Hitler's British Slaves (39 page)

With food shortages biting, some prisoners were forced to dangerous acts to ward off starvation. Alec Reynolds, working at a copper mine, was one of those who risked all to ensure he was fed:

Outside there was a great big horse trough and it was filled with our soup – one day it would be spinach, the next carrots. It was the same trough we washed our one set of clothes in. That was all. Red Cross parcels? We hardly ever got them. I used to go out and hide in the toilets after roll call. When the air raids were on I could go over the top of the fence. I’d go to a farm and get spuds. Then I’d go back and hide until the shifts changed. When they went to get their coffee I’d go back to the hut to bed.
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For Reynolds the real dangers arose when another man asked to join his nightly foraging expeditions:

He was a Scottish commando. I said he could come but he had to follow my instructions. Then later a young paratrooper asked to join us. I said no, ’cause the longer it went on, the more chance there was of getting caught. So we went out that night, I saw a light and said ‘get down’. I lay on my back so I could see. I noticed we were being followed. We lay still and it was the paratrooper. We had just reached the clamp and I showed them how to take the potatoes. I’d just got my hand in when a torch shone in my face. It was a guard. He said ‘Halt or I shoot’, I shouted ‘Run!’ We ran off and the young lad stayed behind. When we got back to the camp we saw the guard marching him down the road. We got back in and they had a roll call. They marched this young lad up the road and shot him. They shot him in the back of the head, the bullet came out of the front but he was alright. They kept him in the camp, in the end he could talk but not very well. They just let him wander about the camp.
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All knew the chaos was leading up to one event – liberation. They couldn’t be sure when that moment would come, nor how they would react, but they knew it was coming ever closer. In those final days the prisoners readied themselves for that moment. Some began to organise their possessions, others spent long hours straining their ears to hear the sounds of the ever encroaching front lines. Others crouched around hidden radios, listening to broadcasts revealing how close their liberators were, whilst a handful organised themselves into groups, ready to seize control from the Nazis if any attempt was made to liquidate the camps. For all their activity few would have any real control over the events that followed.

When the moment of liberation finally arrived each person had a different experience. Some awoke to find their guards had fled and they were able simply to walk out of their camps. At Stalag XVIIIc many among the 13,000 inmates simply left the camp once they realised their guards had departed. Red Cross inspectors found over 300 men at the railway station fighting for space on a train, desperate to be onboard if it began the journey westwards. Despite efforts to shepherd the men back to the camp the NCOs were unable to control the men who were responsible for what the Red Cross described as ‘scenes of considerable disorder and pillage’.
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Others watched battles raging around the Stalags as the enemy attempted to defy the Allied onslaught. At Fallingbostel
the prisoners watched British tanks blowing up the German barrack huts, it was the first time in years that guns had been pointed away from prisoners rather than towards them. In some places the POWs confronted their guards and took possession of the camps, forcing the guards to flee. By late April Ken Willats found himself outside Hanover, having marched from East Prussia. With the end rapidly approaching he once again headed off from the column:

The column had split and was quite small. We had a German officer in charge of us, he was an awfully decent bloke. He called us together and said that the Americans were not far away and they would soon liberate us. He asked us to explain to them that he had been a reasonable guard and had treated us with respect. We agreed. Then a despatch rider came up and the officer told us he was going to have to take it back since the Germans were going to make a stand in the area and so we had to move on. By this time I was mucking in with an American we’d picked up – Freddy Gelfo, a butcher from New York. He said he wouldn’t move on so we stayed at the back of the column and decided to hide. We were in the column with two German guards behind us. They were Frenchmen, from Alsace, who’d been forced into the German army. As we were going along after a couple of hours we spotted a barn and ran off across the road. Immediately the two Germans followed us. We thought ‘This is it!’ But they came into the barn and they took off their German uniforms and had complete French uniforms on underneath! We all headed back into town and no one was about. There was an avenue of trees that stretched as far as the eye could see. In the distance we spotted a speck of dust that was heading towards us quite quickly. So we hid behind a tree. This tank came up and swung its gun towards us. Freddy called up to them ‘Say, are you guys American?’ They replied ‘Yeah, buddy. Jump aboard.’ And so we were free.
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American troops were also approaching Stalag VIIa at Moosburg outside Munich. Some of the prisoners had been marched out of the main camp to a place nearby where they awaited the arrival of the Americans. Bryan Willoughby was among them:

We were in a sort of gravel pit, in marquees, and we could hear the sound of tank guns being fired. And we waited, it went on and on for an hour or two. It got stronger and stronger and we knew they were very near. Some of the Yanks couldn’t wait and one chap ran up to welcome them and got shot immediately. That wasn’t funny. He wasn’t killed, fortunately. But he wasn’t happy about it. I stayed down. By this time I was beginning to learn a bit of sense, I kept my head down. We knew the war wasn’t going to last forever, but there was always a fear that when the end came the Germans could just mow us down with machine guns.
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Fortunately their fears were not realised and apart from those men caught in the crossfire of battle most remained safe. Yet such incidents were not uncommon in those final confusing days. When one group of men decided to celebrate their freedom by cooking the last of their food they made the mistake of lighting a fire. A US artillery spotter plane noted their location and ordered a barrage of fire to hit what it thought was an enemy encampment. Two dozen released prisoners were killed.

Not all of those who were killed in the final days were the victims of accidents. Alec Reynolds, whose paratrooper colleague had already been shot by a guard after a failed
foraging expedition, remembered the violence: ‘When the Americans were close the Germans said they were going to take this paratrooper away to hospital, but they didn’t. They took him off and executed him.’
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Fortunately such malicious acts were few and for many liberation was a time of unsurpassed emotion. Men dropped to the ground and wept whilst others cheered and danced around the vehicles of the liberating troops. At some Stalags and work camps joyous crowds swarmed around their liberators, collecting food and cigarettes handed out by the troops. They watched as tanks crashed through gates and brought down the fences. In the days that followed some among the liberated men walked in and out through broken fences in a symbolic celebration of their new-found freedom. The emotional impact was such that some simply didn’t know what to do: ‘We were free at last, and so overjoyed that we couldn’t speak.’
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But some failed to register any particular emotion: ‘I don’t remember any emotions at the time of liberation. We knew it was coming, so it wasn’t a shock.’
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Alec Reynolds described how uneventful liberation seemed to be: ‘There was firing going on so we knew they were coming. Then up came the Yankees, they had tanks and everything. They were giving us fags and asking what had happened to us. Then they said they were off and they left us behind. We just took it in our stride. No elation at all. You were free and it was up to you to do what you want to do.’
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The sickly Les Allan was unable to join in any celebrations, like so many of the men who had experienced the winter marches his pitiful physical condition controlled his emotions. As he watched the liberating troops moving on to continue the battle he was approached by RSM Lord who asked how long he’d been a prisoner. Hearing the answer ‘Five years’, Lord sent the emaciated Allan to sit on a tea chest. Minutes later medics arrived, deloused him with a
machine with tubes that were stuffed up his sleeves and trouser legs, then put him on a truck taking prisoners straight to an airfield. There was no time for celebrations. This failure to show any emotion was an indication of how much they had endured and how all that now counted was to be alive. This stoical attitude would follow many throughout their postwar lives.

Those arriving among the prisoners were often shocked by what they saw. The liberating troops, often young men barely out of their teens, looked at the thin, drawn faces of the prisoners and thought they looked like old men. From Fallingbostel the War Office representative reported: ‘appalling cases of undernourishment’.
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This was typical British understatement. Many were not simply undernourished, they were starving. Too weak to move from their beds, many simply stayed in their huts when their liberators arrived. They could not celebrate – their war was not over, nor would it be over until they had regained their strength and were returned to a state of physical well-being. For many it would be a long struggle, for some the full recovery would never come.

Although most troops simply felt immense relief at finally being liberated for some there were other, darker thoughts at play. Many scores would be settled – sometimes by former prisoners, sometimes by liberating troops and sometimes by unseen hands. At one mine the British prisoners failed to take action against their guards but watched as liberated Russians caught a cruel overseer and threw him down the mineshaft. In some cases the former POWs pointed out guards who had mistreated them or their mates who were then taken away and executed by the liberating troops. One group of SS men were spotted being led into the woods by a Scottish sergeant armed with a liberated Luger, their fate unseen but their survival unlikely. When one released POW discovered his
former guards hanging from the trees of a nearby forest he was uncertain as to whether they had fallen victims to Russian POWs or his own comrades. James Sims watched his fellow prisoners take revenge: ‘One really cruel guard was discovered hiding in the next village. He was dragged back to face a kangeroo court and sentenced to be hung. He was hoisted aloft and this didn’t bother us one bit.’
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For some their vengeance was to humiliate rather than to attack. One released sailor, housed by the Americans in a former SS barracks, decided to humiliate the SS man detailed to clean the barracks. Defecating on the floor, he insisted the SS man clean it up with his hands. When he refused a guard was called and the German was forced to carry out the task at gunpoint.

Yet, after all they had suffered, surprisingly few prisoners were bent on revenge. It was not that they did not necessarily feel a great hatred for those who had treated them harshly, but simply that most of those responsible for the abuse of prisoners had disappeared. Knowing the fury that might await them they simply slipped out of uniform and disappeared into the countryside. Others who sought vengeance found themselves too weak to hunt down their oppressors. Alec Reynolds noticed how most of his guards had vanished:

We were left on our own, then the Americans came. We told them about the young paratrooper who’d been shot and killed. They asked us which guard it was. They gave us a revolver and they said ‘You point him out, we’ll bring him out and you can shoot him’. But nobody did it. I could have understood it if we had shot him. I don’t know why we didn’t. Some people can do that sort of thing, I couldn’t. I had no hatred for them.
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Les Allan, who had suffered much in his time as a prisoner
– forced to work in industry despite being a stretcher-bearer, having his jaw broken by a guard, marched 600 miles with a fractured ankle – was convinced it was merely circumstances that prevented the released prisoners from taking revenge after they had been liberated:

The guards must have been aware of how we felt because the first thing they did was surrender to our troops – not to us. The fighting troops were still governed by the Geneva Convention and the rules of war. But we’d been treated so badly that the Geneva Convention meant nothing to us. There were certain guards we all would like to have got our hands on. Yes, we would have got revenge – if we could have got to them. It must have been on the mind of the British government for months afterwards. When the time came for me to be discharged, when I was on the truck to leave, an officer asked me ‘Would you like to stay on in the army?’ – it was the first time I’d laughed for years. I said to him ‘I wouldn’t mind being in the army of occupation in Germany’. He told me he had strict orders that no former POWs were to be allowed to go back to Germany. So I said ‘Goodbye’.
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For the weak and incapable retribution was provided by the liberating forces. Those able to muster up the strength to throw stones or beat German prisoners with sticks, did so but others were spotted sitting by roadsides asking the advancing troops to open fire on columns of enemy troops marching into captivity. At one camp where 13 German guards were found hiding among POWs dressed in British uniforms, they were handed over to the Russians who executed them.