Hitler's British Slaves (34 page)

The situation was complicated by German rules. Few among the Australians realised their letters could be sent by airmail for a fee of 40 pfennigs. Instead they continued to send letters by sea. Men from across the Empire were frustrated by the German insistence that only letters written in English could be passed by their censors, thus POWs from families unable to write the language were tormented by never receiving news from home. For all prisoners there was one very real emotion at play. Without the chance to prove to their families that they were alive there grew very real doubts in the minds of all those not receiving mail. It seemed they were just existing, rather than actually living. Indeed, with no parcels coming from the Red Cross it seemed they had been forgotten, and with no facilities for recreation the prisoners felt they could do nothing worthwhile with their lives. As one man wrote in a poem composed whilst in captivity: ‘The skies may be grey, but to me they seem blue, when there’s a letter from you.’
³⁵
Despite the uplifting of emotion enjoyed by most prisoners upon the arrival of mail, not all felt the same. For some there was the feeling that mail was simply a painful reminder of the outside world – something some felt they would never see again.

Another factor that helped maintain morale was the existence of illicit wireless sets. Usually swapped for Red Cross food and kept carefully hidden from the guards, the sets were used to tune into news reports about the progress of the war. This allowed the men to work out the truth behind the propaganda they heard from official German sources. Although few radios were available in the early years of the
war – when most of the news was bad and could be heard from the constant influx of new prisoners – from late 1942 onwards the prisoners heard all the details of the Allied advances which convinced them that salvation would eventually come.

Another concern for some POWs was the access, or lack of it, to religious facilities. Again facilities varied from place to place. For some regular church services were available, usually conducted by captive army chaplains. Others found lay preachers among their fellow inmates, or simply found someone prepared to read prayers and lead hymn singing. For those in the smaller work detachments any such religious facilities were haphazard. In areas with large populations of French workers the Catholics among the prisoners were able to attend services.

Those of other faiths were often left to their own devices. The many faiths embraced by those from the British Empire were all found within the camps. Every conceivable Christian denomination from the British Isles – from the mighty Anglican church down to the smallest Baptist sect, from the pomp of Catholicism to the austerity of the Presbyterians – were found. And that was before those of other faiths: the Moslems, Sikhs and Hindus of India, the Jews of both Britain and Palestine, the Orthodox Cypriots, Calvinists from South Africa – all formed their own congregations and prayer groups. Despite Nazi claims of European superiority, the Germans were surprisingly tolerant towards the religious groups. Muslim prisoners at work camps were even given Fridays off work in order to practise their faith, instead working on Sundays whilst the Christians were at rest. One camp commandant even admitted that he would happily have allowed them their own imam except for one small problem: ‘we have not yet caught any Mohammedan priests’.
³⁶

Even when chaplains were available their efforts to attend to the needs of ‘their focks’ were often frustrated by restrictions on their movements. At Stalag XIa the chaplain found he was unable to make visits to many of the distant working camps since he was forbidden to make overnight stays. Furthermore the few available chaplains were unable to perform services at working parties each Sunday since the camps were often spread out across a wide area. Maybe a few could be fitted in during the one day of rest but for plenty of the prisoners there was simply no access to religious services.

For the average prisoner the notion of religion was no more or less important than it had been in civilian life. Most among them displayed a
laissez faire
attitude towards both God and the views of the strong believers. One prisoner recalled the feelings shared by him and his fellow POWs:

Remember we had padres who prayed for our success in battle and the Germans wore a belt buckle with the words ‘
Gott Mitt Uns
’ – ‘God With Us’ – in the middle. So God was in a bit of a dilemma if he was on both sides. There wasn’t much religion in the camps. There was one hut each Sunday given over to religion, I think it was one of the Salvationist groups. The Germans allowed the hut to be comfortably warm – so that guaranteed a good turn out. So we sat and sang the hymns, but it wasn’t a very deep religious conviction. It was just a chance to keep warm and that there wasn’t a lot else to do.
³⁷

Of course, the attitudes towards religion varied between the men, with plenty finding religion as others abandoned it. Some were buoyed by the thought of a divine force that would eventually offer them salvation from their living hell. Others simply felt abandoned by God and rejected any notion
of divinity. One man later recalled that as he sat reading his bible some among his fellow POWs would call out to him ‘Where’s your God now?’
³⁸
It was little wonder that as the men suffered the agonies of the long march westwards many prisoners retained their bibles as their only possession, whilst others simply abandoned them in the snow.

The psychological pressures of captivity were increased by the knowledge that since they were being treated as slaves they could easily be disposed of. Nearly every prisoner had experienced ill treatment, starvation and cruelty at some point since their capture. Most had seen the cruel treatment of Russian prisoners, with many having witnessed executions of those no longer fit enough to be of use. Some had witnessed the arbitrary murder of concentration camp inmates and slave labourers. All knew stories of men who had been shot whilst escaping or who had been beaten or killed for refusing to work. By the winter of 1945 hunger was the norm as disease, deprivation and death became the men’s constant companions. With their bodies growing weaker and labour becoming an increasing burden, few did not consider the future – and in minds of many the approaching end to the war might herald the moment they were considered expendable.

These real fears were not unfounded and with increasing chaos in the crumbling Reich some of the labourers fell victim to defiant Nazis. In February 1945 600 British POWs from the E393 work camp in Upper Silesia were reported killed at Ratibor in an attack by an SS unit. They were being marched away from the advancing Red Army when the German unit struck the multinational column. In total around 2,000 men were reported dead. Only those inhabitants who had been too sick to join the march survived the atrocity and they later saw the carnage left in the aftermath. The road was littered
with the bloodstained corpses of Russian and British POWs – men who thought they were being safely evacuated but who were left to an anonymous death on a foreign roadside. The attack was an ominous portent for what might happen in those final months of war.

8

The Column of the Damned

‘We walked … and we walked … and we walked …’
¹

Starving, clad in rags, frozen to the very bone – a vast wave of humanity shuffled along the roads of eastern Europe in early 1945. Sick with fear, thick with lice and ravaged by dysentery, these miserable hordes were herded along frozen roads, some in small groups others in seemingly never ending columns, all heading for an unknown destination somewhere in the heart of the Reich. Bodies lay by the roadside. Some, too tired to move another yard, had been shot by their guards. Others were dead from starvation. Disease and deprivation were the daily realities, liberation a distant dream and survival an almost unimaginable concept.

Among this tide of misery were concentration camp inmates, slave labourers and the POWs of all the Allied nations. They shared the roads with retreating German soldiers and civilians fleeing the revenge they knew would come from the advancing Red Army. For the prisoners, many of whom had spent years slaving in the fields and factories of the Reich, this would be their greatest hurdle on the road to liberation. It was a hurdle that hundreds, possibly thousands, failed to cross.

For those men who had spent as many as five years labouring for the enemy the news that they would be moved westwards was no surprise. Most were aware of the progress of the war and once they could hear the Russian artillery in the distance they knew their lives would soon be changing. What would happen to them none could tell. They had heard
plenty of rumours which plagued the lives of the prisoners throughout those final desperate months of war. They heard of camps where the SS had departed only after throwing hand grenades into each hut, or the mine where working parties of POWs were deliberately trapped below ground. True or false, such stories weighed heavily on their minds. Would they be left behind to be liberated by the Red Army? Would they be marched back into Germany and held hostage by Nazi leaders desperate to do a deal to save their own necks? Or would they simply be executed as no longer being of any value to the Reich? It was a question that hung over many POWs that Christmas – would the New Year be a time of hope or of despair? It was also a question that many would never live to see answered.

When the news came that they would be evacuated westwards a sense of relief swept through the work detachments and Stalags. Few expected the journey to be easy, most had made the same trip in the opposite direction back in the summer of 1940 and knew a repeat performance in the depths of winter would be a terrible experience.

Before the massed marches could begin, the men on work detachments had to return to their parent Stalags. In early 1945 prisoners at farms and factories across eastern areas of the Reich began to leave the camps that had been their homes for years. Les Allan was working near Königsberg in East Prussia when the command came to depart. It was an unexpected order that would cause Allan much misery in the months that followed:

In those days you conserved your clothing as much as possible. In the barracks you walked around in your clogs, never your leather boots. You saved them, you never knew when you were really going to need them. The temperature was 25 degrees below zero for much of the time. To be in that temperature is hard enough even if you are well dressed. If you were called for work you put on your boots, but often they had these
Appells
– roll calls – in the middle of the night. It was just to check none of us had run off, mind you who’s going to escape when it’s 25 degrees below? So at night you just put on what you needed, you wouldn’t put your leather boots on, so you left them at your bunk – they wouldn’t be stolen because they had your name on them. But you took all your bits of food and anything you prized. I had a chess set, so I put that under my coat. We would never mess them about, we just wanted to get back inside. But on one night it was different. We went outside and we were surrounded by front line Wehrmacht troops. They just marched us out of the gates and away. So I just had a pair of wooden clogs, a British uniform the Red Cross had issued to me, and an army overcoat. I had no hat. We headed off along the Baltic coast and walked for 600 miles. No one has ever disclosed how many people died on those marches.
²

The suddenness of their departure, that left Allan and many of his fellow prisoners wearing just clogs upon their feet, meant they faced an immediate difficulty. For Allan his situation worsened when he slipped on the ice and fractured his ankle. With no treatment available he was forced to keep walking. He and all the men in the columns knew they had no choice – it was march or die.

Gordon Barber was on a working party at Adlesbruck when he got the news:

All of a sudden the guard came along and said we’d all got to move. We could already hear the Russian guns, we worried about that because we didn’t want them to get us. We’d heard so many atrocity stories about them. They didn’t care if you were their friend or enemy – if you were in their way they’d shoot you. On 3 January we marched out. When we came out it was cold, really cold – I’ll tell you what you couldn’t dig a spade into the ground. You couldn’t dig with a bulldozer, the frost was so deep. We didn’t have much clothing, just what we were wearing. I still had the French overcoat I’d kept since 1940. I had a British army cap and a big balaclava my mother had sent me. It covered my face, I’d have done as a bank robber. And it was warm. We had blankets round our shoulders. I still had a pair of boots. That was the good thing about the Red Cross, you might have to wait six months but you got it in the end. As we left there were five of us – Ken Wilats, Frank Turton from Nottingham, Stevie from Devon, Lofty Griggs from London and myself. We said we’d stick together but if one of us went sick we’d share everything out. We’d been together three years so we knew who we could trust. When we knew we were going, and had a few days to get our gear together, we made a great big knapsack and put all our food in it. I said I’d carry it since I was the strongest. Lofty carried all the utensils, the rest was spread out. They’d made two bleedin’ big straps and they lifted it up onto my shoulders.
³

With the homemade knapsack on his bag Barber and his mates, along with the rest of their detachment, began the long march back towards the heart of Germany. At the same time all across eastern areas of the Reich small work detachments were converging on the Stalags where they would assemble ready to begin the final march. After an overnight march through the snow Barber and his mates made their first stop, at Stalag XXb in Marienburg – the camp from which they had been detailed to farm work three years earlier. Even in
the early war years, whilst many of the inhabitants had been out at work, the inmates had complained of overcrowding. Barber and his mates soon realised they were not the only men returning to the vast camp: