Hitler's British Slaves (45 page)

It was not the fault of the writers that the public perception of prisoners of war grew into something so far removed from the actual truth. Most of those who wrote down their experiences had honestly attempted to represent their life behind the wire. To some degree all had included the boredom of life as a POW, but they had submerged the misery beneath the more interesting and exciting aspects of Stalag life. A further factor was that most of the stories published in the immediate post-war years were written by officers whose experiences
were far removed from those ranks forced to labour for the Nazis. This was not a conspiracy to hide the truth about Stalag life, it was simply that few among the stories revealing the drudgery of POW life had any appeal for the reading public or cinema audiences. As one POW later admitted: ‘Who’s going to sit through an hour and a half film about somebody at a working party?’
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With the passing of the years it seemed to the vast mass of former POWs that their stories would never be told. A number of writers published stories that exposed the realities of life in work camps but they failed to capture the imagination of the reading public or to make a dent in the ever growing mythology of POW life. Adrian Vincent’s
The Long Road Home
was one of the most notable exceptions. Vincent’s story, described by one reviewer as being ‘The most honest prisoner-of-war story I have read in the last ten years’, told of a world without heroes where men simply made the best of their lives in the hope that they might one day be free.

With the passing of time more writers attempted to redress the balance. When Elvet Williams told his story of captivity in alpine work camps he entitled it simply
Arbeitskommando
. Williams, who in the company of a mixed group of Britons and Australians was able to escape via Yugoslavia, summed up the difference between officer escapees and other ranks when he wrote: ‘Escape from such a life meant release from bondage rather than captivity.’
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Unlike many previous writers he was firm in his assessment of his employment by the enemy. He and his fellow prisoners had been: ‘slave labourers hired out to civilian contractors’.
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In the late 1980s serial escaper John Elwyn also told his story of life in the Stalags and on working parties. He didn’t shy away from revealing the violence he had witnessed between prisoners at Lamsdorf, nor the degradation suffered
by the men who marched from France following the defeat of the BEF. He brutally expressed the condition he and his fellow prisoners were reduced to: ‘The evolutionary clock had been put back to the era of survival of the fittest. Man’s primal instincts had taken over. How thin is the veneer of civilization!’
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His words served to reveal a world known to few whose knowledge of POW camps had been based around
The Colditz Story
or
The Great Escape
.

It would take another 15 years before historians finally fully and very successfully confronted the reality of the last desperate months of captivity as endured by thousands of the prisoners. The publication of John Nichol and Tony Rennell’s
The Last Escape
in 2002 was the first time the story of the long marches westwards was fully told. For the prisoners who thought their plight had been consigned to the rubbish bin of history this book was a revelation. After suppressing the memories of their ordeal for so long few former POWs who read it were unaffected by the experience. Among them was Gordon Barber, who after five years of captivity had weighed just over 8 stones when he was liberated, who had considered himself a ‘survivor’ in the harsh world of the Stalags and work camps, and who had never given up hope of surviving his ordeal. His wife watched as the book brought back painful memories of deprivation, disease and death: ‘He cried his eyes out when he read it.’
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Yet if the rigours of those final months were at long last being publicised the sufferings of those prisoners employed as slave labourers for the Third Reich were still all but forgotten. Few but the members of ex-prisoners’ organisations across the Commonwealth remember their plight. Leslie Allan, the founder and General Secretary of the National Ex-Prisoner of War Association is among them. Even to this day he campaigns for official recognition of their sufferings. Yet when
he has talked to politicians and Ministry of Defence officials he has constantly been blocked. On numerous occasions he has been asked why, if conditions were so bad, he and his fellow prisoners didn’t write home and complain: ‘Just imagine me telling my mother and sister the real facts in a letter? We knew they were going through a hell of a time themselves, so we gave them a light hearted view of life – “Yes, I’m fine, don’t worry about me, I’m having a great time” – so as not to worry them.’
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Hoping to raise awareness of how successive British governments have long ignored the plight of the POWs he wrote:

Germany has put together a financial package to compensate those who were subjected to slave labour under the Nazi regime. However, ex-prisoners of war are excluded, with the full approval of the Ministry of Defence. Far East prisoners of war, who were in the hands of the Japanese, have recently been awarded compensation by our government. Sadly, many of our members who were prisoners of the Nazis will not be receiving such compensation because the government considers that their treatment was not bad enough … These were the men who fought the rearguard so that the evacuation of Dunkirk could take place, the men who took on Rommel’s Afrika Korps in the Western Desert, or who parachuted into Arnhem or fought their way ashore at Normandy. Crimes against prisoners of war held in Germany were endless, but for political expediency a conspiracy of silence has been the policy of the UK. To date not one UK POW held by the Nazis has been compensated. Not one!
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For Les Allan, who has worked tirelessly for justice for the POW slave labourers employed by the Nazis, the failure to
recognise their sufferings has remained a bone of contention ever since their return from war. To him, it is clear they were not prisoners but slaves, since they were not treated according to the Geneva Convention: ‘People think you have to have a man standing over you with a whip to be a slave. Our guards didn’t have whips but they did have very efficient guns. Even if you had every comfort in the world and all the food you could want, how would you like to work for five years at the wrong end of a gun?’
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Whilst the official Allied Supreme Headquarters report damned the Germans for their mistreatment of POWs, politicians seemed to offer a different view. The military report considered the Germans were at fault for failing to abide by the Geneva Convention, yet the governments placed the blame squarely on the shoulders of individual guards. Thus there could be no claim for compensation since the German regime had not been responsible for the crimes against POWs. To men such as Allan this is a ridiculous notion – why were the Nazi leaders considered responsible for the actions of their troops against civilians yet not for the treatment they inflicted on the POWs? It was the German government who failed to recognise his status as ‘protected personnel’ and therefore the German government who was responsible for the breaking of his jaw with a rifle butt whilst at work.

In the minds of so many ex-prisoners how could the German government not have been responsible for their sufferings? The failure to provide food to prisoners on forced marches was a breach of the Geneva Convention. The differences between rations given to German soldiers in hospital and Allied POWs in the beds alongside them was also a breach of the Convention. Wages that were never paid, arbitrary punishments of prisoners without the due process of law, the use of POWs in armaments factories, the guarding
of prisoners by armed civilians, the forced employment of NCOs and medical personnel, the murder of escaping POWs by their guards – all were illegal and all were widespread. These were recognised by both the Red Cross and the official SHAEF report on the treatment of POWs, yet British governments have continuously failed to show any interest in their cause.

The failure to recognise the sufferings of the prisoners has long appeared to be a conspiracy:

On my Army Book it says I was granted the 1939-43 Star. Later Churchill made a statement saying the giving of medals and ribbons is to give pride and pleasure to those worthy of wearing them. Then he devalued our medal from the 1939-43 Star to the 1939-45 Star. We wouldn’t have objected but it was his wording about not being worthy. We were treated like pariahs. We’ve never had any official recognition. The Yanks eventually gave their prisoners all a medal. I can always spot an ex-POW, he is the one at the parades with the fewest medals. Members of Parliament have been an absolute disgrace. Some, before they became ministers, they promised us justice. But when they got into government – nothing. We blame it on the political stance of the post-war days, the Allies were desperate to befriend the Germans. So they whitewashed everything that happened to us in Germany. Even now we just can’t seem to break into the MPs. We couldn’t get lottery grants, even though they were giving grants to ludicrous things. We just wanted some money to help produce the newsletter. We applied for a grant, after it was refused three times we didn’t ask again. We are still proud men. Now it would be begging, that’s something I’m not prepared to do. It’s not for us to crawl to them.
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Chief among the complaints from ex-POWs is that they seldom received the wages they were supposed to be paid. One man, supposedly receiving 70 pfennings a day, found he received a total of just 15 reichsmarks for nine months work. As he later commented: ‘we received the money just when they felt like paying you’.
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Many of the returning prisoners also found that non-existent payments had been deducted from their credits when they returned home. Their credits – the wages accrued whilst in captivity, to which was added a bonus for their period of service – were something all the prisoners had looked forward to. Yet they were losing out from these real wages for money they had either never received, or which had been all but useless to them. A stretcher bearer taken prisoner whilst part of the rearguard protecting the retreat to Dunkirk, Les Allan was one of the ‘protected personnel’ forced to work by the Germans. He worked on farms and in factories for four years before he was finally recognised as a ‘protected person’ and exempt from work. His wartime treatment by the Germans and his post-war treatment by the British government caused him much concern. All the time he was slaving for the enemy deductions were being made from his pay. This was supposedly then paid to the German government to make up for the wages they paid him. This was a marvellous concept except for one small hitch – he never received any wages from the Germans. Yet when he returned home from captivity his wartime credits showed the deductions made for the unpaid wages. Sixty years on he has still never been compensated for his loss and when talking to politicians he always resorts to sarcasm and tells them: ‘We paid for our holiday’.
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Adding insult to injury, Allan also discovered that prisoners of the Japanese returned home to receive their full wartime credits since the Japanese had not paid them. This iniquity between how the two sets of prisoners – Far East and
European – are treated by the British government continues to annoy Allan:

The governments say ‘But the Far East prisoners had a hell of a time’. Yes, they did. But that doesn’t mean the rest of us were in holiday camps. We didn’t have as hard a time as most of them, of course we are all glad we were prisoners of the Germans rather than the Japanese, but surely we are entitled to our credits? But the British government took our money away.
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Ken Willats, one of those working prisoners who has never received any payment for his forced labour in the farms and quarries of the Third Reich, still finds the echoes of those experiences resound through his mind as vividly as they did sixty years ago:

At the age of 21, five years is a big slice of your life. As you grow older your thoughts don’t gravitate to the future, they go much more easily to the past. Old men tend to reminisce and World War Two is probably the biggest event in most of our lives. I must have gone over it in my mind ten thousand times – especially if I can’t sleep at night. I can trace the war from 21 January 1940, when I was called up, right through to 20 May 1945, when I came home, in absolute detail. I can remember everything precisely and I can pinpoint anything. I suppose it’s a comfort to remember. I regret the waste of time but it could have been a lot worse. I know I wasn’t a very brave soldier but I hadn’t been trained to be a brave soldier. I didn’t go to war to kill Germans but to stop them killing me.
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Perhaps it is fitting to conclude with the words of Les
Allan, who has devoted years of work to the cause of the men who endured so much at the hands of the enemy and who has struggled long and hard to get official recognition. Like so many of his fellow prisoners he kept quiet about his experiences for many years, even failing to tell his wife the truth of how he had spent the war years. He quite simply never thought anyone would believe him. Once he had finally faced up to the truth and admitted to his family what had really happened he decided it was time to rebuild and gain something positive from what had been such a negative experience:

All ex-prisoners of war are on the same level. Even today, if I was talking to a serving officer I would call him ‘Sir’. But if I was talking to Earl Haig, who was in Colditz, I’d just say ‘hello’ – you wouldn’t say ‘Sir’ – because he’d be on my level. All ex-prisoners immediately talk to each other no matter what their status in life is. It’s a common bond, it’s real and nationality is irrelevant. It’s a great thing to have, it gave me friends for life. Hopefully it made me a better man. A prisoner of war has known every human emotion except the final one – death. He has known fear, happiness, misery, hardship – everything, and in extremes. In all honesty, I wouldn’t have missed it for the world, but if I had to go through it again I’d shoot myself.
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