Hitler's British Slaves (10 page)

Another prisoner remembered the life he saw when he returned to Stalag XXb from work detachments: ‘The sergeant-major and his little clique had a good life. It’s like anything in life – human nature. You couldn’t do nothing about it, you could only join them – if they’d allow you. I didn’t like the sergeant-major’s attitude. He always looked smart and clean, as if he’d had enough to eat. They did get enough to eat. They had all the know how to get food. There was the “Man of Confidence”, that you’d go to with any problems. But if it was going to do them any harm they wouldn’t do it.’
³⁰
At Stalag IIIa a similar situation was found, with men
reporting how BSM Henderson was never around when there were problems over the issue of Red Cross parcels. Another accusation was that he never kept records of how many parcels were available. Furthermore when the Red Cross sent leather to the camp, to be used to resole boots, it soon ran out. Whilst British and Commonwealth troops were forced to wear clogs the leather itself soon became available on the blackmarket, being sold openly by a Serbian prisoner. In the words of another prisoner who referred to the privileged NCOs as ‘The Golden Circle’, some among them displayed the attitude of ‘Fuck you Jack, I’m alright’.
³¹

A prime example of the petty and domineering attitude of some senior NCOs was shown by RSM Read, the ‘Man of Confidence’ at Stalag VIIIb. In January 1945, irritated that prisoners were exchanging their clothing for food, he contacted the British government via the Red Cross and asked permission to punish the offenders by refusing them access to the dwindling stocks of Red Cross parcels. His request was denied and the prisoners were allowed to continue with the trade that was the only thing standing between them and starvation. At Stalag IVb new prisoners entered the camp to be greeted by a sergeant major seemingly eager to help the incoming men. He informed them that since all money was worthless to them they should hand it over for safekeeping. Trusting the NCO and hardly understanding the reality of their situation many handed over all they had. They soon realised they would never see their money again.

These conflicts and conditions endured within the Stalags were a drain on morale and spending day after day sitting around with nothing to do sapped the POWs’ physical and mental strength. It was easy to grow bored with walking around inside the perimeter wire, having the same conversations with the same people, day in day out. Their world was
limited to the sight of the horizon, anything beyond might as well have been on another planet. The resulting mix of boredom and discomfort, teamed with theft, violence and the behaviour of some NCOs, meant it was little wonder many prisoners were happy to be put to work. It was an enthusiasm many would soon learn was misplaced.

3

Industry

‘The majority of British prisoners of war in German hands are employed in work detachments.’
¹

‘The amount of work enforced on English personnel in comparison to the amount of food was inhuman.’
Trooper Vincent

Silverthorne at Gruba Erika Arbeitskommando.
²

Coal, salt, iron, copper, lignite, graphite and potassium mining. Road building. Sugar mills. Lime factories. Welding. Riveting. Brick kilns. Potassium mines. Barge repairing. Pipe laying. Ground levelling. Gravel pits. Quarrying stone. Repairing trains. Smelting. Laying railway lines. Cutting ice from frozen rivers. Boot and clog factories. Paper mills. Post offices. Goods yards. Demolition. Clearing bomb sites. Shunting. Unloading goods wagons. Street sweeping and refuse collection. Breweries and distilleries. Timber yards. Gravel pits. Building sites. Cigarette factories. Woollen mills. Print shops. Cutting firewood. Gardening. Dam construction. Bridge building. Dyke building. Cement works. Oil refineries. Glassworks. Seed factories. Fish farms.

So reads a bewildering list of employments spread across factories the length and breadth of the Reich. Yet such a list can only give a taste of what was on offer to the thousands of POWs who made up Hitler’s new workforce. Yet whether they were emptying the dustbins of hotels in the major cities of Germany or were harnessed to a grinding wheel like slaves in the Old Testament, all suffered a common indignity
– knowing they were nothing but the servants of the enemy. It was little wonder they complained to the Red Cross that they were being: ‘slave driven like the Jews’.
³

Upon arrival at Gewerbe Arbeitskommandos the new workforce had little idea of what awaited them. Indeed, many who had eagerly volunteered for work in food processing plants would soon be disappointed, few of the promised factories ever materialised. Instead appealing work details were often a ruse designed to find volunteers for the worst jobs. At some Stalags prisoners were specifically chosen for work in industry after they were made to fill in their professions on Red Cross forms. All the tradesmen were then separated from their comrades and sent to the appropriate industry.

Yet the use of prisoners as specialised labourers, directed to where their skills might best be utilised, was seldom achieved within the network of work camps. Instead most among the captive labour force were simply picked at random to work wherever they were needed. At a cement factory in Silesia one prisoner made a list of the men of his detachment, a list that reflected the mixture of men in the vast army of ‘civilian soldiers’: industrial labourers, office clerks, regular soldiers, territorials, a travel agent, an architect, a commercial artist, a bank clerk, a farmer and a carpet layer. Such varied groups meant there were many thousands of men who quickly had to learn the realities of heavy labour carried out hour after hour, day after day and year upon year.

Throughout the journey to their new homes the men speculated as to their fate, a fate that for many would mean years of unrelenting toil in conditions few had previously experienced. As they were once more crammed into trains for the journey to their new homes rumours flew around as to what the work might be, some good some bad. There were men pleased to be leaving the drudgery of the Stalags and others
who knew their physical condition would make heavy labour an intolerable burden. Some thought work camps might offer a chance to escape whilst for others the escape from the boredom of the Stalags was enough.

The question of health was important for many of the labourers. Among those captured in the summer of 1940 were plenty of men with little experience of manual labour. Among them were volunteers and conscripts whose working lives had been spent in offices. There were shopkeepers and chefs, clerks and college students, and all manner of men who had never previously seen the interior of factories or mines. Furthermore, plenty of the prisoners were experienced regular soldiers, many of whose age counted against them.

Upon arrival for their first day at work all these men would have to embark on a harsh lesson on the realities within German industry. These were lessons they had to learn in order to adapt to life within a regime that had little time for shirkers and skivers. Although some prisoners were fortunate to be allocated to work camps where life could be easy, plenty more were detailed to live and work in conditions unfit for animals, enduring a burden of labour that would exhaust them both physically and mentally in the years ahead.

One of the first lessons to be learnt was that the language barrier between POWs and their bosses had to be overcome. In some camps interpreters were provided, but in others there was no assistance. Some arrived to find civilian overseers who refused to speak anything but German. They shouted their orders at the prisoners, giving them a brief demonstration of the work they were to do and then leaving them to it. The prisoners soon realised they would need to understand as much of the language as possible if they hoped to survive in any degree of comfort. Most soon learned the most important words, they’d heard the shout of ‘
Raus!
’ – meaning
out – a thousand times. Now they learnt new words ‘
arbeit
’ – work – all too often followed by the instruction ‘
Schnell
’ – or fast – which needed little explanation. One German word did however bring a measure of comfort. Some among this new labour force were designated as
Schwerarbeiter
, a classification that meant their heavy labours entitled them to extra rations. It was a bonus that could mean the difference between existence and starvation.

Another thing the POWs learned as they were shunted around German industry was that no two camps were alike. Some were vast enterprises such as factories belonging to the industrial giant Siemens, or synthetic oil plants run by I.G. Farben. Others were small local sawmills, or factories with just handfuls of men employed. Conditions within depended on the attitudes of the employers, the guards, the foremen and the fellow workers. On some work detachments the POWs were kept working throughout the day – their labours were never ending. For others the labour was less gruelling. Some were offered
Akkord Arbeit
that meant they were allotted tasks and would be free to return to barracks as soon as the tasks were completed. Some reasonable employers decreed that prisoners who worked late into the night due to the immediate requirements of the factory should be allowed to start late the next morning. As a result of these differences for some POWs it was an easy life where, as long as they kept working, they were untroubled by their guards, but for others it grew into a life of drudgery where they were forced to work ever harder with constantly decreasing rewards.

Of all the tasks to which the prisoners were detailed nothing struck dread into the hearts of the prisoners like the mention of mining. When rumours went around the Stalags that men were being detailed for mining the rooms fell silent. Even for those prisoners with experience of mining the thought
of spending the war years in pits was something few had contemplated. Had Alec Reynolds wished to spend the war underground he could simply have remained at home in the pit where he had worked since leaving school. Instead he had given up his reserved occupation to join the army: ‘I didn’t have to go to war. I had five brothers, we were all miners, we all went to war and we all came back. They told me to go home and look after my mother, because my dad had been in the Boer war and then in the First World War. He was gassed and never did another day’s work in his life.’
⁴
Finding himself a prisoner, after having been captured on Kos in 1943, Reynolds had little idea of what was in store for him:

Someone said to me ‘Watch what you say if the Germans ask what you did before the war’. So I was in this room, naked, in front of six of them and they asked me what my job was. I said I was unemployed. They looked at my body and said ‘Miner’. They knew right away I’d worked in a mine. So that was it. But I had no worries about anything. I was very fit. I looked after myself. I didn’t worry about what would happen.
⁵

The knowledge of men like Reynolds was of great benefit to the rest of the prisoners, as knowledgeable miners were able to offer advice that would help many survive in the treacherous conditions underground.

Whether for coal, salt, iron ore, copper or lignite the basic rules were the same. The work was heavy, the hours long and the conditions almost unbearable. For one group their introduction to the mine was daunting. When they claimed that coal mining would qualify as war work and that they would not go down the pit, the German reaction was swift. The men were beaten with rifle butts and kicked by their jack-booted guards. Then they were starved for 24 hours.

Not all had such a violent introduction to their new homes, yet as the POWs arrived at camps in mining villages few could fail to miss the scarred landscape of winding gear, slag heaps, coal dust and chimneys. As one man later recorded, it was: ‘an oasis of industrial sordidness in a sea of cultivated land’.
⁶
This was a world that would engulf many among them and at most camps the prisoners could look out from their huts and see little but the mine buildings from which they would descend into the earth. At one salt mine the winding gear was just 60 yards from their accommodation, with both huts and mines enclosed within the same barbed wire fence. It stood as a constant reminder of the unrelenting nature of their employment.

For men with no previous experience of mining the work was an intolerable burden, and few were ever given any proper instructions over their duties. Instead they had to pick up what they could from watching the civilian miners. Nor was any serious check made over the physical suitability of men chosen to descend into the forbidding darkness. Even men with glasses were included in the work details, the gloomy conditions only serving to further damage their eyesight. Those men who were inspected by German doctors found there was seldom an interpreter available to assist and that any examinations were superficial. As a result prisoners who had caught malaria in North Africa were forced down the mines. Even some of obvious poor health could not escape the mines. Red Cross inspectors found men classed as fit for light duties working at the coalface, and one man with active TB, who had originally been classed suitable for repatriation, was sent to work underground.

By late 1940 over 600 men from Stalag VIIIb in Upper Silesia were employed in four coal mines and 136 men from Stalag IXc were employed down salt mines. By 1944 the
figure had risen to 4,000 POWs from Stalag VIIIb employed on fifteen mining detachments. Few were prepared to hide their feelings, as Private Deakin of the Leicestershire Regiment wrote home in early 1943: ‘I have been forced down the mines here. Our own RSMs are partly to blame, but I repay them when I return. I am not fit for this work, but either you go down or else.’
⁷