Hitler's British Slaves (20 page)

The problem of rats was common to many of the labour camps. Farms were often full of them, nesting in the outbuildings and scuttling into huts to raid the prisoners’ food supplies. At one quarry Australian prisoners were housed in a disused school building where a tiny rat-infested outhouse was used as a punishment cell, with offenders being forced to spend their sentence in the dark with the vermin. On many farms a solution was found by allowing the men to keep pet cats to keep the rats at bay. This worked most of the time, however at the AK62 work detachment from Stalag XXa the rats were so large they frightened the cat off and it ran away leaving the prisoners to fend for themselves.

In many cases the living conditions experienced by the prisoners depended on the generosity of the employers. On a farm at Alt Blumenau the prisoners reported all having two sets of clothing, local women washed their clothes for them and they were even paid in reichsmarks rather than the useless
Lagergeld
. Men on an agricultural detachment from Stalag XXb also reported sleeping in a pleasant room heated by an earthenware stove. They had three blankets each, plenty of good food and extra clothing given to them by the man they worked for. On top of this he had also loaned them a gramophone to listen to after work. Yet another detachment from the same Stalag found themselves lodged in peasant huts where their only water came from the drainage ditches in the surrounding fields, and in another farm the prisoners were housed a metre underground in a potato cellar beneath the farmhouse.

Despite the hardships endured by many of the working prisoners, for many there was an acceptance that good conditions could not be expected in wartime – whatever the
circumstances: ‘The conditions at the work camps were as good as those I’d known when I was first called up. I’d been in private billets in Guildford. The ladies who let the rooms out to us got sixpence a night but often we just had to sleep on the floor. So when you compare that, it wasn’t too bad.’
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The situation was much the same for one group of South Africans sent directly to a work camp from a POW camp in Italy. After long days of transit within the stifling confines of a train it was a joy for them to see bunks, even if they were triple-tiered. After sleeping on the bare boards of a railway wagon they considered a straw mattress ‘heavenly’.
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The varying conditions found in work camps led to a certain amount of mixed emotion. Whilst mining became unpopular with the increasingly exhausted prisoners, it offered one advantage. At least most of the men employed underground had access to hot baths or showers at the pithead – although that wasn’t always the case and at one mine the prisoners constructed their own showers since their employer offered no washing facilities, whilst others bathed in a clear pool found deep within a copper mine. Unlike the miners most prisoners working in German industry faced the daily grind of heavy labour without the benefits of a wash at the end of it. Instead they returned to their barracks still thick with sweat and stinking from their exertions. Few work camps had showers or baths and those that had access to hot water found it was often available just once a week, in one case prisoners working in a factory were allowed just one bath every month – and that was cold. Those camps with the luxury of showers seldom offered any great comforts, often with a single showerhead shared by hundreds. In one case 62 men shared a single cold tap. For the less fortunate there was no running water and it had to be drawn from wells or streams then heated in boilers, alternatively they had barrels of cold water
in a courtyard in which to wash. At one farm the prisoners’ only water came from a nearby lake and in winter the prisoners found themselves first breaking the ice to get washed. Others had to collect water from pumps or wells, dragging it back to their quarters between them. One man remembered the facilities on his East Prussian farm: ‘The churn was put on the stove and heated over a wood fire. Then it was poured into the tin bath and two of you would share it. We did that once a week. We kept ourselves fairly clean.’
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Even those with running water were not guaranteed a good supply, between July and September 1944 the prisoners at work detachment E7111 reported water pipes remaining dry. Others reported having taps within their huts but that these were not actually fitted with drainage pipes. For some even drinking water was not available in their huts, instead they were forced to walk 400 yards just to slake their thirst. One detachment of 36 Palestinian Jews lived in facilities where they were denied access to any washing facilities.

Those with piped water were often unimpressed by its poor quality. They found water pipes to be rusty, leaving the water stained a reddish brown even after it had been boiled. When challenged by the Red Cross over the shortage of baths or showers the Germans had an excuse. They simply claimed that the men could only expect the same conditions as the local people, and since they seldom took baths why should the prisoners behave differently? Their captors may have found this argument convincing, and outsiders may have found the notion of an unwashed rural German population humorous, but to the 52 POWs forced to share a single baby bath as their only washing facility, it was not a laughing matter.

A further question vexed many of the men on work detachments. If they could get water, what would they use to heat
it? Not all were offered sufficient fuel for heating both their rooms, their food and their water. Many huts were heated by briquettes of compressed coal dust rather than genuine lumps of coal. In one camp a group of ten men were offered just one cubic metre of wood for the entire winter. Harsh choices had to be made, balancing the fuel for various needs. Was it better to have a warm body, hot food or be clean but cold? For many the solution was simple, with no fuel they simply broke up their furniture. Starting with tables and chairs, some POWs eventually broke up their beds and the most desperate inmates even tore off doors and window frames to ensure a source of fuel.

Even if they could wash not all prisoners had a towel to dry themselves. Those who did often found the towels were small and thin and grew increasingly filthy as time passed. At one work detachment the prisoners were promised towels by their guards in August 1943. By March the next year the towels had still not arrived, leaving the prisoners to dry their bodies as best they could with old rags or discarded clothing. A further problem became the lack of soap. Issues of cleaning materials by the Germans were few and far between, with soap becoming a precious commodity even for civilians. The prisoners were forced to use whatever came in their Red Cross parcels and when the supply of parcels ran out so did the supply of soap. Once again the prisoners were forced to improvise. Some of the more inventive men collected small remnants of soap they found on the floor in shower rooms. They gathered up all they could find and put them into tins. The tins were then heated up causing the soap to melt. Once the tin cooled down they would have a complete and usable bar of soap.

Adding to their misery was the condition of camp latrines. Few work camps had porcelain toilets, and flushes were virtually
unknown, instead most of the workforce had to make do with wooden latrines. These were often wooden planks with a hole in the middle that stood perched over open pits. In most places the men sat side by side with nothing to separate them from the next man. With no place for modesty they sat next to each other as the hideous aroma arose from the pits beneath. Others found themselves queuing to use the facilities, with often as many as 40 men sharing a single latrine. ‘Bill’ Sykes was among those who soon grew used to sharing: ‘All in all it was a difficult time, but it had its lighter moments, have you ever sat on a tall oil drum acting as a lavatory, facing a large audience during the performance of your daily bodily functions? You can imagine the initial embarrassment. But when you’ve got to go, you’ve got to go, especially after standing in line for some length of time.’
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At his work camp attached to a copper mine Alec Reynolds had a particularly nasty encounter with the latrines: ‘We were told the manager of the mine had lost his gold watch in the latrine. So we had to clean it out. I had to climb down into the pit, it came up to my chest. It was all wet and sloshy. I had to fill buckets, someone would pass it up and then the others carried it off to be used on the fields as fertiliser. There was no gold watch, of course, they just used it as an excuse to get us to clean the pit out.’
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Prisoners in one camp reported their latrines being cleaned out just once every three weeks and in one particularly bad case the latrines were left unemptied between June and December. Foul smells rose from the pits beneath the latrines – smells that penetrated the senses, hanging over the camps and creating an atmosphere of decay. Even in one of the few camps with flushing toilets the location of the cesspit ensured the prisoners remained unhappy with their toilet arrangements. The raw sewage drained not into a sewer but into a
pit directly beneath their sleeping quarters, causing its disgusting smell to torment them during their hours of rest. Even when latrines were finally emptied their contents were usually dumped on fields near to the work camps, the waste matter being used to fertilize the land. Unfortunately the raw human sewage acted as the breeding ground for thousands of flies that tormented prisoners during the summer.

A further problem, experienced by all prisoners, was the shortage of toilet paper. Men on working parties collected litter from the streets with which to wipe their backsides. Others were forced to use the labels from food tins that arrived in their Red Cross parcels. This changed when paper shortages meant the food arrived in labelless tins embossed with the name of the contents. When they became really desperate the prisoners resorted to using leaves, grass, or pages torn from books.

If their skin was becoming dirty it was nothing compared to the state of their uniforms, as one prisoner told the Red Cross: ‘As the prisoners have only one outfit they have no time to wash or dry it. Consequently the clothing is sweaty, dirty and filthy.’
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Some men went for months and years without washing their clothes. Where hot water was available some were able to at least rinse the worst of the dirt from their uniforms, though few could spare much of their precious soap to get them really clean. In some camps, in particular on farms, the men arranged for the women of the village to wash their uniforms – for a price. The problem was that few men had much spare clothing. If a man had a uniform for ‘best’ he would not want to wear it for work. But if he sent his work clothes to be cleaned would they be ready for him to wear in time? Prisoners at one mine discovered the answer when it took clothes over two weeks to return from a laundry.

Their uniforms were often marked to make the prisoners visible to the local population. No one could fail to notice the black triangles or red circles painted onto their backs or on their legs to show their status as prisoners. Some camp commandants insisted the letters ‘KG’ – for
Kriegsgefangene
– be painted on the backs of their jackets. In turn one leg of their trousers was marked with a ‘k’ the other with a ‘g’. Their kit bags were also marked with yellow stripes to make them instantly recognizable if they embarked on escape attempts.

Yet such displays of their servitude were of little concern to the prisoners compared to their worries about the condition of their uniforms. The question of clothing constantly vexed the prisoners. The trials of battle meant that many had seen their clothing damaged even before they began the journey into captivity. Most lost all spare clothing and entered the Stalags with no more than what they stood up in. For the men of the BEF the weeks and months of constant marching soon took its toll on their uniforms. Socks and underwear, unchanged for weeks, became ragged and encrusted with sweat. The soles of their boots became worn and the heavy serge of their battledress wore thin as it rubbed at their crotches, making every step a living hell. With most having lost their ‘housewife’ sewing kits upon capture, few had any way of repairing their clothes. Rips and tears hung open and untouched, buttons fell off to be lost forever. Within months the POWs were dressed in rags, their tattered uniforms hanging from their malnourished frames. Desperate men took to wearing whatever they could find, even if that meant making shirts from cement sacks. In the first year of captivity their worn out clothing would only be replaced with the remnants of uniforms captured from the defeated armies of Europe. Soon the British POWs found themselves clad in Polish overcoats, French trousers, Dutch tunics – or any combination of
any nationality. One man, who spent his war years working in gravel pits, factories and farms recalled the conditions in 1940: ‘I was lucky, my battledress was quite good. But there was an issue of French and Belgian uniforms, which other people had to wear. I remember some were bloodstained so they must have come from corpses or wounded men.’
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Before long the prisoners were unable to distinguish between the various nationalities within the Stalags. It did not take long for their boots to start to wear out, one work detachment of 250 men found over 150 of them were in need of new boots. Thousands were reduced to wearing clogs issued by the Germans in place of their worn out boots, in which they shuffled around the camps. Worse still, many found the rough wood of the clogs could wear out a pair of socks in just one day. It was demoralizing for the prisoners to make their way to work each day, unable to lift their feet from the ground.

For some unfortunate men there was no replacement footwear and when clogs were not forthcoming from the Germans the prisoners found their own simple solution. They removed the battered leather uppers from the worn out soles and nailed them onto pieces of wood, constructing their own simple clogs. Some miners even used large rubber bands from machinery within the mines to repair their boots. Others had to send their boots out to be repaired, a process that could take weeks. In the meantime the prisoners had to beg, steal or borrow to make sure they were adequately shod for work. Some found that even after repairs the boots simply fell apart again within days. By 1942 one work detachment of over 700 POWs was all reported to be wearing clogs. When one working party was promised alpine boots by their guards they expected sturdy climbing boots. Instead they received clogs. They joked that whoever put the order in had filled in ‘All
pine’ on the form. Even when military footwear was available in camp stores it was often found to be unsuitable. Much seemed to be surplus stock – shoes or boots in sizes few of the prisoners seemed to need. In particular the problem was felt by Indian prisoners whose feet tended to be smaller than their British counterparts. To ensure that their precious boots were kept in the best possible condition for work most prisoners chose to wear the German issued clogs whenever they were in their huts or within the compound – although they made sure they marked their names on their boots to prevent them from being stolen.