Armageddon (78 page)

It is an odd reflection of the Nazi psyche that Hitler chose to keep millions of Russians on the brink of death rather than to shoot or gas them. The Third Reich’s immense network of camps required tens of thousands of staff to ser-vice and guard its inmates, men who might otherwise have rendered service at the front. The SS directly employed some 300,000 prisoners manufacturing consumer goods for commercial sale and small quantities of ammunition, but these activities were so inefficiently and corruptly organized—to the despair of Speer—that they brought no advantage to the German war economy. Hundreds of thousands of prisoners were provided with unproductive tasks merely to occupy their days. As Germany’s labour shortage became a critical issue, it was rational enough to exploit captives to sustain the Reich’s industry. It remains baffling, however, that a Nazi leadership willing to murder millions of people without scruple should have allowed other millions to cling narrowly to life. A highly structured, finely tuned hierarchy of suffering, offering pitiful rewards and appalling punishments, persisted in Germany until the end.

By 1945, the millions who languished within the camps of the Third Reich awaited deliverance in the knowledge that they were doomed unless relief soon came. When staff officers in the armies of Montgomery or Bradley, Zhukov or Rokossovsky asked themselves what need there was for haste in completing the defeat of Hitler’s empire, any man and woman confined behind the wire encircling a thousand Nazi barracks could have given an answer. “They could have been quicker,” said Nikolai Maslennikov, for three years an inmate of concentration camps. “The Western allies only started to fight when the Germans were almost beaten. They were bloody slow. They were too late for too many.”

THE PRIVILEGED

T
HE MOST FORTUNATE,
or least unfortunate, of Germany’s prisoners were American and British soldiers, sailors and airmen, though they could scarcely be expected to see their own predicament thus. Under the terms of the Geneva Convention, officers were not liable to work, while other ranks could be conscripted for labour. Ironically, many officers suffered greater psychological stress from the privilege of idleness than some of their men who were put to work. As a PoW, Private Ron Graydon worked without resentment as a coal miner. “You just accepted it.” One of his comrades, a big Guardsman named “Chalky” White, managed to conduct an affair with the landlady of a local bar. Graydon’s circumstances deteriorated when he was transferred to work in a benzine plant outside Chemnitz among slave labourers.

Among those drafted for agricultural service, some were brutally treated by German farmers. Others, however, forged surprisingly close relationships with the families to which they were dispatched. Tom Barker, from Eastbourne in Sussex, was a twenty-two-year-old private in the Royal Engineers, captured in France in 1940. From his prison camp in Poland, he found himself sent to work every day for a local German farmer, Hugo Otto. At first, Barker was merely a clumsy city boy. Within months, however, he found himself managing a horse plough, scything corn, slaughtering pigs, as if to the manner born. He grew to love Laura the mare and her foal Lorchen. The farm grew potatoes and rye, some barley and oats, roots for the animals and a few peas. Barker learned to speak German, and ate with the family: “It always mystified me how, with so few basic things to use, they always managed to produce the most delicious food.” Hugo Otto occasionally offered him a glass of schnapps. Gerda, the family’s teenage daughter, became a close friend, though her somewhat starchy mother tried to insist that, as a PoW, Barker should always walk behind Gerda rather than beside her. In the evenings before he returned to camp to sleep, the girl sometimes sang to Tom’s accordion, while another prisoner played a violin. He was taught to shoe horses, and even to do some iron-working in the forge.

This was the young soldier’s life for more than three years, of a kind shared by hundreds of thousands of others. It would be foolish to assert that many prisoners achieved as rewarding a relationship with their captors as that of Tom Barker. His prison life was not an idyll. Like every other PoW, he suffered a long interruption of his youth. But the experience was redeemed, rendered tolerable, by his engagement with simple peasants. “You may perhaps think that the life of a prisoner as I have described it does not compare with what you have learnt from books and films,” Barker wrote. “We were better treated than the French, which seemed rather odd, as they had made peace with Germany; better than the Poles . . . the brutality to the Russians was indescribable.” The camp guards were mostly Ukrainians. The only interruption of a lax regime came one night when a prisoner sought to indulge a familiar practise of slipping through the wire to visit his Polish girlfriend. The guards shot him. He hung screaming on the fence until he died. Thereafter, none of the prisoners sought to test their captors’ goodwill.

By 1944, there was scarcely a farm in Germany which was not dependent upon PoWs or foreign forced labourers to replace absent soldiers. Stanislas Domoradzki, a Pole, was among those treated far less humanely than Tom Barker. He was regarded as a slave by the first family for whom he worked near Kitzingen on the river Main. “Stan” was just fourteen when he was detained in a summary round-up near his home, herded on to a train and shipped to Germany. He was issued with a yellow “P” armband, and sent to a farm where he was relentlessly beaten and bullied by Herr Schmitt, his elderly employer, and Schmitt’s daughter-in-law. “You’ll fill in for my sons who are away fighting,” said the farmer sourly. Stan was eventually returned to the local mayor’s office, as not worth his keep. He was not strong enough to manage heavy labour. He fared a little better with his next employer. The father of the house was a harsh taskmaster, but his eighteen-year-old daughter Guedraut befriended Stan, and eventually provided his first sexual experience.

As an officer, Captain John Killick was not liable for work. He spent his time as a prisoner in a room with three other men captured at Arnhem. The adjutant of 1 Para occupied himself almost exclusively, it seemed to Killick, in polishing his boots. He himself played a guitar in the camp band. The paratroopers were exceptionally fit when they arrived, so that it was several months before hunger began seriously to corrode them. They were appalled by the mental state of some of those who had been captives for four or five years. “Many had become deeply withdrawn. Several were frankly psychotic.” When Richard Burt, a Liberator gunner, arrived at Stalag IVB after being shot down in November 1944, “we were told by the guards not to stare at our fellow-prisoners, because many of them had been here a long time, and acted a little peculiar. If we were to see them sailing their little boats on the fire pond, we were not to make fun of them. I guess before it was over, we were all a little peculiar.”

Yet it often fell to long-serving prisoners to lend support to bewildered, traumatized new arrivals. At Stalag IVB, the British were horrified by the state of some of the Americans who joined them after the Bulge battle: “their morale was at rock bottom. They were shocked, frightened, suffering from frostbite,” and in need of help and leadership. In all the camps, unlikely people held the prisoners together and strove to keep spirits alive. In Stalag IVB, the guiding light was a forty-year-old dental officer, who had been “in the bag” since 1940. Another veteran, Regimental-Sergeant-Major Andy Samuels, earned the lifelong admiration of other inmates for his leadership in the last months of the war.

The tedium of camp life was dreadful. It was shattered at intervals, however, by incidents which emphasized the prisoners’ circumstances. At Stalag IVB, three PoWs were shot dead during 1944: one was caught stealing coal; another crossed the perimeter tripwire; a third broke the curfew. A twenty-year-old Liberator gunner from Pittsburgh, Charles Becker, believed that the guards at his camp, Stalag IV in Pomerania, behaved well enough as long as men obeyed the rules: don’t cross the warning wire, ensure that windows are barred and no lights shown at night: “I thought they did the best they could under the circumstances and conditions.” Yet Becker suffered the usual chronic malnutrition. His teeth loosened. The diet of starch, bread and potatoes inflicted constant constipation, sometimes for eight or ten days at a stretch. Most of the daylight hours, prisoners walked round and round the perimeter wire talking to friends, or eked out the simple tasks that assumed much importance in a world in which there was so little to do.

Self-respect was deeply corroded by confinement, and that of some prisoners collapsed altogether. “I have seen men degrade themselves to beg for an inch or so of a cigarette being smoked by a guard,” wrote Sergeant Robert Harding. “I have seen men sell the very clothes from their backs for a single fag.” Corporal Denis Thomas observed: “People say: ‘Oh, you were only inside for six months.’ But they were the worst six months of my life.” Many men felt outcasts, cut off from their own kind, their lives deprived of purpose and dignity. Grievances and frustrations became obsessional. Denied privacy, they took refuge in hiding small items, especially food. “Even reasonable men would waste hours in childish kicking against the pricks,” wrote Squadron-Leader Peter Campbell, an RAF officer in Sagan. Tiny events assumed extravagant proportions. One day in the autumn of 1944, some prisoners were allowed out of the perimeter under escort, for a walk. Campbell found this “an overpowering sensation.” New arrivals were intently questioned about the outside world: “How’re we doing? Is London still standing?” In some camps, the dissemination of news received by secret radios was highly organized. New Zealand doctor Richard Feltham was amazed on his first morning in Stalag XXA to receive a smart salute from a Guards sergeant-major who handed him two duplicated sheets, saying: “
The Times
, sir!”

Morale improved in 1944. When news of D-Day reached Tom Barker’s camp, a big Londoner named Bob, who had been attempting with indifferent success to grow tomatoes, dashed to his vegetable plot and joyfully tore up every plant: “I shan’t need the bloody things!” Bob was premature, but at nights thereafter prisoners could see the glow of war on the eastern horizon and hear the rumble of explosions. “We were never satisfied unless we heard the Allies were advancing very rapidly,” wrote Peter Campbell, “and we had no patience when they were stopped for any period.”

Some men became involved in escape plans not because they possessed a serious hope of gaining freedom, but because fantasies of escape provided a focus for lives that were otherwise purposeless. Only a tiny number of Allied prisoners made successful “home runs,” or indeed tried to do so. The difficulties were enormous, even if one spoke good German and was granted extraordinary luck. Peter Campbell felt grateful that a leg injury sustained when he parachuted into the Channel from his Spitfire in April 1942 disqualified him from taking part in Sagan’s 1943 “Great Escape,” which provoked the Nazis to shoot fifty of the officers recaptured. A giant sign was thereafter displayed in the camp by the Germans: “ESCAPE IS NO LONGER A SPORT.” Campbell wrote: “Escape starts as a madness, then the PoW adjusts and becomes institutionalised.” He himself worked in the props department of the camp theatre, and attended Spanish classes. Every man was hungry, and matters worsened dramatically in the last months of the war. Campbell lost over forty pounds. Private Jerome Alexis of the U.S. 110th Infantry, who had been captured in the Hürtgen Forest in November 1944, was among a group of enlisted men working in the officer camp Oflag LXIV at Altburgund. There were educational classes of all kinds. Alexis studied French and German, but still found the boredom crippling.

John Killick suffered a special difficulty, that his marriage was unhappy. He had to think through his personal problems under exceptionally unpromising circumstances. “But I discovered inner resources. I read a lot of Dickens, wrote up my Arnhem diary.” It is dismaying to notice the number of women who felt no scruple about informing husbands behind the wire in Germany of their defection, or even of pregnancy by another man. This added emotional anguish to conditions that were already wretched enough. British officer George Millar became obsessively determined to get home to his adored wife. He made three bids for freedom before finally achieving the miracle of a successful escape from Stalag VIIA in 1944. “The only thing that would end everything,” Millar told his wife when they were at last reunited in their London flat, “would be if you had fallen in love with somebody else . . .” She replied coldly: “Perhaps I have.” Millar wrote of himself: “He began then to wish that he had not come home.” Utterly distraught, the young officer volunteered to parachute back into Europe as a secret agent, and indeed did so.

Cold was the worst hardship in the winter of 1944, and prisoners spent many hours in bed to escape it. Killick became a smoker for the first time in his life—“People said it helped”—and rolled cigarettes from an unlikely blend of dried vegetable leaves. He began imprisonment weighing 189 pounds and emerged weighing 140. Some of the tensions between Allied forces persisted into PoW camps. Most British and American prisoners pitied the Russians, despised the French and thought the Poles unhinged. In Stalag VIIA at Moosburg, near Munich, by the time of its liberation 80,000 prisoners were confined in an area of eighty-five acres, including 38,000 French, 8,000 British, 6,000 American and 14,000 Russian. Nineteen-year-old American Bud Lindsey intensely disliked the three British NCOs who ran Hut 53: “Their demeanour was aloof, conceited. They gave the impression they considered American GIs to be inferior, which did not sit well with our group . . . especially with me, the best soda jerk in central Texas.”