Hitler's British Slaves (17 page)

Working with horses, many among the POWs grew able to read their natures. They recognised the animals as having characters of their own. Some horses were clever, some were stupid, some were lazy, others hard-working or funny, and even lovable. Another important characteristic of the horses they worked with on Polish farms was that they were not the heavyweight carthorses they knew from home. Instead the ploughs and farmcarts were pulled by a breed of horse more suited to riding than working. The explanation was simple. Traditionally the farmers had been made to breed horses for use by the Polish cavalry who needed fast mounts rather than the heavy industrious beasts needed on farms. As they worked, the prisoners were clear about one thing – the Polish army would not be needing horses in the foreseeable future.

As the prisoners worked their teams of horses through the fields they had to keep watch for large stones that might be hit by the plough. In some areas superstition had it that the stones were so large because they grew underground. The ignorance of the locals was a joke to the prisoners, although the hazard caused by the stones was no laughing matter. At best a stone could cause damage to the blade, at worst it could cause the plough to jump out of the ground, at considerable risk to both man and horses. Some of the stones disgorged by the newly turned earth were so large they had to be dragged away with chains.

Once the fields were ploughed the POWs walked the fields with baskets around their necks, sowing the seeds that would grow into crops to fill the bellies of the German military. Once that was done there were many more days of walking the same fields, often in rows ten abreast, with metal trays hanging around their necks, spreading chemical fertiliser. Les Allan was among those men detailed to plant seeds on a farm in East Prussia. His attitude towards the work soon brought him into conflict with his captors:

Captivity didn’t deter us from anything we thought would help our side, but what I did was just plain stupid. It was a beet farm. A horse pulled a two-wheeled seed box and on the box were four tubes leading down to the ground. At the end of the tubes were these little star-wheels, these pushed the seeds into the ground. I waited till the guards weren’t looking and stuffed a cloth down into one of the tubes, so the seeds didn’t plant. Then I stopped, pulled the cloth out and stuffed another tube. I foolishly forgot that within weeks it would become obvious what I had been doing since whole rows of crops didn’t grow. That resulted in a Court Martial. I was put in front of all these high ranking German officers, they asked me all about what I had done. Luckily I was defended by a Red Cross representative. He managed to get the case dismissed within an hour. He said to the Court ‘What do you expect if you send an apprentice toolmaker to work on a farm?’ So that was that. But as I came out afterwards the commandant took me aside and said ‘For sabotage we shoot prisoners’. So I was lucky.
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And so the work continued. POWs spent day after day wielding scythes as they cleared pastureland of long grass to be laid aside for winter fodder. Their hands became blistered as they
cleared weeds by hand or hacked at bushes with sickles. The blisters burst, then more formed until eventually their hands grew hard and calloused. The changes to their hands were not the only physical effects of their labours. Even many of the less physical men found their bodies changing. They grew lean and muscular, their strength increased, and their bodies grew hardy – it was a strength they would all need before the war was over.

Working outside in all weathers meant the prisoners endured almost ceaseless discomfort. They maintained their back-breaking schedule in the cold of winter, in the rains of spring and autumn, and in the blistering heat of summer. At harvest time they would rise early in the morning and work till dusk, hurrying to get the crops in before the weather turned. Others picked fruit, forever assaulted by the wasps and flies that swarmed around their heads as they worked. Under the late summer sun POWs worked till their skin was bronzed and their hands blistered – their bodies fit to drop by the end of each day. Hour upon hour was spent moving scythes through the corn, cutting the crops until the light faded and the day’s work was ended. As the crops were threshed, often with nothing more than a horse to power the threshers, the POWs breathed in the clouds of dust from the stalks, then suffered again as the grain was milled. Men working at threshing looked on in dismay as cart followed cart, with seldom a break throughout the day. The only men who had breaks on some farms were those who waited for the grain to arrive at the stores. Yet despite the short breaks they enjoyed, their labours were an almost unbearable burden. The often poorly nourished men had to lift 70-kilogram sacks onto their shoulders then carry them up steep ladders to be loaded into the grain store.

Even with one harvest finished there was little respite for
the prisoners on farms. When one crop was harvested another might be ready, with grain followed by the vegetables of the season, until eventually they were picking winter vegetables from frost-covered fields. The prisoners became part of the annual cycle of life known to farm labourers the world over – a cycle of endurance and endeavour where man plays but a bit part, forever under the direction of the seasons and the weather.

For many the restrictions placed upon them when doing their best to endure taxing conditions was too much to bear. At a farm in Wabsch two prisoners approached their guards requesting permission to enter their accommodation huts to change clothes after a heavy downpour. Why, they felt, should they endure hours of working in wet clothing when they had a dry uniform waiting for them? When the guards refused the men ignored them and went away to get changed. Their defiance cost them dear and both were badly beaten by their guards. When a third man also tried to get changed he too was beaten up. Following the incident all three men became targets for the guards, regularly being given all the worst jobs on the farm.

It was not just beatings used to get defiant prisoners back to work. Gordon Barber was among a group of prisoners harvesting winter crops:

When we were out there it pissed with rain. We were soaked through. We came in so wet our clothes were stuck to us. We took all our clothes off but the only place you could dry them was in the kitchen – start the oven up. But with twenty sets of clothes? We had a meeting and decided to not go to work again until our clothes were dry. The guards said we had to go to work in the fields. The foreman was out there shouting ‘
Arbeit
!’, we thought ‘Fuck you’. So we went out in our blankets. They didn’t like that, since we’d have to go through the village. All of a sudden the guard fired over our heads. We went out! We went and put our wet clothing on. When they start firing you don’t want to hang around, unless you’re silly.
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For the agricultural labourers winter didn’t mean quite the same misery as it did for some of the other men on labour detachments. In the eastern farms the snows seemed to arrive in October and lie on the ground until the following March. With the frost so deep they could hardly dig a fork into the ground, the POW farmers usually spent the winter months engaged on lighter tasks. Conditions were often so harsh that there were no winter vegetables to be harvested, if all the crops were not in by the time the snows came they would have to wait until spring. Many found there was little work to do on farms apart from looking after the animals. Maybe they would spend a few hours spreading dung onto the snow covered fields, maybe they might chop wood all day, ready to be burned in their fires and cooking stoves. To protect the animals from the weather they were kept inside throughout the worst of the winter. Twice a day the POWs would spread straw in the stalls to keep the livestock warm. By spring the floor of the stables and sheds had risen considerably. It was then left to the prisoners to fetch picks and pitchforks to dig out the compacted and frozen dung ready to be cast onto the manure pile. The depth of the frost was something few had ever previously experienced, as one POW farmer explained: ‘We used to put the mangel-wurzels and sugar beet out in containers. They used to pack them with straw all around. Then put a layer of earth, then more straw, then earth again. But when we used to get them out in the spring we had to break it open with pick axes.’
¹⁰

Although most agricultural detachments found there was little heavy work to do during winter not all were so lucky. One group of men found themselves sent out into a lake in the middle of winter. Here they were forced to wade through the freezing water to cut reeds to be used to make mats. Others found that once the harvest was collected it was time to cut turf ready to be used for winter fuel. In the vast, sodden peat fields they dug away topsoil to the depth of a foot. Then began the task of cutting the peat. They had to dig drainage channels to bring water from old empty holes to flood the one they were working in. Working barefoot, the prisoners had to tramp down the peat in the water until it was the right consistency so it could be loaded into sledges then formed into bricks which were then left out to dry. As the pits grew deeper the work grew more strenuous, with the long-suffering men having to throw the peat higher and higher until they could hardly reach the top of the hole. As they attempted to throw the damp turf it slipped from their shovels, landing on their heads and bodies. By the end of a working day each man was covered from head to toe in thick, black soil.

Former chef Ken Willats, who in ‘civvy street’ had spent his days preparing and cooking vegetables, explained the trials and tribulations experienced during the harvest:

We did everything on the farm. It varied due to the seasons. The intensity of the harvest was the most difficult part. It was very hard. It was amazing what you discovered. You leant that a crop of barley was much heavier than oats. The crops were cut and placed into stooks. Then the big cart, pulled by four horses, would come down the rows and us prisoners with our two-pronged fork would throw the stooks up into the cart. There was a man on the back stacking it. Eventually it would be the size of a bus. If you were doing barley you’d find it very heavy, but if it was oats you’d just flick it on. Potatoes were also a bad one to be digging up. One way or another you’d have your back bent double from September to January. But we used to just tread a lot of the potatoes back into the ground. You’d each be assigned a patch of the field and a machine would come around throwing up the potatoes from the ground. So you’d have to have your patch clear by the time the machine came back. So if you were running slow you’d just push them back underground with your boots. You got used to plenty of little dodges. And there were plenty of them to put into your pockets.
¹¹

Probably the worst of all the agricultural details were those experienced by men engaged in the picking and processing of the sugar beet harvest. Such was the importance of the crop that the POWs were pushed to the very limit of their endurance. Starting in October the farms and factories became scenes of frenzied activity as the vital sugar beet was harvested, transported and refined. The period became known as ‘The Battle of the Beet’. The prisoners would start work early in the morning, whilst the frost was still hard on the leaves. As they walked through the rows the frost got onto their trousers, soaking them as they worked up a sweat. Only when, and if, the sun came up was there any respite from the cold and damp. POWs walked the fields in long lines, each man carrying a ‘ducker fork’ to dig the beet from the ground, as one recalled: ‘The worst thing was pulling it out of the ground. The leaves were high and you stuck a fork underneath and pulled it out – it was like a big turnip.’
¹²
The harvest was then laid out in rows on the frozen ground as the prisoners cut the leaves off with machetes. The beet was then ready to be loaded onto wagons. It was heavy, back-breaking work. The cold, damp weather made their situation
worse since they were unable to wear gloves as the wool would become soaked within minutes of starting and their hands were left to suffer the ravages of the weather. It was little wonder one prisoner wrote in his diary that he would challenge any man to arrive from another job within German industry and endure even an hour on the beet harvest without sinking into exhaustion.

In that first gruelling winter of captivity the prisoners were introduced to the extremes of labouring for the Third Reich. For many of those drafted in to man the beet processing plants this was their first time out of the overcrowded tedium of the Stalags. It was an experience few would ever forget. For five long weeks the men on work detachment E253 worked 12 hours a day without a day off. For others the beet harvest lasted seven weeks. Within the factories that processed the beet the labour was as gruelling as in the fields. The beet was emptied into large rotating drums which shook the dried earth from their skins. This fell down a chute at the bottom of which waited queues of prisoners whose job it was to catch the dirt in sacks. As they worked they struggled to fill the sacks and clouds of dust swirled around them filling their nostrils and throats. As some prisoners struggled to clear up the dirt others loaded the beets into huge tanks in which they were boiled to begin the process of extracting the sugar from the beet. More prisoners worked the fires that kept the water boiling. They collected the ash that fell through grates beneath the fire, wheeling away the still smouldering embers to be piled up outside.

Few of the men thrown into the factories in the winter of 1940 had fully recovered from their exertions in the weeks that had followed their capture in France. The summer of forced marches and starvation rations had weakened their bodies and few felt ready for such extremes of labour.
Les Allan was among them: