Hitler's British Slaves (26 page)

Yet some of the factory owners and farmers were generous towards their prisoners. One factory owner even secretly provided a truck to ensure that supplies of Red Cross parcels could continue to reach ‘his’ prisoners after the military transport network had begun to collapse. For many among the prisoners it was a confusing situation finding guards
friendly at one moment and then violently antagonistic the next, as one prisoner later wrote: ‘Merry Christmas today and a bayonet up the arse tomorrow.’
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Many of the guards were soldiers who had been wounded in battle and for some of them POW work camps were merely a place they were sent to recuperate. Often they retained a respect for their fellow fighting men and had no wish to mistreat them. On smaller work detachments both guards and prisoners lived in the same huts, although the guards were not locked in at night. Ken Willats, working on a farm in East Prussia recalled the relationship between the guards and the prisoners:

The guards were very relaxed. It depended on the individual and there were vast differences between the ones you could get. Remember – without having particular sympathy for them – they weren’t on a good job. We had people we could talk to but they were on their own. They must have been bored out of their minds. But remember, the alternative was the Russian front. So which is better, being lonely or being at the front getting killed? So they thanked their lucky stars. Some were ordinary chaps. Some were men who’d been wounded on the Russian front. Some had medical problems. By and large they weren’t too bad.
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Spending all day every day side by side it was easy to see why a hesitant camaraderie was established between the two factions. Cigarettes from Red Cross parcels were able to help bridge the gap between the factions, with many guards amenable to bribery. They happily turned their heads away and ignored the misdemeanours and black market dealings of the POWs. The bribery and corruption resulted in many work camps being full of contraband goods, something the guards could not fail to be aware of. The problem was that there
existed an ever present threat of spot checks by the Gestapo. Where the guards were complicit in the misdeeds of the prisoners this was a great worry but they simply alerted the prisoners that a search was imminent and took the contraband into safe keeping until the search was complete.

In such circumstances it was not surprising that both guards and prisoners established good relations. A few built up close friendships, going out together at night to visit local bars. At one work camp there was a great commotion after a guard and his prisoner were seen returning to the camp late at night drunkenly singing whilst walking with their arms around each other’s shoulders. Some of the most amenable guards allowed men to sneak out of the work camps in exchange for cigarettes, with a few using this method to attend Christmas parties in the compounds reserved for the foreign labourers they worked alongside. It was simple, the guards would make openings in the wire and agree to turn their backs, just so long as the men made sure they returned before the morning roll call.

At one East Prussian farm the guard was invited to a Christmas party. The party was livened up by a brew concocted by the prisoners. Gordon Barber recalled his role in the makeshift distillery:

We got the guard pissed at Christmas. We made our own still. To this day they’re probably still wondering what happened to the copper piping on the reserve tractor. I know because I took it off. The others asked me to find some piping so one night, just before we were locked in, I got them to tell the guard I’d just gone down to do some work for someone – they would never check – and so I went and stripped the pipes off. That put the tractor out of action. So I got the bits and pieces and this bloke made a still. The brew was really lethal and it was really good. And we got the guard pissed. I wish we could’ve had photographs of that.
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His fellow prisoner Ken Willats recalled what happened:

We had some fun with our guard. We had dried and sliced sugar beet, they called it schnitzel. This was the remnants of the stuff we grew which was sent back by the factories as cattle feed. Each day we’d put it into the inside pockets of our battledress, bring it back home, mix it with sugar and prunes from the Red Cross parcels, put it in a milk churn, keep it for a few weeks then distil it. We then made ourselves a highly volatile drink. It was so strong you could set light to it. We’d save it for the Christmas party. The farmer’s wife gave us a firkin of nettle beer – about 0.5 per cent alcohol – and we mixed this with our firewater. Our guard was a nice sort of chap – middle-aged – and he was obviously lonely because he hung around with us. So we offered him a glass of beer but we couldn’t let him know we’d got this brew going. So we went into a separate room to fetch our drinks. But he latched onto this and so we had no option but to let him in on our secret. He got as drunk as could be. So we got his rifle and we were marching up and down with it whilst he’s laying on the bed, spark out.
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Not all drunken guards were so friendly. At one mining camp a drunken guard threatened to shoot prisoners who refused to clean their room at Christmas. He was only placated when the frightened prisoners retrieved their own stock of precious alcohol and offered him a drink.

Other relationships appeared to go beyond such good-natured fun. In a rather suspicious case a group of prisoners arrived at a remote Silesian forestry camp where there was a
curious relationship between some of the prisoners and their guards. At night they spotted how some among the prisoners went to great lengths to prepare themselves for an evening’s entertainment. They dressed in civilian clothes, including shirts and ties, and combed their hair meticulously. Then they made their way to the guards’ quarters. When the newcomers enquired what the men were doing they were told they were going to work. The homosexual overtones of the curious behaviour of the POWs was obvious and the newcomers contrived to get themselves transferred away as soon as possible.

There was a darker side to relationships between captors and captive. Many disagreements broke out between factions who believed the POWs should do their work quickly and efficiently, in order to ensure a quiet life, and those who believed they should make all efforts to undermine the Nazi industry. Those who believed they should endeavour to sabotage German industry were playing a dangerous game for the Germans openly proclaimed they would execute men for any acts of sabotage. Yet in the minds of the prisoners it was the only way they could play an active part in the war, doing whatever would hinder the efforts of the enemy to run an efficient military machine. All knew they had to be careful, meaning there were few attempts at serious sabotage, but any small personal act of defiance helped to liven up an otherwise dull day. ‘Pinpricks’ they may have been when compared to the bombs dropped on German cities or the bullets fired by their comrades, but these acts of sabotage provided a psychological support for the prisoners – a way of saying ‘I’m still fighting for my country’. For some it was as simple as mixing cement weakly so that in time the building would show defects, or putting sand or gravel into the workings of machinery. Others cut wires and cables before laying them, making
sure their guards would not be able to trace the perpetrators. Some simply let the brakes off on mine wagons when going round corners, ensuring the wagon would derail.

The sabotage of tools was among the most common of all the efforts made by the prisoners to slow down their work. They simply waited until no one was watching, broke their tools and wandered over to the foreman to report what had happened. Some even used the excuse that the accident had happened because of how hard they were working. At one road-building site one man managed to break two picks within 15 minutes. When the guards became irritated by the incessant breakages they ordered all the men to parade at bayonet point. They were then informed that they had to own up to the sabotage. With little choice but to comply the perpetrators admitted their crimes and were joined in their confessions by numerous other prisoners. Eventually the number of prisoners admitting to breaking tools was greater than the number of tools broken, leaving the guards powerless to punish the offenders.

Such ‘accidents’ slowed down production without harming anyone or damaging any machinery. The overseers merely shouted and urged the men to get working again quickly. At one factory prisoners urinated over sacks of coffee, whilst others put salt into sacks of flour or switched the contents of seed packets – all silent, if ineffectual, protests against their enforced labour.

But some prisoners had a desire to make a real impact upon the enemy. Men at one work camp in eastern Germany destroyed a grain conveyor across the River Oder, whilst others put a mine out of action for two days simply by cutting through the main power cable. Australian Sergeant Royce Simmons struck a blow for the prisoners’ cause when he destroyed 300 gallons of milk destined for the German
army. A further act of defiance brought even more comfort to Simmons and his fellow working prisoners when he stole 144,000 German army cigarettes.

For men prepared to take such risks by sabotaging German industry there was little understanding of the dedicated work of some of their comrades. They could understand why a prisoner would do his job properly but why would anyone show enthusiasm whilst working for the enemy? Some of the enthusiasts were accused of treachery, with rumours circulating about the reasons behind their conscientious industrial efforts. Maurice Newey was among their critics: ‘the BAU battalion were a brainwashed lot, the way they used to work. I was under the impression that it was our duty to hinder the enemy, not help him. These chaps worked like the clappers and it was rumoured one man had been presented with a Workers medal for the amount of work that he had achieved.’
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The keenness shown by some men for their work led to uncomfortable situations and conflicts. In April 1945 prisoners at Wargl refused to work on a bomb-damaged railway for fear of future air raids. With the men on strike a Sergeant Patterson, captured at Arnhem, defied his comrades and volunteered to keep working. His actions only further inflamed the situation when he was reported to have apologised to the Germans for the behaviour of his fellow Britons.

In some industrial enterprises the over-enthusiastic workers were considered to be attempting to curry favour with the guards, wanting to be singled out for special treatment at the expense of others. In June 1944 ‘Snips’, the secret handwritten camp newspaper at a copper mine, dared to be critical of the behaviour of a number of prisoners:

On Friday 2nd June the ‘Big Bad Wolf’ inspected the mine, he warmly complimented two of our ‘comrades’ on their efficient drilling and boring, another as being an ‘excellent’ worker in district sixteen. He quoted two other examples, one a shoveller on the face who, when kept waiting for an ‘empty’ does his own trekking, another on a tipping machine, who goes as far as to tell his gang to ‘hurry up’! Names of these men will be supplied on application.
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For all the accusations of treachery against fellow prisoners, in most cases the men who were deemed over-enthusiastic at work were simply trying to make their lives as easy as possible, caring little about what this meant for their fellow prisoners. Often it was simply that they had made arrangements with the foreman that once a job was finished they would be allowed to rest, hiding in the factory smoking and playing cards. Others were allowed by their guards to fulfil their daily tasks then return to their barracks, whiling away the hours of daylight they would otherwise seldom have seen.

Some among the prisoners had a simple solution to the behaviour of such men thought to be too close to the enemy. On a work detail in Poznan one POW posed for photographs with a group of German soldiers, in return for cigarettes he was persuaded to give a Nazi salute. His actions did not impress his fellow prisoners and that night he was forced to run the gauntlet of men who each punched him. After his beating his humiliation was compounded when the offending cigarettes were stamped into the ground. Gordon Barber was one of those POWs who happily responded to such collaboration with violence: ‘They sent me to a lumber camp. I didn’t last three weeks there. I saw too many blokes with broken arms and legs. I smacked the bloke in charge – one of our blokes – in the mouth. He was too far up the Germans’ arses. He had a nice billet and we had the shit. One day he started giving me a lot of mouth so I hit him.’
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Whilst some of the camp leaders used their position to curry favour with the Germans most worked tirelessly for the welfare of their men. They put aside their fears of what might happen to them and used their official position to act as a mouthpiece for those whose rights were quite often being abused by their captors. They knew they would not be able to win many concessions from the enemy but also knew every little bit would help. It also gave the prisoners great faith to know someone was trying to help. The difficulty for camp leaders was that they always knew that if they complained too much they would be transferred away and replaced by a more pliable character. One of those who managed to perform this delicate balancing act was Bombardier Norton, the camp leader for a detachment of prisoners working in a copper mine. Norton, a solicitor’s clerk, law student and Communist Party member who had been captured in North Africa, was revered by the copper miners for his efforts: ‘In this camp he worked consistently for our welfare, always maintaining an even temper and a cool attitude towards our captors. His reward? Our gratitude and appreciation and the knowledge, we trust, that he has performed a difficult task in fine style and spirit.’
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