Hitler's British Slaves (36 page)

Wilats had begun the journey wearing just his battledress, boots, a balaclava and a greatcoat. With only a pair of mittens made from pockets cut from his greatcoat, and without a blanket to sleep beneath, it was little wonder the cold soon took effect. He recalled those final hours before he was carried to the wagon that brought him salvation:

The first night was horrendous. We walked all night and all day. Then we were marched into a field late at night. The temperature must have been 30 degrees below zero. There was no cover. I was carrying a tin of Red Cross corned beef. I got it out to eat and the meat was frozen stiff. I couldn’t get it out of the tin, that’s how cold it was. When we got up in the morning I was so exhausted I could hear music playing and see houses – I was hallucinating. I saw these houses that weren’t there. It was then I decided I would sit down and have a sleep. Of course, if Gordon hadn’t come back for me I would have been dead. My survival instinct was gone. It was as if I had been anaesthetised. I was at the limit of my endurance.
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It was not just the prisoners who were tormented by the journey westwards, many of the guards were also suffering.
Although some had transport – bicycles, motorbikes or horses and carts – most walked alongside the prisoners. They too were freezing and short of food. And just like the prisoners they were uncertain of their destination. But unlike their captives the guards were staring defeat in the face. They had no hope of liberation, they realised their destiny was life behind the wire of an Allied POW camp – if they were lucky. Maybe it was this sense of hopelessness that inspired some guards to mistreat prisoners. For the East Prussians among them they knew their homes were being taken over by the Poles or destroyed by the rampaging Russian hordes. They had little idea where their families were, and most feared the worst. They knew that for the retreating women rape was the best they could hope for.

The fears and apprehensions of some guards led to a state of terror:

We had reasonable guards at first, but we had one who looked like the actor, Alan Ladd. Blond and really good looking but he was the biggest bastard alive. He used to ride around on a little motorbike or in a squad car. He carried this machine gun. Nothing would stop him, he’d use it. We saw him use it. He shot blokes but you never knew who they were.
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There were plenty like him, guards who had no qualms about shooting a sick man who fell out of the column or someone who stepped out of line to accept food from a civilian. It was a lottery, with a very deadly and expensive prize. Some men who refused to walk any further were left behind to fend for themselves, the guards unconcerned by their actions. Others who offered the merest defiance were left in the snow, a patch of dark blood growing beneath their soon to be frozen bodies. As one man later wrote of the help given by the guards:
‘assistance for the stragglers in the form of a blow from a rifle butt’.
¹³
Maurice Newey was among those who witnessed the killing of a prisoner by a guard:

Not knowing how much longer we would be left standing an older chap wearily walked out of the column and sat down on a stone parapet. A young guard ran up to him and ordered him back to the column. The fellow was so tired that he limply raised an arm and said ‘F – off’. The guard became hysterical screaming F- F- F- at him then pointed his rifle at him and shot him straight through the heart. … We learned later that the dead soldier had been a POW for five years. He was a father of four children. What a tragic way to die after all those years in captivity.
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Some of the vindictive guards continued to terrorise the prisoners even in the final days before liberation. The Alan Ladd lookalike was among them:

A bloke got shot, I think he was one who was a bit ‘handy’ – an Indian army boxing champion. He had a go at the guard and they shot him through the stomach. They wouldn’t let us go and sort him out. He lay out there all night crying – calling out ‘Help me, help me’ until he died. I’ll always remember that.
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No one was keeping a count of those who succumbed to the extremes of the weather, were executed, or who starved to death. One man who marched west from Stalag VIIIb estimated that between four and six hundred prisoners had died. Yet in truth no one could tell what had happened to those who had gone missing. Some among the sick had fallen out and died at the roadside, whilst others had been taken away
for treatment, or crawled into the safety of civilian homes. Columns had been split up almost at random with friends losing each other in the chaos, often never to meet again.

However not all of the deaths on the marches went unrecorded. As the columns of men snaked their way across east and central Europe the Red Cross representatives tried to keep track of them. It was not an easy task and deliveries of food or medical relief were rare, yet still they kept trying. Some of the Red Cross staff located the marching columns and noted down offences committed by guards in those final desperate weeks. In April 1945, when the Red Cross men caught up with the evacuees from Stalag 344, they took notes of the names of the Germans’ victims. Among them were two men who died from malnutrition, a Private Russell who was shot dead for stopping to rest during the march, and Mullins and MacLean who died for lack of medical attention. Other individuals made mental notes about those they saw die, hoping the news could eventually be passed on to desperate families – men such as Guardsman Sweetman who died in April 1945 after receiving no medical treatment for pneumonia and pleurisy. Just the simple act of recording their names meant they were not consigned to the lists of the forgotten.

It was not just the attentions of the guards that were a cause for concern – the advancing Allies also put the wretched POWs in danger, as Les Allan remembered:

For the first month we kept being bombed by Russian planes, they must have thought we were retreating Germans, otherwise they wouldn’t have wasted their bombs. But we didn’t hold them in terror, our attitude was that they were foreigners and they couldn’t hit a barn door at ten yards. So when they came over we just dived for cover and hoped for the best. Then there was a period when we were beyond the reach of their airforce, we were too far from the front. Then we came under attack by RAF Typhoons. We’d never seen these planes before, we’d never heard of rockets. They came down and smashed into us, and we were astonished to see red white and blue rings on the planes. From then on we were terrified, whenever we saw planes in the sky we knew they were our planes and the RAF could never miss. And we were the target!
¹⁶

At least the marching men had somewhere to run to. Some of those evacuated westwards were sent by ship from Danzig. It was a terrifying time for the prisoners, locked deep into the freezing hold as the ship slowly made its way along the Baltic coast. For two weeks they travelled, their only food being three pounds of bread per man but the lack of food, the miserable conditions, the cold and the rats were not their only concern. Their greatest fear was drowning. Locked into the hold they were trapped within a steel coffin. A single torpedo from a lurking Russian submarine, a magnetic mine, or an air raid by the increasingly dominant Allied airforces, would all have spelt doom for the POWs. Fortunately their fears were not realised and two weeks after their departure they finally disembarked at Lübeck in Germany.

Whether marching, sailing, or travelling by train, the friendships that had survived the rigours of years of imprisonment soon began to be put under strain. Unsurprisingly the men began to lose all thought of others and concentrate on their personal survival. Tempers frayed and friends fell out over tiny morsels of food. When the Germans provided rations no queues were formed, instead everyone rushed to claim their share of whatever was on offer. One among these mobs later wrote:

Without any bias or prejudice, our boys, myself included, are a rotten crowd. Each one wishes to be at the head of the queue, and the result is a rush and a push … brawling, cursing crowd jammed round the cook-house. Animals and starving at that. … My faith in humanity is now completely gone – and I shall never forget that barn with the darkness, overcrowded, boys crawling out to the lavatory, snarls and curses from men trodden on in the process – shouts about potatoes, groans and cries of the sick, my God! It was hell!
¹⁷

In some cases the sick were lucky enough to be allowed extra rations by their guards and they soon found themselves given plenty of attention by men who would previously have allowed them to drop dead in the snow.

Even those who had contrived to stick together through thick and thin, and whose relationships were not broken by arguments often found themselves separated. Gordon Barber, had already lost one ‘mucker’ to sickness:

In the end you couldn’t help it – you just lost blokes. I don’t know what happened to Frank, we lost him one day. The guards would stay ‘Stop’, you’d stop, you were in one batch your mates were in the other. Then they say ‘Go’ and that was the end. I never knew what happened to Frank or Stevie, but Lofty was with me all the time – he was tall I could always spot him in a crowd.
¹⁸

With the columns being split almost at random it was inevitable that some prisoners were lost in the chaos. Some wandered off to look for food and never found their mates again, others fell out of the columns to rest and were simply ignored by both their fellow prisoners and their guards. The more adventurous among them simply headed out into the unknown on
their own, uncertain of what their fate might be but certain they had no desire to keep marching. Ken Wilats soon found himself separated from the main body of prisoners. Having lost his mates when he was taken sick, Wilats found himself at a camp where prisoners were still employed in a timber yard. Here he remained until he had regained his strength and was sent from the working party in an attempt to rejoin his column. He headed to the local station in hope of catching a train westwards:

The place was a maelstrom. There were evacuees coming out and troops heading for the Russian front, it was a complete mêlée. We waited all day on the station, but nothing came. So we were told to march 15 kilometres to reach them. So we set off up the road – with no guards or anything. The bloke I was with said ‘C’mon lets go into the woods and see if we can find a farm and we’ll wait for the Russians’. So we got off the road and found this little settlement.

Here they were taken in by a Polish farmer who allowed them to rest in the hayloft by day and come into his home for a meal at night. They soon realised it might not be too healthy a place to remain:

One day a German officer came looking for fodder for the horses. Another night as we were eating we heard the Germans coming on a horsedrawn sleigh, we could hear the bells. The farmer said ‘Quick, quick!’ and opened a trapdoor to his cellar and we hid down there. We could hear the German walking about above our heads. But we thought it pretty unfair to take advantage of the farmer because if he’d been caught harbouring us he’d have been shot. So we went on our way. We got back onto the main road and there were crowds of German soldiers all walking towards the Russian front. There were guns and tanks. No one challenged us at all. They were going one way we were going the other. Eventually we joined up with a column of prisoners and stayed with them until we were liberated near Winkelsdorf near Hanover. We were on the road for three months. We were pretty ragged.
¹⁹

Amidst the chaos of the continuing exodus the spectre of theft among the prisoners also raised its ugly head. Men awoke to find their boots had been stolen by others desperate for protection for their feet. Those caught stealing food faced little mercy from former friends and comrades. The guards ignored the prisoners as they attacked the culprits, making them run the gauntlet of kicks and punches from men who could just summon up enough energy to ensure a suitable punishment. When the Germans caught men on one column stealing from the guards’ rations they issued threats that the food should be returned. If the food were not returned immediately all the prisoners would miss the next issue of rations. Where once the POWs had stood firm against such threats, now they changed their minds and pointed out the culprits. This was no longer a game, food meant life and the possible punishment of a few men meant nothing compared to filling their own bellies.

The spectre of disease also hung over them. Within days of beginning the march the POWs, few of whom had ever been able to keep really clean within the camps, found themselves filthy. There was little opportunity to wash and few dared remove any clothing for fear of frostbite. They became encrusted with grime and thick with lice. Few had the energy to shave, preserving their strength for the mile upon mile of tortuous marching and the scratching of their bodies whenever
the columns halted. One column bedded down for the night in pea straw, little did they know what they were sleeping in, since pea straw turns black when laid in barns. When they awoke they found their faces and clothing stained black, yet continued with the march unconcerned by the colour of their skin.

It was not their outward appearance that bothered the prisoners. They may have been unwashed, with their feet blistered and their crotches rubbed red raw. Their clothes may have been collapsing – indeed one man took his trousers off for the first time in three weeks to find his underpants had disintegrated. But this was not their main worry. What concerned them was what was happening to them on the inside. Soon many were hit by diarrhoea. The poor food, often hastily cooked, assaulted their guts leaving them in agony with ‘the shits’. All modesty was a forgotten value as men stopped at the roadsides dropped their trousers and crouched in full view of their comrades, caring only about relieving the pain. They sometimes found themselves the victim of cruel treatment by the guards. On one column those who stopped and dropped their trousers were chased at gunpoint to the front of the column. Almost doubled over in pain, often holding up their trousers, they ran forward, the energy seeping from their body just like the watery faeces seeped down their legs.