Hitler's British Slaves (18 page)

According to the Geneva Convention we should have only worked certain hours, but in a sugar beet factory once the season starts it carries on until the last beet has been processed. It never stops, not even for a minute. I worked in two different factories. They were probably the worst jobs I had. At the first factory we had two 12-hour shifts each day. Then on Friday we worked 18 hours to change over from day to night shift. We worked all winter and never got a penny for it. I was in the filtration room where all the processed liquid went through these cloth filters. When the pressure was getting too great we had to shut the machine off, open it up and shake the filters so all the impurities would fall off and through a hole in the floor. The temperatures were terrible, the room filled with steam and we worked stripped to the waist. Once the filters had been emptied you had to wrap yourself up in your clothes, go down to where the impurities had emptied, then push the wagon outside, where the temperature was –25°. You tipped it out then put it back under the machine. The worst thing was swapping between the extreme temperatures. At the end of a 12-hour shift you were knackered. The second sugar beet factory was even worse. I was unloading the trucks. As they came in on the railway lines we had to shovel them into a trough of running water so they could run down into the factory to be processed. The cold was extreme when you are working outside all day.
¹³

Throughout the winter the decrepit prisoners endured the extreme temperatures. Those lucky enough to receive wages found they earned just 1.20 reichsmarks, just enough to buy them 4 pints of weak beer – if it was available. Few were
allowed to report sick, even those with bad cases of piles were forced to keep working. Those men labouring within many factories were refused work clothes and instead worked in their own uniforms. Those without sturdy footwear were forced to buy shoes at the cost of over 8 reichsmarks – more than a week’s wages. When their day’s work was over they could do little but fall into their beds. For them the shortages of books and games were irrelevant. It was not just the prisoners who felt aggrieved by their treatment. At one Arbeitskommando fighting the ‘battle of the beet’ even the German civilian workers complained that the factory managers cared little for their staff – regardless of nationality or status.

However, the burden of labour was not only on a seasonal basis. Some of those who worked through the winter processing beet found themselves soon returning to work on farms, preparing the land ready for the planting of next year’s beet crop. They became used to the weekly routines known to farm workers since the accepted use of prisoners was for them to work the same hours as local labourers. Despite rules about having days off this meant that prisoners had to work on Sundays. Cows still needed to be milked and animals needed feeding or eggs collecting. Nature did not stop nor did their employers allow them special treatment.

As the prisoners became accustomed to early rising, long hours and heavy work many grew strong and were able to handle the rigours of their labour. With both Red Cross parcels to fill their bellies and goods to trade onto the black market most did not endure quite the same physical debilitation as some of those in German industry. However, among this new breed of farmers were men who were simply not suited to the work. Their physical weaknesses, and the attempts of guards, foremen or other labourers to exploit this led to conflicts
between the factions. Gordon Barber, who had quickly adapted to the heavy labour, watched the treatment of a fellow prisoner:

My mate Fippo wasn’t very strong. When we were unloading the harvest into the barn we had to pile it up then throw it up into the barn. There was one bloke unloading, then others passing it up and dropping it over the side. I was unloading, I liked that because the quicker I could do it the quicker I could get a break. But you had to work fast, you couldn’t fuck about.

He soon noticed his work mate was not keeping pace. The problem was that the Polish labourer had built the stack so high he couldn’t reach to throw the barley up. So they swapped jobs and he began quickly throwing the sheaves at the Pole:

I was hitting this prat in the face with them. All of a sudden I got hit by a load of it. He’d piled it up and pushed it down on me. Down I went. I climbed up the ladder to where he was. He was a big gormless prat, looked like a simpleton. I brought him down and gave him a couple of whacks. I’ve never seen a look of hate like it on anybody’s face. He got his pitchfork and was having a go at me. I ended up in the barley, and it was hard to get up. I got up and let him get up. I chased him backwards and hit him. He went over backwards into an empty bay and broke his arm. So I wasn’t a very popular fellow with the farmer or the Poles.
¹⁴

He began to realise the local labourers could be a serious problem for the prisoners:

They were vicious, they didn’t muck about, you had to fight their way. It wasn’t just fighting hard, you had to have something in your hand. I had a fight with the blacksmith and I was doing ok. All of a sudden his missus comes running down and hit me on the head with a fucking iron bucket. Bang! Next thing I know he pulls out a pair of bleedin’ shears. I thought ‘I’m not having that’ so I ran behind the toilets and he started throwing bricks at me. He hit me in the ribs, and broke a rib. I got a day off work. One of our blokes strapped me up and I was put on chopping wood for the next day – to power their tractor – then when I was chopping wood a bloke gave me my mail and I chopped the top off my finger.
¹⁵

Despite these conflicts the prisoners became part of the community – as much a part of village life as the housewives, farm manager or local priest. They took meals in the farmhouse sculleries, along with the rest of the farm hands and enjoyed a rough but relatively safe life. Prisoners working high in the Alps learnt the local customs. They attended all the seasonal dances, including one for men working on fax picking where they drank cider and indulged in a traditional game where the local girls slapped the men who would have to respond by kissing them. Gordon Barber recalled life on a state farm in East Prussia:

The Germans in that place didn’t treat us bad. I was as fit as a fiddle, I used to box against Darkie Fenwick and this Brummie lad, we’d do press ups, and I was getting my end away – which wasn’t bad. But it was boring, we used to have bets on when the war would end. We learnt Polish and could ask them when they thought the war would finish. The German women used to sit on their doorsteps and show us newspapers about the V1 bombs. We were friendly with them. We were part of the village. For three years we’d been part of the community, we’d speak to one another in the street. We could barter with them. Some of us were getting our ends away. It was like one little village.
¹⁶

One of Barber’s fellow workers at the farm, Ken Willats, remembered how they spent their day off on a Sunday:

They had a sty with about 200 pigs in it and lots of outbuildings. They had a little dog called ‘Footsie’ and on Sundays it went rat hunting. I don’t know what breed it was, but it was like a little terrier. He used to bite the rats on the back of the neck and then throw them up into the air. We watched ‘Footsie’ catch about 12 rats in one day. That was the only time I saw rats, they didn’t have them in the Stalag. When I was in the Stalags there was no spare food so there was no incentive for a rat to be there.
¹⁷

As thousands of POWs adapted to the ways of the countryside and were able to assimilate into the local communities, others were not so fortunate. Just as in the heavy industrial enterprises, some of the farmers were happy to work their new labourers to breaking point. At Marienau the POWs reported going 12 hours at a time without being fed. They would eat breakfast before starting work at 7.30 a.m. and toil in the fields continuously until 5.30 p.m. The farmer refused them any food and allowed them to eat only what was provided in their barracks. Prisoners at AK13, a farm in Gross Partenschir, were seriously exploited by their employer. He contravened the rules on employment of labour by loaning ‘his’ prisoners out to other farms in the locality, in return for payment from the owners. Once their unofficial labours were
complete they were then forced to return to his farm and continue to work for him.

It was not just the actual farms that were staffed by prisoners. They took on all the duties found in the countryside. Some were detailed to maintain farm machinery, repairing tractors, ploughs and threshing machines. Others among them were employed to assist blacksmiths in their forges. They worked hour after hour in the heat of the forges, their hands grasping the tongs that held the metal over the anvil as smiths hammered it into shape. Trying to dodge the sparks the men kept working, often as the smiths laughed at their inexperience. Once they had mastered holding the tongs or operating the bellows the prisoners were able to progress to shoeing horses, as they slipped into the role of true countrymen.

Working parties were also sent into the countryside to work as foresters. For many it was a pleasant life. They worked in teams, operating the long, two-handled saws and felling trees. Others then stripped the bark from the timber and cut the trees into lengths ready to be taken to the sawmills. Most enjoyed the outdoor life, stripping to the waist as they worked under the summer sun. During rest periods they could collect wild fruit and berries from the woods, or search for mushrooms and nuts. For many it was as close to a rural idyll as anything else on offer within the system of camps and working parties.

There were plenty of other rural work details. Men in food processing plants often found the work to be arduous but these usually proved to be places where a certain standard of living could be maintained. Men working in dairies, canning plants and the factories associated with food production were able to sustain themselves with the fruits of their labour. Just as on the farms, they found much of their labour
had to be carried out by hand. At dairies the work began each morning with the arrival of horse-drawn carts bringing milk churns from the surrounding farms. Prisoners found themselves using machines to separate the milk from the cream but then having to do the rest of the work by hand. They learned how to make butter and cheese. These were manual arts that were dying out across much of the world as large scale industrialisation hit food production. They warmed milk in large vats, added the rennet, then waited for the milk to curdle before carving it up. then whisking and sieving it. Once the cheese was made it would be wrapped in muslin and left to drain. Then the prisoners would spend the rest of their day turning the cheeses over and cleaning up ready for the next day’s milk.

With agriculture and industry geared up for the war effort the industrial-scale production of processed food for easy storage and transport meant that thousands of POWs were drafted in to work in processing plants. Some of these were vast modern plants using the latest technology to produce cheap and convenient foodstuffs. In some processing plants the prisoners were given overalls and pristine white hats and their feet were covered by smart white wooden-soled slippers. Former chef Ken Willats was pleased to be transferred away from the exhaustion of labouring in a gravel pit to a cheese processing plant. It was a world away from the small country dairies employing some of the prisoners:

In this factory they made dried and flaked cheese. It was quite a decent place. The man in charge was a Swiss German, he was quite generous with food. The division of labour was that cheese was brought in from a railway station nearby. It came into the sidings and a number of prisoners were detailed to unload it onto a lorry for the factory.

The incoming cheeses were initially stored in refrigerated rooms until needed for blending. The cheeses were then tested by cutting into them with a tool like an apple corer, to ensure the correct blend would be used to create the finished product:

This was then put into vats and boiled. A little bit of good cheese and loads of rubbish stuff was all mixed together, melted and made into dried cheese. When I first went there I was in the cellar. These round flat cheeses were stored on boards and they had to be withdrawn from the racks and wiped over with saline solution. Then they were inverted and put back on the racks. That had to be done every day. Latterly I was made the cook at this working party, which suited me, it was quite a nice job. And if we needed any extra food we acquired the 45 per cent fat cheese, we only took the best for ourselves. So we always had that as a standby. The only problem was that it gave you a bit of constipation. But it was a good detail to get on. He gave us a bit of pork and we had a vegetable garden and grew fresh vegetables. We also had a very good guard who used to take us up to a lake to go swimming. So we did alright. Added to that there were some beautiful Polish girls working there. Things were getting better. Compared to working night shifts in a gravel pit, it was ‘chalk and cheese’ – literally!
¹⁸

The cheesemakers were not the only prisoners to enjoy their work. Large numbers of Indian prisoners found themselves sent to detachments where the work had a number of benefits. They were sent to work in the vineyards of the Rhine and Moselle valleys. Here they planted and tended the vines, cleared weeds and eventually harvested the grapes for making
into the local wines. Like all POWs employed to pick fruit they were able to supplement their meagre rations and Red Cross parcels with sufficient grapes to help keep up their strength.

For the POW farmers, like all farmers the world over, life was tough. Yet despite the rigours of countryside life most experienced an existence that showed them a world they had never previously experienced. Their lives were governed by the seasons not the petty dictates of politicians or army officers. Their boss was the rain and the sunlight – nature itself was both their friend and their enemy, their teacher and their taskmaster. They learned how the cycle of the natural world was unforgiving yet how life on farms offered prisoners a peace far removed from the drudgery experienced by their comrades forced into industry. It was an experience that changed them, both mentally and physically – a change that would help sustain many in the harsh days ahead as the Reich collapsed around them. As Ken Willats recalled: ‘We did all the manual labour. I learnt an awful lot. It was all new. I’d never been on a farm in my life. It was hard work but I grew fit and strong and was able to cope with it.’
¹⁹