on 24 October during the Second Battle of El Alamein, Thoma took command until Rommel returned on 26 October. On 4 November, Thoma was captured as the Allies pursued the retreating Axis forces. Under British surveillance as POW On 4 November 1942, Thoma was captured by the British forces and for the remainder of the war he was a prisoner in several senior officer prisoner-of-war camps in Great Britain, including Trent Park, Wilton Park, Grizedale Hall and Island Farm. Trent Park held high-ranking enemy officers prisoner in comfortable, but secretly monitored, conditions. While there Thoma was recorded speaking to another POW, General Ludwig Crüwell discussing rockets that were being tested at Kummersdorf West, which he had observed while on a visit that also included Field Marshal Walther von Brauchitsch, the Commander-in-Chief of the Army and other technical programme details. Following his indiscretion, further British reconnaissance flights over Peenemünde in May and June 1943 brought back unmistakable images of rockets at the facility which was developing guided missiles and long-range ballistic missiles better known as the V-1 flying bomb and the V-2 ballistic missile. When reconnaissance and intelligence information regarding the V-2 became convincing, Churchill's War Cabinet directed the first planned raid (Operation Hydra), the attack of Peenemünde in August 1943, as part of Operation Crossbow, the Anglo-American campaign against the Vergeltungswaffe, the German long-range weapons programme. Trent Park also intercepted, when he stated that "every bomb, every piece of material and every human life that is still wasted in this senseless war, (is) too bad (zu schade). The only gain, that war brings us, is that... the ten-year gangstergovernment comes to an end". Later he continued: "It would be a shame if one of them got shot. They should be made to forced labor until they peg out(verrecken)." In late 1945, Waffen-SS commander Kurt Meyer, captured in Belgium in September 1944 while commanding the 12th SS-Panzer Division "Hitlerjugend", arrived at Trent Park and noted that Thoma, the German camp leader, was "...highly thought of by the English. Relations between him and the guards is excellent". Post war In 1946 Thoma's leg was amputated while he was still in English captivity. He was repatriated later that year. Thoma lived in his hometown of Dachau until his death of a heart attack in 1948. Reception Churchill's high regard for Thoma is evident from his many later quotations of Thoma's opinions on strategic