Hitler's British Slaves (16 page)

Yet for thousands of the men, farm work came as a shock. Plenty of them had never been near a farm in their lives, never handled animals, nor indeed had much experience of the countryside. They had never been outside their home towns or cities prior to being called up for wartime service. Others knew little except what they’d seen in magazines or newsreels, or as the landscape passing the train windows during bank holiday trips to the seaside. They were to have a rude awakening. Life in the countryside was about more than leaning on a gate, chewing straw and wearing a smock. It was about long hours and hard work in all weathers.

One of the first things to be learnt by the prisoners was how different the landscape was from that of home. Since most of the soldiers were young men with little experience of the world, the landscape of central and eastern Europe was completely new to them. Indeed for many of the men from across the Empire this was their first visit to Europe. Used to the sun of South Africa or Australia, or the intense summer heat of India – and having been first introduced to Europe via the Mediterranean theatre – many among them struggled to adapt to a climate that was kind to them in the spring and summer yet savagely cruel through the winter.

There was a certain irony to what they were learning. Those POWs sent to work in the newly conquered Polish territories or in East Prussia, were labouring in the very lands
that were the German focus of the struggle. The former included the fields and forests Hitler had taken his country to war to claim, the later were the German lands he sought to protect from the supposed attentions of his eastern enemies. This was the territory that the men from Britain and the Commonwealth had been conscripted to free from the clutch of the Germans. And now with an unconscious irony they slipped into the role of labourers bound to slave for the Nazis’ expansionist dream.

Everything was different from the world they knew – from the crops to the livestock, from the houses to the wildlife. The POWs spotted small wooden houses with dark walls and forbidding windows, these were the homes of the Poles. Sharing the villages were more substantial buildings, one- or two-storey brick built homes, which housed the local German population. Yet the homes of the two nationalities shared some features. In the spring and summer their gardens were awash with colour, as daisies and poppies bloomed in the fertile earth. Enclosed within their short wooden fences these gardens and smallholdings were alive with the buzzing of insects and the chirping of crickets. They shared the common feature of wooden outhouses that perched above pits which were regularly emptied to feed the soil of the land they worked.

Fertilised by the human waste of generations of farmers, the fields of eastern Europe were bountiful. Crops thrived in these lands. Whether in the vast fields that fed the armies of the expanding Reich – or the gardens where the locals grew their peppers, cucumbers, tomatoes and dill, whose aroma filled the senses of all who walked through a village – nature was all around the prisoners as they slipped into a rural existence. Perched atop almost every chimney, church tower, or telegraph pole were the nests of storks. Every village had
a pond from which ducks and geese waddled to quack at the prisoners as they marched to work. Every home seemed to have a chained dog, roaming the garden, protecting the livestock from the attentions of the foxes that emerged each night. Other animals crept out from the woods into the fields. As the sun set, deer and boar slipped from the woods, marching through the crops ignoring the careful lines laid out by the POW ploughmen, and treading a course their forebears had trod long before man had chosen to fight over the ownership of these fields.

It was not just the look of the houses or the layout of the fields that opened the eyes of the men. The very scale of things was a revelation. After the relatively crowded British Isles the Polish countryside seemed a vast expanse of field and forest, dotted with farms or small villages and almost swamped by lakes. Fields rolled for mile after mile, connected by pitted tracks or rough tree-lined roads, whilst rivers seemed to be wider and wilder than those at home. Meadows full of sunflowers swayed in the wind, continuing for miles in places where it seemed no one lived near enough to tend them. Roads stretched forever towards the horizon, the roadside shrines and calvaries the only sign of human activity. And as the prisoners worked, like peasants from centuries past, the summer sky seemed to be an expanse of blue rolling ever onward above them. Even when covered in storm clouds, the sky seemed to have a startling blackness that hung over them as if to emphasise their predicament. This was the
lebensraum
Hitler had promised to his people.

The physical essence of this new world was not the only revelation for the prisoners. The very light around them seemed to have an intensity unseen in western Europe. The dust of the harvest, or that kicked up from beneath the horses’ hooves, seemed to hang lazily in the air, glistening in the sunlight.
Whether at sunrise or sunset, the colours thrown across the fields were outstandingly vivid. The yellowy orange of the summer and autumn sunset was unlike any they experienced at home. In the evenings they sat in the hazy shadows and watched as the sun set far away in the west. With the buzzing of insects and the crisp rustling of crops surrounding them, the weary prisoners settled down to rest, not knowing if they would ever follow the setting sun westwards to their own homes. Tied into this natural world, the prisoners slipped into a routine few could ever have dreamed would mark their wartime service.

The men sent to farms in the east were not alone in experiencing a world far removed from that they had known at home. Hundreds were sent to the farms of Bavaria and Austria where they worked land high up in the mountains. For many of the POW farm labourers they felt they had taken a step back in time. Many were delivered to farmhouses where they awaited the arrival of local farmers who came to view their prospective labourers. Like slaves at market the farmers looked the prisoners over before selecting which man they thought most suited their needs. Once working the men found almost medieval ways of working, there was little machinery and tractors were almost unknown. They ploughed with teams of horses and often reaped and sowed by hand, whilst hand-driven blowers were used to separate the grain from the chaff. The farmhouses also had a primitive quality unseen at home. The farmers lived on the upper levels of buildings where the ground floor was used to house their livestock through the winter, when the cattle bedded down on pieces of thinly cut pine branches. As the POWs ate their meals in the kitchens of the farmhouses, pigs and chickens wandered freely in, searching for scraps of food. The farms themselves were spread out around hills, valleys and mountainsides
where the men worked small plots between forested areas and steep slopes where no crops could be planted. Thousands of feet above sea level the prisoners worked in the fields, breathing in the thin, clean air and enjoying the bright sunlight of the summer months.

Gordon Barber was among the new breed of farmers who stepped out into the farms of the Reich. Initially held at Stalag XXa, at Thorn, and then at Stalag XXb near Marienburg, he was soon sent on a work detail:

I will always remember this farm. We didn’t do bad in there, ’cause we got fairly good rations. It was a state farm and they realised if they didn’t feed us we wouldn’t be able to work. We were lucky. One bloke I knew, the Germans knew he was Jewish, they kept him in the Stalag and he died of malnutrition. They used to see him searching for potato peelings. But most of us were ‘townies’ we didn’t know what a farm was. I didn’t know how potatoes grew.
⁴

Separated from his best mate Paddy who, as a pre-war regular in the Royal Horse Artillery, had been detailed to tend the farm horses, Barber was sent to the potato fields. It would be a sharp learning process for him, one which the German guards were prepared to ensure would not take too long. The prisoners soon realised their guards would not tolerate any insolence and their actions shattered any dreams the prisoners had of a rural idyll:

One afternoon in October, it was cold, we were digging up the last of the potato crop. The fields used to go for miles. We used to have a little three pronged fork and we’d get hold of the top of the potato plant, dig under and pull them all out. I was with a Scots bloke at the time, he had all boils on the back of his neck. This little bleedin’ overseer came riding out on his horse. He’d got these packets of ‘
papierosa
’ – Polish cigarettes – they were bloody horrible, but you’d smoke anything. He stuck them up on a stick at the end of the potato row. So the first one to finish would get them. I said to Jock ‘This is what the Americans used to do to their slaves. Bollocks, I’d rather pack up smoking.’ And the guard said ‘Don’t forget you’ll be here until you’re finished. You’ll stop here until night time.’ I still had a load of mouth so I said. ‘Fuckin’ hard luck. Then you’ll still be here. You’re not gonna leave us alone.’

Soon Barber and his mate were left far behind the rest of the workforce – both Polish labourers and fellow POWs – as they worked at a comfortable pace. Their efforts did not impress the foreman.

When it was time for them to go home – they’d all finished their rows – me and Jock still had a couple of miles to go. I wasn’t worried, there was only one thing they could do – they could only shoot you. When the guards came back to us it was dark – they’d got torches. One was called Christian, he was a fucking evil man. They’d got these thin branches they’d cut from a sapling. I said to my mate ‘We’re going to get in trouble here.’ I had a Polish hat on so I pulled it down over my face. They shone the torch at Jock and as he bent down they whacked him. The back of his neck was like a blood bath, they’d burst all his boils. He had a couple of false teeth and they were knocked out. They gave him a right going over. I thought ‘You bastards, I’m gonna get it now.’ So I pulled my collar up and bent down so I’d take it on my shoulders. They set on me and this Christian bloke loved it. He kept laughing when I cried out. Then when we finished they marched us back. The other blokes took our clothes off and washed us down. They said ‘Look at your back!’ It was covered in weals. I thought, if I ever meet that Christian again I’ll kill him.
⁵

It was little wonder men like Barber soon began to ‘learn the ropes’. He and most of his comrades were on a steep learning curve. For young men from the cities it was difficult to adapt but the impetus was simple – by learning the ways of the countryside they would learn ways to keep their bellies full. Prisoners soon became proficient in catching chickens, and learnt that the best way to dispose of bones and feathers was to hide them in the manure pile. Born and bred around Crystal Palace in South London, Barber had no experience of rural life but he soon worked things out:

I knew all the places to get food. I knew exactly where the chickens would lay their eggs. If you walked in a barn and you saw a hen start moving and cackling then she’d laid an egg. You learnt that. You knew if a cow kicked out when you touched its udders then it wanted milking. I used to know when the pig was going to have babies, then I’d wait a couple of weeks and go down and knock one off, ’cause the farmer didn’t know whether it had been killed by the mother. There were lots of things you could use, it was like fieldcraft.
⁶

Yet the trials of becoming farmers was about more than learning where to find food. They had to learn the twice daily routine of cow milking. They learnt when it was time to take bulls for breeding, or when to put horses for stud. They learnt to deliver lambs and calves, assisting the country vets or farmers when necessary until they could carry out the task unaided. They learnt how horses didn’t like pigs and had to
be kept apart for fear the horses would kick the pigs. Shepherding and shearing, milking and milling, all were part of the POWs’ new life. Such was the amount they learned that even in the twilight of their lives the former POW farmers find themselves looking into fields and assessing the quality of the land – checking for weeds and nettles, or noting how many stones lie in the path of the ploughs.

Men who had only seen horses as something that pulled milk floats around the streets of their home towns were soon leading teams of working horses before the plough. William Hymers, formerly a London grocer, was part of a detachment of prisoners sent to a farm after they had disrupted a road building project with their almost constant acts of petty sabotage, such as breaking picks and shovels. He was already in his thirties by the time he found himself told to learn ploughing at an agricultural detachment from Stalag XXa. He later wrote of his labours:

We paced out 50 strides from one end of the field and stuck in a stick. Then, going to the other side we did the same again. With two, sometimes three, horses abreast we ploughed a furrow as straight as possible from stick to stick. Then turning round we ploughed back again, which made a kind of ridge. After that we just went up and down with the ploughed area getting larger and larger until the end of the field was reached.
⁷

At each turn Hymers had to throw the plough onto its side as the horses dragged it into position ready to start the next furrow.

Holding the plough with both hands Hymers was forced to put the reins around his neck and eventually learned to control the horses using his voice. He was taught Polish
phrases that the animals, with years of ploughing experience, would respond to. He shouted ‘Ho-com’ to make them move forward and ‘Ha-com’ to make them turn right. At the command ‘He-com’ the team would turn left and ‘Swick’ would make them walk backwards. The command to make the horses stop was the sound ‘Br-r-r-r-r’, made by vibrating the tongue against the back of the teeth – it was a sound many were never able to master.