Hitler's British Slaves (30 page)

In October 1942 a group of men returning to camp from a work detail witnessed the arbitrary violence of guards. The incident arose from arguments over a guard’s suitcase:

The guard was asking those in the shed to take the case back to the camp and I, amongst others, refused, walked out of the shed and made my way to the road where the others were fell in. I saw the guard carrying the case himself to the road. He placed the case down still asking the men who were near to take it and they refused. The guard was 30-35 yards from where the majority of the party was standing. [Another man continued]: Suddenly without warning a shot was fired. This took us completely by surprise and Wynne fell down saying he had been hit and Potts did not fall but said the same. I had seen nothing that in my opinion would have provoked the guard to shoot at us. Certainly nobody who had fallen in was laughing at the guard and many did not even know about the case.
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Christmas 1943 saw another senselessly brutal incident. At work camp E563 two soldiers, Englishman Sid Smith and Australian Douglas Burling, were shot whilst in the bathhouse of the camp. The two men were defenceless at the time of the attack and fellow POWs reported that Burling had been naked when he was shot. In another vicious attack a group of prisoners attempting to pass food through a latrine wall to a starving Russian were shot. As he reached for the food the Russian was bayoneted by the German guard who then opened fire on the prisoners when they remonstrated with him. They were lucky to all survive the attack, although a number were seriously injured.

It was not just the arbitrary nature of such violence that concerned the prisoners, some among the guards viewed POWs as expendable. In August 1944 John Hankinson, a private in the Durham Light Infantry, paid the ultimate price for defying the guards. After a fight between him and a guard Hankinson was left wounded by shots fired by another guard. Still breathing the 22-year-old was carried to a shed
where his fellow prisoners expected he would be treated. To their horror another guard arrived and entered the hut. Moments later a shot was fired and the guard emerged carrying his revolver.

Such violence was extreme but it was not rare. Many prisoners experienced guards who made their lives unbearable. Some prisoners were beaten to the floor and kicked repeatedly by their guards. One man reported being struck with a rifle butt whilst in his sick bed, whilst others found bayonets and butts were frequently used to cajole them into working harder. Les Allan was working at a brewery when he was attacked by a guard:

The brewery master gave me a broom and told me to follow him. He went to open a small door, I heard someone shout to the guard. The brewery bloke had handed me a club hammer. I can only assume I must have looked at the hammer then looked at the guard longingly and he thought I was going to hit him. He got it in first. Hit me with the rifle butt. He beat me up something shocking. I got my jaw broken. It still haunts me now.
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The violence was something many of the prisoners grew to accept. Yet when Private Sherwood escaped from a working party few could have known the fate awaiting him. After recapture he was paraded in front of the entire camp. Then the beatings began. In front of his gathered comrades Sherwood was beaten to the ground, where the attacked continued: ‘My neck, hands and back were lacerated and bullet wounds which had not quite healed were broken open and bled for some time’.
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Despite his wounds his ordeal was not over. The guards told a British sergeant to join in the beating and when he refused he too was hit with a rifle butt. The
guards then dragged the private away, beating him all the time. Thrown into the coal shed he might have thought he would be left alone, once again he was wrong. Instead the assault ended in a sickening scene of humiliation: ‘each German soldier of the party came in turn and either kicked me or hit me with something. These men also defecated on me’.
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Although his humiliation was complete it was at least over fairly quickly. He took his punishment and was then released into the comradeship of the work camp. Others suffered more enduring punishments and in some cases mental cruelty was favoured. When a Corporal Shortland attempted to refuse to work on the grounds of his rank he was immediately transferred away from his mates. His punishment, though no physical strain, was cruel. He was sent to a work camp for French prisoners where, as the only British inmate, he was alone and isolated.

Yet the threat to the safety of the working prisoners did not just come from the weapons of their enemies. The ever more frequent Allied bombing raids soon took their toll of prisoners labouring in the very enterprises the airforces were hellbent on destroying. By 1944 raids were a regular feature of life for thousands of working prisoners, in particular those at the synthetic fuel plants so vital to the war effort. Many work camps and the barracks for the labourers were built in the heart of industrial areas, leaving the prisoners exposed to attack from above. Railway yards, mines, factories, refineries – all were targets for the bomber fleets whose tactic of inaccurate saturation bombing meant both industrial enterprises and any buildings for miles around were likely victims. Between May and August that year 651 British and Commonwealth prisoners died in air raids, and a further 72 had been killed by Christmas. Ironically, included among the dead were men employed to build air raid shelters.

Such was the fear of bombing that some prisoners took direct action in an attempt to protect themselves. POW miner Alec Reynolds decided the bombing crews needed to be warned: ‘I climbed out onto the top of the winding gear and hung up a white sheet with a red cross painted on it. When we were up there the Germans were shooting at us, but it was worth it. I’d seen the results of bombing. I saw the Yanks dive bombing trains, coming right down out of the sky. It was a shame, they hit a train full of schoolkids.’
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His efforts were worthwhile and the mine was never bombed.

The worst single bombing incident was at Epinal in France where 400 Indians were killed during an air raid, whilst a raid on Aquilla in Italy killed a further 140 men. Other raids saw further larger death tolls: 36 men constructing a factory in the Sudentenland, 38 on a work detachment from Stalag VIIIb, and 56 killed and wounded at Stalag E798. A further 80 were reported missing after a raid on an I.G. Farben plant at Ludwigshafen and 24 were killed during a raid on Leipzig in February 1945. At Linz two prisoners were killed when Allied fighters strafed the site they were working at, whilst at Auschwitz it was not just the Jewish deportees and slaves who faced death and 38 British prisoners were killed during an Allied bombing raid on the factory complex. Ironically the Red Cross blamed the prisoners for having refused to enter air raid shelters, instead preferring to remain outside and watch the bombing.

Work camp E793, part of Stalag 344, was among those hit during these raids. At 12.20 on 2 December 1944 the sirens sounded, signalling the start of an hour-long raid. With the sound of heavy bombers in the skies above them the prisoners raced for the dubious cover of their shelters. As they cowered within the reinforced concrete buildings they could hear the explosions of bombs falling around them. Seven bombs fell
within the camp with two hitting a single shelter in which 65 British POWs had taken cover. As their comrades rushed to their assistance they found a scene of almost indescribable horror. Twenty-eight of the occupants were dead with a further 28 seriously wounded. The 40-centimetre-thick concrete had been no match for the high explosive bomb. Most of the dead were badly mutilated. Among the wounded many had serious head injuries, limbs were smashed and two men had been badly crushed. Other bombs had flattened three barrack huts, the wash house, the clothing store and the Red Cross parcel store. Another hut had burned to the ground. Every building of the camp was either destroyed or damaged and both the water and electricity supplies were cut off. Fortunately for the prisoners only 500 of the usual 1,100 inmates were in camp at the time of the attack.

The experience of repeated bombing shattered the nerves of many prisoners, the crazed stampede for safety destroying all notion of the calm and order the Germans were so famed for. One POW died in such a stampede when he slipped and fell under the wheels of a lorry. At one camp the workers came to recognise the signal for the start of a raid – it was the sight of the factory managers fleeing the site at top speed in their cars. At one working party, loading and unloading at a sugar refinery, the prisoners were forbidden to leave their posts when the sirens sounded. Only when the planes were directly overhead were they allowed to seek sanctuary in the shelters. For prisoners at a factory in Trieben the situation was even worse, with the factory manager Herr Stillner forcing POWs to remain at work during air raids despite their guards having told them they were free to seek the sanctuary of the shelters.

Such raids were a difficult time for many. The sight and sound of Allied bombers gave them the feeling that they had
not been forgotten and that the war was finally catching up with them. There was also comfort in the knowledge that the destruction caused by the raids might mean a day off work. However, there were other emotions at play. The prisoners cursed the irony of a situation where aircrew set out from Britain to destroy German industry – an industry staffed by their fellow countrymen. It was uncomfortable for them to be trapped within their camps in areas targeted by their supposed saviours. No one wanted to survive the rigours of battle only to lose their life to the attentions of their own airforce.

Men working in one factory encountered a downed pilot who gave them ominous news. Since their workplace had not yet been attacked he could guarantee it would soon become a target. He was not wrong, just days later James Witte witnessed the promised raid:

As we ran we heard the menacing roar of hundreds of bombers. We looked up and saw the sky was black with them, so much so they almost blotted out the sun. What happened next was a blur. I ran for my life and flung myself into a ditch as the first load of bombs fell in the fields. I felt the blast travel across the ditch … When the all clear went I struggled out of the ditch, dazed but unhurt, and still clutching my overcoat and haversack. We assembled for a roll call and found out that six lads were missing. They were blown to pieces. Somewhere nearby a woman was screaming hysterically. She had just found her husband’s decapitated body. She started to rush around looking for his head.
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Though being out in the open during a bombing raid was a terrifying experience it could not compare to the fear felt by the men working underground. Although deep within the earth the miners could still feel the ominous rumbling of
bombs that were landing a mile above them. All felt the dread of being buried alive in a pitch black tomb, unable to find a way out from the darkness, slowly dying as the air grew thin. At one Silesian mine the prisoners were trapped underground for an hour and a half after bombing had knocked out the power supply. With the electricity shut down the working prisoners relied on the dim light of their carbide lamps as they awaited their fate. When they finally climbed from the bowels of the earth most could not believe they were still alive.

They may have been shaken by the experience but there were plenty of prisoners growing desperate to seek shelter far beneath ground. The fears regarding bombing were exacerbated by the knowledge that many air raid shelters were inadequate. Frequently shelters were added as an afterthought. At one work detachment in Munich the shelters remained unfinished five months after the camp had opened. Elsewhere in the city prisoners were actually evicted from shelters during air raids by policemen and Nazi Party members. In some locations shelters were little more than trenches dug in soft, sandy soil with boards and soil laid over the top. Even the more substantial shelters were often unlit and poorly ventilated.

After the nightly fears endured during bombing raids their ordeal was not necessarily over. With so many German cities in ruins, the prisoners were a perfect source of labour to clear up the damage caused by the bombing. They were marched into towns, faced a hostile populace and began their work. Prisoners dug in the rubble in search of corpses or survivors. They collected bricks, knocking away the remains of mortar so they could be used again, and piled them high ready for the Germans to begin reconstruction. When the Allied armies arrived in the flattened towns they marvelled at how the enemy had already begun the work to raise their towns
from the ashes of defeat – little did they know how much of the reconstruction work had been done by the bedraggled inmates of POW camps.

Back in London the War Office didn’t object to the prisoners being employed on clearing bomb sites on the condition that the prisoners were not housed in the area at night. Yet for many the question of overnight accommodation was irrelevant. One of the greatest dangers for those clearing the rubble was the likelihood of planes returning to hit the same target in the daytime. In the latter stages of the war, with the Allied bombing fleets given almost free reign of the skies above Germany, repeat missions became frighteningly familiar. One group of prisoners, who had marched all the way from Poland, were employed to spend all day filling bomb craters only to have to repeat the task the very next day in the aftermath of a follow up raid. In spring 1945 Jim Sims was among a detachment sent to clear bomb damage at a railway station when the American bombers returned:

We were attacked by USAF Thunderbolts straffing Uelzen station and then subjected to a raid by Flying Fortresses. We fled from the station area and it was a race between POWs, guards, women, kids and SS as to who got to the dubious shelter of some woods. We were not unduly upset by POWs killed in the raid but dead children upset us. We had some sympathy for German women and children, but it all seemed such a waste.
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