After the Reich (79 page)

The prisoners mixed freely with the refugees and helped one another. They organised their lives together, finding oats and shoes for the horses, chopping wood for heating and making schnapps on the sly. One night Charlotte von der Schulenburg recalled their slaughtering a cow. The animal was cut up and distributed and then all trace of the act was cleared away, so that when the gendarmes came looking for the culprits the next day they found nothing. For Charlotte the worry about feeding her six children was salutary: it prevented her from being overwhelmed by grief after the death of her husband.
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Some soldiers with homes to go to were gradually released. There remained the East Prussians, Pomeranians and Mecklenburger who had no way of knowing what had happened to their nearest and dearest. There were rumours that the senior officers were to be shipped to a camp in Belgium.
^dn
As the countess had learned to read cards, generals would bring her provisions from their scanty stores in order to learn a little more of their fate.
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Not all the East Elbians were content to wait for news. One day Charlotte concealed herself in some straw in the back of a lorry travelling towards the Schulenburg mansion at Tressow in Mecklenburg. She wanted to fetch some provisions for the children, and the British were still in control of the western sector of the old Grand Duchy, as far as Lake Schwerin. After a while she realised she was not alone. She heard a rustling in the straw and turned round to see a man emerge looking like a cattle dealer. He was a von Wedel - like the Schulenburgs, of ancient Prussian lineage. He was escaping from the camp because he wanted to locate his family in the east.
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The Allies’ attitude hardened, however, partly because they had witnessed or had been made to witness the barbarities committed by the Germans, and partly because they saw a use for the men as slave-labourers. At Bergen-Belsen they fed the SS men on starvation rations and made them carry the dead without gloves. The idea was to ‘work them to death’. They achieved this in twenty out of fifty cases, but then a higher authority intervened. The SS were taken away and ordinary German POWs were made to do the work.
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The British disposed of a great many camps in Britain itself. In 1944 there were already 250,000 German POWs in Britain and Northern Ireland. There were also camps filled with Russians who had been fighting alongside the Germans - at Malton in Yorkshire, for example, where they sought solace in drinking methylated spirits. The peak figure was achieved in the third quarter of 1946, when there were 391,880 working prisoners in Britain.
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In 1948, a year before they were disbanded, there were 600 camps. The regime was not so hard, and in terms of percentages the number of men who died in British custody is strikingly low compared to the other Allies: 1,254.
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Prisoners were taken first to the ‘cages’ that were set up on racetracks or football grounds to be interrogated by the PWIS or Prisoner of War Interrogation Section. These had the job of questioning the prisoners in the camp and awarding them grades A, B or C. A was ‘white’, or free from Nazism; B was grey, or mildly tainted; C was black, Nazi. Then they were allocated to camps that might have been just a collection of tents or Nissen huts, or, if they were lucky, a ramshackle stately home.

Country houses such as Crewe Hall in Cheshire, Grizedale Hall in Lancashire, Sudeley Castle in Gloucestershire and the Duke of Roxburghe’s Sunlaws in the Borders were filled with prisoners. Colonel Wedgwood complained in the House of Commons about the use of this sort of luxury accommodation and asked facetiously why they had not considered the Ritz Hotel. Not all German POWs had been treated so well, and Wormwood Scrubs Prison in London was also used to house them. Jewish Pioneer Corps soldiers were given the job of guarding them at Bourton-on-the-Hill, Watton in Caithness, Moreton-in-Marsh, Cattistock, Tiveton, Cheltenham and Kempton Park.

The leading fliers were housed in a camp outside London. In order to prepare the cases for the prosecution in the Nuremberg trials, microphones were concealed to listen to the conversations between Milch, Bodenschatz, Koller and Galland. The British wanted to know about Göring, and to do so they planted listening devices like the Reichsmarschall’s Forschungsamt (Research Office) or Stalin’s NKVD. That way the British learned that Göring’s generals did not hold their master in high regard. He was ‘ungrateful’ and he painted his fingernails mauve. Galland, however, corrected his comrades: it was transparent varnish, not paint. An American Major Emery was sent in as an
agent provocateur
on 5 June 1945 and told the generals that Göring had been blackening their names in his prison in Luxembourg. The men fell for it, and began retailing stories about how corrupt Göring had been.
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In Scotland Camp 21 at Comrie was used to house 4,000 hard-bitten Nazis - U-boat crews and Waffen-SS men who gruesomely lynched Sergeant Wolfgang Rosterg. He had expressed doubt at Germany’s final victory and threatened to uncover a plot to rise up against the guards. He was hung up in the latrines. They also chased and beat Gerhard Rettig to death. Five of the murderers were hanged in Pentonville Prison in London on 6 October 1946, and another two were executed the following month. It took a tough former Prussian officer, and holder of the Iron Cross, Herbert Sulzbach to show them the error of their ways. He had written a respected book on trench warfare, but when the Nazis came to power they put him in a concentration camp as a Jew. Once more England’s gain was Germany’s loss. After leaving Comrie, Sulzbach went to Haltwhistle. This was a progressive camp with its own newspaper, orchestra, theatre and university which laid on exhibitions of prisoners’ art. Sulzbach struck up friendly relations with many prisoners that continued after their release. He was considered the apostle of democratic ideas and a political confessor.
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The youth camp at Cambridge possessed a similar figure in the pioneer Captain Starbroke who looked like a ‘caricature from [the antisemitic paper]
Der Stürmer
’, but was so respected by the prisoners that he was treated as if he had been made of porcelain.
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The former army commander in chief Walther von Brauchitsch was housed in No. 11 (Special) POW Camp, Island Farm, Bridgend - the so-called German Generals’ Camp in South Wales. In his various court appearances he had been economical with the truth and denied having received a cash payment from Hitler at the time of his divorce and remarriage to a Nazi woman. He also claimed to have had no knowledge of the planning of aggressive war and to have been ignorant of the murderous ‘Commissar Order’ that required the shooting of Soviet political officers. From Bridgend he was transferred to the grim Münsterlager to attend trial before a British court, but died before his case came up.
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At one time there were no fewer than 186 German generals or equivalent in the camp. One of them was Lieutenant-General Hans von Ravenstein, who had been taken prisoner at Tobruk. In the spring of 1946 he was transferred to Bridgend from a prison camp in Canada. He was to spend over two years in the camp before he was set free. No one had anything bad to say about him. He disliked Bridgend: the holder of the Pour le Mérite from the Great War looked down on a number of Hitler appointees who were not as well mannered as he might have hoped.
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The generals at Bridgend were housed in bed-sitting rooms big enough to accommodate a six-foot bed. Only field marshals were allowed separate sitting rooms. Ravenstein was befriended by a family of Plymouth Brethren who took him out for picnics, but he was not allowed to carry money. Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt was one of those at Bridgend with a set of rooms. Ravenstein admired him, but he was wont to hide behind superior orders when called upon to justify his errors and omissions.
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The tank general Hans-Jürgen von Arnim had also been in British captivity since May 1943. At the time he was the second most important prisoner in England after Rudolf Hess. He was kept at a ‘beautiful’ mansion in Hampshire and allowed certain privileges concomitant with his seniority. He was not released until 1947. By then his estates had been mopped up by land reform in the Soviet east. He died in genteel penury in 1962.
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Some of the German POWs in Britain had been transferred from camps in the United States, and were officially ‘on loan’. These were called
Amerikafahrer
(American travellers). There were 123,000 of them in all.
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They made up work details, and one of their first jobs was to build a camp for the victory parade on VE Day.
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One
Amerikafahrer
was Kurt Glaser, whose transport arrived in Liverpool in July 1946. He went first to Wollaton Park near Nottingham, where he lived in a hut with fifty other men in the shadow of the ‘Schloss’. An officer came to see him and asked him six questions about National Socialism, similar to those asked in Texas which had branded him a Nazi. He worked for a farmer in Nottinghamshire, and harvested turnips and potatoes. He was later transferred to Revesby in Lincolnshire where once again he worked on the land. A British intelligence officer informed him that he was working to feed his fellow Germans, as there was not enough food in the zone to nourish them. In September he heard James Byrnes’s Stuttgart speech. When he learned that America had released all its POWs, Glaser could not believe his ears. There were still 355,000 German prisoners in Britain. In the main they were treated with much kindness, however, and when Glaser went for a walk in the manicured grounds of Nottingham Castle an old man came up to him and gave him a florin. Shortly after that, like all the
Amerikafahrer
, he was sent back to Dachau in Germany to be released.
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The literary prisoner who had found himself hungry on the 2,000 calories he had received in America began to understand the real meaning of the word when he arrived in Sudbury Camp near Derby. As usual he was shunted through a number of different camps - Pendleford Hall, Wolverhampton; Halfpenny Green, Staffordshire - presumably according to the demands of local agriculture. Meanwhile his stomach rumbled.
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Intellectual nourishment was provided by a Dr R, a ‘naturalised emigrant’ who talked to the prisoners about the Nuremberg trials. On 1 October they learned of the executions after the International Military Tribunal (IMT) verdicts.
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Meanwhile they were being graded for their levels of political reliability. The uncertainty about their future had consequences: 219 of them committed suicide.
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The prisoners began to receive a little money for their work - two shillings a day. The British people were strikingly generous towards their former enemies. A woman gave the man two oranges and an apple, although fruit cannot have been that easy to obtain. Soon the prisoners were allowed to walk out of their camps if they remained within five miles. The prisoner admired English Gothic architecture and enjoyed visiting the village churches. Pubs were out of bounds, but he chanced it. ‘From all sides’ he was ‘cheerfully and amicably greeted’. He came out richer than when he went in. The men had bought him drinks and there had been a whip-round. He had been given five shillings.
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The prisoner was back in Germany in the cruel winter of 1947. He saw some prisoners who had been released from the Soviet Union dressed in rags: ‘We are ashamed that we have warm winter clothes.’ The treatment of German prisoners of war was still nagging Frings, who used a trip to Rome in February 1946 to pick up his cardinal’s hat as a pretext to rally German soldiers incarcerated in Italy, together with Cardinals Innitzer of Vienna and Faulhaber of Munich. He visited Britain in September that year and went to no fewer than twelve camps containing a total of 20,000 men. Later he addressed a congregation of 3,000 British Catholics in Westminster Cathedral calling for the men’s release. In 1947 he performed a similar mission to Canada to try to secure the liberation of Germans in Canadian camps.
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The big fry might visit London from time to time to be interrogated in the London District Prisoner of War Cage of the Combined Services Detailed Interrogation Centre (or CSDIC) in the plush surroundings of Kensington Palace Gardens.
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It was here that Lieutenant-Colonel Alexander Paterson Scotland led a team of German-speaking officers and NCOs whose job was to compile the dossiers to be handed over to the war crimes tribunals. Their principal concern was the crimes committed against British nationals and above all POWs. The Great Escape loomed large, specifically the killing of fifty of the airmen who had escaped from the Stalag Luft III in Sagan in Silesia. Thirteen Gestapo men were eventually brought to justice and hanged in Hamelin Gaol in 1948. The case was not actually closed until 1964.
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The investigators based in Kensington Palace Gardens were also exercised by the several atrocious massacres that had been carried out by SS units in France. One was the killing of ninety-seven soldiers from the 2nd Battalion of the Royal Norfolk Regiment at the strikingly inappropriately named village of Le Paradis on 27 May 1940. Responsibility for the crime was pinned on a company commander in the SS-Totenkopf Division, Fritz Knoechlein, who had learned to hate all non-Nazi forms of humanity in the hard school of Dachau: to be a guard at Dachau or any of the other camps required proof of a man’s contempt for his fellows. Knoechlein had absorbed his lessons well. He was hanged.
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