Hitler's British Slaves (44 page)

Even to this day many among the prisoners look at the ‘youngsters’ who fought the battles that led to their liberation and hold them in great esteem. Having lost in battle they cannot help but admire those who persevered to bring the victory. Maybe hiding beneath this admiration and respect were the seeds of the reasoning behind why so little of the POW story has ever become fully known to the general public. Although few among the men who suffered defeat would ever admit to any feelings that they themselves had personally failed, maybe there was a nagging doubt in their minds that the public would never accept the fact they had never tried to escape nor been part of the ‘goon baiting’ cliques of the Oflags and Stalag Lufts.

Some of the POWs attempted to reveal the truth of what they had experienced but found no one really wanted to hear their version of events. When Arthur Dodds, who had been imprisoned at work camps within the Auschwitz concentration camp, appeared at a talk organised by his local council he found the audience was not interested in his tales of horror. They responded with cheers and applause to the tales told by a veteran of the battles around Arnhem but sat in silence as Dodds spoke. At the end of the meeting the audience crowded around the paratrooper but ignored the POW. It would be many years before he would speak of his horrific experiences again.

Such experiences led some ex-POWs to carry a grudge against the people who imprisoned them. As one man captured in Greece later wrote of his observations of the treatment of the Germans following the collapse of the Reich: ‘The enemy is being treated too good.’
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Lance Bombardier Norman Osborne, a commercial artist from Brighton, put it somewhat bluntly when answering a post-war military intelligence questionnaire: ‘All Germans should be killed.’
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Even
60 years later some are unable to forgive the Germans for the misery they endured and the sufferings they knew whilst working as slaves for the Third Reich. One former POW explained how he feels:

If I meet a young German it is fine. I admire them. But if I meet a German of my generation I don’t want to know. A mate of mine used to run a pub. One of his customers was a young German dentist working in England, they became quite friendly. One day he brought his family, including his parents, in for a meal. He was talking to the dentist and asked if his father had been in the war. He said ‘Yes, he was an SS officer.’ According to his wife my mate jumped over the bar and ran towards them with his fists flailing, he was knocking chairs over. He lifted the table out from under them and threw it over. They left in such a panic that they jumped in the car and immediately crashed into a wall. Some things are difficult to get rid of. They well up inside you. I have no time for my generation of Germans. Even now they are trying desperately hard to make excuses, but there is no excuse for what they did. They say ‘We never knew about the concentration camps!’ But if us POWs knew about the camps the German people must have. Human flesh doesn’t smell like roast beef. The smell of burning flesh covered miles and miles of countryside. They must have known. As far as I’m concerned they should put a big monument up to Bomber Harris in Whitehall. They say we should apologise for Dresden, that we shouldn’t have done it because the war was almost over. It wasn’t almost over for me. My only regret was that they didn’t do more Dresdens. Bomber Harris was great as far as I’m concerned. The only apology should be by them for starting on us.
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The Germans were not alone in continuing to be blamed for the suffering of POWs. The Italians were also guilty of many breaches of the Geneva Convention, with many of those captured in North Africa having reported they were almost dead from starvation within a month of reaching the Italian mainland. As one former prisoner described it, they received: ‘criminally unsanitary and inhumane treatment’.
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In the words of another returning prisoner: ‘They treated us a darned sight worse then the Huns, and that’s saying some-thing!’
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Yet although many ex-prisoners continued to bear a grudge against those who had imprisoned them, others bear their wartime enemies no ill will. Not all of the working prisoners experienced brutality. Many among them suffered from disease and malnutrition yet remained convinced their own guards had played no role in any ill treatment. Quite simply, it was war itself that caused their suffering rather than any Germans they could personally blame. D-Day veteran ‘Bill’ Sykes was one of those who had no animosity towards his captors:

Having never been subjected to any acts of physical violence against my person whilst incarcerated in two Stalag prisoner of war camps, and two work camps, I can say that I never personally witnessed any acts of brutality by the German guards against any prisoners that I was in contact with and can also say that I never felt any malice towards them. I can only attest to the fact that the German guards that I came into contact with acted strictly according to the Geneva Convention. One must remember that these guards were members of the Wehrmacht, and not stormtroopers of the Waffen SS or other brutal organizations.
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There was also the issue of those fellow prisoners who had collaborated with the enemy. The War Office issued questionnaires to returning British and Commonwealth troops to find out about any treachery that had taken place within the Stalags and work camps. Many of the returning POWs include names and details of the offenders and their actions. Their crimes were many and varied: Sergeant Hales at Arbeitskommando E251, who betrayed two men planning to escape. South African Corporal Cloate who disappeared from the Stalags after agreeing to broadcast for the Germans. From Moosberg two other South Africans, Laue and Lochenberg, were also named as was an Australian, Boyse. From Stalag IIIa at Luckenwalde came the revelation that six British and Commonwealth prisoners – including a Canadian named Rose – had been involved in a ruse where they entered the cells of the newly captured. Once there the lights would be turned out and the Germans would enter and pretend to beat him up. This fake beating allowed the collaborators to gain the trust of the new prisoners in the hope of then being able to extract information from them. There were plenty more offenders named, such as Canadian Jim Nicholls who reported the illicit radio at Arbeitskommando E351, or Liverpudlian Private Edmeeds, Corporals Perry, Street and Quickenden, Gunner Brandt, Private Ormond, BSM Harris and Sergeant Major Homer at Thorn. A Private Chappell of Stalag XXId was reported for having been considered over familiar with the Germans whilst in the Stalag. The fears of his fellow prisoners were confirmed when he was spotted in Berlin wearing civilian clothes. Not all the revelations gave specific details, indeed some among the returning POWs chose to classify any NCOs who had imposed discipline within the Stalags as having been collaborators, such as CSM Bruce at Stalag XXIa whose supposed offence was reporting disturbances to the
Germans, or RSM Parslow of the Royal Artillery who was the ‘Man of Confidence’ at Stalag IVd. Parslow was reported for failing to help the men under him and for believing they should not hinder the Germans whilst they were working. There were also officers reported such as a major named Bolton, who was reported as having: ‘no time for POWs’ since they were a “cause of bother”’
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to him.

Some of those reported to Military Intelligence had played a more active role in supporting the Nazis than those who had merely used their position to help themselves. Small numbers of British prisoners had joined another Nazi organisation, the British Free Corps. Their representatives, often British soldiers of German extraction or former members of the British Union of Fascists, toured the Stalags eager to find volunteers for their cause. To their disappointment they received short shrift from the vast majority of POWs who preferred captivity to treachery. Some of those who volunteered were destined to become infamous for their propaganda efforts. Others were adventurers or men who simply took the opportunity to find a way out of the boredom of work camps and Stalags. In 1945 two traitors, John Kenneth Pritchard and Private C. MacDonald were spotted in Estonian SS uniforms heading towards the front. Pritchard was not seen again until he reappeared in the UK alongside returning prisoners, concealing all indications that he had volunteered for the enemy. His efforts were wasted since there were enough men who had witnessed his treachery and passed on his name to Military Intelligence. They were able to pin down Pritchard since he had filled in a questionnaire issued to all returning POWs. Though he made no mention of his activities he gave the name of MacDonald as one of his associates. It was a clear sign to the investigators that they had found their man.

For some the questionnaires were used to record a positive
side to the experience of being a prisoner. More POWs than used the forms to reveal collaborators utilised them to record their thanks to NCOs whose devotion to duty had helped them through the darkest days of captivity. They offered praise and thanks to those who had struggled to keep them fed and who had helped organise their lives in face of great hostility from their guards and work camp bosses. Many also chose to note their thanks to the civilians who helped them whilst in captivity. In particular they gave thanks to those – especially the Czechs – who had taken great risks to feed them during the long march westwards.

Whatever the reasons, the experiences of the POW labourers soon disappeared from the mainstream history of the war in Europe. Even the military report into POW conditions sat in the archives for many years, gathering dust and unavailable for public scrutiny. The SHAEF report into the abuse of POWs highlighted their plight, yet remained unseen by the British public. It concluded their treatment had ‘at all times failed to comply with the requirements in that regard of the Geneva Convention’. And that ‘the degree of such failure has increased in every respect with the progress of the war. … at no time and in no place … have the requirements of the convention been fully or adequately observed’.
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The report made clear that most prisoners lived in cramped conditions that were under-ventilated, often not weather proof, with crowded beds, thin blankets, bug ridden straw mattresses, and that they were kept alive only by Red Cross parcels. The report made clear their labour was: ‘calculated, directly or indirectly, to contribute to the German war effort,’ with ‘excessively long hours’ in ‘dangerous and unhealthy conditions’. Furthermore the report admitted the prisoners had been: ‘compelled to work in localities subjected to Allied air attacks with resulting casualties’ and had been ‘frequently
compelled to work when sick, or suffering from injury, in spite of protests by their own medical officers’.
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Furthermore it was admitted there had been little protection for many POWs who were faced by hostile civilian foremen, many of whom carried weapons in defiance of the Geneva Convention.

Yet despite such post-war recognition of the mistreatment of prisoners there were plenty in the War Office whose view of the men forced to work in Germany seemed outdated. Maybe they had retained their faith in a gentlemanly approach to war, believing German honour would ensure fair treatment for the men behind the wire. Even those men awaiting repatriation had not received full sympathy in London. In September 1941 the Army Council wrote that although the men were ‘compelled to perform this work against their will’ they were of the opinion that: ‘provided the work which prisoners of war passed for repatriation are required to do is of a light nature and care is taken to ensure there is no possibility of injury to their health, such work will tend to benefit the prisoners who might otherwise suffer from the boredom resulting from inactivity’.
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Then in 1942 staff in London expressed regret that prisoners had downed tools whilst working on a project to build a causeway they believed would improve access to a naval base: ‘It is therefore considered particularly unfortunate that the prisoners of war should have sought to impose their view on the camp authorities by unjustifiably refusing to continue work instead of relying upon the action of the protecting power on the receipt of their written protest.’
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This lack of understanding of what labouring in German industry entailed was perhaps understandable in the early war years. For all the doubts about the Nazi regime few could have believed the horrors that would eventually be revealed. No one had expected POWs to be starving to death
or collapsing from disease. Yet when it happened how did they excuse failing to compensate the individuals concerned? Many of the firms for whom the POWs slaved would later become household names. The German industrial giant Siemens was a major employer, even detailing prisoners to work in munitions factories and having the POWs living in conditions described as ‘unsatisfactory’ by Red Cross inspectors.
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For those men who slaved for the enemy there was no solace found in public recognition of their sufferings. A mythical image of POW camps became engrained in the public consciousness via a stream of war movies and books whose camps were far removed from the everyday experiences of a majority of prisoners. They simply created a world unknown to those who had toiled in the hellish depths of Silesian mines or spent their war years confined to the agricultural villages of East Prussia. As one explained:

I have seen a lot of films depicting Stalag life. The camps look like holiday camps and every inmate looks well fed and drinks beer from ‘shops’. They are always well turned out and the Germans are always portrayed as stupid. One of the worst things was the smell from bodies and open wounds – this is never referred to in films.
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