Hitler's British Slaves (5 page)

For all the POWs, wherever and whenever they were taken prisoner, many of the experiences were the same. Sitting in fields among crowds of fellow prisoners as they awaited their fate. Forced marches with little food or water. Day upon day crammed into railway wagons, or locked into the holds of ships. Fear and hunger, deprivation and despair. What was common for all these men – from those captured during the retreat to Dunkirk to those taken prisoner in the fields of Normandy – was a shared sense of bewilderment upon capture. Few had any clear idea of what their fate might be. Receiving a punch, kick or rifle butt across the head was the least of their worries. The theft of personal possessions, whilst frustrating them by their inability to take action, was little more than an inconvenience. They could also be used as human shields by the Germans, who knew men would be unwilling to fire on their comrades. Like Gordon Barber at St Valery, many expected to be shot – indeed some were. During the retreat to Dunkirk over one hundred men of the Royal Warwickshire Regiment were executed by SS troops, as were a similar number of men from the Norfolks.

Though lucky to be alive most felt disappointed to have failed to perform their allotted tasks on the battlefield, aggrieved at being lost in the chaos of war. The emotional
turmoil caused by capture was explained by John Mercer. Though only in captivity for a matter of hours, upon release he realised the impact such an experience could have:

I did suffer a mild form of hysteria. I was introduced to some press people. Captain Thompson said ‘You, have a chat to this guy, something interesting for you.’ And they all gathered around me and talked to me, and do you know, I could not tell them where I lived. I mean I wanted to but I just couldn’t. I couldn’t tell them how old I was, I could get my name out that’s all. They went away and came back about half an hour later and I still couldn’t. I was traumatised. But it passed, I slept it off. I just couldn’t articulate, it wouldn’t come out. I thought to myself that was very strange.
²⁷

Yet despite the mental stress, not all the feelings of surrendering soldiers were negative. Jim Sims, captured at Arnhem, explained: ‘I have often been asked what my feelings were on being captured and my answer seems to upset those asking that question. I felt relief that I was still alive, although badly wounded, and with a bit of luck would see my parents again.’
²⁸

Men like Sims really were lucky, like so many of the men captured earlier in the war, he went ‘into the bag’ in the company of his fellow soldiers. Although wounded he was fortunate to be in the company of his comrades, men he knew and could rely on – men who could help share the burdens of what lay ahead. They retained much of the comradeship that had made life in the army bearable – indeed, the men captured at Arnhem even had the staff of their own field hospitals on hand to assist them.

Others were not so fortunate. Many of those captured in minor battlefield actions found themselves lost and alone, and
at the mercy of their captors. Sometimes the experiences of the first hours of captivity set a precedent for what was to follow. George Marsden, a private in the Duke of Wellington’s Regiment, captured in the Netherlands in late 1944, explained the beginnings of his ordeal: ‘A small number of our Company were ordered to move forward to a very deep and wide antitank ditch, and capture the position. This we did, surprising the enemy, causing little casualties, capturing all the German unit. We dug in outside a farmhouse and were attacked by a large force. After losing some men we were ordered back to our lines.’At nightfall they successfully recaptured the ditch but once again came under counterattack:

A lot of the lads were shot. I was blasted through the arm and shoulder by a machine gun. I regained consciousness some time after and was carried away on a door by two Germans. I didn’t feel fear and certainly not relief. I had lost a lot of blood and was in and out of consciousness. I appeared to be the last of our group, the others killed or taken prisoner. I was carried into a coal cellar. When I got used to the dim light from the grate above me I saw two Germans in the far corner. They were wounded and had their heads bandaged. When they realised who I was they crawled towards me and started shouting and punching my head. I shouted out and they were dragged away, then they attacked me again. I was then carried down a street to a house where a lady tried to wash the blood off me, before the street further down was attacked by an RAF plane firing rockets.

Refused admittance to a civilian hospital by his captors, Marsden was dumped on a footpath until eventually taken to a makeshift hospital where he was operated on and then spent the night drifting in and out of consciousness:

I never had my trousers removed at all, my underpants were stiff with dried blood, these I never removed until the war was nearly over. I was taken to a hospital train and put in a bed near a big iron stove where food was being prepared by the Germans. I soon realised I had a couple of hand grenades in my pocket, I managed to hide these under the mattress I was on. I was taken to a big hospital which housed a number of German wounded. The doctor used to poke his fingers in my wounds saying ‘Pain! Pain!’
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Eventually sent by train to a POW camp hospital, Marsden finally met up with fellow prisoners and began life behind the wire. It was a life that would mirror much of the loneliness, pain and terror he had known in those first uncertain days of captivity – a life familiar to so many of his fellow prisoners.

2

Abandon Hope All Ye Who Enter Here

‘The atmosphere in the POW camp was dog eat dog, and one soon adapted’
¹

‘Horrible. The bed bunks in the sheds at XXb were four or five high with no room to move at all.’
²

With their journeys finally over the weary POWs stepped down from the goods wagons to begin the final march into the Stammlagers – or Stalags as they were most commonly known – that would become temporary homes for most until they were sent out into industry. Few had travelled in comfort and most had endured extreme hardship but, as 18-year-old paratrooper Bill Sykes noted of his arrival: ‘Not a pleasant experience, but we’d survived.’
³
Wearily moving forward, step after step – often dizzy from the physical deprivations of the journey – the prisoners had no idea of what awaited them. Would they be moved into barracks not unlike those they had known back in ‘Blighty’ or would a more uncomfortable fate await them?

As they approached the camps many had a deceptively pleasant look. As Bill Sykes put it:

My first impression upon entering the camp was – I hate to say this, as I believe that I’m leaving myself wide open to a great deal of criticism – that it appeared on the surface to have a sort of Butlin’s holiday camp type environment with a soccer pitch, garden allotments, and many other features which included classes on a varied assortment of subjects. There were bands, instruments, an orchestra, a choir, a small theatre, all of which I really hadn’t expected. If I remember correctly after all these years the camp was sectioned off into three sectors, British/American, French, and Russian. The British/American sector was to the best of my knowledge commanded by a senior British officer who, amongst other duties, controlled the actions of various committees which had been formed in order to try in someway to relieve the inmates of the everyday boredom of being caged up like animals behind barbed wire and get them to pursue active social lives.
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Despite initially noticing how well organised the camp seemed to be he also spotted the barbed wire fences that seemed to run for miles. Two fences, filled with coils of barbed wire, seemed to offer no prospect of exit.

To compound the misery of incoming prisoners were high wooden towers containing searchlights and machine gun posts, another sign that the enemy took the business of detaining them seriously. And beyond the wire they saw what would be their ‘homes’ – long lines of charmless, wooden huts. It was a chilling prospect for the incoming prisoners. Most camps had an unfinished and unpromising look about them. The huts were basic, laundry was often spread around the compound – hanging from windows or strung between huts – bored looking men wandered around within the wire, there were few real paths or roadways and mud seemed an almost permanent feature for long periods of the year. As one man later wrote, the Stalags should have carried the slogan ‘Abandon Hope All Ye Who Enter Here’.
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Before they could enter the main camps the incoming men
had another port of call. Their first stop was usually a transit barracks separated from the main enclosure, in which they waited to be processed by the camp authorities. Crammed into vast huts, usually with never ending rows of bunks, with bare boards and often devoid of any furniture, they awaited their turn. At Stalag XXa at Thorn the prisoners passed through Camp 13a. Here many among the first batches of prisoners arriving in 1940 were beaten with rifle butts for refusing to comply during interrogation. In the camp up to 1,000 men were housed in three vast huts where they slept in triple-tiered bunks. Conditions were so cramped there was no space for tables and chairs between the bunks. When their time came they were photographed, fingerprinted, sometimes given chest x-rays, then given a small piece of metal with their POW number stamped on it. Although oblong in shape the prisoners always referred to this as their ‘disc’. This was to be worn around their necks on a length of string, a symbol that they were no longer a free man but instead just a number in the Reich’s vast new labour force. Once they had been processed the new prisoners were sent for delousing. They were stripped and their uniforms sent to be boiled. Entering the showers the prisoners had no realisation of what lay ahead. Then the taps turned on and their naked forms were assaulted by scalding hot water. After what was little more than seconds, but which seemed like hours, the hot water was turned off to be replaced by freezing cold water. With no towels to dry themselves they were then rushed out to where their now clean clothes awaited them. They struggled to dress themselves, some finding their uniforms shrunk by the heat of the wash, others unable to find their own uniforms as groups of men scrambled around trying to find what was theirs. One man re-dressed only to find a sock had been lost and, knowing the importance of protecting his feet, the lost sock
was replaced with a mitten. Washed and clothed, they were finally let loose into the main compound to find themselves a bunk. Now they were
Kriegsgefangene
, or ‘Kriegies’ as they called themselves, men whose fate rested in the hands of the enemy.

At well-organised camps they were greeted by senior NCOs who allotted bunks to them, at less well-organised ones they were simply left to find themselves a suitable sleeping place. For men arriving at Thorn in the early days of the war an even worse fate awaited them – there were no bunks. Ken Willats arrived at Fort 17, in Thorn, after three days and nights packed into a cattle truck from Trier. He stepped down from the train to see the Napoleonic Fort in front of him:

Our feelings were mixed when we arrived. The train journey had been so horrendous we were pleased for any change and any situation that didn’t stress you too much. Although the conditions in those days were horrendous. Everybody had lice. We slept in rows on the floor on straw in a big open room, there were no bunks. The toilet arrangements were a deep trench with a tree trunk across it. You sat on the tree trunk and held on and hoped for the best. The conditions were primitive but everybody was so worn out you just lay there. The food was inadequate, just a bowl of barley and potato soap and five men to a loaf. You were just existing in those early days. It was absolutely degrading, especially the diarrhoea. It was frightful. There was no organisation, it was every man for himself. There were some NCOs there from my regiment but they all fell to the level of the private soldiers. We became quite equal, because everybody was in the same boat. The NCOs ate the same food as us and had the same diarrhoea as us, so it was a great leveller. I never had a bed at Fort 17. So the first thing I wanted to do was get on a working party.
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Fort 8 at Poznan was another relic of the Napoleonic wars. Here too the prisoners slept on the cold stone floors of underground cells and queued for hours just to collect a mugful of water from the single handpump available for washing and drinking. It was not just water that was in short supply, many of the necessary basics of life were unknown to POWs in the early days of captivity. At their first meals in the Stalags many prisoners felt lost. Those still in possession of their mess tins or enamel mugs were lucky, they could collect the soup or stews they queued for. Others were less fortunate, arriving with nothing to hold food they simply had to improvise. For some it was a situation that would change little in the years ahead. At one work camp it was discovered that more than half the prisoners had no cups or bowls in which to take their meals, and just two men out of 89 had eating utensils. One prisoner, desperate for food, was forced to collect his first meal in his boot. Another stole a dog bowl whilst on a working detail and used that. Others held out their upturned helmets or empty food tins they had scavenged from rubbish dumps. It was humiliating, but food was a precious commodity – food was life.

One group of men arriving at Stalag XVIIIa in Wolfsberg received their first proper meal since their capture in Crete. It was a mixture of cabbage and mashed potato. They marvelled at the fare, excited at the prospect of two hot, filling meals each day. They were soon to be disappointed. As one later recorded it would be one of only two solid meals given to him during four long years of captivity, the rest would be soup or watery stews. In the summer of 1940 prisoners experienced frighteningly little food. Unable to cope with the
influx of men the Germans had given them little more than a bowl of thin watery soup each day, with maybe a little bread or a handful of vegetables. In the following months their bodies had grown thin and their eyes sank deep into their skulls. The once proud prisoners walked, or shuffled, with stooped backs, their eyes fixed on the ground ahead of them, their minds full of thoughts of the meals they might one day enjoy. Day upon day their misery continued as they lost weight and grew weak, hardly able to motivate themselves to rise from their beds in the morning.