Hitler's British Slaves (33 page)

Whilst most buckled down to a life of heavy labour, albeit reluctantly, others chose to move around as much as possible, contriving to make sure they were transferred as often as possible. Such men went from working party back to Stalag and then onto another working party, on a regular basis. They became known as ‘Cook’s Tourists’ after the famous British travel agent, Thomas Cook. The frequent changes meant they were constantly faced with new challenges, never staying in one place long enough to stagnate, always looking for new experiences that would help keep their minds active.

In light of the emotional pressures of captivity the minds of some were thrown into turmoil. One of those who suffered a nervous breakdown traced the roots of his condition to having been forced to work as a weaver despite having poor eyesight and having had his glasses confiscated by the enemy. Madness seized the minds of some prisoners to the extent they were committed to asylums. One Polish hospital housed 11 British prisoners from Stalag XXa, mostly schizophrenics. Among the behaviour exhibited when Red Cross inspectors visited them was a man suffering hallucinations, open homosexuality, a man ‘seized with frenzy’ and another simply described as ‘silly’. At one camp a prisoner took a cowboy costume from the camp theatre and wore it continuously, convinced he was a sheriff. A Canadian prisoner had to be committed to a psychiatric ward after his divorce papers came through from his wife. In his desperation he became an alcoholic, over-indulging himself with wickedly strong home-brewed alcohol. Such was his desperate condition he was repatriated to Canada. Fortunately he was able to
make a full recovery after his return home. John Gambarill, a New Zealander, was not so fortunate. He had remained in the Stalag at Lamsdorf despite suffering from psychiatric problems. In his confusion the unfortunate prisoner crossed the warning wire around the perimeter fence and was shot dead by a guard.

Although only a handful of the POWs succumbed to the pressures of captivity in such a way, all among them experienced a degree of mental strain whilst working for the enemy – it was simply that most were able to cope with it. Their morale was constantly assailed by the rumours that surged through the camps. These rumours took all forms, some true some false, and seemed to cover every subject, from everyday concerns about the arrival of Red Cross parcels to news regarding Allied victories or defeats. In the middle years of the war one prisoner noted down the various stories doing the rounds within his workplace. They heard how the British and Americans had supposedly landed in France, long before the planning for D-Day had even started. Finland was rumoured to have swapped sides and the Swedes and Turks had supposedly joined the Allied cause. Other stories included peace talks between the warring factions to allow the Germans to fight Russia unhindered and that Churchill had resigned with Anthony Eden taking his place.

One of the most common causes of falling morale and emotional upset was the effect of the prisoners’ separation from their loved ones. Men who missed their wives were particularly touched by their enforced captivity, second only to those men whose wives requested divorces or whose girlfriends broke off relationships. This was one of the greatest blows a prisoner could face. Some men tried to make light of it, posting their ‘Dear John’ letters on noticeboards or forming themselves into ‘Broken Hearts Clubs’. Yet others were
unable to face the situation and grew embittered, assailing their mates with promises of what they would do to their wife’s lover when they finally got home.

The burden of lovesick prisoners was one that was sometimes shared by all within a working party. Gordon Barber, on an agricultural detachment from Stalag XXb, shared accommodation with a man who was unable to handle the rigours of captivity:

One chap went stir crazy. This quiet young bloke Phipps, he said to me ‘I’ve fallen in love’. Then one night when we were all asleep, all of a sudden we heard this voice singing. It sounded lovely. He was singing a song called ‘Rosemarie’, the name of this local girl. It was uncanny, it frightened us. What the fucking hell was going on? All night he stood by the window holding the bars, gazing into the darkness and singing about his lover. My mate Ken went up to him and said ‘What’s wrong?’ He said ‘I love her. I don’t care what the guards say I’m going to see her tonight.’ He’d gone. He’d flipped. All you could see were fag ends burning. None of us could handle it. Next morning he wouldn’t go to work. We saw him with his hands through the barbed wire. The guards said they’d shoot him. We said ‘You can’t shoot him, he’s gone crazy’. So ‘Dixie’ Dean walks over, says ‘Phipper, you’ve got to go’. Then hits him and knocks him straight out. We carried him to the fields, but he was useless. When the sergeant in charge of us came round they took him away. He got sent home.
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Not all were so lucky as to have the help of mates to protect them. Some were transferred around the system of work camps and Stalags at random, staying in one camp for a few weeks before being moved on. Others spent years working
alongside the same men, getting to know every small detail about their fellow prisoners. For some of those who were separated from their friends it was a burden not to have anyone to support them. In one camp a soldier was seen to go ‘crazy’ and was noticed constantly talking about his wife. To the surprise of his fellow prisoners he began to miss his meals, a sure sign something had to be seriously wrong. Eventually he tried to break out of camp. The next morning he was found hanging from the perimeter wire, unconscious but alive. He’d been shot by the guards who simply left him to die. Barely alive, he was taken to hospital where, although, he recovered from his wounds, his mind failed to recover. The sad man was returned to the Stalag where he was spotted wandering around the camp, eating soap and sand.

Some among the prisoners, though not losing their minds completely, took extreme measures to avoid work. A few were able to outwit the guards and doctors by giving themselves the appearance of being sick. Silver paper was chewed and swallowed in the hope that it would show as an ulcer on an X-ray. One prisoner feigned a heart condition by holding his breath for as long as possible just before doctors were due to examine him. This got his heart racing and earned him a certificate to say he was exempt from work. Others went even further, smoking a combination of tea leaves and crushed saccharine to ensure their hearts would race prior to any examination. Those unable to pull off such scams sometimes became so desperate that they inflicted wounds upon themselves, preferring the humdrum life of Stalags and hospitals to the never ending toil of the Arbeitskommandos. Some deliberately infected wounds by rubbing dirt into them, causing them to fester and swell. Others placed their fingers on railway lines allowing them to be crushed and forcing amputation. Deep within the mines prisoners deliberately placed
their arms between pit wagons then got their mates to push the wagons together, ensuring fractured bones. For those too squeamish to self harm there were always individuals willing to help. At one camp an Australian prisoner was paid by his co-workers to inflict injuries. This he did by removing the leg from a stool and using it to crush the fingers of his willing victim. Possibly the most unusual ruse used to avoid work was perpetrated by a prisoner at a mine. He claimed his foreskin was causing him intense pain and was able to trick the doctors into returning him to the hospital at his Stalag to be circumcised.

Many who despaired became known as ‘sackhounds’, men who spent any spare time in their bunks. They could raise no enthusiasm for any aspects of life except to do the absolute minimum. They worked, collected food and attended roll calls, then for the rest of their time they kept themselves to themselves, sinking into the enforced apathy of captivity. Some among the ‘sackhounds’ eventually crossed into a state of madness. In one camp a South African was found lying on his bunk with his blankets pulled up to his chin. When his comrades pulled back the blankets they found he had slashed open his forearms in a suicide bid. He was fortunately saved by the camp doctors.

Yet such extreme acts were in a minority and the majority of prisoners were able to maintain a certain level of morale. When the Canadian army made assessments of wounded men captured at Dieppe and repatriated from POW camps in 1944 they saw few signs of ‘Stalag mentality’ and reported on how they felt their men had adapted well to life in the camps: ‘They had organised themselves to resist the Nazis in the Stalags and had united together with the object of making the best of conditions as they found them. By these means they had maintained their sanity and balance.’ As a result
two years in captivity: ‘did not seem to have affected their mental health to any noticeable degree, although it may have left marks which will only reveal themselves at a later date’.
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When reporting on why the Canadians had not been shown signs of ‘brooding introspection’ Lieutenant Chas Counsell wrote: ‘Canadians don’t like to stick around reading books and arguing all the time; they like to get out and play a game of ball. That is what we used to do in the camps.’
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Yet despite this optimism the study of the returning Canadians also revealed some pertinent points about the men left behind in the Stalags. The Canadian troops, who were mostly young, noted how many of the older men in the camps were suffering: ‘Most men report four years of imprisonment is seriously affecting the sanity of British prisoners.’
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The Canadians also curiously reported how anti-semitism seemed to be on the rise among British, Austalian and New Zealand POWs, and how there was an increasing tendency for the men to openly criticise both their allies and their own military leaders. Such was the strength of opinion that the prisoners were suffering from the effects of incarceration, that one Canadian colonel noted in the report that those who had been prisoners for four or five years were more deserving of repatriation than those wounded men who had been captured more recently. In his opinion their mental state meant they were more desperate. Les Allan, who arrived at Stalag XIb in Fallingbostel in the final weeks of the war, recalled the attitudes of many of his fellow prisoners in the camp: ‘By this time – the 1940 ones had been prisoners for five years. They’d got used to it, they never knew any different. If a guard beat up somebody they immediately thought the prisoner must have done something wrong. They were what we called, “Stalag Happy”. The hunger and the filth – they just accepted it.’
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As the Canadians had noted, some prisoners seemed inspired by adversity and made the most of appalling conditions. As one expressed it: ‘I would say that thanks to the Red Cross, life as a POW in a working camp, although definitely not a pleasure is at least bearable.’
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Those whose spirit was not broken examined the world they lived in. One POW focused on world economics and how it played its part in the turmoil of the 1930s in the lead up to war. Though his words concerned the lessons of the past he might have been talking of his own life when he wrote: ‘Is this the ideal of life? Is this civilisation? This progess? Or is it rather the hastening of decay? The encroachment of the Dark Age against which we must all fight, the oozing of the slime that would engulf us all and drive us back into the dark and gloom from which we have emerged.’
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The ‘slime’ engulfing the prisoners was war itself, but on a day to day basis it translated to the complete uncertainty of their continued existence:

This camp is our world: for the time being anyway, and events which would seem insignificant to an outsider are of paramount importance to us. We have no parallel case whatsoever; some comparison of this life might be made with a boarding school, a monastery, a civilian prison, but in these cases there is contact with outside society, time limits and so on.
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One particular group felt the pressures of POW life in a manner experienced by few others. The ‘Irishmen’ assembled into a segregated Arbeitskommando at Friesack had difficulty maintaining morale. Although their living and working conditions remained good it was the psychological rather than physical pressures that vexed them, due in no small part to the
fact that the camp population remained static for three years. None had been able to leave and no new men had arrived causing a stagnation that became the breeding ground for tensions and conflicts among the inmates. In most camps the population was constantly shifting, yet at Friesack they were trapped. By spring 1944 most hated the sight of each other. They knew every irritating detail about everyone else and the same conversations were repeated on a daily basis. With no fresh news from outside and no real source of rumours their life had grown stale. In the words of their ‘Man of Confidence’, Private Morgan Ferries: ‘We have all we want yet we are an unhappy crowd.’
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It was little wonder many among them admitted they would prefer to be transferred to a coal mine rather than remain trapped within the stupefying con-fines of Arbeitskommando 961.

That most prisoners managed to keep their spirits up was based around certain aspects of their life. As long as they had regular mail, food and cigarettes they could endure almost anything. It was only when these things stopped that a growing sense of despair clutched their hearts. Such was the regard for mail that complaints about the lack of concern for their correspondence led to the dismissal of the ‘Man of Confidence’ at Stalag IXc. Mail deliveries, in both directions, were often fitful, with post being unknown for weeks or months on end and then sometimes suddenly arriving all at once. By the summer of 1944 men at an Arbeitskommando in Leipzig reported they had only been allowed to write home once in four months, whilst others found they had still not received parcels posted to them two years earlier. One group of Australians were forced to endure a lonely Christmas when parcels sent from home failed to arrive. By March the following year the parcels had still not reached them. For men who found that regular mail was their only contact with the outside
world the lack of it was intolerable. Letters came referring to the contents of previous letters that had never arrived, leaving the recipients confused as to the mysterious news they had missed.