Read Hitler's British Slaves Online
Authors: Sean Longden
Tags: #History, #Europe, #Military, #World War II
One of those who did ‘make a break for it’ from an Arbeitskommando was D-Day paratrooper ‘Bill’ Sykes, an 18-year-old with an admittedly free spirit, who escaped during what he described as his ‘contrarian period’: ‘As a very young man, I of course felt invincible and if anyone was going to die it certainly wasn’t going to be me. I had of course anxious moments and was at times a little nervous but certainly never felt in need of the services of a psychiatrist. Remember – I was a street savvy youth and a survivor.’ With little thought as to where he would go, or what he planned to do, he decided to make his move. There was not much need for planning or intrigue:
Escape from our particular work groups was relatively easy, you could just walk away when the armed civilian guards were otherwise occupied. A couple of times during my incarceration, I took off for a few days using the ‘Sykes’ confidence approach. I was very much a loner when it came to ‘escaping’, no cloak and dagger stuff. It was pretty obvious that I was a POW from my uniform with a large red circular patch on my back, but it’s surprising how much you can get away with by using the ‘I have a right to be here approach’. Travelling by local trains was not very difficult. Get into conversation with someone, preferably an older couple who spoke a little English, and hope that the ticket collector didn’t call your bluff when you explained to him that the guard you were travelling with was in the toilet. I was eventually caught and apprehended by local police for obtaining food without having any local currency. It’s called stealing – or in my book appropriation by reason of necessity. I was heading north for Berlin, why, who knows, just a whim that perhaps I could get lost in the big city. The first escape cost me seven days on a punishment diet of bread and water and a transfer to another camp. The second pathetic attempt, was more like a weekend affair, modesty forbids me to elaborate upon the precise circumstances. This cost me another week in the ‘cooler’. After that, I resigned myself to waiting for the Allies to come to me, instead of vice-versa. I’m afraid that these two disappearing acts of a few days duration cannot be classified amongst the great escapes of World War Two.
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Although some prisoners, frustrated by the exertions and boredom of slave labour, did make a successful break to freedom most were unsuccessful. Many of those able to get away were men working in areas with strong partisan movements, such as Poland or Yugoslavia. Using contacts with local workers they were able to slip away into the relative safety of the partisan gangs. For those teaming up with Tito’s men in Yugoslavia the route home would see them trekking across the mountains to either be flown homes on supply flights organized by British liaison officers or by meeting with the Royal Navy on the Dalmatian coast. But for most escape was a hopeless dream, a way of gaining a few days’ freedom that more often than not ended in capture and 28 days solitary confinement. One band of men managed to hide in the covered railway wagons that left the mine where they worked. When the train came to a halt the next day they climbed out,
hoping to make their way to freedom. To their dismay they were in the middle of a vast Wehrmacht base.
Such comical ‘escapes’ were not uncommon. Some prisoners were reported as escapers despite their lack of intention. Whilst one POW was working beside a railway line he asked his guard for permission to go to the toilet. Walking into the privacy of the thick forest he dropped his trousers, did his business, then attempted to return to the railway. Lost in the forest, he wandered until he found a village. Whilst he was asking for directions back to his work detail the police and guards were mobilized to look for him. Certain he had escaped they began to comb the local area, desperate to catch him before he got too far. When he was finally apprehended he was found sitting in a village inn enjoying a beer with the locals.
Added to the likelihood of failure was the very real knowledge of how their guards might react. Those men left behind in the aftermath of an escape often faced a clampdown by their guards. Rules forbidding the collective punishment of prisoners were ignored with the guards ordering frequent intrusive searches of the POWs’ kit, the stopping of food parcels and interminable roll calls. Those who had enjoyed the opportunity to go swimming in lakes or wander around found themselves confined to their huts – all so someone else could enjoy a few hours or days of freedom. Thus any recaptured escapees, and few ever successfully got away for long, had to return to camps where their mates had faced increased harassment from the guards. Rather than being treated as heroes the recaptured prisoners were often treated with hostility for having indirectly inflicted punitive reprisals on the remaining men. As one persistent escaper later wrote, he and his like were: ‘very unpopular people, nuisance and trouble makers who caused very considerable inconvenience to others’.
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Furthermore, those who had experienced brutality from their guards had no illusions about the fate that awaited them if they were spotted trying to get away at night. In the aftermath of an assault by a brutal guard Gordon Barber had to be talked out of making a break for freedom:
I went to bed that night very tired. I said to Jock ‘I’m going to piss off tonight. I can’t stand any more of this. I’m going to take a chance. You coming?’ He said no and I asked my mate Paddy. He said ‘I wouldn’t even think of it, Nobby. Look out there.’ And I could see a cigarette burning outside. They’d put a guard outside. They weren’t daft. They knew what we’d be thinking of doing. I’d said to the guard ‘You wait till I get away’. So he probably thought I meant it.
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Some of those caught escaping faced the reality of what Barber had sensibly gathered awaited him if he tried to get away. When Alexander Dawson made a break from a work camp he was taken to the woods and shot through the back of the neck. At another Arbeitskommando a guard was summoned when local police caught two escaping prisoners. When the guard returned empty handed he revealed that he had collected the two men and executed them.
With the exertions of labour weighing heavy on the prisoners it was little wonder their attentions were focused on matters more immediate than escape. For vast periods the POWs found themselves hungry. Their bellies ached and began to crave for far more than the Germans were ever prepared to offer. Rations were minimal. They may have varied on every work detail but few locations ever offered enough food to stay healthy. In the early days of captivity rations had been poor. Most men newly captured in 1940 marched into Germany on rations that did little more than keep them
alive. Yet even on this minimal fare plenty of men were sent immediately out to work. As a result they rapidly lost weight, their faces became lined, they walked with a stoop, their hair lost its youthful lustre – they looked around and noticed how the young men had grown middle aged in a matter of weeks. Ken Willats remembered the arrival of the first Red Cross parcels whilst working in Poland: ‘The first parcels arrived and they were divided up, one item per person. I was lucky I got the soap. At the start it seemed pretty disastrous, when you watched someone sitting down to eat a tin of corned beef and all you could do was wash. I took a dim view of that. But their corned beef only lasted a day, my soap lasted for two weeks. So we were all hungry again, but I was clean.’
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As the situation settled down they slowly began to regain their strength. Rations became more regular and the delivery of Red Cross parcels brought relief to men who had been on the brink of starvation. Yet despite these changes few among the prisoners would ever feel satisfied with food and most would spend their incarceration desperate to increase their meals any way possible. Beg, steal or borrow, they would do their utmost to quell their hunger.
It was little wonder they felt such hunger. Throughout the war the Germans did little to provide them with substantial food. The working prisoners’ meals were supposed to be provided by their employers at the same rate of rations as given to civilians working in industry. Arrangements varied from location to location. A few employers simply ignored the plight of the prisoners, in one case they were simply sent to line up at a charity soup kitchen. In some camps civilian cooks were employed to prepare their food, a situation that often gave the prisoners a view of women that might otherwise have been denied to them. One South African prisoner reported how his work camp had two constantly bubbling
cauldrons. In one was a seemingly never-ending supply of potatoes boiled in their jackets. In the other was a stew of swede, barley and turnips, that was heated and reheated day after day, constantly topped up with more vegetables and the occasional lumps of meat.
In many locations a prisoner was detailed to cook for his mates, with the man in question remaining in camp through the day to ensure a hot meal was ready on the soldiers’ return from their factory shifts. Although the cooks avoided the heavy labour endured by their fellow prisoners it was not the ‘cushy number’ it might have appeared. Many among the cooks found their movements severely limited. One was confined to a barrack hut for eight long months, denied any chance to exercise outdoors. With a prisoner cooking for the men at night some civilian employers completely ignored their commitment to feed their labourers during the day. At AK404, a work detail from Stalag IIId, the prisoners were given a cup of ‘coffee’ for their breakfast at 6.15 a.m. They then remained unfed until their return from work at 6.30 p.m. Similar conditions were found at other camps. At one cement works a single hot meal was provided for the prisoners each day at midday. Thus those employed on the night-shift were forced to go through their shift unfed. Nor were lunch breaks necessarily a rest. Many among the prisoners found themselves allowed just half an hour’s break. In that time they had to walk from the factory to their huts, eat their meal and walk back to the camp. There was no time for them to relax, they could merely devour their food and hurry back to take their place in the factory.
Although those employed at farms or in food processing plants often found they were well catered for – often with the foods they were able to ‘appropriate’ – many of the other working men found their rations no more than just enough to
keep them alive. For men working in industry rations could be a little as a cup of bitter-tasting ersatz coffee made from acorns and a slice of bread for breakfast. That would be followed by a lunchtime bowl of soup or thin stew, then bread and margarine with fishpaste, meat or jam for their evening meal. On this they were expected to labour for up to 12 hours a day. Only occasionally would solid meals arrive for the workers, such as jacket potatoes served with dried swede. Sometimes tea would be served in place of coffee, but it was little comfort to the men for whom tea was their national drink. Just as German coffee had never been near Brazil, neither was the tea from the lush mountainsides of India. Instead it seemed to be made from any number of unidentifiable dried leaves, as one man later commented: ‘it tasted like weeds soaked in hot water’.
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At lunchtimes prisoners queued clutching their battered mess tins, bowls or mugs. They watched as stews, often distributed from oil drums, were constantly stirred to prevent the little solid matter from settling to the bottom. In a world where a potato was a luxury, they joked that meat was like the Holy Grail – widely searched for, sometimes claimed, but never found. When a meat stew was claimed most found it was little more than bones, any flesh having already gone into someone else’s pot. Promised sausage, they discovered instead inedible gristle, more fat than meat. If any flesh was found they would soon identify it as horsemeat. Instead most stews appeared to consist of barley or millet floating in a grey, watery mess of unidentifiable vegetable. Boiled swede, minced carrots, pumpkin, turnip or beet tops became the staple of their diets. Often what was dished up were mangel-wurzels or other root vegetables usually reserved solely for cattle feed. Copper miners in Silesia collected their ‘meals’ each day from a horse trough outside their barracks – it was
usually a watery stew of either spinach or carrots. One man recalled how his evening meal, after a full day breaking rocks in a quarry, was no more than a cup of ersatz coffee and a slice of sponge cake. But to the eager prisoners it was food and food meant life.
Working at an open cast mine in eastern Germany, Bill Sykes became acquainted with the paucity of rations supplied by his employers:
We worked from six o’clock in the morning until late afternoon, doing menial hard labour such as filling 20 ton railway hoppers with sand, carrying lengths of iron rail, and wooden rail ties. The winter months of 1944/5 were particularly rough, as food was not in plentiful supply and the bitter cold took its toll. It takes a lot of shovelling for a bunch of undernourished, starving men to shift 20 tons of sand. Our daily rations consisted mainly of a bowl of vegetable soup, 250 grammes of black bread, four or five potatoes and ersatz coffee. The rationing of the food was a lengthy and precise process, which took the wisdom of a saint and the accuracy of a surgeon to ensure fair distribution. You wouldn’t believe the delays that hungry men will endure to ensure that they get their fair share. Potatoes were counted and sized on numerous occasions during the chain of distribution. The cutting of a loaf of bread, five men to a loaf, was an object lesson in concentration worthy of a master chess player. The pieces were measured for accuracy and handled by each party for weight assessment, before cutting the cards for priority of choice. Remember, the loaves of black bread had rounded ends, so an allowance had to be made for this small discrepancy. The one meal of the day took untold hours of deliberation and patience, but then, when it may be your ‘last supper’ why not savour the fruits of your labour! I was always more than anxious to get my hands on the small amount of food that would see me through the next 24 hours. Our constant thoughts, and discussions, were centred around food.
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