Hitler's British Slaves (14 page)

The very real depths of exhaustion felt by the men working in heavy industry was poetically described by Cyril Baddock working in a copper mine, when he wrote in the camp’s newsletter, secretly pinned up within their huts for the prisoners to read:

She was the most desirable thing in the world. God knows how I needed her – what eternal bliss just to rest in her arms, what unalloyed happiness I could find in the ecstasy of her kiss. At times she seemed as far away as the sun, and others just within my eager reach, but when I tried to draw her close she would slide laughingly out of my embrace. … She would not come to me at night when I most needed her. But whilst I was at work she took me into her loving arms and I gave myself to her absolutely. I was caught of course and the chief did not like it. He avowed that the mine was no place for that sort of thing and he reported me. You see, ‘she’ was the daughter of Morpheus and her name is ‘Sleep’.
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The burden of work became intolerable for some, as they found themselves forced to carry enormous weights. Men on ‘light duties’ found themselves sent to be bricklayers, the problem was that the ‘bricks’ each weighed 18 pounds. Some labours seem designed to exhaust them, forcing them into heavy manual work more normally carried out by machines. At one industrial complex prisoners were forced to carry out pile driving by hand. Using a platform, they strained to pull
the ropes that lifted the pile that they dropped to drive lengths of tree trunks into the ground. It was heavy, monotonous and seemingly needless work. Some worked in damp conditions without suitable protective clothing and soon found themselves suffering from rheumatism. One extremely damp mine was kept open until eventually all the German foremen had been conscripted into the Wehrmacht, only then were the prisoners offered any respite. At some industrial concerns the prisoners held the directors personally responsible for their sufferings. At the Vietscher magnesium works at Trieben in Austria the workers blamed the director, Herr Koenig, for their being forced to work in the most dangerous part of the factory where the magnesium was burnt.

Men sent to a brickworks were dismayed to find their part of the process kept them far from the heat of the kilns. Instead their work involved standing in the waters at the edge of a lake cutting clay and carrying it to skips in relays. Each day they worked in sodden uniforms that they tried desperately to dry overnight. Yearn they might for the heat of the kilns but men working at them also found their situation unhealthy. They found their noses and throats being clogged with dust from the drying clay and without proper face masks they only had rags tied across their faces. Likewise for men employed in cement works it seemed there could be no escape from the dust. They were without protective clothing, the dust attacked their airways, settled in their already matted hair and stained their skin and clothes.

Even in winter men laboured in mountain tunnels where the wind whipped through and water dripped from the ceiling. Those prisoners working outdoors without gloves often found their skin sticking to the metal of the tools they used. POWs in fax factories were forced to buy their own goggles and make their own face masks in order to keep their eyes
and lungs clear of the dust and loose fibres. In one stove factory all among the working POWs suffered burns to their feet since their footwear offered little protection, whilst miners reported new boots lasting just six weeks as their leather soles cracked making them impossible to repair. Such complaints became a common feature of Red Cross reports, as the lack of protective clothing meant there were many accidents, in particular causing the amputations of fingers of men working in mines and quarries.

The prisoners placed the blame for such incidents on their guards and foremen, and anyone involved in the process of sending them to work without suitable protective clothing. As one man later wrote there were ‘numerous accidents through their neglect’.
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One of the victims of this wilful negligence was Frederick Keast, killed in April 1943 at an Arbeitskommando in Stiermark, when he was run over by a passenger train. Even when such serious accidents took place the prisoners were seldom allowed to stop work. Instead they continued to work as the injured and dead were removed from the workplace.

Although a few work camps issued all the POWs with overalls conditions varied from place to place. At one camp, of the 1,166 British POWs only 20 per cent were issued with overalls, the remainder worked in whatever clothes were available. Without overalls these were soon stained with dirt and oil and stiff with sweat. In time they would be reduced to rags. Once their work clothes were worn out they utilized their spare clothing, which in turn became threadbare. Reduced to just one set of clothes, many of the men on working details were a pitiful sight, as one recalled of the mine he worked at: ‘majority of the prisoners are dressed like tat-ters’.
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Some toiled for day after day, month after month, year upon year, without washing or changing their uniforms.
Even when infested with fleas and lice the prisoners had to continue wearing the same clothes through good weather and bad. The heat of summer just added more perspiration to the fabric, the cloth becoming stiff with dried sweat, the smell becoming overpowering for outsiders. Then in the cold of winter men working outdoors were soaked to the skin with little chance of drying their clothes before they dressed again for the next day.

Of course, not all the prisoners were employed in large industrial concerns. Nor were they necessarily sent to work in gangs along with their mates. Plenty found themselves all but alone, maybe in small gangs of two or three, in locations that only served to enforce the notion of servility. Many were sent daily into towns and cities near to their Stalags and employed to build air raid shelters for use by civilians, where they often deliberately reduced the levels of cement in the concrete to ensure the shelters would be useless. It was their simple way of playing a small part in the war effort. Others were employed to sweep the streets of German towns and cities, spending 8 hours a day picking up the rubbish dropped by their new masters. Shuffling along in their clogs, broom in hand, there was no greater sign that they were the members of a defeated army. In the eyes of the Germans their humiliation would be complete, but for the prisoners there were still plenty of perks. They searched for cigarette butts that could be split open to be re-rolled and smoked, they also picked up sheets of paper that could substitute for the toilet paper often in such short supply within the camps.

Les Allan, was one of those prisoners sent out to do menial work for the Germans. In the middle of the winter of 1940, wearing a mixture of the wretched scraps of his uniform and the old French and Polish uniforms the guards had thrown into the compound, he was chosen to work on the frozen
River Vistula:

It was the first time I was made to work. I was taken down to the river that was thick with ice – that shows how cold it was. I had to bang a hole in the ice, then they gave me a two-handled tree saw. On one end was a lead weight, you had to put that through into the river. Then I had to saw two-foot blocks of ice. These then had to be carried to the river bank where they were built into a pyramid, which was then covered in leaves. I assume it was for the German officers to have nice iced drinks.
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It was not only the conditions of labour and imprisonment that weighed heavy on the minds of the prisoners. There was also the question of who they toiled alongside. Many of the larger industrial concerns used prisoners from across Europe – Poles, Belgians, Russians, Frenchmen, Yugoslavs – indeed, from all the defeated nations. Even when they saw the appalling treatment of the Russians, who were starved and beaten mercilessly, it could not prepare them for the sight of some of their fellow labourers. On some work details the prisoners worked alongside the most wretched of all Hitler’s slaves – the concentration camp inmates. Unlike the prisoners they had no Red Cross parcels and no one to complain to. Theirs was not just a life of heavy labour, boredom and discomfort, indeed theirs was not a life at all. Their existence was a living death, the sight of which drove many of the POWs to despair. They watched the concentration camp inmates in their striped pyjamas grow weaker day by day. They watched them be beaten and killed. They had no choice but to stand aside and watch the physical abuse of the old and weak, knowing they could do nothing to save them. Intervening to stop a beating would not save the victim, but it might cost the life of the
POW. Even Jewish children worked alongside the prisoners, scurrying around in their ragged oversized prison uniforms, their bare feet filthy, their eyes old before their time. All the prisoners could do was pass them scraps of food from their own rations. When Red Cross parcels arrived they would save their midday meals, waiting for an opportunity to hand over whatever could be spared to those even more desperate than they were themselves.

Australian Private John McInerney, detached from Stalag VIIIb to a tea factory, witnessed the brutality of the Germans towards Jewish men and women. Towards the end of the war a column of 2,000 concentration camp inmates were marched into the Australian’s camp. The next morning he counted 25 bodies lying dead on the ground. As the column departed the SS rounded up any who had attempted to hide. McInerney watched in horror as 20 of them – both men and women – were executed in cold blood. He even saw civilians he worked alongside in the factory bringing in Jews to be executed. Of the nine recaptured by the civilians five were executed by pistol shot to the back of the head in full view of the POWs.

Of all the work details to which the prisoners were sent none would have the lasting emotional impact of one particular camp. A number of work camps, initially known by their simple Arbeitskommando numbers, might have been just some of the many work details dependent on Stalag VIIIb at Lamsdorf. Yet these were not just any work camps, for they were housed in the small Polish town of Oswiecim or, as it would soon be known, Auschwitz. Here the unfortunate prisoners were forced to witness some of the horror of the Nazis’ attempt to purge Europe of its Jews. When working prisoners at this camp were made to carry rifles to the repair shops they were not merely playing a part in the German war effort they were being forced into playing an unwitting role in
the extermination of millions of innocent civilians. It was an experience few would ever forget, and which fewer still ever wanted to remember.

The British POWs were housed in Camp Three, or Monowitz. Though few came in direct contact with the gas chambers and crematoria of Camp Two, or Birkenau, none were unaware of the horrific scenes being played out around them. Up to 140,000 slave labourers, mostly civilians, were housed in the complex of camps around Auschwitz, a complex that in total covered an area of 25 square miles. Among the German companies employing prisoners was Buna who used them as labourers on the building of a synthetic rubber factory. Others among the elite of German industry had plants within the complex, including I.G. Farben, Krupps and Siemens. Day by day the POWs watched the ceaseless toil and never-ending violence inflicted on the inmates of the camp, who shuffled around in their striped pyjamas under the watchful gaze of SS guards. It soon became a common sight for the prisoners to witness beatings or to see corpses left on the ground awaiting collection for cremation. Sometimes they would see the bodies of inmates left swinging from the gallows, their corpses a chilling reminder of the price of disobedience. In a moment of pure horror one British soldier, Arthur Dodds, witnessed Jewish children being burned alive in a pit. It was hours before he was able to speak and it would be many years before he was able to tell anyone what he had seen. Such was the scale of evil experienced by the soldiers that few could really believe what was going on around them – nothing could have prepared them for such scenes. What made it worse was that they knew they were powerless. With the SS in charge of the camp they could expect little mercy; when one man tried to intervene to assist a young girl carrying a container of soup the guard simply ran him through with his bayonet.

The prisoners carried another burden. Many were certain they would never be allowed to live to tell the tale. Surely the cruel slavery and brutal extermination of Europe’s Jews would have to be kept hidden from the world? Surely the Germans had no intention of letting the POWs live to tell the tale? Thus they spent their days almost certain they too would be exterminated before they would be allowed to leave. In their desperation they did all they could to try to undermine the efforts of the Nazis. They sabotaged machinery, fitting the wrong parts into the networks of pipes in the chemical plants, or forcing stones into them. In the railway sidings prisoners swapped destination plates, filled axle boxes with sand and broke holes into the roofs of wagons, hoping the rain might damage whatever was carried within. They slipped morsels of food to fellow inmates in the desperate hope it might keep them alive for just one more day. The surrendering of food in such a manner was a moral dilemma for the prisoners since they had little enough to sustain themselves. Was it worthwhile to risk one’s own health at the expense of helping someone who would surely be dead within weeks anyway? It was a personal decision that could not be taken lightly, nor could the individual be criticized for the choice he made. A handful took their resistance to another level. A few of the prisoners were courageous enough to team up with the Polish underground who operated within the camp. They helped smuggle weapons and explosives into Auschwitz, aiding the locals in their attempts to make sure the factories would never operate. Bravest of all were the prisoners who helped the Jewish inmates to hide from the Nazis and were even able to smuggle a handful of them out of the camp.