tins, rolled them tightly, and inserted them into the cavities he had created.

He used resin from pine trees to seal the cavities and hide the metal inside. The result was seven rotten teeth that looked like the product of poor hygiene and malnutrition, but actually contained a detailed record of prisoner movements from the Belgian camp. Hans says he did this because he wanted someone to know what happened to the men who disappeared.

 He wanted there to be a record. Let us know in the comments where you are watching this from. Are you in the United States, Germany, the United Kingdom, or somewhere else. We would love to know who is keeping these stories alive because what happens next will determine whether Hans’s painful sacrifice had any meaning.

 We are still at Camp Alva later that same day. Now we go to the verification process because Lieutenant Colonel Davenport needs to confirm whether the information Hans provided is accurate and useful. Davenport sends urgent telegrams to Allied military headquarters in Europe, requesting information about the prisoner of war camp near Lege and asking if records exist for the prisoners whose names appear on Hans’s lists.

 The response comes back within 48 hours. The camp near Leege was a temporary facility operated by the United States Army from October 1944 until March 1945. It processed tens of thousands of German prisoners during that time, but detailed records were not consistently maintained due to the rapid pace of operations. Many prisoners were transferred to other camps without proper documentation and the fate of hundreds of individuals remains unknown.

 The Allied headquarters sends a list of names that match Hans’s records. Out of the 63 names Hans documented, 41 match prisoners who were later confirmed to have been transferred to camps in the United States, Britain, or France. Seven match prisoners who died in Allied custody, their deaths recorded in cemetery registers.

 15 names do not match any existing records and their fates remain unknown. Davenport compiles this information into a report and he notes that Hans’s records provide documentation for prisoner movements that would otherwise be completely lost to history. The lists are not comprehensive, but they are accurate and they fill gaps in the official record.

Davenport returns to the interrogation room and tells Hans what the verification showed. Hans listens without expression and when Davenport finishes, Hans asks what will happen to the lists. Davenport says they will be forwarded to the International Red Cross and to the Allied Repatriation Authorities.

 The information will be used to help trace prisoners who are still unaccounted for and to notify families of men who died in custody. Hans nods and for the first time since the dental examination, he looks relieved. Davenport then tells Hans that he needs to understand the full context. He asks Hans why he chose to document prisoner movements rather than military intelligence.

 Hans says he had no military intelligence to offer. He was a private soldier who knew nothing about strategic plans or operations, but he could see men disappearing and he could remember their names. That was something he could do. We are now back in the dental clinic. 3 days after the initial discovery.

 Now we shift to Captain Voss’s assessment of the damage to Hans’s teeth because the deliberate destruction has serious medical consequences. Voss examines Hans’s mouth again, this time without the secrecy or tension. All seven teeth with cavities are severely compromised. The enamel is destroyed. The dentin is exposed and infected and three of the teeth have abscesses forming at the root.

 Voss tells Hans that all seven teeth will need to be extracted. There is no way to save them. The infections could spread to the jawbone if left untreated and the pain will only get worse. Hans says he understands and he asks if the extractions can be done soon. Voss schedules them for the following day. The extraction procedure takes place in the dental clinic under local anesthesia.

 Voss removes all seven teeth in a single session, working carefully to avoid breaking the roots. Hans handles the procedure stoically, gripping the armrests but remaining still. Each extraction takes between 5 and 10 minutes, and the entire session lasts over an hour. When Voss finishes, Hans’s mouth is packed with gauze, and he is given pain medication and antibiotics.

 Voss tells him the healing process will take several weeks, and he will need to eat soft foods during that time. Hans nods, unable to speak clearly through the gauze. Over the next two weeks, Hans recovers from the extractions. The pain subsides gradually, and the infection clears up with antibiotic treatment. But the loss of seven teeth creates permanent functional problems.

 Hands can no longer chew effectively on the left side of his mouth, and certain foods become difficult or impossible to eat. Voss fits him with a partial denture, but wartime dental prosthetics are crude, and the fit is imperfect. Hans will spend the rest of his life with dental problems stemming from the choice he made to hide information inside his teeth.

 Voss documents all of this in Hans’s medical file and he writes a case report describing the unusual method of information concealment and the medical consequences that resulted. If you are enjoying this story and want more untold accounts from World War II prisoners of war, make sure to subscribe to the channel.

 We are bringing you stories that most history books never covered because Hans Brener’s story raises questions about sacrifice documentation and the lengths people will go to preserve truth. Major Corwin reads Voss’s case report and adds his own observations. He notes that Hans’s actions while motivated by a desire to document prisoner fates resulted in significant self harm.

 Corwin questions whether the preservation of information was worth the permanent damage to Hans’s health. He acknowledges that the information Hans preserved has historical and humanitarian value, but he argues that the cost to Hans personally was disproportionate. Corwin’s report reflects a tension that runs through many wartime medical cases.

The conflict between individual well-being and perceived higher purposes. Hans sacrificed his own health to create a record. And from his perspective, the sacrifice was justified. But from a medical perspective, the self-inflicted damage was a tragedy. We are now expanding beyond Hans’s individual case to examine the larger issue of prisoner documentation during World War II.

 The chaos of the final year of the war created massive gaps in recordkeeping. Prisoners were captured by the hundreds of thousands, held in temporary facilities, transferred repeatedly, and sometimes lost track of entirely. The official systems for documenting prisoners were overwhelmed, and mistakes were common.

 Prisoners were registered under incorrect names or with missing information or not registered at all. Men died without their deaths being recorded. Men were transferred without their destinations being noted. The result was that thousands of prisoners became unaccounted for and families searching for missing relatives had no way to trace them.

 The International Red Cross attempted to maintain comprehensive records of prisoners of war, but their efforts were hampered by the scale of the conflict and the lack of cooperation from some governments. By the end of the war, the Red Cross had documented millions of prisoners, but significant numbers remained unrecorded. In the years after the war, families submitted inquiries about missing relatives, and the Red Cross and Allied authorities tried to match names against available records.

 Hans’s lists, though limited in scope, provided documentation for 63 individuals who passed through the camp near Lege in late 1944. for the families of those men. Hans’s records offered information that no official source could provide. The case also highlights the length to which some prisoners went to maintain agency in situations where they had almost no control. Hans could not escape.

 He could not fight. He could not change his circumstances. But he could observe, remember, and record. The act of documentation became a form of resistance, not against his capttors, but against the eraser of identity that mass imprisonment threatened. By preserving names and dates, Hans was asserting that these men existed, that they mattered, and that their stories should not be lost.

 The physical cost of that assertion was seven destroyed teeth and permanent dental impairment. But Hans considered it worthwhile. Hans Brener’s case is unique, but the problem he was trying to address was widespread. The Allied forces captured approximately 11 million German soldiers during World War II. Of those, over 375,000 were sent to prisoner of war camps in the United States.

 The vast majority were documented and eventually repatriated, but the documentation was often incomplete. Names were misspelled. dates were recorded incorrectly and transfers were not always logged. The result was that even with relatively good recordkeeping by the United States, there were still gaps and errors that complicated postwar tracing efforts.

 The situation was worse in Europe. Temporary holding camps operated near the front lines and prisoners were processed quickly with minimal documentation. The camp near Leech where Hans was held processed an estimated 50,000 German prisoners between October 1944 and March 1945.

 Official records exist for most of those prisoners, but the records are fragmentaryary. Transfer orders were sometimes lost, death reports were delayed, and individual prisoner files were incomplete. Hanses lists documented 63 prisoners from a single barracks over a 4-month period. That represents a tiny fraction of the total prisoner population, but it is a fraction that would otherwise have no detailed record.

The International Red Cross maintained the central tracing agency, which collected information about prisoners of war and attempted to match inquiries from families with available records. By the end of 1945, the agency had received over 30 million inquiries and had processed documentation for over 7 million prisoners.

 The work continued for years after the war ended, and in some cases, families did not learn the fate of missing relatives until the 1950s or later. Hans’s contribution to this effort was modest, but it was real. The 63 names on his lists were added to the Red Cross database, and inquiries about those individuals could be matched against Hans’s information when no other records existed.

 We are now in the realm of ethical analysis, examining the moral dimensions of Hans’s choice. Hans deliberately destroyed seven of his own teeth in order to hide information. The destruction caused pain, infection, and permanent functional impairment. From a medical ethics perspective, self harm is generally considered a negative outcome that should be prevented when possible.

But Hans’s case is complicated by the fact that the self harm was purposeful and motivated by what Hans considered a moral obligation. He believed that documenting prisoner movements was important enough to justify the physical cost. Does that belief make his actions ethically defensible? Major Corwin and Captain Voss debated this question in their reports.

 Corwin argued that Hans’s actions reflected a breakdown in psychological coping mechanisms under the stress of imprisonment. He suggested that Hans fixated on documentation as a way to impose order on a chaotic situation and that the fixation led to irrational self-destructive behavior. Voss disagreed. He argued that Hans’s actions were rational within the context of his values and priorities.

 Hans wanted to create a record that could not be taken away, and he used the only method available to him. The physical cost was high, but Hans made the choice with full awareness of the consequences. Voss concluded that while he would not recommend Hans’s method, he could not condemn it as irrational or unethical.

The debate reflects a larger tension in wartime medical practice. Doctors are trained to prioritize patient health and to prevent harm. But in wartime, individuals sometimes choose to accept harm in service of goals they consider more important than their own well-being. Soldiers risk injury and death to accomplish military objectives.

Resistance fighters endure torture rather than reveal information. And in Hans’s case, a prisoner destroyed his own teeth to preserve documentation. The role of the doctor in these situations is unclear. Should the doctor prevent the self harm, if possible? Should the doctor respect the individual’s choice even when it leads to permanent damage? Corwin and Voss came to different conclusions, and there is no simple answer.

 We are now in December 1945, 4 months after Hans’s dental extractions. The camp at Alva is preparing for large-scale repatriation of German prisoners, and Hans is on the list for the first transport. He has recovered physically from the extractions, though the partial denture continues to cause discomfort. His weight has increased to 135 lbs, and he is deemed fit for travel.

 On December 10th, Hans boards a train with 300 other German prisoners bound for a repatriation center in New Jersey. The journey takes four days, and Hans spends most of it staring out the window at the passing American landscape. The story also highlights the role of medical professionals in uncovering hidden information.

 Captain Voss was conducting a routine dental examination, but his curiosity and thoroughess led to the discovery of the hidden lists. Voss could have simply extracted the rotten teeth without investigating the unusual texture or patterns. Instead, he probed deeper, asked questions, and ultimately brought the information to the attention of authorities who could use it.

 Voss’s role was essential, and his willingness to document the case ensured that Hans’s method was recorded and analyzed. Without Voss’s intervention, the lists might have been discovered accidentally during extraction and discarded as debris.