Hitler's British Slaves (28 page)

Whilst the men working on farms were enjoying liaisons with the local women, those in industry initially had less good fortune. There were few women within factories or working in urban locations and prisoners had less freedom to mix with the local populace than did those in rural areas. Some of the more adventurous men were able to slip away from work camps to brothels, where they paid for the prostitute’s services with bars of Red Cross chocolate. They simply turned their overalls inside out and slipped away to visit the brothels designated for the use of foreign workers. These were staffed entirely by foreign prostitutes, which meant the prisoners were safe in the knowledge they were not infringing the Germans’ draconian racial purity laws. The girls had a secondary function in that they were often amenable to hiding any prisoners who went on the run. Paradoxically though many
among the prisoners were desperate for sex some soon realised it didn’t actually cost them anything except their time. In Munich during the middle years of the war the soldiers were able to buy sex for a tin of coffee or a bar of soap, and would get three reichsmarks change. Such was the exchange rate for commodities such as coffee, chocolate or soap that it seemed to the prisoners that the girls were paying them. They received the soap and coffee for free in their parcels and in exchange could get sex and the equivalent of four days’ wages. For some it was a risk worth taking.

For others the thought of sneaking away to have sex was too risky, they simply bided their time until circumstances changed. Then as time passed and the manpower situation in Germany became more serious, changes took place within the factories. The POWs found themselves working alongside women from throughout occupied Europe. Many were slave labourers brought in to bolster the workforce but others were attracted to the Reich by the offer of high wages. These women, whatever their circumstances, would become a source of much comfort to the men who worked alongside them.

In one case John Elwyn, a Welsh Guardsman captured during the fall of France in 1940, began a relationship with a Polish girl at a factory. By night he would sneak from the camp to meet her at her lodgings. Their relationship blossomed until he eventually proposed to her. Their wedding was carried out in secret and so began a brief but intense relationship, tempered only by the impossible circumstances surrounding their love. Eventually the new groom and one of his mates were apprehended whilst on a visit to the bride and the camp was subject to a new strict regime of extra guards and increased security. Despite the increasing restrictions in the work camp, the prisoner was able to continue to make occasional trips to visit his bride. Their love was only curtailed
when she fell sick and eventually died. For Elwyn this was the spur for him to continue with his escape attempts until he was eventually able to flee across the Baltic to Sweden.

However, it was not only the Germans who disapproved of such contacts between POWs and women, the Red Cross also complained about the situation. In 1942 they reported to London about the behaviour of four men from Stalag XXb working at Arbeitskommando 9 who had been caught sneaking through the wire into an enclosure for female workers. Though they had acted with the consent of the girls their actions were considered irresponsible and the Red Cross, though blaming the women for ‘provocation’, felt measures should be taken by the Germans to prevent such contact. They didn’t bother to report the opinion of the POWs.

During the latter stages of the war the prisoners discovered new sexual horizons opening up before them. When escapes were discovered by the guards they more often than not apprehended the prisoners not desperately heading towards the Swiss border but tucked up in the beds of their girlfriends. Just like their more celebrated comrades in the camps for officers some among the working men scrounged tools to dig tunnels. Yet they had no intention of escaping. Instead these were ‘Tunnels of Love’, dug to connect their compounds with those of the female labourers. After work each night the POWs crawled along the dark tunnels to emerge in the foreign labourers’ enclosures and spend the night alongside their girlfriends, retracing their steps at dawn in time for roll call. Prisoners also swapped clothes with civilian labourers so that they could enter the civilian compound to visit their girlfriends. In return the civilians would be able to stay overnight in the POW compound where they could share the luxuries of the prisoners’ Red Cross parcels. In some cases tunnels were unnecessary. Fifty cigarettes were enough to make
guards avert their gaze and allow prisoners out of their huts to attend parties with the foreign workers. Those amenable guards were in turn given chits confirming their compliance and good will that could be showed to liberating troops once the final defeat of Germany came.

As more and more German men left the factories for the front German women soon began to flood into the factories. One artilleryman, James Witte, was offered the chance to meet a female crane operator. In the knowledge that sex was on offer he agreed, arranging to meet her in the cab of her crane: ‘She promptly undid the braces of her overalls revealing that she was stark naked underneath. She then lay on the floor and opened her legs. To my horror I realised that I wasn’t going to be able to do anything. Dolly began to get impatient, eyeing my limp organ with disfavour.’
²⁸
Ironically, for the rest of the day, realising the opportunity he had missed, he kept getting erections. This made Witte realise that he had to conquer his fears and find a woman in circumstances where he would be able to perform. In the aftermath of his failure he began sneaking into the enclosure for foreign labourers and there built up a relationship with a foreign worker.

On one work detail a Belgian labourer came up with an interesting offer for a group of POWs. For a price he could arrange for one of his countrywomen to meet with the prisoners. On the allotted day the prisoners drew lots to decide the order in which they would take their turn with the woman. When the time came, one by one the prisoners approached the guard and requested they be allowed to go to the toilet where the girl was hidden. For the price of a packet of cigarettes each man had his way with her. The 19-year-old girl seemed nervous, visibly trembling and obviously not enjoying her task, as one of the prisoners remembered: ‘She was in a dreadful state of fear, trembling and her eyes were rolling.
She whispered “Be quick” but there was no pleasure in it at all. I left, feeling that I had been cheated. After all my expectations it had been a complete let down. I gave the nod to the next man and off he went.’
²⁹
For the men it was intense, passionless and, in the most part, very quick. The men couldn’t help but realise her plight, but like her they were desperate. They longed for the intimacy of a woman’s touch and she for the purchasing power she acquired from the western cigarettes. So they took their place in line, relieving the sexual tension of years of imprisonment. It is hard to blame the prisoners for playing their role in this degrading scenario, in the closing months of the war there was little room for the niceties of pre-war civilian morality. With death an almost constant companion, and starvation a very real prospect, life was cheap. Who could afford to be afraid for someone’s moral welfare when tomorrow they might all be dead?

In the final, chaotic months of war it was the prisoners working in German towns and cities who were able to benefit most from contact with civilians. Throughout the war years, prisoners based in large cities had maintained regular contact with the locals. In Munich prisoners employed to sweep the streets took shelter from the winter weather by bribing the attendants of public toilets to allow them to shelter beside their stoves. Similarly, on their one day’s rest, the prisoners could bribe their guards to allow them out into the city. The bribes would ensure only the most amenable guards were sent to accompany them, something that would allow them an afternoon’s peace drinking in the bars. One guard found his party of prisoners seated at a table alongside a group of soldiers from the Afrika Korps, happily getting drunk together. In Munich an Australian POW entered into a clever arrangement with the foreman of his working party. Although a non-smoker the Australian ordered cigarettes in
bulk from his friends and family back home. These, along with his ration from Red Cross parcels, were then passed to the German who traded them on the black market. The astonishing profits from these deals were then used for the Australian to purchase a house, paying off his mortgage instalments as each parcel arrived.

As Germany was plunged deeper into economic and social turmoil more and more prisoners were able to exploit the contacts they made whilst working. Despite not yet having fully recovered from the wounds he sustained at Arnhem, Bryan Willoughby, in Stalag VIIb, made sure he got onto working details sent out from the camp each day into Munich. Wearing what he described as ‘the remains of a uniform’, including an overcoat with deep ‘loot pockets’ that he had acquired he joined the queues of working prisoners that assembled each morning within the compound:

The working parties used to go out to the station at 4 o’clock in the morning, and go 30 kms down to Munich. Munich was in an awful state, big piles of rubble everywhere. Then first time I went out I found it was tough, boring work. Most of the guards were all right. Occasionally some of our chaps would get a bit obstreperous and they’d get hit with rifle butts. But mostly it was all very peaceful. You’d see German troops marching along, singing their Waffen SS songs, but no one took any notice of them. The whole place was in such a state nobody cared about anything. There was no hard feeling anywhere. We didn’t have many feelings at all. I soon realised, as I got into the way of things, that some of the blokes were so advanced they had an entrepreneurial spirit – with the rackets. They built up a stock of stuff. Some of them used to go down to Munich on a working party, stay with a Russian woman for a couple of weeks and then come back. They didn’t bother escaping. You don’t read about this in the books. The way they did it was that the cattle wagons would start from Moosburg station and they’d do the count. We’d do all sorts of things to make them miscount. They would count 40 yet maybe 43 actually went. They’d just stay down in Munich, staying with their Russian women. How they had the strength to do it I don’t know! Munich was a hell of a place. Maybe you’d work on the railways or on the roads – pick and shovel work, but nobody did very much. We just played at it. On one particular occasion I was emptying dustbins in the Café Leopold, a high class café. When I was down in the kitchen a woman emptied a big ladle of stew into a bowl and said ‘
Essen Schnell
!’ So I ‘
essened’ schnell
. I had to get the hang of this trading business. I’d bring 25 cigarettes from the camp and hang around looking out for a likely civilian – whether they were German or not I wouldn’t know, they could’ve been any nationality. You’d get a two kilo loaf for the price of five cigarettes. You took it back to the camp and you could flog the loaf for 20 or 25 fags. So it was a clear profit of maybe 15 or 20 cigarettes.
³⁰

The obvious economic sense of such transactions meant few of the working prisoners failed to exploit the opportunity for trade. The only problem was that they still had to get their day’s haul back into the camp, as Willoughby recalled:

You took a chance of being searched. On the way back there’d be maybe a quarter of a mile column of prisoners all shuffling along being shouted at. They’d pick out a certain group and everyone in it was searched. If you were in there you were unlucky, if you had bread you lost it. But you took that chance. But on the average you would gain.
³¹

However, he soon discovered it was not just the attentions of the guards he had to worry about. Willoughby found himself in Munich carrying three 2-kilo loaves, the fruits of a trading deal with local civilians:

As luck would have it an air raid happened and we went into these catacombs. Before the raid stopped in came the Gestapo. They started searching everybody. Some people got bashed with the butt of a rifle. I was waiting and waiting, getting nearer the end. They were knocking hell out of a bloke and I got down on my hands and knees and crawled behind them. I got clean away with three loaves of bread.
³²

The trade between civilians and prisoners was not an entirely two-way process and not all of the hungry POWs had to trade cigarettes for food. There were plenty of German civilians who witnessed the suffering of the prisoners and decided to help. With Red Cross parcels failing to reach some prisoners, and employers giving them just starvation rations, some became desperate. One prisoner, housed in the cellar of the railway station where he worked, reported kindly civilians passing food to him through the barred windows. Elsewhere a Frau Gramgg helped prisoners to escape from a disciplinary camp, giving them information on patrols and passing them a compass and map. At Graz a Fraulein Kaplan risked her life to help a prisoner employed to build air raid shelters. For 16 months she gave food and cigarettes to Sidney Banner, despite being arrested and questioned three times by the Gestapo. The threat to such brave civilians was real, in Czechoslovakia Freda Wybreck was given a three-year prison sentence for helping prisoners. Such acts of selfless kindness offered by such courageous women were something few among the prisoners had ever expected, but all appreciated.

As the end of the war approached the prisoners began to look forward to more than just food as they craved the chance to meet the women in the towns and villages around their camps. They knew, or rather hoped, that if the liberating troops arrived they would be set free to enjoy themselves. At one copper mine the prisoners discussed the matter and were told by a French prisoner working alongside them that the: ‘Eisleben girls are awaiting “Der tag” with pleasant anticipation. When warned that the Tommies had been separated from the fair sex for some years they replied “We are not at all anxious. Only English and Frenchmen know how to make love!”’
³³
Such news helped the prisoners sustain their morale in the desperate last months of the war. Indeed, the mine was liberated without serious incident and the American troops simply passed them by and left the prisoners to explore the delights of the town. It was a peaceful end to a dangerous period in their lives – an end which would not be enjoyed by most among the workforce of POWs.