Hitler's British Slaves (42 page)

Whether the journey home was immediate or after hospital treatment all among the ex-prisoners experienced feelings of trepidation. As they sat down in trains or buses they were alone for what seemed the first time in their lives. Stripped from the close confines of the Stalags and work camps, they were finally free to take in all they had experienced in the years that had passed between capture and liberation. No
longer with their mates at their shoulder laughing and joking, their minds began to wander back to the good times they had shared and the horrors they had experienced.

Some ‘palled up’ with other former prisoners or men heading back on leave, others made the journey in silence, their minds racing with thoughts of what lay ahead of them. Maurice Newey, released after years in camps in Italy and Germany, later wrote of arrival at his family home in York. Having walked through the still city night he finally greeted his parents then made his way to bed. All across Britain in the May of 1945 there were thousands of men sharing this moment, as they returned to the peace of home after years of the pain and hardship of forced labouring for the Germans. Newey might have spoken for them all: ‘I stretched out in the comfortable bed relishing the feeling of the sheets. An overwhelming desire to cry came over me and tears rushed to my eyes, I shut them tight but one tear managed to escape and tickled my cheek as it ran down. After a while I became calmer and felt unutterably weary. I let myself relax and I drifted into a dreamless sleep. I was home, in my own bed.’
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10

Every Day a Bonus

No more lining up for parcels

Same old pushing shoving throng

Same old laughter, same old faces

Same old voice ‘It won’t be long!’

No more standing late on rollcalls

Cross the surging restless foam

We’ll be overjoyed, elated

This is England! This is home!
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‘Life in a POW camp, as I experienced it, was not the cops and robbers theatrics as portrayed in “Hogan’s Heroes”, it was a constant battle to survive.’
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And so they came home – men who had changed, returning to a land that had changed. They had spent years musing on what they might do once their shackles were cast aside and they were free once more to rebuild their lives away from the deprivation and disease of the Stalags. Hours of discussion had passed with men planning the meals they would eat, the women they would chase, what work they wanted to do. In short, how they would maximise the freedom that had been won for them by the supreme efforts of the liberating armies – efforts that they would never forget and always be thankful for.

Yet many returned home with a shadow over their lives that would take years to erase. George Marsden was among them. His experience of arriving home was perhaps symbolic of the uncertain future faced by many of the returning prisoners,
as he later wrote of his typically subdued homecoming: ‘made my way home on the train alone, caught a bus to Sheffield, and sat on the doorstep waiting for my mum to get back from shopping. So that was that, no flag waving, no fuss, the end of an exciting time of my life, some happy, some not very good at all.’
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The first days of freedom back home were a chance to see whether they could realise these wartime musings. The men who had written poems – rather eulogies – to the prospect of liberation, with titles such as ‘The Jubilation of a Repatriated Prisoner’ or ‘It’s All A Day Nearer’ would soon find out if their dreams would be fulfilled. Back in the spring of 1944, when liberation seemed so far away, one POW had written his thoughts of the future:

I think that the ordinary things of life which we hardly noticed will in future mean more to us. Such commonplace things as an armchair and a coal fire, or a real bed complete with smooth, white sheets and without bugs. These, I maintain, will forever give us an extra, subtle satisfaction, even though we may not be fully conscious of it. … I don’t think little setbacks and annoyances will ever affect us again as they once did. … You can’t stop either the clock or the calendar and before long we’ll be looking back thinking of this as a period of cold storage, but finding life so much more grander than it was by sheer contrast.
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As the returning prisoners arrived back in the UK they were soon packed off to their homes, they were not eligible for foreign service for at least six months and started life back home with a period of six weeks leave, being given double rations for the first 28 days. They were then called to a medical board to see if they were still fit for military service. Those
deemed unfit were then given an additional eight weeks ‘terminal leave’ before being discharged from the army. The conditions were not the same for all since some still had plenty of time before they would be returning to their families. The Commonwealth and Dominion troops were all far from home and would have to await the long journey across the oceans before they would see their loved ones again. Unlike prisoners released in the Mediterranean who shipped directly home the Australians and New Zealanders who arrived back in Britain were given 28 days leave before they would be expected to return home. The Canadians were given just 14 days leave before returning to service. More generously the Indians were allowed a period of three months leave and the South Africans were warned they were likely to remain in the mother country for ‘some months’.

Once they had crossed the threshold of their homes it was time to start rebuilding their lives. However nothing was that simple. In the time they’d been away much had altered. Women throughout the land were occupying many of the jobs previously held by men. Young children had grown up with little real memory of their fathers and older children had left home and moved on. Parents and grandparents had died and wives and girlfriends had moved on – sometimes emotionally and sometimes physically. Even the look of people had changed. The prisoners were shocked to see how much makeup was worn by British women. They were used to the clear faces of central European women and they felt the women at home were wearing masks. Furthermore, the physical landscape of the world they returned to had suffered – prisoners came home to find whole areas flattened by enemy bombing, some returning to ‘homes’ they had never seen before. Nor did they return to a land of plenty – a land where they would be able to sate their cravings for food and leisure. They came
home to a bleak Britain, still gripped by rationing, a country exhausted by six years of war.

For most the shocks began even before they reached home. As they sat clutching their kitbags on trains and buses they listened to the conversations around them. They attempted to pay bus fares only to find drivers and conductors laughing at them because the prices they expected to pay had risen so much in the passing years. Small talk about events and people they had no knowledge of were confusing. Discussions about the constraints of rationing meant little to men who just weeks before had fought over bread crusts or potato peelings. Some found themselves craving a bar of chocolate only to find the vending machines of railway stations empty, their contents having succumbed to the rigours of rationing many years before. Men attempted to enjoy their freedom by walking into shops and spending their money, a privilege denied them for so long. Yet, when one ex-prisoner returned to shop where he had always previously bought his cigarettes he was informed they were reserved for regular customers only.

Such irritations were the least of their worries, what was of greatest concern was the mental and emotional burden they had carried home from the Stalags. The experience of imprisonment meant that the return home for married men was not always marked by a great outpouring of emotion. They had dreamt of the day they would walk through the front door of their home and whisk their wife upstairs to bed for the long awaited reunion. Like everything else about their return home, such grand intentions were often undermined by the reality of the situation. Many felt uncomfortable with their wives, the lack of contact over so many months and years left a gap that could not immediately be bridged. Furthermore some lacked the physical strength to make love and
wished to do little more than rest. W.G. Harvey, who had ironically helped build POW camps in France in 1940 for the expected influx of German POWs only to be later captured himself, recalled his return to his wife: ‘I remember kissing Edith but after that time apart we both felt rather strange with each other and I suppose in my rundown condition I would seem aloof and miserable. It was at least a fortnight before we could come together in the normal relationship of husband and wife, due entirely to my physical condition.’
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In a bizarre contrast to this, some prisoners found that peppering their food acted as a strong aphrodisiac. After having been denied pepper for so long they found it stimulated those parts of their body that had long lain idle.

Harvey was not alone. Plenty of ex-prisoners were self-conscious about their appearance. The ravages of the final months of war had stripped the flesh from their bones, leaving them emaciated, with eyes and cheeks sunk hollow into their skulls. Hair had lost its shine, gone grey or fallen out. Gums had receded, indeed many among them had lost their teeth. Their skin was grey and lined and many admitted feeling they had grown old during their time as ‘guests of the Third Reich’. Not only that but some had all their body hair shaved off during the delousing programme. They felt self-conscious about the appearance of their bony, hairless bodies, not wanting to be seen naked by anyone.

There was genuine concern that many of the long-term POWs would need psychiatric help. In late 1944 the War Office had compiled figures showing how much help would be needed. With around 100,000 British soldiers held in Germany, of whom 58,000 had been in captivity for over three years, it was expected that around 71,000 of them would be in need of ‘mental’ help. In reality few would ever receive any serious counselling. In an effort to help the returning prisoners
rebuild their lives plans had been drawn up by the War Office to help families understand the men who returned. Written by POWs who had been in captivity earlier in the war, the documents helped illuminate the mental state of the liberated men. A list of points was to have acted as a guide for families yet was never issued. Instead the ex-POWs were left to make the best of the situation upon their return, often being faced by families with an unrealistic notion of how they should behave. This was a pity since the proposed leaflet had offered much useful advice about how to best aid rehabilitation. Families were urged to be good listeners but not to pressure the men to talk if they didn’t want to. They should also answer any questions carefully to help the returning man understand how society had changed during his missing years. Business or personal matters should be ignored until the man was ready to put his mind to such matters. Families were told to expect men to be moody: ‘He will very likely be very cheerful and talkative at times and then very quiet and depressed for a spell. He may get upset rather quickly too. That’s all natural and will pass in time if you don’t worry him about it. Show him that you sympathise with him when he needs it but don’t let him think you are pitying him.’
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It was also recognised that POWs should be allowed to do whatever they liked at first, urging families to let a man stay in alone if he wanted to whilst agreeing to let him go out all the time if he so desired. Wives were also given pointers as to how they might expect their husbands to be with them: ‘He may be rather shy of showing affection at first. He has been starved of it for a long time. Give him a chance to realise he is at home with those who love him.’
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Other tips included not overfeeding ex-prisoners and not allowing them too much strong alcohol since their weakened bodies would not be able to cope with it. Finally they were offered one important piece
of advice: ‘Remember a prisoner of war is not a sick man unless the doctor has said he is one.’
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The British government approached the whole issue of the returning POWs with trepidation. There had already been psychiatric evaluations made of POWs who had returned home in January 1945. Of the 31 men all but two were medically downgraded on the advice of army psychiatrists – and the other two had been admitted to a psychiatric hospital. There were others aware of how the returning men would need careful handling. As early as December 1944 the BBC had proposed broadcasting a talk by a Colonel Chapel, himself an ex-POW who had been repatriated earlier in the war. Chapel’s talk was an honest assessment of the mental state of POWs:

But do you understand quite clearly just how he feels when he realises that all the places and faces that he has dreamt about and thought of so often in captivity are not quite as familiar as he had thought and hoped they would be? People and places too – thanks to Hitler and his bombs – change quite a lot, you know, in four or five years … After all, we are more or less ‘Rip Van Winkles’ coming back to life again after a long period of isolation from the world we knew … Please don’t laugh at us if we ask a question which seems foolish and out of date … We are all a bit touchy. The kind of question I mean is ‘What are points?’ ‘Why can’t I buy sardines without points?’
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Such questions about the complexities of the rationing system and how prisoners and their families needed to be prepared were simple common sense. However the War Office decided against allowing the broadcast, preferring instead to present a much more formal talk by a General Adams which was
devoid of the emotional aspects of Chapel’s planned speech. As a result of the ‘stiff upper lip’ approach of the War Office both families and prisoners entered this new period of their lives with little preparation.