Hitler's British Slaves (37 page)

As the marches progressed the weather slowly began to turn. First the snows melted. That left the prisoners marching through slush and mud that seeped through their boots, soaking their already wretched feet. Where once they had been able to brush snow from their coats they found themselves soaked by the heavy rains that followed the worst of the winter. But this meant little. The temperatures were slowly rising and the light of spring began to appear. Slowly but surely they began to spot the shoots of flowers appearing on
the roadsides as they marched. The avenues of trees were no longer leafless, instead a new life was beginning with buds appearing on the once bare branches. Then, as the weeks turned to months, the sun finally began to show from behind the clouds. With this light came hope. The Red Army had been left far behind and the prisoners were slowly moving towards the Allied lines. Ahead of them no longer lay nothing but a wasteland, instead as they looked towards the horizon they could sense salvation.

Yet for many such hopes would never be fulfilled. Gordon Barber, for example, eventually fell victim to sickness:

Things started getting a bit dodgy because we all got the shits. That was the worst. By now we’d left the Russians far behind. By this time we were all getting under the weather. We were just walking and hoping we would get home. We looked a sorry state – worrying how long we’d keep walking. The weather was getting nice, it was March or April by then. We tried to stick together but we were getting weaker, and blokes were dying – just falling by the side of the road. You couldn’t do nothing for them, you weren’t strong enough to carry yourself. The place we got to had just been bombed by the Americans. We knew we were getting near the front. And the Germans were getting a bit easier, they might as well not have been there. Waste of space, they were too old or too ill. You’d look around and think ‘where are they?’ You could’ve pissed off but I was in no fit state.
²⁰

As another marcher later wrote: ‘I think if they had shot us and dumped us at this point and in these conditions it would have been a relief.’
²¹

It was unsurprising that many of the prisoners started to feel increasingly bitter towards the Germans. Although air
raids posed a threat to the safety of the marchers, they did give them an opportunity to vent their anger, as Les Allan remembered: ‘When we saw our planes we called out to them “Kill the bastards, kill every man, woman and child”. The bombing was our salvation, it certainly lifted our morale. I witnessed the blanket bombing of Hanover, we were marching towards it but we still said “Kill them, bomb them, smash them”’.
²²

These air raids may have lifted morale but they also helped to sap the strength of the POWs. Despite their worsening condition the Germans still saw fit to make them work. Hardly able to walk, the forlorn prisoners were herded through towns to play one final part in the desperate attempts by the Germans to keep alive any hope of saving the Reich. To sustain the military in those final weeks of war they needed to keep roads open and the railways running. To this end the columns of prisoners were used to clear up in the aftermath of bombing raids and load and unload trains. Exhausted prisoners – men who had marched hundreds of miles through the winter snows from Stalag XXb – were forced to work 12-hour days at a railway station, surviving on rations of just half a pint of soup and 120 grammes of bread per day. Prisoners found themselves dragging rubble from roads or once more wielding shovels to fill in bomb craters. In the chaotic aftermath of air raids the prisoners were able to search for food, but many took risks that plunged them deeper into despair, as Gordon Barber remembered:

We were marched through the town down to the station to clear the bomb damage. The worst thing that happened was that we walked in and found a lot of dead animals. There were pigs that had been laying there for two or three days. Some of our blokes cut them up, one of them said ‘Let’s have this pig. We’ll cut the bad bits out and eat the rest.’ ’ Cause we were bloody hungry. We cooked it up and ate it. Our guts weren’t very good before, but when we ate this it was a killer. I can still remember sitting on a plank of wood at the latrine they’d dug. The bloke sitting beside me said ‘Ain’t it terrible. Do you think we’ll make it?’ I said ‘Yeah’. We sat there watching the American bombing raids, knocking the shit out of this town. All we could see going down into the pit was blood. We had dysentery and malnutrition. I said ‘I wish they’d drop a bomb on us’. I don’t know how we wiped ourselves, there was no toilet paper. There was water just running out of me. I felt so weak and so horrible, every time I moved I shit myself.
²³

It was little wonder some among them decided to take their chances on their own. Some men had headed off alone through the snow to the farms where their Polish girlfriends awaited their return. Others simply slipped into the woods hoping to team up with gangs of resistance fighters or join up with the Red Army. For many of those who disappeared into the countryside their eventual fate was uncertain, no one knew their names and no one ever recorded what happened to them. Countless men lost their lives in the battles that followed the evacuation and in the ensuing chaos. Those who waited until they reached the relative safety of central Germany had the best hope of survival. ‘Bill’ Sykes, who had already made two unsuccessful escape attempts from his workplace, was finally able to make his exit whilst marching away from his work camp. Just like his previous ‘escapes’ there was little attempt at subterfuge. This was less than a ‘great escape’:

As the war was coming to a close – on or around March of 1945 – we were marched south with a large contingent of other prisoners. The Russians were approaching the river Elbe from the east, and the Allied forces were approaching the river Mulde from the west, and we were in no-mans-land between the two rivers. After a week or so of marching I was reaching the end of my tether as I was weak from a bad case of dysentery. I decided enough was enough and took it upon myself to make one more ‘dedicated’ try to escape from captivity. The other ones had just been half hearted one-man protests against the German guards. When I say escape, I use the term loosely, I just walked away. The prisoners – British, American, French, Russian – were incarcerated in a large wooded area surrounded by German guards at 50-metre intervals with orders to shoot anyone approaching the perimeter. I, having reached a point of no return, approached one of the guards who asked me where I thought I was going, I answered that I was going back to England and nothing but nobody was going to stop me.

As at that time I was down to a frail 100 pounds in body weight and had a severe case of dysentery. He appeared to find some humour in this statement, or perhaps it was just my poor German interpretation of my intentions, so to my amazement he turned his back and allowed me to pass through the cordon. He probably thought that I wouldn’t get very far and that the next German soldier I met would shoot me anyway. This lead to a chain of events of many days of pure misery, constantly soaked to the skin by cold torrential rain, no food, a bad case of dysentery. What a miserable specimen of the human race I must have appeared. But salvation was at hand, a German family took me under their roof for a few days and gave me a share of the little food that they had and so I survived. I will be forever grateful.
²⁴

For men such as Sykes the marching was over, they were free,
if not yet safe. For thousands of others the marching continued. For some, the columns continued westwards until they met with the advancing Allies. For others their destination would simply breed more uncertainty. They might have been able to see the flashes of Allied artillery in the distance and some among their guards had got rid of their rifles but their war was not yet over and there was a final shock in store for them. Just as they were expecting to be free they were once more marched behind the wire of the Stalags.

9

The End

‘Being liberated was one of life’s greatest experiences. However I was still suffering from malnutrition and dysentery and was hospitalised after being flown home. I really don’t remember much of VE Day except I was in some pain.’
¹

Whilst some individuals slipped away and the rest kept walking through the countryside until liberated, others were marched into the overcrowded Stalags of central Germany. Reaching their supposed safety the prisoners were in for a surprise. Though most had experienced overcrowding in the eastern camps few were prepared for what awaited them. As many of those who had marched for months through the snow and ice of the Polish winter were shepherded into Stalags they were joined by recently captured Allied troops from the western front. As early as the summer of 1944 some camps had reached bursting point as new arrivals entered them from camps in Italy following the surrender in 1943. One NCO, arriving from Italy, found it took him three weeks before being issued with a palliase, and took another three weeks before he was allocated a bunk to put the straw-filled mattress on. Such were the shortages of coal that each stove was given only twelve pieces of coal per day, just enough to keep the stove alight for an hour and a half.

As the British and Americans had steadily advanced eastwards the Germans had relocated camps from their western regions. At Stalag XIIIc in Hammelburg a group of over 200 Indians and South Africans had arrived from France in the autumn of 1944. They arrived in a state of confusion, with
most having lost all their identification papers. As the camps bulged at the seams they sank into chaos. Tents were put up as emergency accommodation, which were soon filled by the incomers. The camps soon took on the appearance of shanty towns as spare bunk boards and Red Cross packing cases were hastily nailed together to provide makeshift shelters.

In Stalag Xb, at Sandbostel, which housed POWs alongside thousands of slave labourers, fresh arrivals found little space and even less comfort. Newly captured men from the west were even segregated from the long-term prisoners, being forced to occupy a separate compound between which no contact could be made. When one group of 700 new arrivals were found to be without boots, to alleviate their discomfort the Germans simply issued them with straw slippers. By March 1945 the Red Cross found that all the inmates were sleeping on bare boards, with even the patients of the camp hospital forced to sleep on the wooden floorboards of their huts. Less than a third of the POWs had palliases, and these were filled with heather they had collected on the local heaths rather than the more usual straw. Only 50 per cent of them had been issued blankets by the Germans and the washhouse was without water. Such were the shortages that prisoners were marched 10 kilometres just to collect firewood.

It was little surprise that rats began to thrive amidst such chaos. The only thing that controlled their numbers was that little food was ever thrown away. At Lamsdorf the latrines began to fill with excrement since the Germans no longer had the will to arrange for them to be emptied. As the piles of shit grew so did the horror for the men using the latrines. The piles were so high than rats ran across them, stopping only to bite the exposed backsides of men using the latrines. The terror of these unwanted attentions during what should have been their most private moments meant prisoners perched
above the latrines ensuring the rats could not reach their bare flesh.

Such squalor became evident throughout the system of camps. Teeming with weakened men, any attempts to keep the barrack huts clean and tidy were pointless. The floors soon became thick with grease and grime, just like the bodies of the prisoners. What little food they received was cooked in unsanitary conditions, often being prepared in deep urns that were seldom washed out, and then transported from the kitchens in buckets used day after day without washing. The prisoners could not help but compare it to the pig swill it tasted like. At Stalag XIa in Altengrabow, during April 1945 the camp was provided with electricity for just half an hour per day and the British and American prisoners were no longer receiving Red Cross parcels. Coal had not been seen in the camp since February and over 600 prisoners were sleeping on blankets on the bare earth inside hastily erected tents. Half of the 600 men had just one blanket and thus had nothing to cover their bodies as they slept at night. At this late stage in the war there were no delousing facilities and the inmates of the camp had no way of keeping clean. Even worse the latrines could no longer be emptied – the only solution to the problem being to dig a series of overflow pits to prevent the sewage from spreading throughout the camp. It was little wonder that Red Cross inspectors reported the camp as: ‘nothing but one big complaint’.
²

The columns of prisoners fleeing from Stalags in the east were bound for two main destinations – Stalag XIb at Fallingbostel and Stalag VIIa at Moosburg. For the men already in these camps, the new arrivals meant a further deterioration of living conditions that would push them one step nearer to the abyss. Fallingbostel had never been designed to hold vast numbers of men. Its purpose was merely as a transit
camp for men heading for working parties. In April 1944 nearly 70,000 prisoners, 2,000 of them from Britain or the Commonwealth, were working Arbeitskommandos supplied by the camp. Positioned in northern Germany, its numbers had been swelled by 4,000 men captured during Operation Market Garden. Though many of the veterans of Arnhem had arrived in the camp with an air of defiance – marching through the gates in step, proudly wearing their red berets, and were led by their soon to be legendary RSM J.C. Lord – they were thrown into life in a camp where they would struggle to maintain that morale.