Hitler's British Slaves (27 page)

The divisions between prisoners also fell along national lines. Right from the collapse of the 1940 campaign British and French troops had clashed angrily, often with violent results. This hostility often continued once behind the wire, with little co-operation between the erstwhile allies. Many among the French considered Dunkirk a betrayal whilst the British thought the French had too often surrendered without a fight. Worse still were the frequent differences between British and Commonwealth troops, most notably the South Africans. Whether fair or not, stories spread through the camps about how the Boers among the South Africans were over-friendly
towards the Germans. Many were considered sympathetic to the Nazi cause, and rumours spread that they had deliberately capitulated at Tobruk, allowing the Germans to capture the town. The same rumours suggested many among them yearned for a Nazi victory, after which they would be free from the British Empire.

There was an altogether different situation between the British and American prisoners. Those prisoners who could remember the Americans back in Britain could only visualise men swaggering about confidently, spending their money on having a good time with British women. They were so casual nothing seemed to worry them. However, once within the POW camps many found the Americans a shadow of their former selves, something to be pitied rather than envied. One man later wrote that the Americans were: ‘a sorry, scruffy lot who couldn’t take captivity’. He went on to explain how distant this was from their public image: ‘The scene bore out our theory that there was a lot of difference between victorious advancing Yanks, sitting on tanks blowing kisses to the girls, and Yanks in adversity.’
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Whilst the GIs in Britain were attracting the attentions of British women it was a different group of uniformed men who were befriending the women of Hitler’s expanding Reich. For the thousands of men working in the farms and factories of the Reich employment outside the Stalags was more than just a change of scenery. The relative freedom of life on an Arbeitskommando also gave them access to a most important commodity – sex. Right from the start of imprisonment sex had been an important issue for many of the newly captive men. Many of those men of the BEF captured in June 1940 had been regular visitors to the French brothels that had thrived in the towns around their camps. Much the same situation had existed in North Africa where the whores of Cairo and
Alexandria had done a roaring trade among the troops passing through their towns. Married men missed the regular attentions of their wives, but once ‘behind the wire’ all the prisoners had to find a substitute. The obvious solution was to indulge themselves, but conditions within the Stalags meant there were few solitary moments when masturbation could be enjoyed. With cramped huts and overcrowded washrooms the men had little choice but to wait until after lights out when they could furtively relieve their frustration under the threadbare blankets of their bunks. Despite the restrictive situation, pornography became a widely traded source of visual stimulation for the men known as ‘mutton floggers’, ‘bishop bashers’, ‘wire pullers’ or, more simply, ‘wankers’ – men whose hands were known as ‘the five fingered widow’. One prisoner was so famed for his regular self relief he became known as ‘Wanker Bill’ and his room mates joked how he even ‘wanked between wanks’.
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and was famed for still being interested in sex even after most of his fellow prisoners had physically lost the ability to get erections. One of his mates, initially held in Italy and then in Germany, later wrote:

Onanism was widely practised and there would have been hardly a man who hadn’t indulged at one time or the other. It seemed the married men were the worst because when their stomachs were full they would spend hours reliving their courting days, the wedding night, the honeymoon and sundry Sunday afternoons on the carpet. Not that the single men hadn’t any memories to look back on. They had, but our sex lives had tended to be more spasmodic, so that we were used to going without it.
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Many of the prisoners noted how their sexual urges were suppressed whenever food supplies were bad but recovered
with the arrival of Red Cross parcels. The same situation was found in winter when the cold dampened their ardour, only for the awakenings of spring to restore their urges and once more the ‘one-eyed milkman’ was brought fully back into action.

Among those confined to the Stalags there was another outlet for their urges – homosexuality. Although commonly laughed about by the prisoners – who would joke about dropping their soap in the showers and what would happen when they bent over – open homosexuality was uncommon. Some men developed close bonds, not always sexual, with their fellow prisoners. The men were not always obviously suited as one POW recalled: ‘Liaisons sprang up between all kinds of people, tall and short, fat and thin, and the good, the bad and the ugly. Relationships took many forms from parcel sharing, holding hands, heavy petting and actual indulging.’
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Some formed inseparable couples, embroidering matching monograms on their jumpers, as if to seal their relationship in lieu of marriage. Men developed crushes on other prisoners, some unrequited, some reciprocated. One camp medic noticed what he called ‘abnormal acquaintances’ between inmates. They would go on parade together dressed alike and holding hands like a normal courting couple. He also noticed how anyone who played the female role in the camp theatre was considered a heart throb, whose every movement was followed by the admiring gaze of fellow prisoners. In some Stalags desperate men waited outside camp theatres for the chance to meet ‘leading ladies’ and even fought each other for their attentions.

With those confined to the Stalags having to find their own entertainment the men sent out on working parties discovered opportunities for encounters with someone other than their own hands or their fellow prisoners. A few desperate
working prisoners were able to find an outlet for their sexual urges among the local workforce. In one Polish mine a few local teenage boys prostituted themselves to the prisoners for a few cigarettes. It was desperate behaviour on the behalf of both parties and their acts were carried out in the privacy of dark corners of the mine. Unable to converse and unable to see the boys the prisoners simply did their best to clear their minds and concentrate on the sexual relief rather than who was providing it. Such acts were rare and there was little criticism from others for those who indulged.

Yet not many of the working prisoners had any interest in homosexuality, what they really wanted was contact with local women. At first many had been wary of the women they met, uncertain as to what might happen if they were caught having sex with them. Rumours went round that the prisoners found having sex with women whose husbands were in the German army would be tried in German military courts and their sentences served in civilian prisons. Notices put up within work camps soon confirmed their fears: ‘Prisoners of War are strictly forbidden to approach German women or girls in any way or have intercourse with them. This order is issued with the command that any contravention of same will result in a court martial and besides imprisonment, for serious cases – sexual intercourse for instance – the death penalty will be imposed.’
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In reality such extreme options were not used by their captors and punishments varied from place to place – in Munich both the male and female offenders were stripped and paraded naked through the streets of the city carrying placards proclaiming their misdeeds.

It was not just the reaction of their guards that worried them, they also feared the reactions of local people – both German and Polish – knowing that hostility could make their lives uncomfortable. As a result the prisoners remained wary
of those they met in the course of their work, but with time it was difficult to suppress the urges brought on by mutual attraction. It was on work detachments to farms where relationships first flourished.

Initially many of the working prisoners had faced hostility whenever they appeared in public. One man working as a dustman in Munich had been clearing bins from a girls’ boarding school when one of the pupils threw a used sanitary towel at him. Indian prisoners reported how German civilians spat at them in the street and even stopped to slap the faces of the humiliated POWs. Yet such attitudes did not endure throughout the war years. Initially the changes were noticed in Poland where local women seemed to hang around in areas where they could be seen by the prisoners. Each time the prisoners had to march through towns they noticed how women watched their every movement with interest, with flirtatious glances being shared between them. With an air of sexual tension simmering between the two factions it was not long before men on many working parties were able to exploit the situation to their benefit. The common trick was to bribe guards to allow them to go out on walks in the evening or on Sunday afternoons. Whilst out of the camp the guard would escort them to a meeting place where they could spend time alone with their chosen woman. The danger was that outsiders might discover what was happening – something which could bring these privileges to a swift end. For the guards the threat was even more real, they faced a transfer away from the safety of a POW camp to the hell of the Russian front. To counter the threat of being seen whilst walking through the local town one prisoner borrowed women’s clothing and made his way in safety to his girlfriend’s house.

In one work camp the guards decided such nights out were
too dangerous and chose a simpler course of action. Rather than taking the men out they simply invited in a local prostitute who was hidden in the prisoners’ washhouse. The men then paid a fee to the guard to be escorted to meet her. The same men were also able to sate their desires when taking the commandant’s laundry to be washed. The men established a rota for the weekly visits since the washerwoman was known to have a voracious sexual appetite, always being willing to entertain whoever visited her.

As the war progressed it was not just the Polish women who became enamoured with the prisoners, with so many of the German men away at the front their wives sought comfort in the arms of other men in uniform – the prisoners. On a working party from Stalag XXb Gordon Barber, who had already come into conflict with both the German farm managers and the Polish workers soon formed a more harmonious relationship, with a local woman known to the POWs as ‘Frau Stinkabit’:

Some of us used to get our ends away. The Poles were against me but I didn’t bother because by that time I’d got in with a married woman, Frieda, she was about 35 or 40. In that village a lot of our blokes did, there was a bit of the other going on. You’ve got to remember we’d been out there for over three years. We were working and we were fit. We were all about 23 or 24 and the young women – in their thirties and forties – liked us. The governor of this big state farm used to make us go and help with their smallholdings. One Sunday I had to take the boar down to her sow. That was a bit funny. I remember watching the boar have a little bit. I could speak quite a lot of German by that time. I said ‘Good job we’re not like that!’ She said ‘What are you like?’ That was the opening. She wasn’t a bad looking woman. But nothing happened that day. But then on my birthday, 26 February 1943, she promised me some cake. I was doing the painting in her bedroom, then she came in and put her arms around my neck. And that was the start of a beautiful friendship. My mates’ll tell you I was the only bloke walking out on a Sunday afternoon all spit and polish, going down to see his ladylove. When I put me best uniform on they all knew I was going to see Frieda.
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For all the pleasure taken with the local girls the POWs faced immense risks for consorting with German women. Some of Barber’s fellow prisoners made a conscious effort to avoid their attentions. They did not fear for themselves but for what might happen to the women: ‘I never had a relationship with any of the women. The maximum sentence I would get would be 28 days, but that did not apply to the women. She would probably have gone to prison for years or been shot. So it wasn’t a very fair risk. I just lay on my bed and kept myself to myself. I kept my head down.’
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He was wise to do so. Despite the 20-day sentences some men expected to get for such liaisons there were plenty of offenders who faced more severe punishments. One inmate of Stalag XXb was given a four-year prison sentence for his liaisons whilst others were threatened with execution – a policy that was used to force some unwillingly to join the British Freikorps. Gordon Barber was lucky not to be caught: ‘Frieda had two kids and I used to take them chocolate and the kids used to run out to see me. But we had a new guard and as we were walking by the kids ran up shouting “Uncle Nobby! Uncle Nobby! Chocolade”. So you had to be very careful. But in the end she started going with the governor of the farm.’
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Some of the men working on farms picked up strange stories about the war from the women they met. On one East
Prussian farm the workers heard about secret weapons being developed by the enemy:

There was an evacuee woman who had been bombed out of her home by the British. Her husband was in the Luftwaffe and she came to live with a family in the village. One of our chaps, Sparks, got friendly with her. He would spend his spare hours, between coming back from work and being locked up for the night, with her. He told us that he couldn’t meet her because her husband was going on a secret mission and he was coming to see her. Sparks said the husband was working on a pilotless plane – the V1. We took it all with a pinch of salt. We later saw leaflets dropped by the airforce showing a V1, and saying that the British knew all about the flying bombs. This confirmed what Sparks’ girlfriend had told us. So we knew all about it before the people back home.
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