Hitler's British Slaves (13 page)

When British prisoners were sent to a woodworking company near Danzig they found an ideal solution to being made to do war work. At first they had no idea what they were making, they were simply nailing together pieces of wood to make large frames. Then they discovered these were moulds for concrete anti-tank traps. Knowing any attempt to stop work would only be met by violence they decided to take direct action. They had discovered their barrack huts were only separated from the factory by a single barbed wire fence that could easily be passed through in the dark. One night a prisoner was able to sneak out, enter the factory and start a fire that destroyed the entire building. The Germans must have suspected the prisoners but could take no action since once the fire was noticed the culprit was safely back in his bunk.

They were not alone in being forced to do such work. Inevitably many questions were raised over the nature of POW labour and how much it was benefiting the Nazi war machine. Though banned from doing any work of military value, as in the Krupps case the lines between civilian and military work were often blurred – and only became more so as the war progressed. Early in the war prisoners complained they were forced to construct brick barracks for the Wehrmacht, whilst in Greece troops cleared wrecked planes from airfields or were made to sandbag gun emplacements. It seemed the Germans were even breaching their own rules which stated POWs should not be employed anywhere they might be able to carry out espionage.

The real military benefit of much of this work was debatable – it was certainly a technical breach of the Geneva Convention but was of little consequence to the progress of the
war. Others found themselves more directly involved in the aiding of the enemy, as Sergeant Perry of the Royal Artillery reported of his experiences in Greece:

Reveille was at 4.45, parade for work at 5.30 a.m. Prisoners were then taken to the aerodrome to load bombs into Stukas, they also had to load olive oil and maize which was flown to Germany … Work finished at 6p.m. After returning to the camp prisoners are confined to their billets which are lousy with lice and every imaginable insect … So life goes on for the British prisoners. From what I experienced in Salonika the English were treated like pigs and they were made to live like them.
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It was not just the nature of the work that troubled this group of prisoners. Seventy per cent of them worked on through severe attacks of dysentery and one man was forced to work with appendicitis. When he was eventually released to go to hospital he survived for just two days. They also had to endure witnessing their guards abusing Greek civilians who attempted to aid them, watching one teenage girl hit with a rifle butt for throwing food to them. She too died in hospital.

As the war went on more and more reports of illegal work reached London via complaints made to the Red Cross by prisoners. Work detachments reportedly worked in munitions factories filling shells for the Siemens company. Prisoners from Stalag VIIIb complained they were made to operate blast furnaces in a munitions works, they had been in the factory for some months working in the coking plant but when the enterprise was reorganized they found themselves making munitions. They downed tools and were returned to the Stalag. Despite their complaints later reports found 450 men
from the camp forced to work in a munitions plant. Another group of 80 men were found to be working in a stove factory, closer examination uncovered that it had been converted to be an armaments plant. Others made bombs, loaded army trucks headed for the Russian front, constructed ammunition boxes, built army trucks and manufactured engine parts for tanks and planes. At one detachment prisoners were even made to construct what were obviously aircraft fuselages. The thought that they were constructing machines that might soon be heading off to bomb their homes hung heavy over the unfortunate prisoners.

And so the list went on. POWs operating furnaces in Friedenshutte discovered they were melting scrap metal to produce artillery shells, whilst at Ohlau hundreds of prisoners were employed to load trains headed to the Russian front. At Farge, near Bremen, 31 captured merchant seamen were employed to build underground submarine repair shops. One 55-year-old seaman who refused received 25 blows with a rubber truncheon for his disobedience. Some were detailed to build, camouflage and maintain anti-aircraft sites, unload transport planes at Luftwaffe bases in North Africa or load bombs onto planes in Yugoslavia. Indian prisoners were sent from Germany to Genoa to load ammunition into ships and those who refused were beaten with rifle butts, with 50 men taken to hospital, whilst other Indians at Mainz were detailed to load artillery shells onto trains. In France another group of Indian POWs, who refused to build runways for the Germans, were sent from Rennes to Fort Bismarck in Strasbourg. There they were detained in underground rooms in an attempt to break their spirit. After a month most found their dark skin had turned pale, whilst two among them had been driven insane.

In July 1943 280 British POWs were asked to volunteer
for agricultural work at Foggia in Italy. When they arrived they discovered their true employment was as labourers building runways for German bombers. When they refused the Germans informed the prisoners that such work was legal as long as it was at least 200 kilometres from the front line. Four South Africans and nine Indians from the same camp were killed in a bombing raid whilst employed in what the Germans described as ‘agricultural work’ near an airfield.

A group of captured Palestinian troops were firstly employed as stevedores unloading German supply ships in North African ports, then sent to Berlin to manufacture machinery – with many suffering acid burns in the course of their work – then sent to Palermo to load petrol onto German ships heading to North Africa. They were eventually released by the advancing Allies whilst working as stevedores in Tunis. In one particularly appalling case Australian troops on working parties from Stalag XXa were reported to have been handling mustard gas shells.

It seemed those troops captured in North Africa were among those facing the worst breaches of the Geneva Convention. A Sergeant Smallcombe later wrote of the conditions faced by him and his comrades, as they worked 18-hour days with their guards firing at them at the slightest provocation: ‘The work consisted of the handling of bombs, ammunition, tanks, guns, petrol and food destined for use by the German forces … Protests against this only met with punishment and some of the men were badly manhandled.’
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They spent 10 months in these conditions with no change of clothes or chance to repair their footwear. Despite Sergeant Smallcombe’s protests there were other British NCOs in North Africa who were implicated in the forcing of prisoners to work. One mixed group of South African and Indian POWs reported how an RSM Gibson had made a great effort to force them to unload
ammunition for the Germans, threatening to withhold their rations if they did not follow his orders.

Yet whilst the prisoners were engaged in this illegal and degrading work, the War Office seemed uncertain as to the truth of such stories. Although serious investigations were made via the Swiss government there seems to have been a willingness to accept the German explanations of the work. Despite the reports one official wrote in late 1941: ‘Have we sufficient evidence to show that the Germans are using our prisoners of war for work or in ways which is or are in contravention of the Geneva convention?’
²¹
This remained a serious issue that vexed officers back in London. Whilst British and Commonwealth prisoners of war were defusing bombs, loading ships and building runways, the War Office was agonizing over whether German and Italian POWs in Britain could be employed to build air raid shelters or repair military uniforms.

Yet for all these arguments there were some prisoners who had no protection or representation, and there were some among the king’s men who disappeared into German industry, bound into the misery of slavery. A group of 30 coloured soldiers from South Africa were taken into captivity by the Luftwaffe who failed to report them to the authorities. Instead they were kept in Italy as slaves and forced to work for the Germans. They received neither Red Cross parcels nor mail, indeed they could receive no mail since officially they didn’t exist. This continued for months before they were finally given POW status, even then their misery was not over. Six of them were forced at gunpoint to drive lorries to the eastern front. After their departure they were never heard of again.

It was not just labour related to the war effort that vexed the prisoners. There were other duties with which they were
less than comfortable. In the early days of captivity some prisoners were taken to a park. Here they were forced to break paving stones and obliterate all traces of the park. Its crime was to have been Polish, and the Germans were intent on humiliating the prisoners by using them to help eradicate all traces of Polish culture. As they worked the prisoners watched as Poles were forced to walk in the gutter when they passed Germans, and were made to show their nationality in the form of a letter ‘P’ displayed prominently on their clothes. Some among the group of prisoners who had been forced to destroy the Polish park were later ordered to destroy gravestones in a Jewish cemetery. To a man they refused, even when the guards threatened to shoot them. They were lucky, their guards relented and the work was cancelled. Later in the war POWs at Maxthal were more personally involved in German efforts to wipe out evidence of the Jewish community, when they were detailed to clean out train wagons. What they discovered shocked them. These were the cattle wagons used to transport what the Germans referred to ‘refugees’ and ‘deportees’ – in other words those destined for concentration or extermination camps. By the time the men had finished their work their bodies and uniforms were alive with lice and fleas, their hands and clothes soiled with the filth left behind on the trains by their unfortunate occupants. It was not a task they would soon forget. In the final days of the war prisoners who had been marched all the way from Poland were made to dig pits for the Germans to bury concentration camp victims, in a desperate attempt to hide the evidence of their crimes.

Whilst arguments raged about what work was suitable for POWs the men themselves had more pressing concerns – their own physical well-being. Thousands of those on work detachments found conditions an almost intolerable burden.
The Red Cross did their best to get some harsh work camps closed down, knowing the men could not continue to work in industry with insufficient food. The Red Cross representatives returned to camps month after month and watched as the POWs got thinner – it was only a question of how long they could survive before disease and death took control.

It was not just the burden of physical exertion that took its toll on the prisoners. They were also made to work long hours. For most the notion of an 8-hour working day was a long forgotten memory. The old idea of dividing the day between 8 hours’ labour, 8 hours’ recreation and 8 hours’ sleep was something few knew the luxury of. Instead, across the Reich, many found themselves working up to 12 hours a day. Without warning the Germans could simply change the hours of the working day. One man working a 9-and-a-half-hour day in a coal mine was caught resting when he should have been working. His punishment was to be kept working for an extra 4 hours. By the time he finally got to eat his evening meal it was 14-and-a-half hours since he had begun his shift in the morning. For some men such impositions became the norm. Repair teams at some mines were kept on duty for as long as there remained work to do and were forced onto double shifts without food or drink. One of the repairmen was kept at his post continuously for 23 hours. At one work camp announcements were made stressing that the men had to do 2 hours ‘overtime’ each day on top of the 9-and-a-quarter hours they were already working. Even when the men thought they were about to rest they were sometimes told they should keep working. One group of copper miners finished a 12-hour shift only to be told they would have to spend the night clearing snow. When the Red Cross inspected the work camps they discovered work details nearly always working for at least 10 hours a day, seldom with a day off. As
they reported to London, the conditions were: ‘extremely bad … such as might be expected of slave labour being used’.
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On top of such excessive hours the prisoners also had the time spent travelling to and from work, which for most meant walking. One Arbeitskommando inmate recorded rising at 5 a.m., walking for an hour to reach their workplace, toiling to level ground for 12 hours and then marching back to camp where they arrived at 9 p.m. – just 8 hours before they would rise the next morning to restart the routine. Another detachment was woken at 3 a.m. to depart for work at 4 a.m. and not return to camp until after 7 in the evening. For some the walk to work was even longer, as much as 4 hours each day. Others found themselves finishing work but being forced to remain in the factory until the guard decided to march them back. Salt miners at Kaliwerke found themselves in a similar situation. They worked a 10-and-a-half-hour shift but were forced to remain below ground until the civilian workers finished an hour and a half later.

Even with these extreme hours some men found themselves forced to work beyond the norm. In many factories the shift system ensured that when shifts were swapped over at the end of the working week those men on the final shift would be forced to remain at their posts continuously for up to 18 hours. Their only consolation was that they could look forward to a straight 18 hours of rest at the end of the following week when they could recuperate.

On occasions the Germans offered the prisoners some respite from their labours, promising that if they worked hard and got a task completed they would be allowed to finish work early. For many this was ideal, they were working at less than a breakneck pace and could easily pick up the pace to make sure they would get plenty of time off. However the offers were not always what they seemed. When one detachment
were offered Boxing Day as a holiday in return for extra work on Christmas Eve they jumped at the chance. It would allow them a chance to celebrate Christmas and then have a lie in the next morning. Yet when the morning came they heard the usual shouts of ‘
Raus
’ and were roused from their beds, denied their one day of peace.