Excerpt from Official History of New Zealand in the Second World War

This passage describes news of the Allied landings in Normandy reaching the POWs in Germany.

For most prisoners in Germany the landing [6 June 1944 - D-day] was the most significant event of the war; for as it became clear that it had been consolidated, they felt for the first time that they could see the end of their captivity. But the frustration of the failure of the plot against Hitler on 20 July, and the attempts of the Nazi propaganda machine to urge the German people, through fear, to greater efforts, precluded any thought of an early armistice. And though there were great Allied advances on both the Eastern and Western fronts, and city after city was liberated from German occupation, the Allied forces in the West did not enter German territory until 12 September. After the setback at Arnhem, with the summer gone and the German leaders determined to fight on, nothing decisive seemed likely to happen and prisoners resigned themselves to another winter in Germany.