Behind Hitler's Lines (23 page)

IV-B was like an international convention of NCOs, for all the inmates were sergeants. Guards boasted that this was the oldest, indeed the original stalag. Most of them were pretty old too, veterans of World War I. The camp was divided into nationalities with the most senior Allied sergeant controlling the POW side of it. Joe never figured out if “senior” meant rank, prison time, or a combination. Anyway, the Commonwealth NCO corps ran things. For four years they'd interacted with the camp authorities, and there was mutual respect. The Americans felt like kids entering junior high, not knowing teachers or schoolmates, grimly accepting new-guy status and making the best of it.

Rosie admired the organizational skill of the Germans, but they had nothing on the British when it came to setting up a prison. There was a formal ceremony at IV-B where the senior NCO of the arriving Americans was received by his Commonwealth counterpart amid salutes and handshakes. The Americans were shown to their huts by British hosts, who the next day held a briefing complete with map and charts. The camp worked this way, said a former announcer for the BBC, to begin a description of the POW organization.

It was headed by “the Man of Confidence,” or MOC. A Canadian sergeant major, he had been elected by the inmates. Whatever needed to be brought up with the Germans, he was the man to do it, the man in whom fellow prisoners had to have confidence—a confidence that was to undergo more tests than before. Americans proved much more vocal with their complaints than krieges of other nationalities and created many new problems for the MOC, whose interest in what he called stable “kriege-kraut relations” equaled that of the commandant. To Joe, Man of Confidence sounded like a Mafia title, and there was a considerable resemblance. Things went on aboveboard and underground. There seemed to be understandings between the British and Germans that he
couldn't understand. They'd been friends and foes for centuries. At his age it was too much to understand. Joe knew himself, denned himself, as a soldier, intent to fit in but only to find a way to get out.

Eventually the British divulged their sub-rosa infrastructure, which included an escape committee. Any escape plans had to be approved by the committee, or they wouldn't be supported. It seemed a dormant issue. From what Joe could discern, he was the only one thinking about escaping into eastern Germany. As a new guy, Joe was being checked out. Week by week he learned a lot talking with Canadian krieges who'd been in the stalag system for years. His respect for them and the questions Joe asked impressed them that he might be an escape candidate. It was nothing solid or specific, but to Joe it was encouraging to be under consideration to enter a pool of potentials. Slowly the Germans seemed to be taking his measure too, now that he was in a small camp. Stalag authorities knew it took a long period to organize an escape. One of the ways they prevented that was to move krieges from camp to camp so a plan would fall apart when key men were transferred at random. It made sense too to move potential escapees to where they would be the problem of another commandant.

Yet there was one escape plan with which the Germans would cooperate. If a kriege could accumulate sixty cartons of American cigarettes—in Joe's experience that never happened—he'd go to the escape committee with his wealth. They'd provide him a tutor to learn basic German. His cigarettes would be left in trust with the escape committee, which would give him a civilian ID card provided by cooperating Germans in IV-B. From them he would later receive civilian clothes, a picnic basket of sandwiches, and a train ticket to the Swiss border with appropriate papers. There would also be advice on where to cross. The last step would be his assignment to a work detail in Muhlberg where the guards would arrange for him to change clothes near the
Bahnhof.
He would have a railway schedule and, with luck, a train within an hour; with more luck he'd make connections to
trains that wouldn't be strafed during a four-hundred-mile ride to the border. Getting into Switzerland would be his problem, but if successful, he was to send a postcard to the Man of Confidence, who would then pay off with cigarettes the German accomplices. They'd have received some of the cartons up front for the train ticket and papers, but the basic deal was no postcard, no payoff.

The “Basel Express” was far beyond Joe's means. With experienced krieges he wasn't yet a gambler superior enough to win many cigarettes, and by just saving them it would take years to squirrel away sixty cartons. It did cross his mind to steal them from certain krieges who collaborated with the Germans without approval from the MOC.

However, Joe had no direct dealings with collaborators because they disgusted him to the point of depression. Collaborators were pretty well identified, so no one had to be with them unless he wanted to. He didn't know the most notorious, Master Sergeant Keating, who accepted favors from guards at the expense of his fellows. A big paratrooper, Keating got extra food from the krauts so that he was the strongest kriege in camp. His instructions were to taunt prisoners to get in the ring with him, that he was
Fallschirmjager
Max Schmeling, champion of the Reich. Guards had to force most krieges to fight him, but not Jim Bradley, who was willing to take a beating if he could get in one nose-flattening punch. It cost him four rounds of vicious punishment before he did, till Keating snorted gobbets of blood as krieges roared for more. Guards halted the bout while their gladiator recovered, then pounded Bradley into the ground like a pile driver.

Of course Keating and other collaborators rose to the attention of the Man of Confidence, whose charter was to take the broadest view in considering the prisoners' best interests. Assuredly he had the cigarette wealth to take the Basel Express but didn't, a precursor of John McCain, who refused early release from the Hanoi Hilton. Based on the MOC's proven unselfishness, speculation was that Keating had to kick back some of his extra food to the kriege community split with the MOC, who could use it for rainy days, of which
there were many when
Jabos
strafed everything the Germans tried to move on the ground. That included carts hauling cabbage to the stalags, lowest of all transportation priorities.

The Man of Confidence had a staff, some in the open but more not, like the escape committee, concealed from both krieges and krauts. That way he had more real power. Accordingly he wouldn't summon Keating but instead would send someone to his mucker to explain alternatives, which were to kick back or have an accident (for which there would be plenty of volunteers). It would be safe to communicate such an indirect threat because the commandant valued cooperation with the MOC more than any other kriege relationship. On the other hand, it was for the MOC to accommodate the commandant's interests, one of which was to provide amusement for the guards through one-sided boxing matches.

Keating was situationally a borderline case, in contrast with even more blatant collaborators. A few appeared in XII-A after Joe left. They were complete turncoats with swastikas, working openly and informing for the Germans, who housed them outside the stalag and the reach of even MOC enforcers. Krieges would have bid up a cigarette auction to a Basel Express level for the chance to disembowel these turncoats. After the war they were subject to court-martial, but no one Joe knows of brought charges. It wasn't to save the traitors but to save their families from shame.

THOUGH THEY LOST AN AVERAGE OF 20 PERCENT OF THEIR
body weight, krieges nevertheless regained some strength as compared with prestalag captivity, probably because they were now settled into a system resembling that of their own army, and the long haul was the road to survival. “IV-B or not to be,” one of them put it. Rosie and his mucker, Jim Bradley, would walk the perimeter to the Canadian, Dutch, and French compounds, divided by double twelve-foot-high barbed wire fences but open to international conversation. The only compound totally off-limits was the Russians', as if Germany denied their very existence. Each side of the perimeter was about a quarter mile. Joe paced it off repeatedly. Though IV-B was no less depressing than XII-A, here in IV-B he detected an air of latent verve among a few krieges drifting with the others, passing on rumors, looking to trade, exchanging survival tips. The most important were about new guards.

The worst news was that a Waffen SS had been detailed as camp guard because he'd been wounded and could pull only light duty
^*
If he had been wounded on the Eastern Front, he'd take it out on the Russians—though nothing more could
be done to them than what could already be seen. It was the Americans' turn in the barrel if a new guard had been wounded on the Western Front. At IV-B there was a postwar plan for the SS: to be loaded on the longest troop train in history and sent east (subject to
jabo
strafing) to wherever Stalin requested. That's what the krieges would petition Eisenhower to do with the SS.

With a settled population, krieges of different nationalities met and talked throughout the day. If Rosie took up with someone who didn't interest Bradley, Bradley'd go off and find someone who did. Then they'd get back together and both have something to discuss. Talk, barter, and gambling were the great time-passers. If a kriege was punished with solitary confinement, the worst of it was not bread and water but the loss of conversation.

Like George Rosie, Tom Gintjee had stalag experiences nearly identical to Joe's, but so far as he can remember they never met. Gintjee of the 82nd Airborne had been captured on D +1, strafed in the convoy to St.-Lo, and starved on Starvation Hill, and he had survived the death train to Limburg. At XII-A he presented a puzzlement for the Germans, for he was Japanese-American, one of very few the War Department had allowed to serve as individual soldiers outside the 442nd (“Go for Broke”) Regimental Combat Team, which would win great laurels in Italy and France. Almost all other Nisei were employed as translators in the Pacific. The Germans made some effort to convert Gintjee to the cause of their Axis partners but soon shrugged him off as too scrawny. Besides, the Japanese were allies of convenience, not of the master race, as the Germans made clear to him.

Gintjee was an engraver, cartoonist, and diarist, leaving a vividly written, wryly illustrated journal much read by the postwar kriege community. He dated each entry D,
beginning with his capture, ending with D+320. Gintjee was the Pepys of IV-B, as stalag existence forced him to be by its unmitigable hours, days, and weeks of nervous boredom on which he reflected in the introduction to his unpublished memoir,
Don't Fence Me In
—the title taken from a Bing Crosby hit of the times.

Where Joe was restless, Gintjee was resigned to “the slow process of developing into an old kriege, a life expressly pointed to that day when [he'd] be freed and what was so important in prison life became suddenly useless…. [His] captivity was an utter waste,… a period of nothing, except for being sorely exposed to fellow krieges reduced to what was produced by their background and breeding.” He likened himself to a newborn, learning, “There are three elements— air, water, food—and that only air is unrationed by the Germans. He must learn self and mental discipline, constantly exercise them in order to continue … things the Army, for all its hard training, never tried to teach. Being a prisoner was not something they ever wanted him to be.

“Maybe a lesson will be gained from this and I hope I'm wrong in doubting it. As long as there are wars, another face will appear where mine is gone. In the place I vacate will be another prisoner. I hope he fares as well as possible.”

Like small slices of the IV-B pie were compounds holding French and Italian soldiers, who wore little silver stars on their caps and walked around freely—”not prisoners the way we are”—Gintjee noted, in extreme contrast with the mostly invisible Russians, the undead.
^*

“It's downright sadistic the way the Nasties [Nazis] slap them around. If we show emotion when the Russians are beaten we're punished too. I think that's why the Russians are beaten where we can see it. But the Nasties also beat them just because they like to do it.”

And because the wretched prisoners were the only Russians
the Germans could beat any longer. The crushing success of Red Army offensives in the second half of 1944 were little known in IV-B, but from BBC broadcasts, heard on a secret kriege receiver, it was common knowledge that the Reich was being constricted on two sides.

Gintjee recorded: “They fell us out in formation for an SS general. Of course he was hours late and that's how long we stood in the cold. Maybe he thought we didn't know how the war was going. He had this leer while he went up and down our ranks and nodded to himself as if he knew a secret. He looked straight into my eyes. His eyes were like a dead fish and I felt a cold hand on my spine. What was God thinking, what was He drinking, when He created creatures like this?”

This SS general announced that lenient treatment of Western prisoners had improved their health to the point where they could now enjoy athletics. Thus boxing gloves were provided, this time for matches between nationalities. There were few volunteers. Anyone who could hold up his gloves for three rounds usually won. Once again the camp champion was Keating, though he was thoroughly booed whenever he fought.